Newest Literary Fiction Reviews

Literary fiction

Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald by Therese Anne Fowler

Literary Fiction

As Therese Anne Fowler points out in her acknowledgements, views on the relationship between F Scott Fitzgerald and his wife and muse, Zelda, tend to split into 'Team Scott' and 'Team Zelda'. The former believe that it was Zelda's instability and possessiveness that limited Scott's creative output while the latter argue that it was Scott's debauched behaviour that led to Zelda's mental problems. Z takes a more balanced view - the truth of the matter is that they needed each other but were tragically, mutually destructive. Getting the fact-based fiction tone right is always a challenge, and this is exacerbated when the author gives a writer the narrative voice, and Zelda was a talented writer in her own right as well as a dancer, artist and general social phenomenon. However Fowler pulls it off with aplomb in what is a sensitive and engrossing story of Zelda - 'the First Flapper'. Full review...

How Should A Person Be? by Sheila Heti

Literary Fiction

Much has been made in the media about the similarity in approach of Sheila Heti's fictionalised autobiographical How Should A Person Be? and Lena Dunham's HBO television series Girls. They certainly share a similarly bleak and introspective view of life, both are apparently based on the writer's own experience, both have a somewhat knowingly shock factor particularly when it comes to sex and both leave me somewhat depressed and sad. And both have been critical successes in the US. Indeed, How Should A Person Be? also features on the 2013 long list for the Women's Prize for Fiction, although it's not easy to assess where the fiction starts and the reality stops. In fact, the conceit is also somewhat similar to the scripted reality shows that dominate certain television channels. The effect is something that is interesting as a concept and exercise but less than enjoyable to read. Full review...

Flight Behaviour by Barbara Kingsolver

Literary Fiction

Set in rural Tennessee, Dellarobia Turnbow is a young mother, trapped in the result of a shotgun wedding in a largely loveless marriage on her husband's failing family farm dominated by the disapproval of her God-fearing mother in law. She dreams of escape with equally unsuitable younger men until one day on her way to acting on this impulse for the first time, she encounters an act of nature that will change her life for good. Barbara Kingsolver perfectly captures in the opening paragraphs the sense of entrapment and dissatisfaction of Dellarobia and doesn't let up for a moment. Full review...

The Enchanted Wanderer and Other Stories by Nikolai Leskov, Richard Pevear (translator) and Larissa Volokhonsky (translator)

Literary Fiction

This is a collection of 17 Nikolai Leskov stories as mixed in subject matter as they are in length. From the very short Spirit of Madame de Genlis, warning of the dire consequences of selecting literature for a mollycoddled princess, to the novella-length The Enchanted Wanderer telling the tale of the apparently immortal monk who prayed for suicide victims, Leskov (aided greatly by the talented translators Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky) unlocks the mores, traditions, religion and superstitions of 19th century Russia for a modern readership. Full review...

Ghana Must Go by Taiye Selasi

Literary Fiction

Kweku Sai, father, husband and doctor, awakes early one morning and wanders outside into his Ghanaian garden. As he gazes back at his house, he suffers a fatal heart attack and, during his last moments reflects on his life and a family fragmented. On hearing of his death, his children and first wife Folasade look back on what they were before and, thanks in part to Folasade's and Kweku's actions, what they've become. Full review...

Ignorance by Michele Roberts

Literary Fiction

Michèle Roberts's Ignorance is a beautifully written, lyrical story about life in wartime France. Narrated mainly by two characters, Jeanne and Marie-Angèle, it jumps back and forward in time and is an enthralling mixture of guilt, faith, and survival. The two girls could not be more different. Marie-Angèle is the grocer's daughter while Jeanne is the daughter of a Jewish mother who washes clothes for a living. The two girls together go to the village convent for their education but come from different ends of the social spectrum. When the German occupation arrives, the two girls' experiences are very different but both are 'ignorant' of each others plight and their judgements are repeatedly shown to be wide of the mark. In fact the book could just as well have been titled 'Judgement'. Just when you think you know one through the eyes of the other, you get the opposite view of things. Full review...

