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[[Category:Literary Fiction|*]]
[[Category:New Reviews|Literary Fiction]]==Literary fiction==__NOTOC__{{newreviewFrontpage|author=Matthew CondonEowyn Ivey|title=The Trout OperaBlack Woods Blue Sky|rating=43.5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Judges Carrington ''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 Thorpe recline her accidental neglect of Emaleen. Described as a ''wild card'', she feels stuck in leather armchairs her day-to-day life, and yearns to cross the Wolverine river and live on the verandah North Fork to fulfil her desires of Buckleya 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 Crossing hotel and watch in silence as a giant trout shuffles across the bridgelives forever. |isbn=1472279042}}
The Judges, despite their initial prominence {{Frontpage|author=Sally Rooney|title=Intermezzo|rating=4.5|genre=General Fiction |summary=Sally Rooney has studied the chessboard of life and convincing back-story giving them is something of a valid reason for being in Buckley's Crossinggrandmaster at putting it into words. Her dialogue is gripping and so brilliantly frustrating, will not really concern usas her characters never quite say exactly what they feel. They are there Among the many relationships woven into this story, the central one for readers to represent a type: unravel is the fraternal connection—or lack thereof—between Ivan and Peter Koubek. Ivan, a visitor to small town Australiasocially awkward chess prodigy, a fisherman from the citycontrasts sharply with his older brother Peter, a seeker after something successful lawyer living in the Snowy that probably isnDublin. Following their father't fish.  We shalls passing after a long battle with cancer, however, be concerned with the giant troutbrothers' already strained relationship faces new trials.|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>038561506X</amazonuk>0571365469
}}
 {{newreviewFrontpage|author=Clare MorrallFyodor Dostoyevsky|title=The Man Who DisappearedWhite Nights|rating=45|genre=Literary FictionShort Stories|summary=I was drawn to this book straight away. FirstlyAs always in Dostoyevsky, the jacket cover character work is lovelysublime. The subliminal message is read me, please read me. We are introduced to the Kendall family; mother, father and three children. All leading unremarkable, rather ordinary lives. The father, Felix, works hard to provide for his family. He loves them all dearly. They all love him back. It One is never left wondering what a secure family unit. Until - completely out of the blue - he simply disappears. His family character is distraught thinking or feeling because Dostoyevsky lays bare their innermost dispositions and mystified. We all know that a person cannot simply disappear. But Felix Kendall has taken himself off the radartemperaments with remarkable clarity. Why?|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>0340994274</amazonuk>0241619785
}}
 {{newreviewFrontpage|author=Christopher IsherwoodJames Baldwin|title=A Single ManGiovanni's Room|rating=4.5|genre=Literary Fiction|summary=If you've ever wanted to know what goes on inside someone'Giovanni's mind youRoom'll love this short novel' follows the narrator David, first published back an American man living in 1964. We join George Falconer just at the moment Paris, as he awakes from sleep and witness navigates his innermost thoughts as torturous affair with Giovanni, an Italian bartender he goes about meets in a typical daygay bar. It all sounds pretty dull and monotonous but what makes this exciting While David is that George isn't just any old professor living the American Dreamengaged to Hella, oh nowho is travelling in Spain, he's so detached the real tension in the novel arises not from his infidelity but from the banal normality of the world that hedeeper conflict within himself. It is David's almost outside crippling shame and denial of his own body at timessexuality that ultimately dooms his relationship with Giovanni.|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>0099548828</amazonuk>0141186356
}}
 {{newreviewFrontpage|author=Angelica GarnettAlba de Cespedes |title=The Unspoken TruthForbidden Notebook
|rating=4
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=I would not normally start a review with the biography This Italian work of the author, but The Unspoken Truth is presented as autobiographical feminist fiction by a child holds an air of suspense and tension from the Bloomsbury Group – moment our protagonist, Valeria Cossati, purchases her forbidden notebook, and learns about herself in fact the subtitle is 'A Quartet of Bloomsbury Stories'. The blurb on the inside cover even identifies which character is based on the author in each of the four stories, just in case we are not suremost intimate and revealing ways.|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>0701184353</amazonuk>1782278222
}}
 {{newreviewFrontpage|author=Amos OzOttessa Moshfegh|title=Rhyming Life My Year of Rest and DeathRelaxation|rating=53
