Newest Literary Fiction Reviews
Literary fiction
If it is Your Life by James Kelman
If This Is Your Life is not so much a collection of short stories as a collection of pieces of creative writing. Kelman doesn't really do 'stories'. In nineteen pieces of writing of varying length from just a single page to more lengthy pieces, such as the story that gives its title to this collection, Kelman writes (mostly) about people on the edge of society. He addresses issues such as class, politics, gender, age and ill health. Full review...
The Housekeeper and the Professor by Yoko Ogawa
I never really got on with maths at school. Or sport. So a book that seems to deal with both baseball and mathematics ought to fly to the bottom of my 'to read' pile. However, this slim little Japanese novel slipped into my hands and into my heart as soon as I saw it. The premise is very simple - a young housekeeper is assigned to a job working for an elderly, brain damaged professor of mathematics. He has only eighty minutes of short-term memory, so he doesn't remember her from one day to the next, but his memory pre-1975 remains intact and somehow he continues to function, living through his obsession with numbers. Each morning he greets her at the door asking for her birth date and her telephone number. He finds puzzles and equations in everything, including shoe sizes and baseball, and the housekeeper becomes fascinated as she and her son also begin to see the beauty and the poetry in numbers. Full review...
A Day and a Night and a Day by Glen Duncan
Augustus Rose was brought up in New York, but not in a des res, in an altogether grittier part of the city. ' ... his childhood in East Harlem, darkness framing the blistered stoop, the blinding asphalt, the smell of garbage cans and urine.' He's had an unfortunate start in life. Mother, white, father (unknown) black so that makes the young Augustus an in-between, a not-sure, a neither-one-colour-nor-the-other. Today, in the 21st century, no one would raise an eyebrow, bat an eyelid. But this novel is set in the 1960s where racial tensions abound. Yes, even in cosmopolitan cities such as New York. Full review...
The Tin-Kin by Eleanor Thom
Dawn is a single mother who has been avoiding a lot of things for a long time. When her aunt, who raised Dawn as a daughter, dies, Dawn finds the key to a cupboard which she was forbidden to look into as a child. Inside she finds clues to her family history, links to a Traveller Community, unearthing a journey that sees her finding her roots. We also witness her struggle to renew her complicated relationship with her family and her efforts to escape the ever-present memory of her abusive husband. Full review...
The Strange Case of the Composer and His Judge by Patricia Duncker
It's rural France, and 2000 is barely begun, when hunters come across a spread of human corpses in the mountains. Several families, all in the same cult, seem to have killed themselves on their path to wherever. If so, this is a problem, for the last time it happened, in Switzerland a few years previous, nobody could work out why – and who was there to dispose of some of the evidence. This isn't a problem for the policeman involved, as he fell desperately in love with the investigative judge in collaborating on the initial case. Combining again, they see a link with everybody involved in both cases, a famous conductor /composer. Full review...
Revenge of the Mooncake Vixen: A Manifesto in 41 Tales by Marilyn Chin
Revenge of the Mooncake Vixen (oh, how I love that title!) will almost certainly not be to everyone's taste, but I confess that I loved its originality, boldness, sassy style and the humour of it. Full review...
The Solitude of Prime Numbers by Paolo Giordano
The Solitude of Prime Numbers follows the lives of Alice and Mattia from childhood to middle age. Alice is a wilful anorexic, scarred by a childhood skiing accident and an overbearing father. Mattia is an reclusive self-harmer trying to live with the guilt of having been responsible for his disabled twin sister's death. Their paths cross at a school friend's party during a painful adolescence and their lives are destined to intertwine throughout the coming years, despite the chronic awkwardness of their courtship. Full review...
Dark Matter by Juli Zeh
Dark Matter is translated from German and nothing has been 'lost in translation' here. The lives of two very bright academics are interwoven throughout. Students Sebastian and Oskar are the very best of friends; it's almost as if they share the same heartbeat. However, as they grow into adulthood real life comes along and tends to get in the way. Sebastian settles for domestic bliss. Their friendship cools off, becomes a little tense and strained. Full review...