Mateship with Birds by Carrie Tiffany

Literary Fiction

In the early nineteen fifties a lonely, middle-aged farmer observed the birds on his land and recorded what he saw in the blank pages of his milk ledger. His animals and the birds were his family and his land - difficult though it could be - a part of him. Whilst Harry watched and recorded, his neighbour, Betty, watched Harry and recorded the childhood illnesses and accidents of her two children. By day she worked in a nursing home where she was a lunchtime 'wife', sitting at the bedside of some of the old men in her care. Her daughter, Hazel, kept a nature notebook which was completely factual and accepting of birth and death in a way that can only be achieved by those who live with livestock - and deadstock - on a daily basis. Full review...

I Am Forbidden by Anouk Markovits

Literary Fiction

The date is 1939 and the place is what we know as Romania and Hungary. Young Zalman Stern is stopped by soldiers and for a moment he feels this is his last moment on Earth. Meanwhile, not too far away, one moment 5 year old Josef Lichtenstein is playing with his baby sister, the next his childhood is deleted by the same bigotry and blood that deletes her. One day their paths will meet. This is the story of Zalman, Josef, their descendants; their struggles, their beliefs; the cost of escape and the cost of remaining. Full review...

The Middlesteins by Jami Attenberg

General Fiction

Edie Middlestein almost has the American dream within her grasp. She trained as a lawyer, has a husband, a daughter who followed her professional footsteps and a son married to an ambitious wife who provided him with two high-achieving children. There are just two flies in the ointment preventing the dream's arrival: 1. Edie is so morbidly obese that she has to undergo surgery; and 2. this is the moment her husband chooses to leave her. Apart from that… Full review...

The Light and the Dark by Mikhail Shishkin and Andrew Bromfield (translator)

Literary Fiction

Two lovers write letters to each other about their love, their dreams and their separate lives; lives that they hope will one day merge once again to become one. For Sasha life is the everyday grind with work and demanding loved ones along with the challenges they engender. For Volodenka, it's life in the Russian army and his eventual posting to China. However their love is more complicated than most as more than geography and circumstance stands between them: they're also separated by the decades… many, many decades. Full review...

Instructions for a Heatwave by Maggie O'Farrell

Literary Fiction

In London, in July 1976 it hadn't rained for months. Gardens - if you could call them that any longer - were thick with aphids and what water there was, which was to be consumed or used for washing, came from a standpipe. Robert Riordan told his wife, Gretta, that he was going round the corner to buy a newspaper. This was what he did every morning, but this time he didn't come back. The police weren't interested as the closer they looked the more it was obvious that there was an intention to disappear. Gretta turned to her three adult children for help. But how much help would they - could they - be? Full review...

Byron Easy by Jude Cook

Literary Fiction

Byron Easy is a 30-year-old poet and product of a failed marriage who, in turn, has a failed marriage of his own. He works in a shop whilst waiting to be discovered as a poet. How did his depression-tinted life reach this point? Once there was hope, love and many good times and, as he sits on a train travelling to his mother's for Christmas with a bag full of money, he reflects and ponders while trying to escape something more tangible and dangerous than the past. Full review...

The White Shadow by Andrea Eames

Literary Fiction

As a general principle I am a little tired of books that start at the end. I want to argue for a return to good old fashioned narrative where stories start at the beginning, go on until the end, and then stop. Full review...

Mountains of the Moon by I J Kay

Literary Fiction

The story starts harshly, with a release from prison, a bail hostel, a refuge for people with mental health problems as a better-than-nothing-lied-to-be-obtained kind of a sanctuary and a slow easing back into society. If you can call a housing association flat, with a decorating voucher and no furniture, only occasional power and annoying neighbours society. Full review...

