|summary=Shorty is lying in the rubble of the great Haitian earthquake of 2010. If he's not rescued soon, he will die. Shorty is from Site Soley, the sprawling slum of Port-au-Prince. After the murder of his father and abduction of his twin sister, Shorty has allowed himself to fall further and further into the slum's gang culture. But Route 9 isn't all about drug-dealing and gun-running - it's also about feeding the poor and educating the children. And Shorty has a great deal to teach his readers, as he recounts his life while waiting to die.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1408824183</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=John Burnside
|title=A Summer of Drowning
|rating=3.5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=''A Summer of Drowning'' is a book in which for much of the time not a lot happens - but always spookily. Set on the Norwegian island of Kvaløya in the Arctic Circle, the story is narrated by Liv who is now 28 but who recalls events of a summer when she was 18. Liv resides with her artist mother in, if not isolation, then certainly seclusion. The book makes much of the midsummer madness that 24 hour daylight induces and in that respect it is wholly successful. It aims for a dream-like and timeless quality which it largely achieves.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>022406178X</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Sue Eckstein
|title=Interpreters
|rating=4.5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Julia Rosenthal whilst visiting her childhood haunts, is invited to go around what used to be her family home. As she wanders around the rooms, she relives her past and seeks to understand why her parents (particularly her mother) were as they were. Julia also desperately seeks reassurance that she has not, in turn, damaged her own daughter, Susanna. Meanwhile the reader is given the privilege of knowledge unavailable to Julia. Via transcriptions of discussions with counsellor, the reader learns about Julia's mother first hand. Slowly, in alternating chapters, whilst Julia goes over her far from normal 1970s upbringing, her mother haltingly and touchingly reveals the secret life which almost destroyed her.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0956559964</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Jennifer Johnston
|title=Shadowstory
|rating=4.5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Polly grows up in an Anglo-Irish family in the years following World War II. Her father died in the war. Her mother sends her off to spend school holidays with her grandparents at Kildarragh, a great house in the countryside, far away from Dublin.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0755383478</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Fabrice Humbert
|title=The Origin of Violence
|rating=4
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Fabrice Humbert's French Orange Prize winning 'The Origin of Violence' has a young French teacher as a narrator who, while leading a school trip to Buchenwald concentration camp, sees a photograph of a Jewish prisoner taken in 1941 and is struck by the similarity in appearance of the man to his own father. However, he discovers that not only does the man in the photo have a different name to his, but the man died in 1942. Clearly there are dark family secrets afoot that he sets about discovering.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1846687500</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Helen Gordon
|title=Landfall
|rating=4
|genre=Women's Fiction
|summary='Most people at one time or another of their lives get a feeling that they must kill themselves; as a rule they get over it in a day or two' ('How Girls Can Build Up The Empire: the handbook for Girl Guides' 1912)
Excerpts from the handbook precede each section of ''Landfall'' and it is hard to know what to make of them – other than to take on board that women are not, by any stretch, the weaker sex, just the more emotional one 'They can even…shoot tigers, if they can keep cool'.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1905490828</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Conny Braam
|title=The Cocaine Salesman
|rating=4.5
|genre=Historical Fiction
|summary=Picture a world of hellish exclusion, nightmarish noise and images, and horrid violence. Picture one person trying to live through the sleepless nights, the isolation among his peers, the permanent sense of dreadful threat. Picture him needing drugs. His best friend might even be called Charlie. But don't picture an inner city slum, 2012, but a man on the front in World War One.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1907822054</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Bruce Duffy
|title=Disaster was my God
|rating=4.5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=The life of Arthur Rimbaud must be one of the most outrageous in literary history, more scandalous than Wilde, more self-destructive than Malcolm Lowery, Rimbaud was the boy poet and iconoclast who took on the literary establishment at end of the nineteenth century and won. So Duffy's fictional account, based closely around the actual facts of Rimbaud's life, was bound to be an exciting and furious, and he doesn't disappoint. This is a difficult book to put down.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1846685273</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Kevin Brophy
|title=The Berlin Crossing
|rating=4.5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=It's the 1990s and Herr Doktor Ritter - to give Michael his full title - is about to lose his teaching job. Although a German national, he teaches English. Apparently the Social Review Committee has been doing some 'reviewing' lately and it doesn't look good for Michael.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0755380851</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=German Sadulaev
|title=I Am A Chechen!
