==Literary fiction==
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{{newreview
|author=Joshua Ferris
|title=The Unnamed
|rating=5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Tim Farnsworth seemed to have it all. He loved his wife Jane and daughter Becka and his job as a partner in prestigious law firm was enjoyable, fulfilling and financially rewarding. The fly in the ointment was that sometimes he was overtaken by a compulsion to walk. The time of day, the weather or the occasion did not matter – when the compulsion came he had to walk until he was physically exhausted and fell asleep immediately after calling his wife to come and collect him. There seemed to be no medical explanation for what was happening – and Tim and Jane had tried every source they could find – but Tim was still reluctant to accept that this was a mental rather than a physical illness.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0670917702</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Joe Treasure
|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
|author=Milan Kundera
|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>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Andrew Miller
|title=One Morning Like A Bird
|rating=4
|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.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0340825154</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Sadie Jones
|title=Small Wars
|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
|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.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0141183969</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=William Trevor
|title=Love and Summer
|rating=4.5
|genre=Literary 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.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0670918245</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Bryony Doran
|title=The China Bird
|rating=4
|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.
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.
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.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>095556302X</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Jude Morgan
|title=The Taste of Sorrow
|rating=4.5
|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.
|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 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>
}}