|summary=In the late nineteen eighties sixteen year old Marina is a border at Combe school, destined - as she and all about her know - for Cambridge and the medical profession. After her first term she's wonders if she's made a mistake as it's definitely not like it was at Ealing Girls. There, a girl whose mother is emotionally fragile doesn't stand out, even if the mother gets to sleep on the sofa in her in-laws' flat because their son - her husband - upped and left her and their daughter. You would still fit in even if the family you're living with is Hungarian and hasn't entirely left the ways of the old country behind. At Combe there's too much about Marina that she could be mocked for - or could get her a cruel nickname. Marina simply doesn't fit in, but the family have sacrificed everything so that she can go there.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>144721997X</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|title=1Q84: The Complete Trilogy
|summary= Nine-year-old Skid Beaumont lives with his three brothers, father Alrick and mother Valerie in the swamps beyond the New Orleans city limits. Life is hard and home is a rundown shack with no running water but they're only there temporarily; a 'temporarily' that is rather long-term. Alrick moved them from their nice home in New Orleans because the land was cheap and soon the city would build out to envelop them. Years later they're still waiting for that to happen. Life isn’t exactly mundane though; there are rumours that when Skid's brother Frico draws left-handed, strange things seem to happen.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1846882427</amazonuk>
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{{newreview
|author=Francesco Pacifico
|title=The Story of My Purity
|rating=2.5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=In Francesco Pacifico's translated Italian novel 'The Story of My Purity', Piero Rosini is a 30 year old, ultraconservative Catholic working for a radical Catholic publishing house. His marriage is devoid of physical contact, and he yearns for his virginal sister-in-law. Largely to escape these longings, he heads for Paris, never the first choice of one seeking to preserve their purity, where he is further tempted by a slightly unlikely group of girls, and one in particular, which is further complicated for him by the fact that she is Jewish. Almost living a separate life in his head, he cannot escape either the intellectual or physical constraints of his old life in Rome.