Newest Literary Fiction Reviews
The Waking by Matthew Smith
Isabel Sykes, 23, recounts the recent attempt she made to come to terms with the loss of her mother, the acclaimed but psychologically disturbed novelist Marianne Sykes. Marianne died in an unexplained house fire when Isabel was ten. Inspired by the appearance of Imogen Taylor, an enchanting young woman who wants to write a PhD on her mother's work, Isabel plunges into the depths of her past and an intense new friendship. After discovering that Imogen is not who she seems to be, Isabel must face the darkest moments from her childhood in order to protect her family from more tragedy. She receives unexpected help from beyond the grave: in the strange, glittering fragments of her mother's last, unfinished work, 'Midnightsong'. Full review...
Autumn by Ali Smith
The first part in Ali Smith's four part 'Seasonal' series, Autumn is the story of Daniel Gluck and Elisabeth Demand, unexpected friends who used to be neighbours when Elisabeth was a little girl. In a series of memories and dreams, we discover their friendship from Daniel babysitting Elisabeth through to her visits with him now that he is in a home and drawing towards the end of his extremely long and fascinating life. Along the way, we get a wonderfully written insight into time, memories, and the fleeting nature of life itself. Full review...
Malacqua by Nicola Pugliese and Shaun Whiteside (translator)
We're in Naples, in recent history, and it's raining. It will in fact rain for four days solid – and seeing as it's October everyone's dressed for all seasons and expecting a bit of grey, but this is taking the proverbial. It's also making the city rather dangerous – when people report a huge sink-hole appearing in one street it's soon found that a pair of cars went into it, and two people have died, and more passed on with a whole building collapsing. What's more, some strange noises are coming from an abandoned civic palace. Is the city being told something by these strange events, or can a journalist find a logic behind the circumstances? Full review...
Petite Fleur by Iosi Havilio
Every now and then you read a book that leaves you thinking “well I have no idea what just happened but I know I enjoyed it”. This is how I felt after reading Petite Fleur, the fifth novel (perhaps 'long paragraph' would be more appropriate) from cult Argentinian writer Iosi Havilio. Full review...
Some of Us Glow More Than Others by Tania Hershman
I won't be alone in stating that reading short story collections can be slightly awkward. Going through from A-Z, witnessing a bounty of ideas and characters in short order can be too much, but do you have the right to pick and choose according to what appeals, and what time you have to fill? The sequence has carefully been considered, surely. Such would appear to be the case here. The last time I read one of this author's collections, with The White Road, the only real difficulty was holding back and rationing them, but here you not only get a whopping forty pieces of writing, they are also spread into sections. Full review...
That Was a Shiver, and Other Stories by James Kelman
This is the ninth book of short stories by this author, which means he's presented just as many collections of the short form as he has novels. You will find it hard to think of another author that has been so noted for longer works (what with How Late It Was, How Late winning the Booker) but who is so generous in presenting shorter pieces for the time-poor, or those like me who see the variety in a writer's short or less typical works to be the more interesting places to turn. Opening these pages, from the pen of such an esteemed pro, came with no small sense of anticipation. Full review...
Skylarking by Kate Mildenhall
Kate and Harriet are best friends growing up together on an isolated Australian cape. As the daughters of the lighthouse keepers, the two girls share everything, until a fisherman, McPhail, arrives in their small community. When Kate witnesses the desire that flares between him and Harriet, she is torn by her feelings of envy and longing. An innocent moment in McPhail's hut then occurs that threatens to tear their peaceful community apart. Full review...
Worlds from the Word's End by Joanna Walsh
We here at The Bookbag liked this author's fairly recent collection of short stories, Vertigo. I myself missed out, but that seemed to be vignettes from one character's narration – here we get homosexual male narrators and a host more, as well as much less of the sadness prevalent before. Having had a brief encounter with this author courtesy of her entry into the Object Lessons series, I was intrigued by her name being stamped on a selection of shorts. Was it the ideal calling card? Let's face it, the very short story itself can be a postcard – let's say, from a specific hotel or two, as we see here. Perhaps I should have geared myself up, however, for such intricate writing on said postcards – and for the exotic locations from which they came… Full review...