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Rhyming Love and Death At best, this novel is a kind scathing critique of philosophical love letter to literaturemodern society and reveals the fragility of human relationships; at worst, it is the cynical, or perhaps more so to fictionpredictable and slightly trite tale of an unlikeable protagonist. It is This unlikely heroine, a book about how to writeslim, about attractive and newly orphaned girl in her twenties is disillusioned with the compulsion world, but resolves not to writelose sleep over it: in fact, and about the strange world that the writer of fiction must live her solution lies inher hibernation.|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>0099521024</amazonuk>1784707422
}}
 {{newreviewFrontpage|author=Paul MurrayMatthew Tree|title=Skippy DiesWe'll Never Know|rating=34.5|genre=Literary Fiction|summary=Life in Seabrook College is a mess. Some of the staff are young enough to remember their own school days there, but many are certainly too old for that. A lot of the boys are victims of ragging and bullying for being too chunky, or too smart - but some are so chunky and smart there's a certain kudos to them. The female of the species is a thing only spied from their own school next door, and only met by selling them ritalin as a weight-control pill, or meeting them at the very rare combined school disco.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0241141826</amazonuk>}} {{newreview|author=Tom Wolfe|title=The Bonfire of the Vanities|rating=5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=In Timothy Wyndham wants nothing more than to be different from his own mindfather, bond trader Sherman McCoy is a 'Master drunk and chronic underachiever whose dreams of being exceptional at any of the Universe'. He has a pleasant wife, a beautiful mistress, his artistic passions all failed miserably and a sweet six year old daughterwho had endless crises of self confidence. Henry Lamb is a black student from the projects. Under normal circumstancesSo Tim applied himself to his studies, it's clear that McCoy's world and Lamb's world would never overlap. But when McCoy and cultivated his abilities rather than his mistress Maria Ruskin end up lost in the Bronx, daydreams and an accident leads to Lamb being hit by McCoy's Mercedes, a chain of events start which will lead to his downfallset himself high but achievable ambitions.|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>0099548798</amazonuk>B0CVFXPGP8
}}
 {{newreviewFrontpage|authorisbn=Kate Cole-AdamsB0C47LV1PC|title=Walking to the MoonFragility|author=Mosby Woods
|rating=4
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=We meet the main character JessicaCan you make a ''Yo birthing person'' joke? And if you could, or Jess as she is usually called, deep in an emotional black hole. She can see no light at the end of question should you make it? Or is the tunnel. And right from the startquestion if you did, right from page one, we have a sense of would it land? The catch is that the beautiful and poetic language of Cole-Adamsanswer for both could well be. 'Time and I have a new arrangement. We leave each other alone.' And indeed time is not important in this novel. We have all the time in the world would probably be the motto of the medical staff - if they had oneno. |amazonuk=<amazonuk>1849161348</amazonuk>}}
{{newreview|author=Ru Freeman|title=A Disobedient Girl|rating=5|genre=General Fiction|summary=''A Disobedient GirlFragility'' follows two women struggling to retain control of their lives in is set as the face city of servitude. Latha is a servant girl to the affluent Vithanage family, whose daughter, TharaPortland, is Latha's age. As childrenOregon, the girls are the best of friends, but they are destined cautiously begins to be separated by class, which is made painfully obvious when boys come into emerge from the picture. Meanwhile, Biso serves a cruel and drunken husband who beats her and terrorises her children, one of whom is another man's love child. Biso's husband murdered her lover in a hateful rage when he uncovered her affair and she realises that she must escape his house if she and her children are to live. Latha too seeks escape, but she finds it in restrictions imposed during the arms of Thara's boyfriend and this sets off a chain of events that will echo far into her future.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0670917958</amazonuk>covid pandemic
}}
 {{newreviewFrontpage|author=Simon RobsonMosby Woods|title=CatchA Whirly Man Loses His Turn
|rating=4