|rating=4
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=That exclamation mark in the title says a lot. It says that, in spite of everything, in spite of Sadulaev leaving his homeland, it still tugs at his heartstrings - and will probably do so throughout the rest of his life. The short author's note at the beginning ends with the arresting sentence - ''Sadulaev's work has unleashed heated debate in Russia.'' And I'm thinking, brave author indeed and I also couldn't wait to find out what all the fuss was about.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0099532352</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Mark Mustian
|title=The Gendarme
|rating=4.5
|genre=Historical Fiction
|summary=There are times when you will want to shut 'The Gendarme' and just walk away from the despair and disgust that this account of genocide engenders. Don't. Ultimately this tale of an old Turk revisiting his terrible past is both touching and important - an exploration of memory and forgiveness that shouldn't be missed.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1851688390</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Otto de Kat
|title=Julia
|rating=4.5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=The book opens with Chris as an elderly man who is nearing the end of his life. Turn a page or two and he is, in fact, dead. Suicide apparently. It's all very sad. He lived alone and a paid employee, his young driver, found him in his study. 'Suicide for the posh' his driver thinks looking at the corpse. But we have to travel back down the decades to find out why.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0857050559</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Howard J Booth (editor)
|title=The Cambridge Companion to Rudyard Kipling
|rating=3.5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Rudyard Kipling, born in India in 1865, is still the youngest ever Nobel literature laureate. He was a prolific author and at the turn of the century up to the first World War an immensely popular one. Even now he remains the most frequently quoted of all English authors (with the possible exception of Shakespeare) – albeit often taken out of context.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0521136636</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Padgett Powell
|title=You and I
|rating=3.5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=
I've often wondered how men and women of letters can pack it all in. People churn out a career of fiction, as well as reading all the classics, and offering pages and pages of diaries and letters on their death. Padgett Powell can get to be a professor of books, and therefore I assume is duty-bound to read and write lots, but still find time to knock out novels, however short. It was only a few months ago I was reading ''The Interrogative Mood'' for a review elsewhere, and here is another new release from him. Serpent's Tail will cheat in 2012 by giving the British audience Powell's debut novel, almost two decades old.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1846688167</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Art Spiegelman
|title=MetaMAUS
|rating=5
|genre=Graphic Novels
|summary=Before the Holocaust was turned into [[The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas by John Boyne|a child-like near-fable for all]], and before it was the focus of superb history books such as [[Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin by Timothy Snyder|this]], it became a family saga of a father relating his experiences to a son, who then drew it all - featuring animals not humans - [[Maus by Art Spiegelman|Maus]]. To celebrate the twenty-five years since then, we have this brilliant look back at the creation of an equally brilliant volume.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0670916838</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Javier Marias
|title=While the Women are Sleeping
|rating=4.5
|genre=Short Stories
|summary=
The first thing the trivially minded will note is that this is not the complete edition of While the Women are Sleeping, for not all the stories in the original Spanish volume are here. You might think that's because some have been hived off for a future 'best of' compilation. But if this isn't the best of Javier Marias, then I don't know what is.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0099553929</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Joseph Heller
|title=Catch 22
|rating=5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=At the heart of the very black comedy that is ''Catch 22'' is Captain Yossarian, a World War II American bombardier, who wants to survive the war. Flying repeated combat missions is undermining his sanity, and surely a mad man should be grounded? But if he asks to be grounded, he demonstrates an absolutely sane concern for his own safety. If he is sane, he can't be grounded. This, his doctor tells him, is catch 22.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0099529114</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Thomas E Kennedy
|title=Falling Sideways
|rating=4
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Kennedy, although a New Yorker, has lived in Copenhagen for over twenty years so he'll have a good feel for the European slant on the novel, I would think. It is one of four called the Copenhagen Quartet. The top brass, the movers and the shakers at the 'Tank' are introduced to the reader one by one and have a whole chapter devoted to their individual lives, both professional and private. So we get a very good idea indeed of their homes, their neighbourhoods, their families and perhaps more importantly, their thoughts on the Tank and of their colleagues.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1408812398</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Hari Kunzru
|title=Gods Without Men
|rating=3.5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Quite literally at the heart of Hari Kunzru's latest novel stands not a person, but strange geographical feature in the California desert - three large rocks known as 'The Pinnacles'. If you've ever looked at a feature of the landscape and wonder what it has meant to those who have gone before, then you will find a similar stance here. Kunzru's episodic narrative takes in various points in time from 1775 to 2009 all of which centre around this rock structure which has had different meanings for different generations. There are echoes of the past in each new version, but no more than that.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>024114311X</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Alice Hoffman
|title=The Dovekeepers
|rating=5
|genre=Historical Fiction
|summary=Set in the last desperate days before the Roman siege on Masada (70CE), the lives of four women collide and merge. They are Yael, the daughter of a Sicarii assassin; Revka, the wife of a gentle baker who witnessed her daughters' rape and murder; Aziza, raised as a boy with the skills of a great warrior and Shirah, born in Alexandria to a mother well versed in ancient magic. All four have crossed the heartless desert on separate journeys to arrive at the last outpost against the Roman Legion, where 900 Jews held out for many, many months. Here they have little power and less hope, but each refuses to be a victim. All are harbouring deep secrets about their pasts, as they become the Masada's dovekeepers. With supplies dwindling and certain death drawing near, their uneasy bonds to each other strengthen as their truths are unveiled. They find an uneasy comfort that becomes true loyalty and empowerment. While few in their company survive to recount the tale, their story has lived on to haunt the deepest of memories.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0857205420</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Irene Nemirovsky
|title=The Wine of Solitude
|rating=4
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Helene adores her father but hates her mother, who neglects her and sees her as nothing more than an inconvenience. She grows up with the realisation that the only way that her mother can hurt her is to sack her French governess – the only person who has ever tried to give Helene a stable upbringing. The winds of war blow them all from a fictional Kiev, to a harsh St Petersburg and on to a snowy Finland to end up – finally – in France at the end of the First World War. Helene's father has made a lot of money from mining in Siberia but whilst the family might have money – ridiculous amounts of it – they have nothing else.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0701185570</amazonuk>
}}