The Dove's Necklace by Raja Alem, Katharine Halls (translator) and Adam Talib (translator)
I always hated Lit-Crit at school, so it came as something as a surprise that I ended up reviewing books, for fun. Now I understand. Finally, I see why literary critics get so up-in-arms about lowly book reviewers. There is a difference. This book explains it all. The author is the first woman to win the International Prize for Arabic fiction for this book. The book also the LiBerator prize for the best book translated into German in 2014. I suspect it's not done yet. The Times tells us that it exemplifies everything that is currently shaking the foundations of Arab society. I am sure that not only will more plaudits fall upon the author and the book, but also that it will become a classic, spoken of in the same breath as the international classics: Proust, Márquez, Joyce, Rushdie, Nabokov… Full review...
You Should Have Left by Daniel Kehlmann and Ross Benjamin (translator)
Our narrator is a screenwriter, tasked with coming up with a sequel to his hit movie Besties – a film which helped pay for a house, but which his actress wife keeps letting him know, isn't art. To concentrate, the family – he, the wife, and their four year old daughter – have rented a large, modern house at the end of a horrid, hairpin bend-filled road, in a charming alpine landscape. But things aren't right. The couple are at loggerheads too much, things keep unsettling our narrator, and the sole shopkeeper for miles around is ready with the Hammer Horror styled warnings of strange events. Quickly we see the book's title in all its galling clarity – but it isn't too late to get out… is it? And out of what, exactly? Full review...
Letters From Klara by Tove Jansson
Famed in the UK for her creation of the Moomin family, Jansson is rather belatedly beginning to gather the richly deserved esteem for her adult writings. For that I offer my heart-felt thanks to publishers Sort of books and Thomas Teal, who has been responsible for most of the translations. Receiving this one, two things strike: firstly I somehow seem to have missed one of the series, and secondly there'll come a time sooner rather than later when there'll be no more to be had. The former will be rectified, the latter is a sad thought. Full review...
In Every Moment We Are Still Alive by Tom Malmquist and Henning Koch (translator)
Tom Malmquist is a poet from Sweden. Originally published in Swedish in 2015, this is his first work of prose. While it's being marketed as a novel, it reads more like a stylized memoir. Similar to Karl Ove Knausgaard's books, it features the author as the central character and narrator, and the story of grief it tells is a highly personal one. Full review...
Your Father's Room by Michel Deon
I don't feel altogether qualified to review Michel Déon's 2004 fictionalised memoir Your Father's Room, translated here into English for the first time. I hadn't heard of Déon before receiving my copy, let alone read any of his books, published over a 70 year period to much acclaim in his homeland. But it's part of the pleasure of book reviewing to read with no prior knowledge or prejudice, all the more so if you discover an absolute gem. Full review...
The Power by Naomi Alderman
It started with the girls and spread. From younger woman to older woman, it was awoken and everything changed. Womankind now has the power of electricity in their fingertips and, slowly at first, the balance of power in the world starts shifting. We follow the stories of different people, in different walks of life, who see this from the very beginning and hurtle towards 'the event'. One thing in this startling new development is certain, patriarchal archetypes and chauvinist thinkers are in for the shock of their lives. Literally. Full review...
The Futures by Anna Pitoniak
When we first meet Evan Peck, he has just started at Yale College, where he plays ice hockey. Like lots of the other players, he is actually Canadian, from small-town British Columbia. One night after a party Evan meets Julia Edwards at their dorm and they go out for pizza. She technically has a boyfriend from her Boston boarding school days, but they soon break up and before long Julia and Evan have become inseparable, as they will remain for the rest of their college years. Full review...
The Song of the Stork by Stephan Collishaw
Stephan Collishaw has achieved a rare feat – a novel set amidst the horrors of Nazi tyranny that does not shy away from human suffering, but does not drown in it either. Full review...
