Difference between revisions of "Newest Literary Fiction Reviews"

From TheBookbag
Jump to navigationJump to search
 
(980 intermediate revisions by 5 users not shown)
Line 1: Line 1:
 
[[Category:Literary Fiction|*]]
 
[[Category:Literary Fiction|*]]
[[Category:New Reviews|Literary Fiction]]
+
[[Category:New Reviews|Literary Fiction]]__NOTOC__
==Literary fiction==
+
{{Frontpage
__NOTOC__
+
|author=Eowyn Ivey
{{newreview
+
|title=Black Woods Blue Sky
|author=Simon Robson
+
|rating=3.5
|title=Catch
 
|rating=4
 
 
|genre=Literary Fiction
 
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Catharine's husband Tom is away on business in Birmingham, and so Catharine awakes alone for the first time in their little cottage at the end of their lane.  They moved there a few months previously, and since then Catharine has spent her days quietly awaiting her husband's return from work.  She is sure that she will figure out, some day, what her purpose in life is.  She thought it might be to have a baby, but they have been trying for some time and it hasn't happened as yet.  Meanwhile she waits, and thinks, and waits.  In the lounge stands her piano, a stark reminder of the life she didn't manage to realise because although she studied music she found, quite quickly, that in spite of being passionate she lacked any kind of talent for it whatsoever.  So, on this day, alone at home, Catharine finds herself tormented by the piano's presence and over-thinking every second of the day.  She worries away at who she is, and what her life is, as her loneliness and the day itself unravel around her.
+
|summary=''Black Woods Blue Sky'' tells the story of Birdie, the young mother of toddler Emaleen, who longs for a life beyond the Alaskan lodge where she works as a bar waitress, a setting which enables her bad habits and her accidental neglect of Emaleen. Described as a ''wild card'', she feels stuck in her day-to-day life, and yearns to cross the Wolverine river and live on the North Fork to fulfil her desires of a simple life surrounded by nature. When she meets Arthur Nielson, a strange, taciturn and solitary man, who says he has a cabin over there, she feels called to go - and bring Emaleen with her. Without realising it, this calling will transform hers and Emaleen's lives forever.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0224090232</amazonuk>
+
|isbn=1472279042
 
}}
 
}}
  
{{newreview
+
{{Frontpage
|author=Joe Meno
+
|author=Sally Rooney
|title=The Great Perhaps
+
|title=Intermezzo
 
|rating=4.5
 
|rating=4.5
|genre=Literary Fiction
+
|genre=General Fiction  
|summary=Jonathan Casper faints when he sees clouds. His wife Madeline worries about everything, not least the way the pigeons that she is studying are murdering each other. Their seventeen year old daughter Amelia wants to overthrow the evil empire of capitalism and is making her own bomb, while fourteen year old Thisbe is looking for God and praying to him. Jonathan's father, seventy six year old Henry, is planning his disappearance. Jonathan and Madeline may be on the verge of splitting up, to the dismay of both daughters.
+
|summary=Sally Rooney has studied the chessboard of life and is something of a grandmaster at putting it into words. Her dialogue is gripping and so brilliantly frustrating, as her characters never quite say exactly what they feel. Among the many relationships woven into this story, the central one for readers to unravel is the fraternal connection—or lack thereof—between Ivan and Peter Koubek. Ivan, a socially awkward chess prodigy, contrasts sharply with his older brother Peter, a successful lawyer living in Dublin. Following their father's passing after a long battle with cancer, the brothers' already strained relationship faces new trials.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0330512471</amazonuk>
+
|isbn=0571365469
}}
 
 
 
{{newreview
 
|author=Elizabeth Kostova
 
|title=The Swan Thieves
 
|rating=2
 
|genre=Literary Fiction
 
|summary=1999 – A renowned painter, Robert Oliver, goes mad, attacking a painting with a knife. He's arrested, and sent to a psychiatrist who is also an artist. The psychiatrist, Andrew Marlowe, can't get his patient to talk to him, but tries to investigate what drove him to this by talking to his wife and his girlfriend, and reading some letters Oliver seems obsessed with.
 
 
 
1879 – Beatrice de Clerval, aspiring artist, corresponds with her uncle-by-marriage Olivier Vignot, a more experienced painter. Their letters will be found by Robert Oliver, 120 years later, and will lead to his loss of sanity.
 
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1847442404</amazonuk>
 
 
}}
 
}}
 
+
{{Frontpage
{{newreview
+
|author=Fyodor Dostoyevsky
|author=Atiq Rahimi
+
|title=White Nights
|title=The Patience Stone
 
 
|rating=5
 
|rating=5
|genre=Literary Fiction
+
|genre=Short Stories
|summary=Set in Afghanistan, ''The Patience Stone'' is a partly allegorical tale of a Muslim wife tending to her comatose soldier husband who has been shot in the neck. As she cares for him, for the first time ever she is able to speak to him without fear of censorship and he becomes, for her, like the mythical Patience Stone to which you tell your troubles and when the stone finally bursts, you are free from your torments. But also this might mean the Apocalypse.
+
|summary=As always in Dostoyevsky, the character work is sublime. One is never left wondering what a character is thinking or feeling because Dostoyevsky lays bare their innermost dispositions and temperaments with remarkable clarity.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0701184167</amazonuk>
+
|isbn=0241619785
 
}}
 
}}
 
+
{{Frontpage
{{newreview
+
|author=James Baldwin
|author=Joyce Carol Oates
+
|title=Giovanni's Room
|title=A Fair Maiden
 
 
|rating=4.5
 
|rating=4.5
|genre=Literary Fiction
+
|genre=Literary Fiction  
|summary=I've recently read the terrific short story collection ''The Female Of The Species'' also by Oates and couldn't wait to start her latest book.  I felt sure that I was in for a literary treat - and I was. Firstly, the book itself, a hardback with a beautifully nostalgic cover is a book lover's delight.
+
|summary=''Giovanni's Room'' follows the narrator David, an American man living in Paris, as he navigates his torturous affair with Giovanni, an Italian bartender he meets in a gay bar. While David is engaged to Hella, who is travelling in Spain, the real tension in the novel arises not from his infidelity but from the deeper conflict within himself. It is David's crippling shame and denial of his sexuality that ultimately dooms his relationship with Giovanni.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1847248586</amazonuk>
+
|isbn=0141186356
 
}}
 
}}
 
+
{{Frontpage
{{newreview
+
|author=Alba de Cespedes
|author=Dai Sijie
+
|title=Forbidden Notebook
|title=Once on a Moonless Night
+
|rating=4
|rating=3.5
 
 
|genre=Literary Fiction
 
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=A French female scholar, studying in China, finds herself caught up in the search for a lost, sacred text that was inscribed on an ancient scroll.  The scroll was torn in two by Emperor Puyi years ago, and was lost.  After falling in love with a young grocer called Tumchooq the young woman becomes caught up in tales within tales, as she finds that Tumchooq's father found and translated half of the missing scroll and became obsessed with finding the other half, and soon Tumchooq too becomes embroiled in the search.
+
|summary=This Italian work of feminist fiction holds an air of suspense and tension from the moment our protagonist, Valeria Cossati, purchases her forbidden notebook, and learns about herself in the most intimate and revealing ways.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0099521326</amazonuk>
+
|isbn=1782278222
 
}}
 
}}
 
+
{{Frontpage
{{newreview
+
|author=Ottessa Moshfegh
|author=Thomas Trofimuk
+
|title=My Year of Rest and Relaxation
|title=Waiting for Columbus
 
|rating=4.5
 
|genre=Literary Fiction
 
|summary=I was hooked instantly by the title.  Original, thought-provoking, quirky.  The book revolves around a youngish man who has been admitted to an insane asylum (these two words alone make me want to shiver) in modern-day Spain.  The staff have their work cut out.  He doesn't remember his  name or anything at all about his past.  He's sporadically violent - and he says he is Christopher Columbus!  As the Americans would say, go figure.
 