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=CatharineThe West isn's husband Tom is away on business t the dominant force it once was. Nobody in Birmingham, and so Catharine awakes alone for the first time in their little cottage at West is quite sure how to mend this or even if mending it is the end best course of their laneaction. They moved there a few months previously, and since then Catharine has spent her days quietly awaiting her husband's return from workGovernments are flailing. She is sure that she will figure outA war here, some day, what her purpose in life is. She thought it might be to have a baby, but they have been trying push for some time and it hasn't happened as yetclimate action there. Meanwhile she waits, and thinks, and waitsA feeling that nobody is in actual charge. In the lounge stands her pianoImagine then, there was a stark reminder of man with precognition. Imagine the life she didn't manage to realise because although she studied music she found, quite quickly, that strategic advantage in spite of being passionate she lacked this asset; a man who can tell you what will happen given any kind set of talent for it whatsoevercircumstances. SoThat man would be valuable, on this day, alone at home, Catharine finds herself tormented by right? Perhaps the piano's presence and over-thinking every second of the daymost valuable asset in history. She worries away at who she isImagine then, and what her life is, as her loneliness and the day itself unravel around herthat this man loses this ability.What would governments do to get it back?|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>0224090232</amazonuk>B0C9SNG8R1
}}
 {{newreviewFrontpage|authorisbn=Joe Meno0571379559|title=The Great Perhaps|rating=4.5|genre=Literary 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 House 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.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0330512471</amazonuk>}} {{newreviewBroken Bricks|author=Elizabeth Kostova|title=The Swan ThievesFiona Williams|rating=25
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=1999 – A renowned painter''The House of Broken Bricks'' is the story of four people. Tess Hembry's roots are in Jamaica: temperamentally she might be happier there, Robert Oliverbut instead, goes madshe lives in the house on the riverbank, attacking a painting with a knifebuilt of broken bricks. He Insubstantial as it might look, it's arrestedstood the passage of time, storms and sent to a psychiatrist who is also an artistfloods. The psychiatrist Her husband, Andrew MarloweRichard, can't get struggles to grow his patient to talk to himvegetables, but tries to investigate what drove him complete the delivery rounds - and to this by talking to his wife bring in sufficient money. They have twin boys - Sonny and Max, the rainbow twins. Sonny's colouring reflects his girlfriend, and reading some letters Oliver seems obsessed withmother's Jamaican heritage1879 – Beatrice de Clerval, aspiring artist, corresponds with her uncle-by-marriage Olivier Vignot, a more experienced painterMax takes after his father. Their letters will be found by Robert Oliver, 120 years later People don't believe that they're related, much less twins and will lead to there's an assumption when Max is out with his mother that she's his loss of sanitynanny.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1847442404</amazonuk>
}}
 {{newreviewFrontpage|author=Atiq RahimiClaire North|title=The Patience StoneHouse of Odysseus
|rating=5
|genre=Literary Fiction|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.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0701184167</amazonuk>}} {{newreview|author=Joyce Carol Oates|title=A Fair Maiden|rating=4.5|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.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1847248586</amazonuk>}} {{newreview|author=Dai Sijie |title=Once on a Moonless Night|rating=3.5|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 What could matter more than 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.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0099521326</amazonuk>}} {{newreview|author=Thomas Trofimuk |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|genre=Literary Fiction|summary=Ku Dongliang and his father, Ku Wenxuan, are forced follow-up to live on a barge on the river following Ku Wenxuanexcellent ''Ithaca''s fall from gracepicks up a few months after where we left off. Originally believed to be In the son palace of a revolutionary martyrOdysseus, it is eventually proved that Mr Ku was not so - as a resultwith delicate care Queen Penelope continues to rule without her husband, his position in society takes a nose-divewho sailed to war at Troy and then by divine intervention never returned home. Dongliang suffers as a result As ever she remains surrounded by suitors vying for the throne of this, finding it hard to make friends within the barge community Western Isles. Having survived – politically and physical – the chaotic storm that Clytemnestra brought to Ithaca's shores, Queen Penelope is on shore. Then an orphaned girl moves onto the barges and finds brink of a place in Dongliang's apparently cold heartfragile peace. Will she be able to take him out One that shatters however with the return of Orestes, King of himself? Or will sheMycenae, tooand his sister Elektra, turn her back on him?seeking refuge.|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>038561344X</amazonuk>0356516075
}}
