Newest Literary Fiction Reviews

Burial Rites by Hannah Kent

Crime (Historical)

Fridrik, Agnes and Sigridur are accused of murdering two men one Icelandic night in 1829 before setting fire to their home. Now Agnes awaits execution, imprisoned in the farm of a lowly local family who, rumour has it, wouldn't be too great a loss if the prisoner becomes dangerous. Margrit Jonsdottir (the farmer's wife) doesn't feel threatened and sets the shocked, malnourished Agnes to work. Gradually Agnes reveals the events of that night to Margrit and Toti, a young priest. Her version seems to be a little different from what everyone else concluded, predictably… Or perhaps not so predictably. Full review...

Harvest by Jim Crace

Literary Fiction

As harvest comes in, a village finds itself under threat. Invaded by a series of unfamiliar visitors, it will find itself utterly transformed over a short but apocalyptic seven days. We watch through the eyes of Walter Thirsk as three vagabonds escaping the enclosure of their fields are blamed for the trangressions of others, as the chartmaker Mr Quill enumerates the common land, and as Master Kent's benevolent rule is overtaken by a new owner, who comes with enforcers in the name of profit, progress and enterprise - or sheep farming as Walter quickly realises. Full review...

The Interestings by Meg Wolitzer

Literary Fiction

Back in 1974 six teenagers met at summer camp and did all those things which you get to do when your parents are not around to stop you. They smoked pot, drank vodka and Tangs - and talked way into the night about anything and everything. Plays were put on, animations were perfected, but most importantly friendships were made that would last for years - for some it would be a lifetime. Back in 1974, as Nixon left the White House under a particularly heavy cloud, 'The Interestings', as one of their number called them, knew that they could achieve anything they set their minds to. For three summers they returned to Spirit-in-the-Woods and then they faced the real world. Full review...

Almost English by Charlotte Mendelson

Literary Fiction

In the late nineteen eighties sixteen year old Marina is a border at Combe school, destined - as she and all about her know - for Cambridge and the medical profession. After her first term she's wonders if she's made a mistake as it's definitely not like it was at Ealing Girls. There, a girl whose mother is emotionally fragile doesn't stand out, even if the mother gets to sleep on the sofa in her in-laws' flat because their son - her husband - upped and left her and their daughter. You would still fit in even if the family you're living with is Hungarian and hasn't entirely left the ways of the old country behind. At Combe there's too much about Marina that she could be mocked for - or could get her a cruel nickname. Marina simply doesn't fit in, but the family have sacrificed everything so that she can go there. Full review...

1Q84: The Complete Trilogy by Haruki Murakami

Literary Fiction

The 1Q84 trilogy is, without doubt, an impressive book. In many ways, the trilogy almost has to be read in this way as the three component books make little sense on their own. The first book in the series in particular is almost completely baffling if taken in isolation. It does, though, demand a degree of dedication, and if the prospect of a 1300 page novel in which not a huge amount happens in terms of plot and in which there is a significant level of repetition leaves you cold, then this might not be the best entry point into the wonderful world of Haruki Murakami. As often with Murakami though, it's possible to read this book at a number of levels. On the surface it's a love story set in a slightly fantastical setting with a little bit of crime thrown in. At a deeper level, he explores the thin lines between imagination and reality, life and death and what you might call yin and yang. It's a novel where balance and vacuums play a big part. It seems counter-intuitive to call a book of this magnitude 'delicate', but that's just how the story appears. Full review...

A Kind of Eden by Amanda Smyth

Literary Fiction

Martin Rawlinson has escaped from the cold dreary English weather to the exotic heat and exotic women of Trinidad. He might have a wife and a daughter back home, but home is a long way away and here is the young and beautiful Safiya. She's a journalist and could easily have just dismissed him as some sad old white guy, but somehow she didn't. Somehow they talked, and walked, and she showed him the real Trinidad and he fell in love with her, and with her home. Full review...

A Marker to Measure Drift by Alexander Maksik

Crime

Jacqueline roams the beaches of the Greek islands offering massages for money to ward off starvation. It helps but hunger is always with her, lurking alongside the memory of a former life in Liberia and the mind's ear voice of her mother. Jacqueline is at least alive and existing, but at what cost? Full review...