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0330518844</amazonuk>
 
}}
 
 
 
{{newreview
 
|author=Su Tong
 
|title=The Boat to Redemption
 
 
|rating=3
 
|rating=3
 
|genre=Literary Fiction
 
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Ku Dongliang and his father, Ku Wenxuan, are forced to live on a barge on the river following Ku Wenxuan's fall from grace. Originally believed to be the son of a revolutionary martyr, it is eventually proved that Mr Ku was not so - as a result, his position in society takes a nose-dive. Dongliang suffers as a result of this, finding it hard to make friends within the barge community and on shore. Then an orphaned girl moves onto the barges and finds a place in Dongliang's apparently cold heart. Will she be able to take him out of himself? Or will she, too, turn her back on him?
+
|summary=At best, this novel is a scathing critique of modern society and reveals the fragility of human relationships; at worst, it is the cynical, predictable and slightly trite tale of an unlikeable protagonist. This unlikely heroine, a slim, attractive and newly orphaned girl in her twenties is disillusioned with the world, but resolves not to lose sleep over it: in fact, her solution lies in her hibernation.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>038561344X</amazonuk>
+
|isbn=1784707422
 
}}
 
}}
 
+
{{Frontpage
{{newreview
+
|author=Matthew Tree
|author=Iain Banks
+
|title=We'll Never Know
|title=The Steep Approach to Garbadale
 
|rating=4
 
|genre=Literary Fiction
 
|summary=It took me a while to realise that Iain Banks is, most of all, a teller of tales - I would call him a story-teller had this term not became a compliment-cum-invective usually reserved for the Jeffrey Archers and Dan Browns of the modern publishing world. This ability to tell stories - not to plot as much as to weave a yarn - combines with a penchant for creating appealing contexts for Banks' narratives to unfold in (this gets magnificently realised in the world building of his [[:Category:Iain M Banks|Iain M. Banks]] alter-ego) and populating them with memorable, larger than life but usually short of caricature, characters.
 
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0349119287</amazonuk>
 
}}
 
 
 
{{newreview
 
|author=Mary McCarthy
 
|title=The Group
 
 
|rating=4.5
 
|rating=4.5
 
|genre=Literary Fiction
 
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary='Given the attention paid to relations between the sexes, it would be tempting to call The Group a forerunner of today's chick lit. It's not.'
+
|summary= Timothy Wyndham wants nothing more than to be different from his father, a drunk and chronic underachiever whose dreams of being exceptional at any of his artistic passions all failed miserably and who had endless crises of self confidence. So Tim applied himself to his studies, cultivated his abilities rather than his daydreams and set himself high but achievable ambitions.
 
+
|isbn= B0CVFXPGP8
So writes Candace Bushnell, the writer behind the TV series Sex and the City, in the introduction to this new Virago Modern Classics edition of The Group by Mary McCarthy. First published in 1963, this novel is about the lives of a group of young women after leaving college in 1933, including careers, relationships, sex, babies, parents, and money.  
 
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1844085937</amazonuk>
 
 
}}
 
}}
 
+
{{Frontpage
{{newreview
+
|isbn=B0C47LV1PC
|author=Janice Galloway
+
|title=Fragility
|title=Collected Stories
+
|author=Mosby Woods
|rating=5
+
|rating=4
|genre=Short Stories
 
|summary=In this collection, stories are taken from two previous volumes, Blood and Where You Find It. The forty-two snap shots of life are mainly of women and young girls, struggling with emotions, sometimes realized and sometimes not. In all, there seems to be an underlying link of isolation and truth. The settings are varied, from a visit to the dentist to the place known as home, to a walk in the evening. We have a peek into the deepest darkest corners of everyday relationships, with lovers, partners and most of all ourselves.
 
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0099540398</amazonuk>
 
}}
 
 
 
{{newreview
 
|author=Herta Muller
 
|title=The Passport
 
|rating=3
 
 
|genre=Literary Fiction
 
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Meet Windisch.  A miller in a small village, he trudges through there, and through his neighbours, and through his life, counting his days and hours, for reasons that are not initially clear.  But he does want something - he is waiting for a passport so he can leave for other climes.  The perks of his job are the bags of flour he leaves by the mayor's house with regularity, as an open bribe, but there might be a bigger sacrifice to have to make.
+
|summary= Can you make a ''Yo birthing person'' joke? And if you could, is the question should you make it? Or is the question if you did, would it land? The catch is that the answer for both could well be.... no.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1852421398</amazonuk>
 
}}
 
  
{{newreview
+
''Fragility'' is set as the city of Portland, Oregon, cautiously begins to emerge from the restrictions imposed during the covid pandemic
|author=Jennifer Johnston
 
|title=Truth or Fiction
 
|rating=4
 
|genre=Literary Fiction
 
|summary=Caroline Wallace is not a happy woman.  She has waited ten years for her lover to propose to her, and now just as he finally does, she has to go to Dublin to interview faded literary star Desmond Fitzmaurice.  Desmond promises his tale will be brimful of 'sex and violence', but Caroline has no idea of the mystery that lies at the heart of his story.
 
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0755330544</amazonuk>
 
 
}}
 
}}
 
+
{{Frontpage
{{newreview
+
|author=Mosby Woods
|author=Julian Barnes
+
|title=A Whirly Man Loses His Turn
|title=Staring at the Sun
 
 
|rating=4
 
|rating=4
 
|genre=Literary Fiction
 
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Jean's first Incident involved Uncle Leslie, hyacinths and golf tees. It's perhaps best forgotten, but Jean doesn't forget. Uncle Leslie figures large in her life - mostly on the golf course - until the War comes and he runs away to America. He's replaced by Tommy Prosser, a grounded pilot who once saw the sun rise twice in one day and excites as many questions in Jean as he ever answers. Tommy is replaced by Michael, a policeman, whom Jean eventually marries. He doesn't know why minks are excessively tenacious of life and he doesn't much care. But Jean does. She cares much less for the Dutch cap that Michael sent her off to obtain before the wedding and much less again for their rather disastrous adventures in the bedroom.
+
|summary= The West isn't the dominant force it once was. Nobody in the West is quite sure how to mend this or even if mending it is the best course of action. Governments are flailing. A war here, a push for climate action there. A feeling that nobody is in actual charge. Imagine then, there was a man with precognition. Imagine the strategic advantage in this asset; a man who can tell you what will happen given any set of circumstances. That man would be valuable, right? Perhaps the most valuable asset in history. Imagine then, that this man loses this ability. What would governments do to get it back?
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0099540096</amazonuk>
+
|isbn=B0C9SNG8R1
 