 {{newreviewFrontpage|author=Iain BanksKay Chronister|title=The Steep Approach to GarbadaleDesert Creatures|rating=4|genre=Literary Dystopian Fiction|summary=It took me With a while to realise world that Iain Banks isbecoming increasingly inhospitable for humanity, most of allpost-apocalyptic fiction can become an almost masochistic thrill. Whether it is a robotic takeover, a teller world devoid of tales - I would call him water or a story-teller had nuclear holocaust, this term not became genre is a way for humans to cathartically experience their most existential fears. ''Desert Creatures'' by Kay Chronister is a complimentnew work of post-cum-invective usually reserved for the Jeffrey Archers and Dan Browns apocalyptic fiction that aligns many of the modern publishing worldfears that exist for humanity today. This ability to tell stories - not to plot as much as to weave It is a yarn - combines with a penchant for creating appealing contexts for Banks' narratives shocking novel that still manages 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, charactersfind hope.|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>0349119287</amazonuk>1803364998
}}
 {{newreviewfrontpage|isbn=1803363002|author=Mary McCarthy Eric LaRocca|title=The GroupTrees Grew Because I Bled There|rating=4.5|genre=Literary FictionHorror|summary='Given the attention paid Horror taps into something primeval within us. It is used as a way to relations between the sexes, it would be tempting to call The Group reflect our darkest emotions and how we as humans react and process them. Most horror fiction feature a forerunner of today's chick lit. It's not.Big Bad'So writes Candace Bushnell, the writer behind the TV series Sex whether that is a home invader, a monster or a ghost, it usually something tangible and the City, in by the introduction to this new Virago Modern Classics edition end of the story, beatable. Eric LaRocca's ''The Group by Mary McCarthyTrees Grew Because I Bled There'' is not like that. First published in 1963, this novel It is about the lives of a group collection of young women after leaving college short stories more interested in 1933, including careers, relationships, sex, babies, parentsthe horrors of illness, grief and humiliation. Horrors that linger and moneyare harder to defeat than any ''Big Bad''. |amazonuk=<amazonuk>1844085937</amazonuk>
}}
 {{newreviewFrontpage|author=Janice GallowayMadelaine Lucas|title=Collected StoriesThirst for Salt
|rating=5
|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
|summary=Meet Windisch. A miller in a small village''Love, he trudges through thereI'd read, was supposed to be a light and through his neighbours, and through his life, counting his days and hoursweightless feeling, but I had always longed 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 mayorgravity''s house with regularity, as an open bribe, but there might be a bigger sacrifice to have to make.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1852421398</amazonuk>}}
{{newreview|author=Jennifer Johnston|title=Truth or Fiction|rating=4|genre=Literary Fiction|summary=Caroline Wallace is not Told from a retrospective view, a happy young womanunravels the year-long relationship that once defined her. She has waited ten Overlaid with later wisdom, the narrator relives the affair with a man twenty years for her lover senior from its inception – the summer after finishing university – to propose to her, and now just as he finally does, she has to go to Dublin to interview faded literary star Desmond Fitzmauriceits sorrowful end the summer after. Desmond promises his tale will be brimful Set against the backdrop of an isolated Australian coastal town ''sex and violenceThirst for Salt'' details the 24-year-old narrator's deepening relationship with her older lover, but Caroline has no idea of the mystery that lies at the heart of his storydepicting its all-consuming nature, how it changed her perspective on both romantic and familial relationships and how it altered her irrevocably.|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>0755330544</amazonuk>0861546490
}}
 {{newreviewFrontpage|author=Julian BarnesMichael Grothaus|title=Staring at the SunBeautiful Shining People
|rating=4
|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 But fearing something and he runs away having it come to Americapass are two different things. HeAnd I's replaced by Tommy Prosserm willing to bet most of what we fear will never happen, 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 marriesor we can take steps to change it. 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. |amazonuk=<amazonuk>0099540096</amazonuk>}}
{{newreview|author=Russell Celyn Jones|title=The Ninth Wave (New Stories from ''Beautiful Shining People'' revolves around the Mabinogion) |rating=4question of identity and acceptance.5|genre=Literary Fiction|summary=Pwyll rules a medieval-style fiefdom in a post-climate change WalesOf what it means to be human. Life Of what is different in many ways - there's a new-but-old social order built on feudalism real and horsepower what is artificial, and whether the main means development 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 livestechnology is exciting or frightening. |amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>1854115146</amazonuk>191458564X
}}