Familiar by J Robert Lennon

General Fiction

Is there a greater change in the life of a middle-aged woman than the death of her teenage son? Elisa might have thought not, having been forced to bury fifteen year old Silas, and try and move on with her husband Derek and the year-older son, Sam. But a greater change occurs on the way back from her annual, solo pilgrimage to his grave – something very weird happens to the universe. She pops from one car to another, from under a cloudless sky to a slightly greyer one – and from her self as Elisa to a world where people call her Lisa, where she is plumper, in a different job, stiil married to Derek in the same home – but still the mother of two young men… Full review...

The Sorrow of Angels by Jon Kalman Stefansson

Literary Fiction

Our decidedly unheroic main character has been at the café for three weeks now, so we are following on very closely from Heaven and Hell. After the tragedy and soul-searching of that first book, he seems settled in the ridiculous family that has formed around him there, finding employment, enjoying the literature, yet being very intrigued by the female body. The man who is still young enough to be known only as the boy might have latched on to stability for once, and replaced the family and best friend he had lost. But everything is restless in this environment, and once again he might just be tempted to go on a journey, with another male companion, despite the harshness of the surrounds. Full review...

Heaven and Hell by Jon Kalman Stefansson

Literary Fiction

Iceland, a hundred years ago. From a place that is the very definition of rural and remote, a small fishing boat leaves for four hours' hard row to a profitable bank. It carries six men on the way out, and five on the way back. The deceased is the best friend – or perhaps only friend – of the main character, who is still young enough to merely be known as boy. When he returns to port he enters an almost Camus-like semi-existence, wondering just how much life is an answer, and for what, after the tragedy he has witnessed. Full review...

The Son by Philipp Meyer

Literary Fiction

Philipp Meyer's second novel, The Son, is an epic, multi-generational saga of Texas life. Tracing the McCullough family from the middle of the nineteenth century to the present day, Meyer joins those writing today's masterpieces of American 'dirty realism': Ron Rash, David Vann, Richard Ford and especially Cormac McCarthy. Like McCarthy's Blood Meridian, The Son is a gory Western that transcends a simplistic cowboys-versus-Indians dichotomy to draw broader conclusions about the universality of violence in a nihilistic world. Full review...

The Spinning Heart by Donal Ryan

Literary Fiction

'My father still lives back the road past the weir in the cottage I was reared in. I go there every day to see is he dead and every day he lets me down. He hasn't yet missed a day of letting me down.'

This is how we meet Bobby - Bobby Mahon, as we'll learn - and he's brutally honest about his feelings for his father, who has deliberately drunk away the farm he inherited from his father. But Frank Mahon isn't Bobby's only, or even main, problem. He's been earning big money as Pokey Burke's foreman but the financial crash has hit and Pokey has done a runner. An investment in a fake island off Dubai finished him and now he's disappeared. On the estate of forty houses he was building, just two are occupied and the rutted roads are nothing more than a racetrack for the joyriders. Full review...

The Gallery of Vanished Husbands by Natasha Solomons

Literary Fiction

On her thirtieth birthday Juliet Montague went out to buy a fridge for the princely sum of twenty-one guineas. She'd saved hard for it - and her parents had given her the final few pounds - but then Juliet did something impulsive. Instead of buying a fridge she commissioned a portrait of herself and so began her involvement in the post-war art scene. Juliet wasn't - by any stretch of the imagination - an artist, but she had a startling ability to spot a good picture. It was simply something which she knew, much as she had known for certain that her husband had left for good on the day he didn't return home as expected. Full review...

Indiscretion by Charles Dubow

Literary Fiction

Charles Dubow's debut novel promises to be a modern day Great Gatsby. It too is set amongst the rich and famous outside New York, it too is narrated by a character seemingly on the outside, Maddy's childhood friend Walter. Full review...