}}
 
}}
 
+
{{Frontpage
{{newreview
+
|isbn=0571379559
|author=Russell Celyn Jones
+
|title=The House of Broken Bricks
|title=The Ninth Wave (New Stories from the Mabinogion)
+
|author=Fiona Williams
|rating=4.5
+
|rating=5
 
|genre=Literary Fiction
 
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Pwyll rules a medieval-style fiefdom in a post-climate change Wales. Life is different in many ways - there's a new-but-old social order built on feudalism and horsepower is the main means of transport. But in many ways it's much the same - people still fight one another, towns still have sink estates, rich boys still have too much time on their hands and precious little meaning in their lives.  
+
|summary=''The House of Broken Bricks'' is the story of four people. Tess Hembry's roots are in Jamaica: temperamentally she might be happier there, but instead, she lives in the house on the riverbank, built of broken bricks. Insubstantial as it might look, it's stood the passage of time, storms and floods.  Her husband, Richard, struggles to grow his vegetables, to complete the delivery rounds - and to bring in sufficient money.  They have twin boys - Sonny and Max, the rainbow twins.  Sonny's colouring reflects his mother's Jamaican heritage. Max takes after his father.  People don't believe that they're related, much less twins and there's an assumption when Max is out with his mother that she's his nanny.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1854115146</amazonuk>
 
 
}}
 
}}
 +
{{Frontpage
 +
|author=Claire North
 +
|title=House of Odysseus
 +
|rating=5
 +
|genre= Literary Fiction
 +
|summary= ''What could matter more than love?''
  
{{newreview
+
The follow-up to the excellent ''Ithaca'' picks up a few months after where we left off. In the palace of Odysseus, with delicate care Queen Penelope continues to rule without her husband, who sailed to war at Troy and then by divine intervention never returned home. As ever she remains surrounded by suitors vying for the throne of the Western Isles. Having survived – politically and physical – the chaotic storm that Clytemnestra brought to Ithaca's shores, Queen Penelope is on the brink of a fragile peace. One that shatters however with the return of Orestes, King of Mycenae, and his sister Elektra, seeking refuge.
|author=Owen Sheers
+
|isbn=0356516075
|title=White Ravens (New Stories from the Mabinogion)
 
|rating=4.5
 
|genre=Literary Fiction
 
|summary=In the old tale, Branwen is the sister of Bendigeidfran - the giant King of Britain. She marries the King of Ireland, who doesn't treat her well. She manages to send Bendigeidfran a message via a tamed starling and war and killings ensue.
 
 
 
In this new tale, a young girl has just walked away from her brothers who, in the wake of the devastating foot and mouth outbreak, are despoiling their heritage by rustling and illegally slaughtering sheep. She meets an old man who tells her a story involving the superstitions about the ravens in the Tower of London, propaganda work during World War II, and an equally doomed love affair.  
 
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1854115030</amazonuk>
 
 
}}
 
}}
 
+
{{Frontpage
{{newreview
+
|author= Kay Chronister
|author=Shirley Jackson
+
|title= Desert Creatures
|title=We Have Always Lived In The Castle
+
|rating= 4
|rating=4.5
+
|genre= Dystopian Fiction
|genre=Literary Fiction
+
|summary= With a world that is becoming increasingly inhospitable for humanity, post-apocalyptic fiction can become an almost masochistic thrill. Whether it is a robotic takeover, a world devoid of water or a nuclear holocaust, this genre is a way for humans to cathartically experience their most existential fears. ''Desert Creatures'' by Kay Chronister is a new work of post-apocalyptic fiction that aligns many of the fears that exist for humanity today. It is a shocking novel that still manages to find hope.
|summary=Mary Katherine Blackwood, also known as Merricat, is eighteen, and lives with her older sister Constance in the family home where 'Blackwoods had always lived'. Merricat quickly draws the reader into her world by a series of matter of fact but bizarre statements – her likes include her sister and death cap mushrooms, and everyone else in her family is dead. The wealthy Blackwood family has always kept the house 'steady against the world', shutting out other people, and they live near a village. Merricat believes that 'The people of the village have always hated us', and tells us that she hates them too.
+
|isbn=1803364998
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0141191457</amazonuk>
 
}}
 
 
 
{{newreview
 
|author=Deborah Gregory
 
|title=Dancing With The Dead
 
|rating=3
 
|genre=Literary Fiction
 
|summary=I wanted to read ''Dancing with the Dead'', because I'm interested in family history. The blurb on the back of the book also mentioned Gill – our heroine of the piece – was moving from Bristol (my current home) to Lincolnshire (where I was born and brought up). I felt with all these links, the novel could not fail to interest me – but this was not the case.
 
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1904529305</amazonuk>
 
 
}}
 
}}
 
+
{{frontpage
{{newreview
+
|isbn=1803363002
|author=Elizabeth Baines
+
|author= Eric LaRocca
|title=Too Many Magpies
+
|title= The Trees Grew Because I Bled There
|rating=4
+
|rating= 5
|genre=Literary Fiction
+
|genre= Horror
|summary=Becoming a mother brings a whole new world of fear into your life. Suddenly you see the danger in every situation, and fear and trepidation can be become your constant companions. In this novella, we meet a young mother who is married to a logical scientist.  They attempt to control their children's futures on a scientific basis, growing their own fruit and vegetables, giving their children nothing sugary, eating no eggs for a whole year until any adverse affects from them were disproved. But after meeting with an enigmatic stranger our young mother begins to struggle as he introduces ideas of freedom into her world. She begins an affair with him, begins to let things slip at home and with the children, yet finds she is still continuously haunted by the sense of an ever-present danger.
+
|summary= Horror taps into something primeval within us. It is used as a way to reflect our darkest emotions and how we as humans react and process them. Most horror fiction feature a ''Big Bad'', whether that is a home invader, a monster or a ghost, it usually something tangible and, by the end of the story, beatable. Eric LaRocca's ''The Trees Grew Because I Bled There'' is not like that. It is a collection of short stories more interested in the horrors of illness, grief and humiliation. Horrors that linger and are harder to defeat than any ''Big Bad''.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1844717216</amazonuk>
 
 
}}
 
}}
 
+
{{Frontpage
{{newreview
+
|author=Madelaine Lucas
|author=Katherine May
+
|title=Thirst for Salt
|title=Burning Out
 
|rating=4
 
|genre=Literary Fiction
 
|summary=Violet has it all – a well-paid job, and a luxurious apartment all to herself. Everything is catered for; her meals, her clothes, and her health are all how she would like them to be. But the life she is leading is beginning to take its toll. On the verge of snapping, a drained and somewhat out-of-sorts Violet, withdraws back to her home town. There, she meets someone familiar, a ghost reminding her of how she used to be ten years earlier – a young carefree girl, full of life. Only this isn't a ghost, but a girl living the life Violet once lived – exactly the same. Haunted by the past Violet realizes history is repeating itself and is convinced events will happen again. Events that will in turn haunt the girl.
 
