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Revision as of 20:39, 10 March 2016

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{{newreview
|author=Tania James
|title=The Tusk That Did the Damage
|rating=3.5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Tania James was a Fulbright Fellow in New Delhi in 2011–12. For this, her second novel after ''Atlas of Unknowns'' (shortlisted for the DSC Prize for South Asian literature) and the story collection ''Aerogrammes'', she clearly draws on her personal knowledge of India in all its contradictions, especially when it comes to environmental policy. The novel alternates between three perspectives: a third-person account of an elephant named the Gravedigger and first-person narratives from a poacher and a documentary filmmaker.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1784700584</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|summary=Contemporary writers are mining a rich seam of psychological thrillers and, within this genre, I seem to be particularly attracted to stories featuring comatose protagonists. Comatose protagonists? Isn't that a contradiction in terms? True, you do normally expect a protagonist to, well, do something. And Deborah Mee's heroine Sarah does nothing at all, other than listen, and try and remember, from her unconscious state. In her narrative she offers us nothing more than fractured memories and snippets of conversations from around her bedside. Yet with these meagre tools she helps the reader build up a vivid picture of what is happening around her, of her own character, and of the events leading to her hospital admission. As a reader you gradually piece together what made Sarah what she is today. At first you see an apparently successful career woman in a loving marriage but, as layers are gradually removed, what lies beneath becomes apparent. Sarah's controlling husband has a sinister brother who comes to sit by her bedside, while her toxic mother wages an ongoing war of words with Sarah's spineless father... At times I wanted to weep for what happened to Sarah; at other times I wanted to scream at her for letting it happen.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>B0196P0S4W</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author= Sharon Guskin
|title= The Forgetting Time
|rating= 5
|genre= General Fiction
|summary= Janie is a single mother, living in New York with her pre-schooler Noah. It's just the two of them, so it's rather disconcerting when Noah screams out in the night, calling for his ''real mom'' and asking when he can go home. Night after night this happens. There's other things, too. He hates water and regularly goes to nursery stinky because his mother simply cannot get him in the bath. He has the odd bizarre turn of phrase that comes out, far beyond what one might expect for a child of his age. He knows certain things, too, without anyone understanding how he picked up this knowledge, whether it be the names of different reptiles or the plot of books he's never read.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1509806792</amazonuk>
}}
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