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[[Category:Literary Fiction|*]]
[[Category:New Reviews|Literary Fiction]] __NOTOC__<!-- Remove -->
{{newreview
|author=Donal Ryan
|title=The Thing About December
|rating=4.5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Johnsey Cunliffe was always a nice boy, but a little slow - the one that the other kids picked on and it's much the same in adult life. If you were to ask Johnsey he'd say that he was a gom. Even if you've never met the word before you know what it means. It wasn't too bad whilst Daddy was there - he was a man with a certain presence and even when it was just Johnsey and his mother he had some support. But after her death Johnsey was dependant on small kindnesses from other people and at the mercy of those for whom he was an easy target. His life might have continued in this rather unsatisfactory way for some time but for the collision of two events.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1781620091</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=James McBride
|summary=Ernest Hemingway called Frederic Manning's ''Her Privates We'' 'The finest and noblest book of men in war' he had ever read. But Hemingway wasn't a very trustworthy man, so we tend to defer judgement. He is, however, useful for contrast. Hemingway's tales of war (such as ''A Farewell to Arms'' and ''For Whom the Bell Tolls'') usually involve macho misfits and trite love stories, feats of derring-do and filmic dialogue; all the things, in fact, that have no place in Manning's First World War novel. Why is this? Well, by the time Hemingway started driving a Red Cross ambulance on the Italian front (1918), Manning's service was already over. Nevertheless, unlike the illustrious (and self-mythologising) Hemingway, Manning spent his war deep in the trenches of the Somme, mixing it with the proletarian soldiery. As such, ''Her Privates We'' is a brutal novel concerning the 'subterranean, furtive, twilight life' of the average Tommy, a work of startling power, and one that completely eclipses the war novels of the romantic Hemingway.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>184668787X</amazonuk>
}}