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1906727392</amazonuk>
 
}}
 
 
 
{{newreview
 
|author=Tove Jansson
 
|title=The True Deceiver
 
 
|rating=5
 
|rating=5
 
|genre=Literary Fiction
 
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Most people of my age will have come across Jansson's work unwittingly, via the televised renditions of the Moomin tales.  The readers amongst us would then have been entranced a few years ago to discover that at last Thomas Teal had set about the translation into English, first of The Summer Book and then of a collection of short stories which were published as 'A Winter Book'.
+
|summary= ''Love, I'd read, was supposed to be a light and weightless feeling, but I had always longed for gravity''
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0954899571</amazonuk>
 
}}
 
  
{{newreview
+
Told from a retrospective view, a young woman unravels the year-long relationship that once defined her. Overlaid with later wisdom, the narrator relives the affair with a man twenty years her senior from its inception – the summer after finishing university – to its sorrowful end the summer after. Set against the backdrop of an isolated Australian coastal town ''Thirst for Salt'' details the 24-year-old narrator's deepening relationship with her older lover, depicting its all-consuming nature, how it changed her perspective on both romantic and familial relationships and how it altered her irrevocably.
|author=Daniel Kehlmann
+
|isbn=0861546490
|title=Me and Kaminski
 
|rating=4.5
 
|genre=Literary Fiction
 
|summary=After reviewing several long books, it's been refreshing to read such a fluent yet pared down story as 'Kaminski and Me'. In it, Sebastian Zollner, the obnoxious main character, shoves himself forward in a desperate attempt to research a best seller which will re-ignite his career as an art critic. Kaminski, the proposed subject, was a fashionable painter long ago, but now, ancient and chronically ill, has virtually slid into oblivion.  So the second-rate writer is on a loser unless he can dig up some juicy details to hook the art world and general public.
 
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1847249892</amazonuk>
 
 
}}
 
}}
 +
{{Frontpage
 +
|author= Michael Grothaus
 +
|title=Beautiful Shining People
 +
|rating=4
 +
|genre= Literary Fiction
 +
|summary= ''But fearing something and having it come to pass are two different things. And I'm willing to bet most of what we fear will never happen, or we can take steps to change it.''
  
{{newreview
+
''Beautiful Shining People'' revolves around the question of identity and acceptance. Of what it means to be human. Of what is real and what is artificial, and whether the development of technology is exciting or frightening.
|author=Hilary Dixon
+
|isbn=191458564X
|title=When Rooks Speak of Love
 
|rating=4
 
|genre=Literary Fiction
 
|summary=Arthur Transcombe is a middle-aged, grey-haired, self-effacing poet. Unremarkable really - on the outside. He has, however, managed to achieve some success with his poems.  (Being a guest speaker at the Cheltenham Literary Festival is no mean feat). He is also a babe magnet!
 
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1904529429</amazonuk>
 
 
}}
 
}}
 
+
{{Frontpage
{{newreview
+
|author=Jennifer Saint
|author=David Malouf
+
|title=Atalanta
|title=Ransom
 
 
|rating=5
 
|rating=5
 
|genre=Literary Fiction
 
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Taking his theme from a small part of Homer's Iliad, Malouf tells the story of the king of Troy, Priam's grief-stricken voyage into the Greek camp to ransom Troy's wealth for the body of his fallen son, Hector, killed by the equally grief-stricken Achilles whose great friend Hector had killed in battle before Achilles took his cruel revenge. Malouf tells the story in sparse, yet lyrical and poetic fashion suggesting the personal stories behind the epic themes that Homer related. It is an exquisitely written piece managing to be both deeply moving as well as a great piece of story telling.
+
|summary=''I was as worthy as any one of them. I would get on board that ship, I vowed. I would take my place, not just in the name of the goddess. It was for the sake of my name, too. Atalanta''
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0701184159</amazonuk>
 
}}
 
  
{{newreview
+
Princess. Warrior. Lover. Hero.
|author=David Vann
 
|title=Legend of a Suicide
 
|rating=4.5
 
|genre=Literary Fiction
 
|summary=Some books defy categorisation and that's the case with ''Legend of a Suicide''. Is it Literary Fiction?  Is it a series of short stories linked by a common theme, or a novella with supporting pieces?  Is it fiction with a strong autobiographical thread running through it?  The simple answer to all these questions is ''yes'' – for the book is all that and more. It's also a compelling page-turner – I began reading at ten o'clock last night and finished it at three thirty this morning, resenting every moment away from the book.
 
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0141043784</amazonuk>
 
}}
 
  
{{newreview
+
Abandoned at birth for being born a daughter rather than a son, Atalanta is raised under the protective eye of the goddess Athemis and fashioned into a formidable huntress, one who longs for adventure. When the opportunity comes – to join the Argonauts, a fierce band of warriors, descendent from the Gods themselves Atalanta seizes the chance to fight in Artemis' name and carve out her own legendary place in history. What follows is a whirlwind of challenges and discovery and through it, Atalanta must remember Artemis' fatal warning: that if she marries, it will be her undoing.
|author=Milan Kundera
+
|isbn=1472292154
|title=The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
 
|rating=4.5
 
|genre=Literary Fiction
 
|summary=It's with a somehow guilty feeling that I admit that I have never been particularly fond of Milan Kundera. He's certainly a very good writer and undoubtedly a very intelligent man capable of interesting philosophical insights. All those qualities contributed to a cult status accorded to Kundera, compounded by the frisson of political subversion never a harmful thing for a writer from what used to be known as Eastern Europe (but which returned to its status as Middle (or Central) Europe with the fall of the Iron Curtain).
 
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>057117437X</amazonuk>
 
 
}}
 
}}
 
+
{{Frontpage
{{newreview
+
|author=Amanthi Harris
|author=Andrew Miller
+
|title=Beautiful Place
|title=One Morning Like A Bird
+
|rating=5
|rating=4
 
 
|genre=Literary Fiction
 
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Tokyo in 1940 is a place that we British tend not to give a great deal of thought to.  Japan entered the war, we say, with the attack on Pearl Harbour in December 1941, completely forgetting that Japan, like most of the rest of the world, was already a country at war.  She had been fighting in China since 1937 and was making in-roads into European colonial territory in the area as well.
+
|summary= Padma, a young Sri Lankan, has returned to the Villa Hibiscus on the southern coast of her home country.  This is a place she spent her formative years.  It is not a place she was born into, but the one she thinks of as home.  How she came to be at the Villa, how it became her home, and the machinations that have flowed through her life ever since she first arrived there provide the ''score'' for this gentle and yet subtly violent novel.  Padma's present fails to escape her past and much like the musical score of a film, that strand weaves its way through everything that happens at the Villa.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0340825154</amazonuk>
+
|isbn=1784631930
 
}}
 
}}
 
+
{{Frontpage
{{newreview
+
|isbn=178563335X
|author=Sadie Jones
+
|title=Sea Defences
|title=Small Wars
+
|author=Hilary Taylor
|rating=4.5
 
|genre=Literary Fiction
 
|summary=Even though our world is ostensibly at peace, hundreds of localized, unwinnable conflicts continue to grumble on. Mostly, we only hear and care about the ones involving 'our boys', as if war was some giant game of football.  But it isn't, and ''Small Wars'' reflects on the casualties of war in a story set in Cyprus in the Two-Way Family Favourites era of the nineteen-fifties. It may turn out to be an important book as the public mood turns against the 'war on terror' in Afghanistan. It's certainly a prescient one.
 