 {{newreview|author=Owen Sheers|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>}} {{newreviewFrontpage|author=Shirley JacksonJennifer Saint|title=We Have Always Lived In The CastleAtalanta|rating=4.5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Mary Katherine Blackwood, also known ''I was as worthy as Merricatany one of them. I would get on board that ship, is eighteenI vowed. I would take my place, and lives with her older sister Constance not just in the family home where 'Blackwoods had always lived'name of the goddess. Merricat quickly draws It was for the reader into her world by a series of matter sake of fact but bizarre statements – her likes include her sister and death cap mushroomsmy name, and everyone else in her family is deadtoo. The wealthy Blackwood family has always kept the house 'steady against the worldAtalanta', 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.|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 historyPrincess. 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)Warrior. I felt with all these links, the novel could not fail to interest me – but this was not the caseLover. Hero.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1904529305</amazonuk>}}
{{newreview|author=Elizabeth Baines|title=Too Many Magpies|rating=4|genre=Literary Fiction|summary=Becoming Abandoned at birth for being born a mother brings daughter rather than a whole new world son, Atalanta is raised under the protective eye of fear into your life. Suddenly you see the danger in every situation, goddess Athemis and fear and trepidation can be become your constant companions. In this novellafashioned into a formidable huntress, we meet a young mother one who is married to a logical scientistlongs for adventure. They attempt When the opportunity comes – to control their children's futures on join the Argonauts, a scientific basisfierce band of warriors, growing their own fruit and vegetables, giving their children nothing sugary, eating no eggs for a whole year until any adverse affects descendent from them were disproved. But after meeting with an enigmatic stranger our young mother begins the Gods themselves – Atalanta seizes the chance to struggle as he introduces ideas of freedom into fight in Artemis' name and carve out her worldown legendary place in history. She begins an affair with him, begins to let things slip at home What follows is a whirlwind of challenges and discovery and with the childrenthrough it, yet finds Atalanta must remember Artemis' fatal warning: that if she is still continuously haunted by the sense of an ever-present dangermarries, it will be her undoing.|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>1844717216</amazonuk>1472292154
}}
 {{newreviewFrontpage|author=Katherine MayAmanthi Harris|title=Burning OutBeautiful Place|rating=45
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Violet has it all – a well-paid jobPadma, and a luxurious apartment all to herself. Everything is catered for; her mealsyoung Sri Lankan, her clothes, and her health are all how she would like them has returned to be. But the life she is leading is beginning to take its toll. On Villa Hibiscus on the verge southern coast of snapping, her home country. This is a drained and somewhat out-of-sorts Violet, withdraws back to place she spent her home townformative years. There It is not a place she was born into, but the one she meets someone familiar, a ghost reminding her thinks of how as home. How she used came to be ten years earlier – a young carefree girlat the Villa, full of life. Only this isn't a ghosthow it became her home, but a girl living and the machinations that have flowed through her life Violet once lived – exactly ever since she first arrived there provide the same''score'' for this gentle and yet subtly violent novel. Haunted by the Padma's present fails to escape her past Violet realizes history is repeating itself and is convinced events will happen again. Events much like the musical score of a film, that strand weaves its way through everything that will in turn haunt happens at the girlVilla.|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>1906727392</amazonuk>1784631930
}}
 {{newreviewFrontpage|authorisbn=Tove Jansson178563335X|title=The True DeceiverSea Defences|author=Hilary Taylor
|rating=5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Most people of my age will have come across JanssonWhen 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 work unwittinglydaughter-in-law won't let her see her grandson. Holthorpe, via on the televised renditions 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 Moomin tales. The readers amongst us would vicar, Gail, but then have she's been entranced a few doing the job for more than thirty years ago to discover . Rachel and Christopher hoped that at last Thomas Teal had set about a walk on the translation into English, first of The Summer Book and beach would do them some good - it was stormy but it was probably what they needed. And then of a collection of short stories which were published as 'A Winter Book'Hannah went missing. |amazonuk=<amazonuk>0954899571</amazonuk>
}}
 {{newreviewFrontpage|authorisbn=Daniel Kehlmann 1398515388|title=Me The Boy and the Dog|author=Seishu Hase and KaminskiAlison Watts (translator)
|rating=4.5