The Things I Would Tell You: British Muslim Women Write by Sabrina Mahfouz
What does it mean to be British and Muslim? This is a question these writers tackle with stunning clarity. Modern day British society has a varied sense of cultural heritage; it is a society that is changing and moving forward as it adds more and more voices to the population, but is also one that has an undercurrent of anxiety and fear towards those that are minorities. So this collection displays how all that fear is received; it comes in the form of stereotypical labels and racial prejudice, which are themes eloquently reproduced here. Full review...
All That Man Is by David Szalay
Two teenage boys on an Inter Rail trip around Europe find themselves staying with a frustrated housewife on the outskirts of Prague, a driftless young Frenchman discovers sexual fulfilment on a package holiday in Cyprus, a lovestruck Hungarian minder is embroiled in a prostitution racket at an upmarket London hotel, a Belgian academic is forced to confront his egotism when his partner becomes pregnant, a Danish tabloid journalist exposes a high-ranking politician's love affair, a property developer inspects a new project in the French alps, a Scot living in Croatia fails in love and business, a Russian millionaire confronts divorce, an elderly English politician survives a road accident in Italy. Full review...
His Whole Life by Elizabeth Hay
If you think that un-put-down-able is the greatest accolade for a book, think again. Put-down-able can be stronger praise: His Whole Life is put-down-able. It encourages you to put it down, to wrap yourself in the slow-moving story, the exquisite writing, the subtleties of the characters, and just walk around for a while with them slowly sinking in; it encourages you to come back to it again and again; mostly it encourages you to put it down, to read it slowly, because you don't want it to end. Full review...
The Barrowfields by Phillip Lewis
Just before Henry Aster's birth, his father, a frustrated novelist and lawyer, reluctantly returns to the remote North Carolina mountains in which he was improbably raised and installs his young family in a gothic mansion - nicknamed 'the vulture house' - worthy of his hero Edgar Allan Poe. There, Henry grows up under the desk of this fierce and brilliant man. But when a death in the family tips his father toward a fearsome unravelling, what was once a young son's reverence is poisoned, and Henry flees, not to return until years later when he, too, must go home again. Full review...
How to Be Human by Paula Cocozza
When Mary arrives home from work one day to find a magnificent fox on her lawn - his ears spiked in attention and every hair bristling with his power to surprise - it is only the beginning. He brings gifts (at least, Mary imagines they are gifts), and gradually makes himself at home. And as he listens to Mary, Mary listens back. She begins to hear herself for the first time in years. Her bullish ex-boyfriend, still lurking on the fringes of her life, would be appalled. So would the neighbours with a new baby. They only like wildlife that fits with the decor. But inside Mary a wildness is growing that will not be tamed. Full review...
Birdcage Walk by Helen Dunmore
Bristol 1792: Lizzie married well. John Diner Tredevant is a property developer who has reached the zenith of his life's work: building a terrace of prestigious houses overlooking the Avon Gorge. In a time of turbulence as France reaches the dawn of revolution, Britain, including Diner, fears it may spread. This puts Lizzie in a difficult position since her mother and step-father both believe in propagating pamphlets and ideas of egalitarianism for and to all, including women. In other words, they think nothing of spreading ideas of the sort that fanned the French flames. However, that's not Lizzie's only problem… there is a darkness in her husband's past of which she's unaware. Full review...
The Valentine House by Emma Henderson
In June 1914, Sir Anthony Valentine, a keen mountaineer, arrives with his family to spend the summer in their chalet, high in the French Alps. There, for the first time, fourteen-year-old foundling Mathilde starts work as one of the 'uglies' - village girls employed as servants and picked, it is believed, to ensure they don't catch Sir Anthony's roving eye. For Mathilde it is the start of a life-long entanglement with les anglais - strange, exciting people, far removed from the hard grind of farming. Except she soon finds the Valentines are less carefree than they appear, with a curiously absent daughter no one talks about. It will be decades - disrupted by war, accidents and a cruel betrayal - before Mathilde discovers the key to the mystery. And in 1976, the year Sir Anthony's great-great grandson comes to visit, she must decide whether to use it. Full review...
The Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley by Hannah Tinti
When she turns twelve, Samuel Hawley teaches his daughter, Loo (short for Louise), how to use her grandfather's rifle. Shooting a gun and hotwiring a car prove to be useful skills for this daughter of a fugitive. Hawley is a lawless modern cowboy who's had many close shaves over his years on the run for committing robberies and making dodgy deals. He and his young daughter form a cosy unit of their own; they live off of Chinese food and vending machine snacks in motel rooms and move on every six months or so to avoid the consequences of his criminal activities. But when they get to Olympus, Massachusetts, Hawley decides it's time to settle down. He buys a house by the water – with cash – and becomes a clean-living fisherman. Full review...
Here Comes the Sun by Nicole Dennis-Benn
You have to assume the team behind the cover sleeve for Nicole Dennis-Benn's debut novel Here Come's the Sun have a keen sense of irony. Either that or none of them read beyond the first page. Full review...
Larchfield by Polly Clark
I It's early summer when a young poet, Dora Fielding, moves to Helensburgh on the west coast of Scotland and her hopes are first challenged. Newly married, pregnant, she's excited by the prospect of a life that combines family and creativity. She thinks she knows what being a person, a wife, a mother, means. She is soon shown that she is wrong. As the battle begins for her very sense of self, Dora comes to find the realities of small town life suffocating, and, eventually, terrifying; until she finds a way to escape reality altogether. Another poet, she discovers, lived in Helensburgh once. Wystan H. Auden, brilliant and awkward at 24, with his first book of poetry published, should be embarking on success and society in London. Instead, in 1930, fleeing a broken engagement, he takes a teaching post at Larchfield School for boys where he is mocked for his Englishness and suspected - rightly - of homosexuality. Yet in this repressed limbo Wystan will fall in love for the first time, even as he fights his deepest fears. Full review...
The Longest Night by Otto de Kat and Laura Watkinson (translator)
Emma has a philosophy – let the dead rest, and love the living. The problem with that, as a 96-year-old, is that there are too few living left, and so while the love remains she will go through her memories, taking a woozy, diaphanous path through all the major events of her life. Starting in wartime Berlin with one husband, who gets snatched from her at work, fleeing to another place to wait for peace, and wait for him in vain, moving to Holland and finding new love, and so on – this wispy journey will show all the impacts of war, from rationing right up to exile, death and survival. The memories are coming strongly here and now, as Emma is waiting for at least one of her two sons to visit, and then she will die… Full review...
Little Nothing by Marisa Silver
In an unnamed country at the beginning of the last century, a peasant couple longs for a child. In despair they turn to gypsy tonics and archaic prescriptions, and one cold wintery night, the couple's wish comes true. But the silence that follows the birth forewarns of darker days to come. Strangers look on askance and fall speechless in the child's presence, and villagers protectively hush their children as they pass on narrow market lanes. Pavla is no ordinary child, but then this is no ordinary tale. Full review...
The Yellow House by Jeroen Blokhuis and Asja Novak (translator)
If you were the needy kind, would you really join in the drumming-out of town of two people accused of murder purely because of their nationality? Would you get a feeling of belonging just because you were there when someone carried a dead dog down off a mountain? The main character in this novel does. But he has something that will really get him noted, well-thought-of, included. He has come to the south of France to set up an artists' collective, where he can live and work alongside his counterparts, who can inspire each other and best each other to create wonderful art. In fact a much-respected guest is on his way now, so surely he can find kinship? The guest's name is, after all, Gauguin. The main character is, of course, Vincent van Gogh… Full review...
Our Magic Hour by Jennifer Down
There had always been Katy, Audrey and Adam. They've been friends since school and now, along with Audrey's partner Nick, they remain inseparable as young professionals. Then, one day, Katy kills herself. No warning, no reason just no Katy. The four are suddenly three trying to make sense of a moment that leaves so many questions in a world that refuses to pause while they figure it out. Full review...