Unfaithfully Yours by Nigel Williams

General Fiction

When Nigel Williams first really burst on to the best-seller list, a couple of decades ago, it was with a book set in Wimbledon that really quite tickled a younger me – and my mother. But then he produced two more in the same series, and we soon decided he was a bit of a one-trick pony, and could never be sure how much of the trilogy we'd read, or be too eager to read more. Flash forward, and Williams has certainly branched out – his setting this time is Putney. Wimbledon Common is now Putney Heath, and so on. But here he provides an epistolatory novel – and if there's one kind of novel to make me prick up my ears it is one built from letters. It is the blatant two-and-fro timing of the narrative, and the succinctness that characters are formed with, that strike me as obvious benefits of such a book – and Unfaithfully Yours has those and many more. Full review...

Russian Stories by Francesc Seres

Short Stories

This brilliant and varied collection of short stories is the product of a current academic interest in cross-cultural translation. Francisco Guillen Serés is a Catalan professor of Art History from Aragon. A Russophile, he has travelled widely to collect stories from those writing during the past hundred years of Russian history. These have been translated into Catalan and then into English. These unusual and delightful stories, some twenty one of them written by five writers read fluently and engagingly. They form an informative tapestry of Soviet and post-Soviet life, moving back in time with the older, earlier writers like Bergchenko, who died in the siege of Stalingrad, at the end. Ranging over mythic and symbolic tales to realistic portrayals of personal relationships; love trysts in St Petersburg, ferocious bears in the deep heart of the Taiga to the perils of becoming lost in continuous orbit in space. All aspects are impressively recounted. Full review...

The Parrots by Filippo Bologna

Literary Fiction

When confronted with the topic of parrots, most people would describe them as tamed tropical birds that are taught to repeat simple phrases, having no particular intelligence to engender an originality of their own. Filippo Bologna has not in fact written a book about birds, but about writers - in fact, three writers. Just as the Neo-Pagans have a liking of the Triple Goddesses of The Maiden, The Mother and The Crone, our three writers are similarly split into The Beginner, The Writer, and The Master. All three of these novelists are battling it out for The Prize, a prestigious award that would revitalise the career of The Master, legitimize the efforts of The Beginner and assure The Writer a place in the annals of history. The setting of Rome is utilised to provide both a stunning backdrop and one that is sympathetic to the mood of our characters. The stories of our three protagonists are interwoven in a delightfully clear fashion; Bologna's prose is delicate and descriptive, but not at the sacrifice of pacing. The stage is set; the characters have learned their lines. There is just one problem... out of the three writers, none of them deserves to win The Prize. Full review...

In The Dutch Mountains by Cees Nooteboom

Literary Fiction

Often, when asked if what I’m reading is a good book I hesitate before answering, trying to decide what the asker really means. Do they mean is it exciting? Funny? Full of interesting characters? Recently, someone asked me that and when I hesitated they gave me this as a clarifier: “Are you better off for having read it?”. In this instance, yes. I think I am. However, despite coming away from this book with a strong positive feeling about it, it’s also left me a little befuddled. Full review...

Every Promise by Andrea Bajani

Literary Fiction

Italian writer, Andrea Bajani's Every Promise is narrated by Pietro. His partner, Sara, has left him due to their inability to have a baby, but soon she finds herself pregnant after a one night stand and reliant on Pietro's mother for advice. Meanwhile Pietro meets Olmo, an elderly man who lives in their old family apartment, who reminds Pietro of his own Grandfather, Mario, who, like Olmo, served in Mussolini's ill-fated Russian campaign. Olmo persuades Pietro to go to Russia to visit the scenes of some of the photographs he has to try to come to terms with the past. It's a story about the past, the present and the future and the struggle for one man to make sense of this. It's packed with surpassingly detailed imagery and Bajani is at times breathtakingly unflinching in exposing the vulnerability of his narrator. However, it is very much a slow burn of a book and it's not always an easy book to read. Full review...

In Between Days by Andrew Porter

Literary Fiction

After Chloe Harding is forced to leave her East Coast college, for reasons she refuses to explain to her recently divorced parents or older brother Richard, her family's lives start to unravel. Will the rest of them ever find out what caused her fall from grace, and can they solve their own problems? Full review...

Visitation Street by Ivy Pochoda

Literary Fiction

Red Hook, Brooklyn and it is blisteringly hot. Two fifteen year old girls decide the best and most exciting way to cool off is to take a small inflatable raft on to the river. The next morning one of the girls is found unconscious and washed ashore with no memory of what happened in the river and the other girl is nowhere to be found. This becomes a big local story and the survivor, saviour and community have to deal with the loss in their different ways. Full review...