|genre=Literary General Fiction|summary=After reviewing several long booksFirst of all, it's been refreshing to read such a fluent yet pared down story as 'Kaminski and Me'. In itwas the earthquake, Sebastian Zollnerdeep in the ocean floor, which created the obnoxious main charactertsunami and this, shoves himself forward in a desperate attempt to research a best seller which will re-ignite his career as an art critic. Kaminskiturn, caused the proposed subject, nuclear meltdown. The result was a fashionable painter long ago, but nowcomplete and utter devastation. The deaths were uncountable, ancient and chronically ill, has virtually slid into oblivionthe loss of livelihoods was widespread. So The fact that many pets were separated from their owners came far down the list of priorities but - six months after the secondtsunami -rate writer is on Kazumasa Nakagaki discovered a loser unless dog outside a convenience store. He wasn't a dog person but the convenience store owner's comment that he can dig up some juicy details would call Public Health prompted Kazumasa to hook open his car door and Tamon the art world and general publicdog jumped in.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1847249892</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreviewFrontpage|authorisbn=Hilary Dixon0989715337|title=When Rooks Speak of LovePapa on the Moon|author=Marco North
|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>}} {{newreview|author=David Malouf |title=Ransom|rating=5|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 Some frogs had gotten 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.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0701184159</amazonuk>}}''
{{newreview|author=David Vann |title=Legend of a Suicide|rating=4.5|genre=Literary Fiction|summary=Some books defy categorisation and that's 'Walter stood waist-deep in the case with ''Legend of a Suicide''fragrant water, naked except for his beaten leather hat. Is it Literary Fiction? Is it a series Long strands of short stories linked by a common themetheir eggs wove around him, or a novella sticky gray pearls with supporting pieces? Is it fiction with a strong autobiographical thread running through it? The simple answer to all these questions is ''yes'' – for tadpoles inside them. Two of the dogs leaned over the book is all that opening and morebarked down at the strange noise of the buckets as he filled them. 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|author=Milan Kundera|title=How is that for an opening? The Book style of this novel in the form of Laughter interconnected short stories goes from succinct 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 laconic to wistful and undoubtedly musing, turning on a very intelligent man capable of interesting philosophical insightssixpence. All those qualities contributed to a cult status accorded to KunderaAnd author Marco North, compounded by who has the frisson most wonderful turn of political subversion – never a harmful thing for a writer from what used to be known phrase, starts as Eastern Europe (but which returned he means to its status as Middle (or Central) Europe with the fall of the Iron Curtain)go on.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>057117437X</amazonuk>
}}
 {{newreviewFrontpage|author=Andrew Miller Daisy Hildyard|title=One Morning Like A BirdEmergency
|rating=4
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Tokyo in 1940 is a place that we British tend not to give a great deal The summary of thought this book doesn't come close to. Japan entered the war, we say, explaining what is done 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 wellpremise.|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>0340825154</amazonuk>1913097811}}
{{newreviewFrontpage |author=Sadie Jones Sally Oliver |title=Small WarsThe Weight of Loss |rating=4.5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Even though our world Marianne is ostensibly at peace, hundreds grieving. Traumatised after the death of localizedher sister, unwinnable conflicts continue she awakes to grumble on. Mostlyfind strange, we only hear and care about thick black hairs sprouting from the ones involving 'our boys', as if war was some giant game bones of footballher spine which steadily increase in size and volume. But it isn'tHer GP, and ''Small Wars'' reflects on diagnosing the casualties of war in odd phenomenon as a story set in Cyprus physical reaction to her grief, recommends she go to stay at Nede, an experimental new treatment centre in the Two-Way Family Favourites era of the nineteen-fiftiesWales. It may turn out Yet something strange is happening to be an important book as Marianne and the public mood turns against the 'war on terror' in Afghanistanother patients at Nede: a metamorphosis of a kind. ItAs Marianne's certainly memories threaten to overwhelm her, Nede offers her release from this cycle of memory and pain—but only at a prescient oneterrible price: that of identity itself.|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>0701184558</amazonuk>086154112X }} {{newreviewFrontpage|author=Evelyn WaughNatalia Garcia Freire|title=A Handful of DustThis World Does Not Belong To Us