Isa and May by Margaret Forster
Isamay is a would-be academic and she's writing a thesis about grandmothers in history, inspired, one suspects, by her own grandmothers, Isa and May. Her efforts are constantly diverted by the present needs of her grandmothers and the secrets about their pasts which rise to the surface when she least expects them. There's another complication too. Isamay is in her thirties and has never wanted a child, but reconsiders, despite the fact that her partner, Ian, is adamant that he doesn't want children. The more Isamay delves, the more she realises that there are secrets in Ian's past too. Full review...
The Help by Kathryn Stockett
Jackson, Mississippi: 1960. The talk at the bridge club and the tennis club is of what Jackie Kennedy is wearing. They're white women, of course and they're free to play because a coloured woman will be looking after the children, doing the shopping and cleaning the house. They're trusted to bring the children up, but they're not trusted to be honest about the silver. Aibileen is raising her seventeenth white child but something hardened in her heart when her son died whilst the white bosses looked the other way. They took his body to the coloureds' hospital and rolled it off the back of the truck and left. Full review...
The Concert Ticket by Olga Grushin
The Concert Ticket follows the lives of a family in Soviet Russia who have grown desperately distant from one another. Sergei, the father, is a frustrated musician who longs to play the pre-revolutionary masterpieces of composers like Igor Selinsky but is forced to play the kind of patriotic ditties he despises. His schoolteacher wife, Anna, longs for his love, but is never quite able to get his attention with her shy gestures. Their shiftless son, Alexander, has quietly given up going to school and spends his days hanging around the park, consorting with undesirables. Also living in their house is Anna's silent, elderly mother. Full review...
The Temple-Goers by Aatish Taseer
Aatish Taseer is probably best known for his journalism, publishing regularly in the Indian press, in Prospect, and perhaps most prolifically in Time magazine. He has won acclaim for his memoir: Stranger to History in which he, raised by his Indian Sikh mother, traces his absent Muslim father across the border in Pakistan – and also for his translations of the short stories of Saadat Hasan Manto. Full review...
The Spider Truces by Tom Connolly
The title of this debut novel by Tom Connolly is enigmatic, mysterious. It draws the reader in - just like a fly to a spider's web. And in fairness 'The Spider Truces' does exactly what it say on the tin as the main character, Ellis, is obsessed and terrified in equal measure, of spiders.
... and when you live in an old house, as the O'Rourke family does, there are plenty of spiders and other creepy crawlies about. Full review...
The Favorites by Mary Yukari Waters
This story is set in Kyoto, Japan, starting in June 1978. Fourteen year old Sarah Rexford and her Japanese mother, Yoko, have come back from the US to stay with family for a few weeks. Sarah was born and brought up in Japan but has lived in the US with her mother and white American father for five years. She is very conscious of the differences between life in Kyoto and in Fielder's Butte, California. Here in Kyoto, the women, including Sarah and her mum, go shopping every day for food, and the food is very different – in an opening scene, Sarah is trying to explain to her grandfather what she normally has for breakfast in the US, and becoming aware of the gulf between her life in Japan and in California. Full review...
Trespass by Rose Tremain
Set in the hills of Southern France, Trespass is a novel about sibling love and rivalry, disputed territory and ultimately revenge. In the French corner are Aramon Lunel, resident of the Mas Lunel, and his sister Audrun who lives in a cottage in the grounds. In the English corner are Victoria Verey, a garden designer, and her partner, an untalented watercolourist, Kitty. The catalyst that brings these together is the arrival in France of Anthony Verey, Victoria's sister whose exclusive antiques business in London is failing and who decides to follow his sister in finding a new life in France. Aramon is tempted to sell his family Mas by the lure of 'foreign' money even if that means that his sister's house has to be destroyed to secure the deal. Full review...
All That I Have by Castle Freeman
Castle Freeman may sound like two thirds of a firm of provincial solicitors but thankfully this Castle Freeman is a man very skilled in writing about the law rather than practicing it. In his latest novel Freeman tells an intriguing tale involving local Sheriff Lucian Wing and his practical yet low-key approach to maintaining order in rural Vermont. Not for Wing the gung ho approach to fighting crime. He doesn't wear a uniform, he drives a battered old car rather than the standard issue sheriff's wagon and his gun, so ubiquitous in US law enforcement, is safely tucked away in his bottom drawer. Everyone in the area knows the sheriff and by and large they respect him and his slightly unorthodox way of doing business. Full review...
