|summary=Aryan (14) and his brother Kabir (aged 8) are refugees, fleeing the horrors of their homeland, Afghanistan. Equipped only with some money sewn into a belt and stories of a promised land called England, they learn about desperation, misplaced trust and other lessons normally kept from children.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1408817756</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Jon McGregor
|title=This Isn't the Sort of Thing That Happens to Someone Like You
|rating=4.5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=The clue is in the Christopher Brookmyre-styled title. If the events, characters and circumstances in these stories are known to you, then you have my sympathies. A man causes an embarrassment trying to watch his daughter's first school nativity play. Another has a phobia of eggs containing an avian foetus when he puts knife and fork to them. There's a car crash here - and there, a drowning, some arson, some theft... and a lot of clues that point to some national disaster. Take all those clues as one and you eventually see this is more than just a collection of disparate short stories, but a very fractured, obfuscated novel.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1408809265</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Wendy Jones
|title=The Thoughts and Happenings of Wilfred Price, Purveyor of Superior Funerals
|rating=5
|genre=General Fiction
|summary=It's Spring 1924 in South Wales, and young undertaker Wilfred is going to learn the hard way how serious the trivial can be. Fascinated by a girl's dress - worn very seductively by Grace, who he has met but twice as an adult - he blurts out a marriage proposal. As much as wants to take it back, she won't let him. He tries to move on, leaving her disappointed, especially when he falls for the daughter of a man he buries, but... There are things dangerously spoken, dangerously left unsaid, and a complex web of divided loyalties and enforced connections, in this brilliant debut novel.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1780330561</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Fadi Azzam and Adam Talib (Translator)
|title=Sarmada
|rating=5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary='Sarmada' is small and remote village in the Northern hills of Syria, close to the Turkish border. And for much of Azzam's novel it seems a forgotten village, lost in the rituals and mysticism of ancient Druze belief and folk tales that inform the collective consciousness of the place. For the novel weaves the tales of three Syrian women and their relationships with each other, the men of their lives and the fabric of a life almost caught in the timeless past of the Middle East.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1906697345</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Ali Shaw
|title=The Man Who Rained
|rating=5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Do you remember being a child who had only just learned how to read? Do you remember the very first time you read a fairy story that no-one had told you before? Can you recapture the joy of entering a truly magical land and (for a time) believing it was real?
No? Then I recommend that you read Ali Shaw's second novel 'The Man Who Rained'.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0857890328</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt
|title=Noah's Child
|rating=4.5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Joseph, a young Belgian Jew, is sent away by his parents when they grow nervous about the treatment of Jews during World War Two. He is taken in by a village priest, Father Pons, and given a new identity and a place in Father Pons' school along with an assortment of other children, some of whom are genuine pupils and others who are, like Joseph, seeking sanctuary.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1848874189</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Susan Hill
|title=A Kind Man
|rating=4.5
|genre=General Fiction
|summary=Meet Eve, and her husband, the title character, Tommy. She's at a bit of a sticky wicket in life, for however much they want a baby, her sister and his feckless husband churn out son after son after son, and go no lengths at all to love them. So when Eve and Tommy do at last have a child, it's a tragedy for it to die when only three years old. But in this plot, which you'll thank me for not going into further, there will be a lot more swings and roundabouts, of torment and ecstasy, doldrums and delights, hell and heaven, to come.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0099555441</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Chris Womersley
|title=Bereft
|rating=5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Quinn Walker, a young Australian man fresh from fighting on the European front in World War One, returns to the very town he was drummed out of ten years before, after being accused of raping and killing his own younger sister. Two things have beaten him to the small settlement - one, the global flu pandemic; two a telegram saying he died bravely in action earlier in the war. And the less you know of what he meets and does back in Flint the better, the more to keep this fresh and brilliant book's many intrigues as secret as they were for me.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0857386549</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Eric Orsenna
|title=The Indies Enterprise
|rating=4.5
|genre=Historical Fiction
|summary=As soon as you pick up a novel about Columbus's discovery of the Americas, certain expectations come to mind. Orsenna however is much more than your average writer and he manages to subvert almost all of these by delivering a quiet, scholarly account of what seems at first a diversion, the art of map making. But this book is not about Columbus himself, but rather his brother Bartholomew, and how he is swept into the excitement and ambition of his older sibling.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1906598932</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Mahmoud Dowlatabadi
|title=The Colonel
|rating=4
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=The novel opens at dead of night in a house in Rasht in Gilan province, Iran. It is pouring with rain and the colonel of the title is in the grip of extreme melancholia. Two policemen are knocking on the door. They are bringing news of his youngest daughter. This triggers a night of misery in which the colonel recalls his own past, and the tragic lives of his five children.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1906598894</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Tessa Hadley
|title=Married Love
|rating=4.5
|genre=Short Stories
|summary=Married Love is Tessa Hadley’s second collection, containing twelve short stories looking at (mostly) modern relationships and family dynamics – many are about parents and their grown up children and in-laws, others are about couples. Flicking through the book to choose some of the best and/or most interesting stories to mention, I have found a difficulty. Almost all of these incisive, witty stories reveal an interesting group of characters I would like to know more about after the end, sometimes from several different viewpoints, and it is hard to pick out just a few.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0224096427</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Louisa Young
|title=My Dear I Wanted to Tell You
|rating=4.5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=It takes a while for the full power of Louisa Young's remarkable ''My Dear I Wanted To Tell You'' to become apparent, but when it does, it can hardly fail to move you. Set just before and during World War One, it's a story of love and human spirit against the odds. The impact of the book is in what happens to the characters, so I don't want to give too much away, but it's worth pointing out that it's not for the overly squeamish reader particularly in some of the descriptions of surgical procedures, which have clearly been meticulously researched by Young. The title itself it taken from the opening words of the standard letters that the wounded were given to send to loved ones back home. The wounded were required to fill in the blanks.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0007361432</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Jonathan Evison
|title=West of Here
|rating=3
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=The town of Port Bonita, located on the Pacific coast of Washington State, is the setting – and almost a character itself, such is its importance – of Jonathan Evison’s newest novel. In a massively ambitious narrative, we start at the Elwha River Dam in 2006, before just two pages later being transported back into the 1880’s, to see the town’s founding. A hundred pages or so later, we’re brought back to the 21st century, then returned to the 19th, and the cuts between scenes get faster and more furious as we seem to flip forwards and backwards in time without giving us much time to catch our breath. By 2006, the Dam is about to be destroyed, and we see the effect its construction has had on the local community and how the descendants of the original characters have turned out.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1780331967</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Janette Jenkins
|title=Little Bones
|rating=4
|genre=Historical Fiction
|summary=While this might sound like the afterlife of a brilliant and unlikely cabaret mimic, it's not. It's a rich, evocative and engaging novel set in the last years of Victoria's reign, in the depths of her darkest London. Fate - and being abandoned by, in turn, her mother and older sister - leaves Jane Stretch living with and working for a doctor and his lumpen, housebound wife. Jane is alternatively called an 'unfortunate' and a 'cripple' for her disabilities and distorted frame, but she has enough bookish intelligence to pass herself off as an assistant to the doctor, who only ever does one operation - abortions, for music hall artistes. The plot is evidently gearing up to reveal how dangerous such a criminal business might be, for the both of them.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>070118194X</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Nick Lake
|title=In Darkness
|rating=5
|genre=Teens
|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>
}}