Nowhere Ending Sky by Marlen Haushofer

Literary Fiction

Little Meta is growing up in a childhood paradise with two parents who love her and a younger brother to tease and train to do all the things that Meta wants him to. However the world outside Meta's paradise will soon change beyond all recognition as the Austria and Germany of the 1920s makes way for the Austria and Germany of the 1930s. Full review...

Eleven Days by Lea Carpenter

Literary Fiction

Sara raised Jason alone; even when she was with his father it felt as if she was a lone parent. Jason's father always seemed to be away doing something indefinable abroad; then he disappeared leaving her completely. Two years later Jason's father was dead. However Jason is a lad to be proud of, never giving Sara a moment's trouble and now a member of the elite US Navy SEALS. Now he's missing in action… Now she has to hang on and hope. Full review...

The Trader of Saigon by Lucy Cruickshanks

General Fiction

In the Saigon of the 1980s the Vietnam War is over but the traces remain. Alexander has deserted from the US army and makes a comfortable living selling girls to local business men. Phuc used to be a business man, complete with mansion and the means to keep his wife and three children in affluence. Now his family live in a shanty hut, afraid of the ruling government that spies through the eyes of children. At last he finds a way out, his luck just needs to hold. Hanh also lives in poverty, desperately trying to help her sick mother with the pittance she earns from cleaning one of the city's many open latrines. Then one day she meets someone who offers so much more. His name is Alexander. Full review...

All Is Silence by Manuel Rivas

Literary Fiction

The small community of Noitía is a place where everyone knows each other and each other’s business, which considering most of the adults are involved in the one business, smuggling, is potentially dangerous knowledge. We follow a small group of three young friends growing up in the area as they play and learn and even experience a little of the black market dealings. They stumble across a stash of smuggled whisky and are caught by the charismatic king pin responsible for the trafficking, who teaches them that silence is the most important lesson to learn when growing up in Noitía. Full review...

From The Fatherland, With Love by Ryu Murakami

Literary Fiction

From The Fatherland, With Love is a 2005 Japanese novel set in the then-near future of 2011. Fatherland (as I will abbreviate it) explores the social and political ramifications of one speculative scenario: what if North Korea invaded Japan? Full review...

The Other Typist by Suzanne Rindell

Literary Fiction

The Other Typist is set in 1920s New York City, with Prohibition at its height and Rose Baker, an orphaned young woman, working as a police typist. While she has no real friends, she's good at her job and seems to have the respect of the Sergeant, whom she admires and the Lieutenant Detective, whom she's less keen on. Then a perfect storm comes into their lives, in the shape of the enchanting Odalie, and nothing will be the same again. Full review...

What Lot's Wife Saw by Ioanna Bourazopoulou and Yannis Panas (Translator)

Science Fiction

It's been over 20 years since The Overflow came, flooding half of Europe. Around the same time Violet Salt, a new multi-functional mineral, appeared, its production now governed globally by the mysterious, all-powerful Consortium. Meanwhile back in Europe The Colony, a haven for those escaping floods and indeed justice, is ruled by Governor Bera and six officials, the 'Purple Stars'. All seems to be well in a despotic, lawless way until the six wake up to the realisation that the Governor has died mysteriously in the night. The Consortium needs answers so choose the greatest crossword compiler of the age, Phileas Book, to investigate, whether he wants to or not. Full review...

Dirty Work by Gabriel Weston

Literary Fiction

1. There are two women in an operating theatre and when one starts bleeding heavily - fatally - the other freezes, unable, despite all her training and undoubted skills, to do anything at all. Whatever the outcome it cannot pass unnoticed, unreported and surgeon Nancy Mullion is called to appear before a tribunal appointed by the General Medical Council. Over a period of weeks she's forced to confront the effect of being a doctor who has killed as well as cured. You're probably making assumptions now and nodding wisely. Don't - because you are almost certainly going to be wrong. This will not be the story which you are expecting and it was certainly not the story which Nancy's hospital wanted to hear.

Full review...