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0701184558</amazonuk>
 
}}
 
 
 
{{newreview
 
|author=Evelyn Waugh
 
|title=A Handful of Dust
 
 
|rating=5
 
|rating=5
 
|genre=Literary Fiction
 
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=A complex class society which evolved into a highly sophisticated culture is invariably a fertile ground for development of social satire, and British literature would have been hugely depleted if all novels that can be regarded as such were suddenly to disappear. Evelyn Waugh made the genre his own, and ''A Handful of Dust'' is a sublime example of his mastery of it.
+
|summary=When we first meet Rachel Bird she's a trainee vicar, sitting in on a PCC meeting and wondering why they're held when you need to pick the children up.  Her husband, Christopher, collects six-year-old Hannah and her elder brother, Jamie, whilst Rachel holds a sobbing parishioner.  Thelma's daughter-in-law won't let her see her grandson. Holthorpe, on the Norfolk coast, is a lovely place, but Rachel is struggling to develop a real bond with the parish - and she's in awe of the vicar, Gail, but then she's been doing the job for more than thirty years.  Rachel and Christopher hoped that a walk on the beach would do them some good - it was stormy but it was probably what they needed.  And then Hannah went missing.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0141183969</amazonuk>
 
 
}}
 
}}
 
+
{{Frontpage
{{newreview
+
|isbn=1398515388
|author=William Trevor
+
|title=The Boy and the Dog
|title=Love and Summer
+
|author=Seishu Hase and Alison Watts (translator)
 
|rating=4.5
 
|rating=4.5
|genre=Literary Fiction
+
|genre=General Fiction
|summary=''Love and Summer'' is set in the small town of Rathmoye in a rural Ireland 'some years after the middle of the last century'. The novel charts the doomed love affair between Ellie, a young farmer's wife, and Florian, the Irish-Italian son of two artists, but it as much about the place and time in which it is set.
+
|summary=First of all, it was the earthquake, deep in the ocean floor, which created the tsunami and this, in turn, caused the nuclear meltdown.  The result was complete and utter devastation.  The deaths were uncountable, and the loss of livelihoods was widespread.  The fact that many pets were separated from their owners came far down the list of priorities but - six months after the tsunami - Kazumasa Nakagaki discovered a dog outside a convenience store.  He wasn't a dog person but the convenience store owner's comment that he would call Public Health prompted Kazumasa to open his car door and Tamon the dog jumped in.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0670918245</amazonuk>
 
 
}}
 
}}
  
{{newreview
+
{{Frontpage
|author=Bryony Doran
+
|isbn=0989715337
|title=The China Bird
+
|title=Papa on the Moon
 +
|author=Marco North
 
|rating=4
 
|rating=4
 
|genre=Literary Fiction
 
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Edward is a sad and solitary figure.  Late middle-aged, twisted-spined and hump-backed, a loner who works in the archive basement of the library, lodges with Mrs Ingrams who makes his tea and ruins his laundry, and hoards letters from his mother.  
+
|summary=''Some frogs had gotten into the well.''
  
Like many an unmarried man with an aging, widowed mother, Edward finds his relationship with her somewhat strained. Unlike many of those men, his relationship was always that way.
+
''Walter stood waist-deep in the fragrant water, naked except for his beaten leather hat. Long strands of their eggs wove around him, sticky gray pearls with tadpoles inside them. Two of the dogs leaned over the opening and barked down at the strange noise of the buckets as he filled them.''
  
She is rude and demanding, and he either doesn't have the strength or the inclination to force the issue with her.  Apart from an occasion half-hearted reprimand, he stands back, ignores, makes excuses.
+
How is that for an opening? The style of this novel in the form of interconnected short stories goes from succinct and laconic to wistful and musing, turning on a sixpence. And author Marco North, who has the most wonderful turn of phrase, starts as he means to go on.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>095556302X</amazonuk>
 
 
}}
 
}}
 
+
{{Frontpage
{{newreview
+
|author=Daisy Hildyard
|author=Jude Morgan
+
|title=Emergency
|title=The Taste of Sorrow
+
|rating=4
|rating=4.5
 
 
|genre=Literary Fiction
 
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=The children were born in Thornton, a suburb of Bradford, and compared with where they were to go it was a soft living.  Howarth was high up on the Yorkshire Moors, industrialised and with weather which chilled to the bone.  The parsonage was four-square but draughty and not exactly welcoming.  They, of course, were the Brontë family.  The father was the impoverished curate and his six children had somehow to be cared for after his wife's death from cancer.
+
|summary=
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0755338898</amazonuk>
+
The summary of this book doesn't come close to explaining what is done with the premise.
}}
+
|isbn=1913097811
 +
}}  
  
{{newreview
+
{{Frontpage
|author=Agnes Owens
+
|author=Sally Oliver
|title=The Complete Novellas
+
|title=The Weight of Loss
 +
|rating=4
 +
|genre=Literary Fiction
 +
|summary= Marianne is grieving. Traumatised after the death of her sister, she awakes to find strange, thick black hairs sprouting from the bones of her spine which steadily increase in size and volume. Her GP, diagnosing the odd phenomenon as a physical reaction to her grief, recommends she go to stay at Nede, an experimental new treatment centre in Wales. Yet something strange is happening to Marianne and the other patients at Nede: a metamorphosis of a kind. As Marianne's memories threaten to overwhelm her, Nede offers her release from this cycle of memory and pain—but only at a terrible price: that of identity itself.
 +
|isbn= 086154112X
 +
}}
 +
{{Frontpage
 +
|author=Natalia Garcia Freire
 +
|title=This World Does Not Belong To Us
 
|rating=5
 
|rating=5
 
|genre=Literary Fiction
 
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Who is Agnes Owens?  A Scottish author who portrays working class life from the nineteen forties and fiftiesNow an octogenarian, apparently Agnes Owens started writing at the age of 58Here are five previously published stories collected into one new edition, a companion volume to her short stories, published in 2008.  I don't think you'll be disappointed.
+
|summary= Early comments on this debut novel from Ecuadorian writer Natalia García Freire include Tremendous, a delight.  I will agree with the first – tremendous is no understatement – but 'a delight' is perhaps using the expression in a way I'm not familiar withI have to confess my ignorance of the Spanish-language literary tradition so forgive my generalisation hereFrom the little I have read (in translation, I don't read Spanish) there does seem to be a tendency towards the fantastical – the mystical realism.  
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1846971373</amazonuk>
+
|isbn=0861541901
 
}}
 
}}
 
+
{{Frontpage
{{newreview
+
|author=Jennifer Saint
|author=J M Coetzee
+
|title=Elektra
|title=Summertime
 
|rating=4.5
 
|genre=Literary Fiction
 
|summary=''Summertime'' is the third of a series of fictionalised autobiographies by J M Coetzee, following on from ''Boyhood'' and ''Youth''. There, that sounds straightforward enough, doesn't it? Except, in this 'autobiography' (or 'autrebiography' as one critic described the earlier volumes) the subject is dead. So, clearly, this story isn't 'true'. But then, how true is an ordinary autobiography? And to what extent is it a function of the novel to use fiction to reveal truth? So many questions, and I haven't even begun.
 
