|summary=A short while ago, I read [[The Corn Maiden and Other Nightmares by Joyce Carol Oates]] and was moved by the sheer emotional impact of the stories it contained. This was especially true of the title story, which looked at the impact on a family torn by the disappearance of their daughter. The synopsis of ''Daddy Love'' suggested a similar impact, given the nature of the story and what I'd recently discovered about the power of Oates' writing.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1781850658</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=J E Ryder
|title=Blood Pool
|rating=4
|genre=General Fiction
|summary=Samantha Shelley was surprised to become the owner of a boatyard when her husband died in a cliff fall. She had worked in the East Devon boatyard - run it in fact - for quite some time but it's the men of the Shelley 'blood pool' who have always inherited the land for the past two hundred years. She was aware of ill-feeling against her in the village, but her priority was to keep the business running as smoothly as possible for herself and for the staff she employed. There was some support in the village - an old friend, known to one and all as 'the Prof' - had always been there for her and willing to listen to her outpourings or just to chatter as she drank coffee. Then he disappeared in violent circumstances.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>B00AR0XFX2</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Julia Gregson
|title=Jasmine Nights
|rating=4
|genre=General Fiction
|summary=The temptingly titled Jasmine Nights starts promisingly. Saba, a talented singer whose gift to the war is entertaining the troops, comes from an unhappy family background, and one that has little patience for the opportunities for women brought about by war. Dom, a fighter pilot who has sustained injuries, is feeling displaced - the war has changed his world forever.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1409103048</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Toni Jordan
|title=Nine Days
|rating=5
|genre=General Fiction
|summary=Christopher 'Kip' Westaway lives in a suburb of Melbourne, Australia with mother Jean, sister Connie and his twin, Francis. Kip's mother considers him a layabout who doesn't deserve the special privileges of his educationally elite brother and so he works at the big house next door for the Hustings, caring for their horses. One day Mr Husting presents Kip with a shilling; their little secret. As its 1939, that's a fair amount of money so Kip hides it away, not realising how special that coin will become as the decades pass.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1444763555</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Sarah Butler
|title=Ten Things I've Learnt About Love
|rating=5
|genre=General Fiction
|summary=Alice returns home to spend time with her dying father. She's been travelling in Mongolia, finding temporary escape from the issues that had haunted her life in London but now, on her return, events bring the pain she thought was behind her into sharp focus. Meanwhile Daniel is an elderly vagrant who calls the streets of London home. He seeks his lost child, leaving a trail of random items across the city in the hope of reunion like someone occupying a verse of ''Eleanor Rigby''. Disparate lives, seeking love and acceptance in a world that seems to exclude it.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1447222490</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Gavin Extence
|title=The Universe Versus Alex Woods
|rating=4.5
|genre=General Fiction
|summary= While re-entering the UK with some human ashes and a stash of marijuana, Alex Woods is stopped by customs and referred to the police. It all started 6 years before when, as an 11 year old living in England's West Country, his escape from bullies necessitates breaking into a shed; the shed of a man with a gun pointing at Alex. The man is American Vietnam veteran Isaac Peterson and, whatever his school teachers may say to the contrary, this is the moment when Alex's education really begins; this and the moment when he was hit on the head by a passing meteor of course.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1444765884</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Carolyn Mathews
|title=Transforming Pandora
|rating=4
|genre=General Fiction
|summary=When we first meet Pandora Armstrong in the spring of 2003 she's grieving for her husband, Mike, who had died just a few weeks before. It hadn't been his first heart attack and he had reduced his workload but this attack was fatal. He was only in his fifties and Pandora feels that he'd been snatched away from her as they'd only been married for a few years. When a friend suggests that she goes with her to an Evening of Clairvoyance she runs out of excuses to refuse and although she's not exactly ''convinced'' by what she hears there's a lingering doubt. A spirit voice mentioned her children and Pandora was adamant that she didn't have any children - it's actually quite a sore point - but that wasn't true of Mike.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1780997450</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Chloe Hooper
|title=The Engagement
|rating=4
|genre=General Fiction
|summary=Chloe Hooper's gothic, psychological thriller concerns an affair between a thirty-something English girl, Liese, working in Australia at her uncle's real estate business and a blandly handsome Australian farmer, Alexander. Set over one weekend as Liese is heading to Alexander's remote family farm for the first time for a weekend of passion, this is a classic 'girl trapped in spooky house and situation' story with a dark, sexual twist. Liese, who trained as an interior architect, met Alexander while showing him around exclusive Melbourne properties and, has somehow managed to get herself into a situation whereby Alexander pays her for her attentions, believing that she is some kind of prostitute. He's even paying her handsomely for her time at the weekend. With debts of her own, Liese willingly encourages this perception with little idea of the problems to which this fantasy will lead.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0224096346</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Jack Sheffield
|title=School's Out!
|rating=4
|genre=General Fiction
|summary= The beginning of September 1983 starts a new academic year for the village primary school of Ragley-on-the-Forest. Headmaster Jack Sheffield starts the autumn term with a skip in his step as he and wife Sally enjoy their new baby, John William despite the broken nights. What else will the year bring? The advent of a new teacher and a tragedy that strikes sorrow in the heart of the village reduces Jack's skip a bit but there are always moments to lift the mood; for instance, whatever it was that little Madonna Fazackerly did in her cat's ear. It's all there in the school's daily log; perhaps not the one that the inspectors see, you understand, all is explained in living detail here in Jack's memoir of life as a teacher and villager.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0552167037</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Sophie Divry
|title=The Library of Unrequited Love
|rating=5
|genre=General Fiction
|summary=Prepare yourself to try a book the likes of which you'd never particularly expect, and prepare yourself to find it becoming a favourite – one that has a snappy story, yet is a monologue, one that concerns what we all love – books, and love, yet one that also intrigues and tempts us with other, very diverse subjects. One morning our narrator turns up to start work early at her geography station in a very large but provincial library, and finds a locked-in regular. Over the next hour and twenty or so (for I read it out loud) she talks to him, barely allowing him a word in edgeways, and what we get is one big, fat lump of a paragraph of her world. Told you to be prepared for the unusual…
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0857051415</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Owen Martell
|title=Intermission
|rating=4
|genre=General Fiction
|summary=There is a line in Alan Bennett's play 'The History Boys' that I love. It talks about 'subjunctive history', imagining things that might have happened. In ''Intermission'', his first book in English as opposed to Welsh, Owen Martell borrows this idea, taking an event a surmising what may have happened afterwards.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0434022047</amazonuk>
}}
