[[Category:Literary Fiction|*]]
[[Category:New Reviews|Literary Fiction]] __NOTOC__<!-- Remove -->
{{newreview
|author=Philip Dent
|title=Mutable Passions: Charlotte Bronte: A Disquieting Affair
|rating=3
|genre=Historical Fiction
|summary=As the 200th anniversary of Charlotte Brontë's birth approaches, it is a perfect time for reading about her. Philip Dent's second novel chooses a lesser known period of her life to dramatize. All her siblings are now dead; during a hard winter when she is unable to visit her best friend, Ellen Nussey, Charlotte spends her time finishing ''Villette'', her final novel. The family servant, Tabby, ribs Charlotte about her romantic prospects – including Patrick Brontë's curate, Arthur Bell Nicholls. Charlotte responds with indignation: 'I could no more kiss the lips of a man with a beard as big as rooks' nests than I could yours, Tabby.'
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>178589093X</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Miroslav Penkov
|summary=Willem, JB, Malcolm and Jude don't have a lot in common apart from their friendship. They gravitated together at college and remain close as they become successful in careers as different as the theatre and architecture. However even hopes for successful future can't erase the blight of the past for one of them. Jude is physically disabled from a cause that isn't genetic or congenital. In fact the cause isn't even something he's shared with the other three. The events around it stem back to his childhood and haunt each thought and action he takes as well as his ability to take them.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1447294815</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Julia Franck and Anthea Bell (translator)
|title=West
|rating=3.5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Put yourself in the shoes of a young mother to two children, who declares her intention to leave the Communist East Germany for West Berlin, and thus loses her scientist job. What would you expect on the other side – shops full of attainable products, pleasant neighbourhoods, nice neighbours, an active and busy new life, where things might feel alien but at least you speak the same language? Well, for Nelly Senff, this is hardly the case. Once past the depressing Eastern exit procedures she is confronted with more desultory interrogations from those 'welcoming' her to the West, beyond which she and her children (their father, whom she never married, is long assumed dead by the authorities, if nobody else) are practically left in a shared accommodation in a transit camp. The shops are full of what is still unobtainable, the children hate their new school – and people still look down on them as being foreign, even if they have only moved across a city.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0099554321</amazonuk>
}}