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1846553180</amazonuk>
 
}}
 
 
 
{{newreview
 
|author=James Lever
 
|title=Me Cheeta
 
 
|rating=4
 
|rating=4
 
|genre=Literary Fiction
 
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Straight out of the golden age of Hollywood comes the bitchiest, most revealing memoir from one of its stars. There are scores to be settled, stars to be insulted, secrets to be hinted at none too subtley, and lost opportunities to be longed for. Oh, and the star telling all? Well, for those of you who can't tell from the title (or even the picture on the front cover) it's Cheeta - chimpanzee star of the Tarzan films.
+
|summary='Elektra' by Jennifer Saint tells the story of three women who live in the heavily male dominated world of Ancient Greece. Cassandra, Clytemnestra, and Elektra are all bit players in the story of the Trojan War. Yet Jennifer Saint shows us that often the silent women have the most compelling stories and the most extreme furies.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0007280165</amazonuk>
+
|isbn=1472273915
 
}}
 
}}
 
+
{{Frontpage
{{newreview
+
|isbn=8409290103
|author=Erick Setiawan 
+
|title=If Only
|title=Of Bees and Mist
+
|author=Matthew Tree
|rating=5
+
|rating=4.5
|genre=Literary Fiction
 
|summary=The first few chapters of this amazing work, had me scratching my head, and pondering, 'what on earth is this about, and where is it going?' It struck me as simply bizarre. However, I was quickly reeled in, and the initially disparate cast of characters, who seemed more like caricatures, soon had lives of their own - and fascinating ones at that!
 
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0755348532</amazonuk>
 
}}
 
 
 
{{newreview
 
|author=Hilary Mantel
 
|title=Wolf Hall
 
|rating=5
 
 
|genre=Literary Fiction
 
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=A revisionist look at Henry VIII's minister, Thomas Cromwell. Rich, absorbing and intelligent, it's a beautiful, beautiful book.  
+
|summary=Twenty-one-year-old Malcolm Lowry had been sent abroad by his father, cotton-broker AO Lowry: he asked his accountant, Mr Patrick, to ensure that the young man got on board the boat and thereafter Patrick was to send him a monthly allowance. Patrick sent the money regularly and a correspondence - of sorts - sprang up between the two although we hear more about what Lowry has to say than Patrick.  It wasn't that Lowry senior didn't care for his son, it was that he didn't care to have him in this country where he might be a danger to his wife and other children.  The alcohol problem was obvious even before Patrick managed to get the young man on his way.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0007230184</amazonuk>
 
 
}}
 
}}
 
+
{{Frontpage
{{newreview
+
|isbn=B098FFFBH9
|author=A S Byatt
+
|title=Snowcub
|title=The Children's Book
+
|author=Graham Fulbright
 
|rating=4.5
 
|rating=4.5
 
|genre=Literary Fiction
 
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Antonia Byatt's Booker-nominated ''The Children's Book'' (her first novel for seven years) is a staggering, complex and multi-layered book, set between the last years of Victoria's reign and the end of the First World War. Although this is undoubtedly an intelligent book, full of learning and ideas, ranging from class, early feminism, Fabianism and anarchism, it is highly readable and accessible. The author's stance is that this was a unique time for children in the UK, freed from the 'be seen and not heard' of the early Victorian age, but before the 'treat them like adults' of the post war loss of innocence. It was a time when children, at least rich children, were allowed to be free and adult authors like JM Barrie wrote both about and for children and was also widely read by adults.
+
|summary=Fourteen-year-old Rachel is her school's animal rights project leader and she and her friend are producing a competition entry to highlight the way in which human beings exploit the animal world. She gets a great deal of support from her family: father Pip Harrison, a lecturer at Imperial College, London, mother Kate and her twin, Nick. Kate runs the family business, a toy shop called Cornucopia in Putney, which is where we'll meet Rachel's main (if unsuspected) source of information: five soft toys.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0701183896</amazonuk>
 
}}
 
 
 
{{newreview
 
|author=Colm Toibin
 
|title=Brooklyn
 
|rating=5
 
|genre=Literary Fiction
 
|summary=Colm Tóibín's quietly powerful new novel, Brooklyn, opens in the author's own home town of Enniscorthy, County Wexford in the 1950s. We are sitting with his conscientiously introverted heroine, Eilis Lacey, as she watches through the upstairs living room window as her more glamorous older sister Rose walks briskly home from work. Rose is popular at the local golf club, with many male admirers. Meanwhile, Eilis' three brothers have all gone to England where there is work to be had. There are few opportunities in Enniscorthy, for employment or anything else. Eilis is lucky to be offered a Sunday job in Miss Kelly's grocery shop, a shop Eilis' widowed mother will not enter. Later, Eilis will entertain her mother and sister with imitations of Miss Kelly's voice. Showing everything only through Eilis' eyes, Tóibín brilliantly evokes life in the claustrophobically tight-knit town.
 
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0670918121</amazonuk>
 
 
}}
 
}}
  
{{newreview
 
|author=Shandi Mitchell
 
|title=Under This Unbroken Sky
 
|rating=5
 
|genre=Literary Fiction
 
|summary=A photograph opens the story.  A black and white picture of a family, husband, wife and their three children, smiling for the camera.  Thin, underfed, in their summer clothes despite the four inches of snow, they smile.  Partly they smile because they do not know what is to come.
 
 
A page and five years later we catch up with the Mykolayenkos.  In the Spring of 1938 Ivan and his cousin are catching mice in the barn and taking bets on which of the farm cats will pounce on the individually released rodents first.  The game is interrupted by a man with a loaded .22 rifle.  It takes a while for it to sink in, that this is Ivan's father, Teodor, free after a prison sentence for stealing his own grain.
 
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0297856588</amazonuk>
 
}}
 
  
{{newreview
+
Move on to [[Newest Paranormal Reviews]]
|author=Roddy Doyle
 
|title=Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha
 
|rating=5
 
|genre=Literary Fiction
 
|summary=I'm kind of a reverse literary snob, in that I tend to avoid books that win awards.  I've found that such books are often very well written, but they're not always good reading.  As shameful as it is to admit, I would much rather read for story as for fancy words.  Clearly I'm not alone, as in 1993, the year Roddy Doyle's ''Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha'' won the Booker Prize, the bestseller lists contained [[:Category:John Grisham|John Grisham]], Sue Townsend and Jeffrey Archer.
 
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0099535084</amazonuk>
 
}}
 
 
 
{{newreview
 
|author=Sarah Waters
 
|title=The Little Stranger
 
|rating=5
 
|genre=Literary Fiction
 
|summary=When was the last time you couldn't put a Booker nominated novel down?  Sarah Waters, author of acclaimed novels ''Fingersmith'' and ''The Night Watch'' has written a chilling psychological ghost story that kept me guessing until the very last page.
 
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1844086011</amazonuk>
 
}}
 
 
 
{{newreview
 
|author=James Kelman
 
|title=How Late It Was, How Late
 
|rating=4.5
 
|genre=Literary Fiction
 
|summary=Sammy has just woken up outside in what looks likes a park after a heavy night of drinking. He can't remember much – how he got there, or why he is wearing some old trainers and not his new shoes. He doesn't know what's happened to his wallet or why people are staring at him. He does remember some things – one being a row of some sorts he'd had with Helen, his girlfriend. Now he has been arrested, beaten up by the police, and released back onto the street again. He needs to find a way to get home, the only problem is; he has just gone blind.
 
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0099546272</amazonuk>
 
}}
 
 
 
{{newreview
 
|author=Douglas Coupland
 
|title=Generation A
 
|rating=3.5
 
|genre=Literary Fiction
 
|summary=I think with Douglas Coupland you either love him or hate him.  So I suppose I should probably say straight off that he's one of my favourite writers.  I've read all his fiction, and I just about peed my pants with excitement at getting to review this latest offering, ''Generation A''.  Those in the know will see that he is jumping off from his earlier novel, ''Generation X'', that dealt with three disillusioned twenty-somethings who seem to have opted out of life, working 'Mcjobs' in the Californian desert and telling each other stories to pass the time.  Here, with this new generation, there's storytelling again, this time amongst five characters, all from different places in the world, and different ages, who are brought together through one singular event in each of their lives - they are each stung by a bee.
 
