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[[Category:Literary Fiction|*]]
[[Category:New Reviews|Literary Fiction]] __NOTOC__<!-- Remove -->
{{newreview
|author=Jon Kalman Stefansson and Philip Roughton (translator)
|title=The Heart of Man
|rating=3
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=What could be better than an existentialist book from rural Iceland, full of gnomic comments about how close life and death are, that has as its core a journey taken by, amongst others, a naïve and hormonal teenaged lad and a full coffin? Why, I hear you cry, a trilogy concerning the same. Yes, it's the obvious answer, really – why else would we come to this third part, where the survivors of the expedition rest up, note the women giving them help, and see how eminently close the circle of life is to the figure of a snake swallowing its tail through, among other things, dogs rutting in a church below the coffin's bier?
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>184866236X</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author= Joanna Walsh
|summary=Tessa Hadley writes beautifully subtle stories of English family life. Her understated style has a touch of the 1950s or 1960s about it, calling to mind Elizabeth Taylor or early Margaret Drabble, and she seems to adapt classic genres like the novel of manners or the country house novel. Here she deliberately channels Elizabeth Bowen with a setup borrowed from ''The House in Paris'': the novel is divided into three parts, titled 'The Present', 'The Past', and 'The Present'. That structure allows for a deeper look at what the house and a neighbouring cottage have meant to the central family, and paves the way for one final shocker of a secret.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0224101692</amazonuk>
}}