Red Joan by Jennie Rooney

Literary Fiction

It is very obvious where Jennie Rooney has taken the idea for her novel Red Joan from. As she acknowledges fully, it has its origin in the 1999 story of Melita Norwood whose espionage for the Russians wasn't discovered until she was in her late 80s, but while Norwood was a dyed in the wool communist, Rooney offers a more complex back story to her character, Joan. The result is a very different type of spy novel than normal. Joan, a widowed grandmother, is going about her day to day life when MI5 come knocking on her door to ask about her past. The narrative switches between their questions to her and her recollections of her time at Cambridge in the late 1930s where communist feelings were, by some, given a more sympathetic ear. When Joan falls for Leo, the cousin of her Russian born friend Sonya, she gets dragged into a world that is dangerous and morally complex. Full review...

The Conception of Zachary Muse by Jason Hinojosa

Literary Fiction

Evangeline Muse gives birth to Zachary alone in her special lagoon… but that's starting at the end. In the beginning, Thomas Greene is a tutor and Will Archer a talented wood carver who both accept employment from Michael Muse. What they don't realise at that moment is, once they meet his beautiful daughter, Evangeline, nothing will ever be the same again for any of them. Full review...

Worthless Men by Andrew Cowan

Literary Fiction

If you read a lot of fiction about World War One, it's tempting to imagine pre-war England as an idyl of peace and innocence. Andrew Cowan's Worthless Men depicts a much more gritty and earthy England. Set in 1916 in an industrial and market town, it weaves together several narratives that combine to depict a hard life even before the outbreak of war. In fact, its easier to imagine the lure of adventure that the war initially offered as a change from the harsh realities of life at home, although by the time Cowan's novel begins, the grim reality of what is involved has dampened much of this enthusiasm. Full review...

Magda by Meike Ziervogel

Literary Fiction

Meet a woman who, despite praying to remain virginal, had seven children. Meet a woman whose mother thought her hoity-toity, and spoilt, and who thought she should go to work in a factory at school age to know her place better. Meet a woman of whom her oldest daughter would write 'I don't care what Mother says. Mother isn't always right. No, she definitely isn't.' All three women are, of course, one and the same, and they're Magda Goebbels, the woman who epitomised more than anyone the Nazi wife. Full review...

The People of Forever are not Afraid by Shani Boianjiu

Literary Fiction

Yael, Lea and Avishag go through their final years at high school in a little Israeli town on the Lebanese border and then on to the inevitable: the Israeli Defense Force (IDF). Gender is immaterial, all Israeli citizens must serve at least two years and for these girls the moment arrives after graduation. Yael's posting seems futile as she guards a training base against marauding lads, sneaking across the border to pinch perfume from pockets rather than pose any real security threat. Lea's assignment on a border checkpoint searching the daily line of immigrant workers is riddled with routine. Avishag joins up with her own demons, her brother Dan having died after his national service. She knows how it happened but continues to struggle with why; something she must handle alone. Full review...

A Glass of Blessings by Barbara Pym

Literary Fiction

Wilmet Forsyth is a married woman, childless and living a life of leisure. She and her friend Rowena met their husbands - both Majors - in Italy, where they served as Wrens during the war. Rowena now has three children and her husband David might just be developing a wandering eye. Wilmet's husband, Rodney, is still Noddy to his mother with whom they live. Unburdened by children or domestic responsibility Wilmet lunches or shops and becomes involved in the social life of the local church, St Luke's. But it's her relationship with Piers, Rowena's somewhat wayward brother, which might pose the biggest threat to her comfortable, if rather boring existence. Full review...

Nine Days by Toni Jordan

General Fiction

Christopher 'Kip' Westaway lives in a suburb of Melbourne, Australia with mother Jean, sister Connie and his twin, Francis. Kip's mother considers him a layabout who doesn't deserve the special privileges of his educationally elite brother and so he works at the big house next door for the Hustings, caring for their horses. One day Mr Husting presents Kip with a shilling; their little secret. As its 1939, that's a fair amount of money so Kip hides it away, not realising how special that coin will become as the decades pass. Full review...

Ten Things I've Learnt About Love by Sarah Butler

General Fiction

Alice returns home to spend time with her dying father. She's been travelling in Mongolia, finding temporary escape from the issues that had haunted her life in London but now, on her return, events bring the pain she thought was behind her into sharp focus. Meanwhile Daniel is an elderly vagrant who calls the streets of London home. He seeks his lost child, leaving a trail of random items across the city in the hope of reunion like someone occupying a verse of Eleanor Rigby. Disparate lives, seeking love and acceptance in a world that seems to exclude it. Full review...