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0434019836</amazonuk>
 
}}
 

Latest revision as of 16:14, 21 November 2024

1472279042.jpg

Review of

Black Woods Blue Sky by Eowyn Ivey

3.5star.jpg Literary Fiction

Black Woods Blue Sky tells the story of Birdie, the young mother of toddler Emaleen, who longs for a life beyond the Alaskan lodge where she works as a bar waitress, a setting which enables her bad habits and her accidental neglect of Emaleen. Described as a wild card, she feels stuck in her day-to-day life, and yearns to cross the Wolverine river and live on the North Fork to fulfil her desires of a simple life surrounded by nature. When she meets Arthur Nielson, a strange, taciturn and solitary man, who says he has a cabin over there, she feels called to go - and bring Emaleen with her. Without realising it, this calling will transform hers and Emaleen's lives forever. Full Review

0571365469.jpg

Review of

Intermezzo by Sally Rooney

4.5star.jpg General Fiction

Sally Rooney has studied the chessboard of life and is something of a grandmaster at putting it into words. Her dialogue is gripping and so brilliantly frustrating, as her characters never quite say exactly what they feel. Among the many relationships woven into this story, the central one for readers to unravel is the fraternal connection—or lack thereof—between Ivan and Peter Koubek. Ivan, a socially awkward chess prodigy, contrasts sharply with his older brother Peter, a successful lawyer living in Dublin. Following their father's passing after a long battle with cancer, the brothers' already strained relationship faces new trials. Full Review

0241619785.jpg

Review of

White Nights by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

5star.jpg Short Stories

As always in Dostoyevsky, the character work is sublime. One is never left wondering what a character is thinking or feeling because Dostoyevsky lays bare their innermost dispositions and temperaments with remarkable clarity. Full Review

0141186356.jpg

Review of

Giovanni's Room by James Baldwin

4.5star.jpg Literary Fiction

Giovanni's Room follows the narrator David, an American man living in Paris, as he navigates his torturous affair with Giovanni, an Italian bartender he meets in a gay bar. While David is engaged to Hella, who is travelling in Spain, the real tension in the novel arises not from his infidelity but from the deeper conflict within himself. It is David's crippling shame and denial of his sexuality that ultimately dooms his relationship with Giovanni. Full Review

1782278222.jpg

Review of

Forbidden Notebook by Alba de Cespedes

4star.jpg Literary Fiction

This Italian work of feminist fiction holds an air of suspense and tension from the moment our protagonist, Valeria Cossati, purchases her forbidden notebook, and learns about herself in the most intimate and revealing ways. Full Review

1784707422.jpg

Review of

My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh

3star.jpg Literary Fiction

At best, this novel is a scathing critique of modern society and reveals the fragility of human relationships; at worst, it is the cynical, predictable and slightly trite tale of an unlikeable protagonist. This unlikely heroine, a slim, attractive and newly orphaned girl in her twenties is disillusioned with the world, but resolves not to lose sleep over it: in fact, her solution lies in her hibernation. Full Review

B0CVFXPGP8.jpg

Review of

We'll Never Know by Matthew Tree

4.5star.jpg Literary Fiction

Timothy Wyndham wants nothing more than to be different from his father, a drunk and chronic underachiever whose dreams of being exceptional at any of his artistic passions all failed miserably and who had endless crises of self confidence. So Tim applied himself to his studies, cultivated his abilities rather than his daydreams and set himself high but achievable ambitions. Full Review

B0C47LV1PC.jpg

Review of

Fragility by Mosby Woods

4star.jpg Literary Fiction

Can you make a Yo birthing person joke? And if you could, is the question should you make it? Or is the question if you did, would it land? The catch is that the answer for both could well be.... no.

Fragility is set as the city of Portland, Oregon, cautiously begins to emerge from the restrictions imposed during the covid pandemic Full Review

B0C9SNG8R1.jpg

Review of

A Whirly Man Loses His Turn by Mosby Woods

4star.jpg Literary Fiction

The West isn't the dominant force it once was. Nobody in the West is quite sure how to mend this or even if mending it is the best course of action. Governments are flailing. A war here, a push for climate action there. A feeling that nobody is in actual charge. Imagine then, there was a man with precognition. Imagine the strategic advantage in this asset; a man who can tell you what will happen given any set of circumstances. That man would be valuable, right? Perhaps the most valuable asset in history. Imagine then, that this man loses this ability. What would governments do to get it back? Full Review

0571379559.jpg

Review of

The House of Broken Bricks by Fiona Williams

5star.jpg Literary Fiction

The House of Broken Bricks is the story of four people. Tess Hembry's roots are in Jamaica: temperamentally she might be happier there, but instead, she lives in the house on the riverbank, built of broken bricks. Insubstantial as it might look, it's stood the passage of time, storms and floods. Her husband, Richard, struggles to grow his vegetables, to complete the delivery rounds - and to bring in sufficient money. They have twin boys - Sonny and Max, the rainbow twins. Sonny's colouring reflects his mother's Jamaican heritage. Max takes after his father. People don't believe that they're related, much less twins and there's an assumption when Max is out with his mother that she's his nanny. Full Review

0356516075.jpg

Review of

House of Odysseus by Claire North

5star.jpg Literary Fiction

What could matter more than love?

The follow-up to the excellent Ithaca picks up a few months after where we left off. In the palace of Odysseus, with delicate care Queen Penelope continues to rule without her husband, who sailed to war at Troy and then by divine intervention never returned home. As ever she remains surrounded by suitors vying for the throne of the Western Isles. Having survived – politically and physical – the chaotic storm that Clytemnestra brought to Ithaca's shores, Queen Penelope is on the brink of a fragile peace. One that shatters however with the return of Orestes, King of Mycenae, and his sister Elektra, seeking refuge. Full Review

1803364998.jpg

Review of

Desert Creatures by Kay Chronister

4star.jpg Dystopian Fiction

With a world that is becoming increasingly inhospitable for humanity, post-apocalyptic fiction can become an almost masochistic thrill. Whether it is a robotic takeover, a world devoid of water or a nuclear holocaust, this genre is a way for humans to cathartically experience their most existential fears. Desert Creatures by Kay Chronister is a new work of post-apocalyptic fiction that aligns many of the fears that exist for humanity today. It is a shocking novel that still manages to find hope. Full Review

1803363002.jpg

Review of

The Trees Grew Because I Bled There by Eric LaRocca

5star.jpg Horror

Horror taps into something primeval within us. It is used as a way to reflect our darkest emotions and how we as humans react and process them. Most horror fiction feature a Big Bad, whether that is a home invader, a monster or a ghost, it usually something tangible and, by the end of the story, beatable. Eric LaRocca's The Trees Grew Because I Bled There is not like that. It is a collection of short stories more interested in the horrors of illness, grief and humiliation. Horrors that linger and are harder to defeat than any Big Bad. Full Review

0861546490.jpg

Review of

Thirst for Salt by Madelaine Lucas

5star.jpg Literary Fiction

Love, I'd read, was supposed to be a light and weightless feeling, but I had always longed for gravity

Told from a retrospective view, a young woman unravels the year-long relationship that once defined her. Overlaid with later wisdom, the narrator relives the affair with a man twenty years her senior from its inception – the summer after finishing university – to its sorrowful end the summer after. Set against the backdrop of an isolated Australian coastal town Thirst for Salt details the 24-year-old narrator's deepening relationship with her older lover, depicting its all-consuming nature, how it changed her perspective on both romantic and familial relationships and how it altered her irrevocably. Full Review

191458564X.jpg

Review of

Beautiful Shining People by Michael Grothaus

4star.jpg Literary Fiction

But fearing something and having it come to pass are two different things. And I'm willing to bet most of what we fear will never happen, or we can take steps to change it.