|rating=5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=A complex class society which evolved into Early comments on this debut novel from Ecuadorian writer Natalia García Freire include Tremendous, a highly sophisticated culture delight. I will agree with the first – tremendous is no understatement – but 'a delight' is invariably perhaps using the expression in a fertile ground for development of social satire, and British literature would way I'm not familiar with. I have been hugely depleted if all novels that can be regarded as such were suddenly to disappearconfess my ignorance of the Spanish-language literary tradition so forgive my generalisation here. Evelyn Waugh made From the genre his ownlittle I have read (in translation, and I don''A Handful of Dust'' is t read Spanish) there does seem to be a sublime example of his mastery of ittendency towards the fantastical – the mystical realism.|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>0141183969</amazonuk>0861541901
}}
 {{newreviewFrontpage|author=William Trevor Jennifer Saint|title=Love and SummerElektra|rating=4.5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary='Elektra'Love and Summer'' is set in by Jennifer Saint tells the small town story of Rathmoye three women who live in a rural Ireland 'some years after the middle heavily male dominated world of the last century'Ancient Greece. The novel charts the doomed love affair between EllieCassandra, a young farmer's wifeClytemnestra, and Florian, Elektra are all bit players in the Irish-Italian son story of two artists, but it as much about the place Trojan War. Yet Jennifer Saint shows us that often the silent women have the most compelling stories and time in which it is setthe most extreme furies.|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>0670918245</amazonuk>1472273915
}}
 {{newreviewFrontpage|authorisbn=Bryony Doran 8409290103|title=The China BirdIf Only|author=Matthew Tree|rating=4.5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Edward is a sad and solitary figure. Late middleTwenty-aged, twistedone-spined and humpyear-backed, a loner who works in the archive basement of the library, lodges with Mrs Ingrams who makes old Malcolm Lowry had been sent abroad by his tea and ruins his laundryfather, and hoards letters from cotton-broker AO Lowry: he asked his mother.  Like many an unmarried man with an agingaccountant, widowed motherMr Patrick, Edward finds his relationship with her somewhat strainedto ensure that the young man got on board the boat and thereafter Patrick was to send him a monthly allowance. Unlike many Patrick sent the money regularly and a correspondence - of those mensorts - 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, his relationship it was always that way.  She is rude and demanding, and he either doesndidn't care to have the strength or the inclination him in this country where he might be a danger to force the issue with herhis wife and other children. Apart from an occasion half-hearted reprimand, he stands back, ignores, makes excusesThe alcohol problem was obvious even before Patrick managed to get the young man on his way.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>095556302X</amazonuk>
}}
 {{newreviewFrontpage|authorisbn=Jude Morgan B098FFFBH9|title=The Taste of SorrowSnowcub|author=Graham Fulbright
|rating=4.5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=The children were born in Thornton, Fourteen-year-old Rachel is her school's animal rights project leader and she and her friend are producing a suburb of Bradford, and compared with where they were competition entry to go it was a soft living. Howarth was high up on highlight the Yorkshire Moors, industrialised and with weather way in which chilled to human beings exploit the boneanimal world. The parsonage was four-square but draughty She gets a great deal of support from her family: father Pip Harrison, a lecturer at Imperial College, London, mother Kate and not exactly welcomingher twin, Nick. TheyKate runs the family business, of coursea toy shop called Cornucopia in Putney, were the Brontë family. The father was the impoverished curate and his six children had somehow to be cared for after his wifewhich is where we'll meet Rachel's death from cancermain (if unsuspected) source of information: five soft toys.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0755338898</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Agnes Owens
|title=The Complete Novellas
|rating=5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Who is Agnes Owens? A Scottish author who portrays working class life from the nineteen forties and fifties. Now an octogenarian, apparently Agnes Owens started writing at the age of 58. Here 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.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1846971373</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview|author=J M Coetzee|title=Summertime|rating=4.5|genre=Literary Fiction|summary=''Summertime'' is the third of a series of fictionalised autobiographies by J M Coetzee, following Move 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>}}[[Newest Paranormal Reviews]]