Lenin's Kisses by Yan Lianke

Literary Fiction

Yan Lianke's 2004 novel, Lenin's Kisses, newly and beautifully translated by Carlos Rojas, is a rare and fascinating example, not just of Chinese fiction from a writer living and working in China, but also a book that has won literary awards (the prestigious Chinese Lao She Literary Award), now available in English. In many respects, the fact that this book won such a literary prize is somewhat surprising - not I hasten to add because of any lack of quality - but because Lianke, who has previously sailed too close to the political wind for Chinese censors, here presents a not altogether flattering view of Chinese politics. It's a book that is literary with a capital L, and while the core of the plot is relatively simple, what makes this book so interesting is the structure and way the story is told. Full review...

The Art of Hearing Heartbeats by Jan-Philipp Sendker

Literary Fiction

Sendker is German-born (Hamburg 1960) and worked as American correspondent for Stern (1990 to 95) and then as its Asian correspondent from '95 to '99. He now lives in Berlin. This probably gives him enough global insight to write about a US-born high flyer with an Asian heritage heading off to Burma to find out the truth of her father's disappearance. It probably also gives him the language skills to do it in English without recourse to a translator. Full review...

Cashel Byron's Profession by George Bernard Shaw

Literary Fiction

Cashel Byron’s Profession is the fourth of five 'Novels of My Nonage',written by George Bernard Shaw in 1882. In the preface of the book, Shaw heavily criticises these early works, which were rejected by the publishing houses of the time, blaming his immaturity and lack of experience in life. He was clearly unhappy about the way he had written some of his characters, stating that: '...he has not in his nonage the satisfaction of knowing that his guesses at life are true.' Full review...

The Low Road by Chris Womersley

Literary Fiction

Wild is a man on the run. In a slow, underhand and underwhelming way he is leaving behind danger, mistakes and unhappiness in his past, and has fetched up in a nondescript motel. However this is only the beginning, for he is quickly ordered to put his medical training to good use in the case of Lee, when the latter is dumped into his care with a gunshot wound. Lee, too, is a man on the run - from danger, mistakes and unhappiness in his future. But this pairing are not the only people running in this pitch black thriller. Full review...

In the Gold of Time by Claudie Gallay

Literary Fiction

A young father (I'm not sure we ever know his name) leaves his Montreuil apartment and takes his wife and their seven-year-old twin daughters on the annual holiday to the coast. They have a house, La Téméraire, overlooking the sea a few kilometres south of Dieppe. They'd bought the house just after the girls were born and go there every summer, and maybe for a weekend or two in the Spring. Never in winter. Full review...

The Investigation by Philippe Claudel

Literary Fiction

And you think you had it bad. Our hero gets off a train at the right station, but doesn't get collected by those he's working on behalf of, can't have his order at the bar fulfilled, cannot get to the place of work on time, then cannot find the hotel almost opposite without a major trek through a snowy, unsavoury but completely empty city. And when he gets to the hotel - well that and the other people he meets there are a whole new category of odd. Is this how things are supposed to be - is this limbo, a nightmare or just a novel our hero is trapped in? Full review...

The Friday Gospels by Jenn Ashworth

Literary Fiction

There are five in the Leeke family. Martin is the father and he works in the mail sorting office. There's not a lot of pleasure in Martin's life, but if you were making a list you'd put Bovril at the top of it. She's a labrador and Martin's obsessed with her training. Well, he's partly obsessed with the training and the training is partly an excuse for his other obsession. Nina owns two labradors and Martin sees them (he and Nina, that is - not he and the labs) as having a future together. It would be easy to be critical, but Martin's wife is in a wheelchair. Pauline's been unwell since the birth of their youngest child. She's not quite doubly incontinent, but accidents are frequent and embarrassing. She's also got a penchant for spending on home improvements - despite the fact that there really isn't the money for them. Full review...