Beautiful Shining People revolves around the question of identity and acceptance. Of what it means to be human. Of what is real and what is artificial, and whether the development of technology is exciting or frightening. Full Review

1472292154.jpg

Review of

Atalanta by Jennifer Saint

5star.jpg Literary Fiction

I was as worthy as any one of them. I would get on board that ship, I vowed. I would take my place, not just in the name of the goddess. It was for the sake of my name, too. Atalanta

Princess. Warrior. Lover. Hero.

Abandoned at birth for being born a daughter rather than a son, Atalanta is raised under the protective eye of the goddess Athemis and fashioned into a formidable huntress, one who longs for adventure. When the opportunity comes – to join the Argonauts, a fierce band of warriors, descendent from the Gods themselves – Atalanta seizes the chance to fight in Artemis' name and carve out her own legendary place in history. What follows is a whirlwind of challenges and discovery and through it, Atalanta must remember Artemis' fatal warning: that if she marries, it will be her undoing. Full Review

1784631930.jpg

Review of

Beautiful Place by Amanthi Harris

5star.jpg Literary Fiction

Padma, a young Sri Lankan, has returned to the Villa Hibiscus on the southern coast of her home country. This is a place she spent her formative years. It is not a place she was born into, but the one she thinks of as home. How she came to be at the Villa, how it became her home, and the machinations that have flowed through her life ever since she first arrived there provide the score for this gentle and yet subtly violent novel. Padma's present fails to escape her past and much like the musical score of a film, that strand weaves its way through everything that happens at the Villa. Full Review

178563335X.jpg

Review of

Sea Defences by Hilary Taylor

5star.jpg Literary Fiction

When we first meet Rachel Bird she's a trainee vicar, sitting in on a PCC meeting and wondering why they're held when you need to pick the children up. Her husband, Christopher, collects six-year-old Hannah and her elder brother, Jamie, whilst Rachel holds a sobbing parishioner. Thelma's daughter-in-law won't let her see her grandson. Holthorpe, on the Norfolk coast, is a lovely place, but Rachel is struggling to develop a real bond with the parish - and she's in awe of the vicar, Gail, but then she's been doing the job for more than thirty years. Rachel and Christopher hoped that a walk on the beach would do them some good - it was stormy but it was probably what they needed. And then Hannah went missing. Full Review

1398515388.jpg

Review of

The Boy and the Dog by Seishu Hase and Alison Watts (translator)

4.5star.jpg General Fiction

First of all, it was the earthquake, deep in the ocean floor, which created the tsunami and this, in turn, caused the nuclear meltdown. The result was complete and utter devastation. The deaths were uncountable, and the loss of livelihoods was widespread. The fact that many pets were separated from their owners came far down the list of priorities but - six months after the tsunami - Kazumasa Nakagaki discovered a dog outside a convenience store. He wasn't a dog person but the convenience store owner's comment that he would call Public Health prompted Kazumasa to open his car door and Tamon the dog jumped in. Full Review

0989715337.jpg

Review of

Papa on the Moon by Marco North

4star.jpg Literary Fiction

Some frogs had gotten into the well.

Walter stood waist-deep in the fragrant water, naked except for his beaten leather hat. Long strands of their eggs wove around him, sticky gray pearls with tadpoles inside them. Two of the dogs leaned over the opening and barked down at the strange noise of the buckets as he filled them.

How is that for an opening? The style of this novel in the form of interconnected short stories goes from succinct and laconic to wistful and musing, turning on a sixpence. And author Marco North, who has the most wonderful turn of phrase, starts as he means to go on. Full Review

1913097811.jpg

Review of

Emergency by Daisy Hildyard

4star.jpg Literary Fiction

The summary of this book doesn't come close to explaining what is done with the premise. Full Review

086154112X.jpg

Review of

The Weight of Loss by Sally Oliver

4star.jpg Literary Fiction

Marianne is grieving. Traumatised after the death of her sister, she awakes to find strange, thick black hairs sprouting from the bones of her spine which steadily increase in size and volume. Her GP, diagnosing the odd phenomenon as a physical reaction to her grief, recommends she go to stay at Nede, an experimental new treatment centre in Wales. Yet something strange is happening to Marianne and the other patients at Nede: a metamorphosis of a kind. As Marianne's memories threaten to overwhelm her, Nede offers her release from this cycle of memory and pain—but only at a terrible price: that of identity itself. Full Review

0861541901.jpg

Review of

This World Does Not Belong To Us by Natalia Garcia Freire

5star.jpg Literary Fiction

Early comments on this debut novel from Ecuadorian writer Natalia García Freire include Tremendous, a delight. I will agree with the first – tremendous is no understatement – but 'a delight' is perhaps using the expression in a way I'm not familiar with. I have to confess my ignorance of the Spanish-language literary tradition so forgive my generalisation here. From the little I have read (in translation, I don't read Spanish) there does seem to be a tendency towards the fantastical – the mystical realism. Full Review

1472273915.jpg

Review of

Elektra by Jennifer Saint

4star.jpg Literary Fiction

'Elektra' by Jennifer Saint tells the story of three women who live in the heavily male dominated world of Ancient Greece. Cassandra, Clytemnestra, and Elektra are all bit players in the story of the Trojan War. Yet Jennifer Saint shows us that often the silent women have the most compelling stories and the most extreme furies. Full Review

8409290103.jpg

Review of

If Only by Matthew Tree

4.5star.jpg Literary Fiction

Twenty-one-year-old Malcolm Lowry had been sent abroad by his father, cotton-broker AO Lowry: he asked his accountant, Mr Patrick, to ensure that the young man got on board the boat and thereafter Patrick was to send him a monthly allowance. Patrick sent the money regularly and a correspondence - of sorts - sprang up between the two although we hear more about what Lowry has to say than Patrick. It wasn't that Lowry senior didn't care for his son, it was that he didn't care to have him in this country where he might be a danger to his wife and other children. The alcohol problem was obvious even before Patrick managed to get the young man on his way. Full Review

B098FFFBH9.jpg

Review of

Snowcub by Graham Fulbright

4.5star.jpg Literary Fiction

Fourteen-year-old Rachel is her school's animal rights project leader and she and her friend are producing a competition entry to highlight the way in which human beings exploit the animal world. She gets a great deal of support from her family: father Pip Harrison, a lecturer at Imperial College, London, mother Kate and her twin, Nick. Kate runs the family business, a toy shop called Cornucopia in Putney, which is where we'll meet Rachel's main (if unsuspected) source of information: five soft toys. Full Review


Move on to Newest Paranormal Reviews