Little Hands Clapping by Dan Rhodes
The first character to mention in this book is a moth. It's a human moth, drawn to the flame that is a museum of suicide - a supposedly cautionary, life-affirming, memento mori, somewhere in Germany. Its curator is an old hand at lonely, unloved museums, fresh from an art gallery in an airport - it didn't take off - who notices the noise of the latest suicide to happen in the museum, and goes right back to sleep. A spider crawls into his mouth and gets eaten. Full review...
No and Me by Delphine de Vigan
Lou is a clever, clever child with an IQ approaching 160. She's thirteen, but she's been moved up two years at school and she compares her flat chested, nervous self somewhat unfavourably with her fifteen-year-old peer group. Funnily enough, her only real friend at school is Lucas, who's seventeen and such a rebel that he's been moved down two years. Things at home aren't great for Lou. Her baby sister died a few years ago and her mother has been severely depressed ever since. She barely talks, seldom gets dressed. Her father is worn down to the bone with worry and Lou doesn't get a great deal of attention from him either, so distracted is he. Full review...
The Unnamed by Joshua Ferris
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. Full review...
Besotted by Joe Treasure
It is late August 1982, the day when O level results come out. Michael Cartwright already knows he has failed his exams and is dreading his parents finding out. He, his twin brother Kieran (who has done very well) and their younger sisters are on the family holiday, staying with their mother's parents in Kilross, County Cork. To escape boredom and his parents' anger, he wanders round the village, where he meets Fergal Noonan, training to be a priest, and lively Peggy O'Connor. He has his first kiss and a bit more with Peggy. The family soon goes home to Cheltenham, but their brief visit to Ireland will have far reaching significance. Full review...
Secret Son by Laila Lalami
Secret Son is the story of Youssef El-Mekki, the slum-dwelling teenage son of single mother Rachida. Youssef has always been told that his father is dead, so when he finds out his mother has lied to conceal the fact that he was born out of wedlock, he plunges headlong into an identity crisis. He tracks down his real father, a wealthy businessman called Nabil Amrani who is surprisingly enthusiastic about his illegitimate son's arrival. Nabil has recently fallen out with his daughter and he seizes this opportunity to mould Youssef into the obedient son he has always wanted. Full review...
The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga
Balram Halwai, a Bangalore entrepreneur (of sorts) and a natural philosopher, hears that there is a planned visit from the Chinese leader to India to learn the source of Indian entrepreneurial talent. Balram knows that the story he will be told by the Indian leader will be a long way from the true story of modern Indian life, and so resolves, over the course of seven nights, to write to the Chinese premier with the story of his life and his own journey from a poor son of a rickshaw driver to the head of his own business. Full review...
The Trout Opera by Matthew Condon
Judges Carrington and Thorpe recline in leather armchairs on the verandah of Buckley's Crossing hotel and watch in silence as a giant trout shuffles across the bridge.
The Judges, despite their initial prominence and convincing back-story giving them a valid reason for being in Buckley's Crossing, will not really concern us. They are there to represent a type: a visitor to small town Australia, a fisherman from the city, a seeker after something in the Snowy that probably isn't fish.
We shall, however, be concerned with the giant trout. Full review...
The Man Who Disappeared by Clare Morrall
I was drawn to this book straight away. Firstly, the jacket cover is lovely. 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 is a secure family unit. Until - completely out of the blue - he simply disappears. His family is distraught and mystified. We all know that a person cannot simply disappear. But Felix Kendall has taken himself off the radar. Why? Full review...
A Single Man by Christopher Isherwood
If you've ever wanted to know what goes on inside someone's mind you'll love this short novel, first published back in 1964. We join George Falconer just at the moment he awakes from sleep and witness his innermost thoughts as he goes about a typical day. It all sounds pretty dull and monotonous but what makes this exciting is that George isn't just any old professor living the American Dream, oh no, he's so detached from the banal normality of the world that he's almost outside of his own body at times. Full review...
The Unspoken Truth by Angelica Garnett
I would not normally start a review with the biography of the author, but The Unspoken Truth is presented as autobiographical fiction by a child of the Bloomsbury Group – 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 sure. Full review...
Rhyming Life and Death by Amos Oz
Rhyming Love and Death is a kind of philosophical love letter to literature, or perhaps more so to fiction. It is a book about how to write, about the compulsion to write, and about the strange world that the writer of fiction must live in. Full review...
Skippy Dies by Paul Murray
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. Full review...
The Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe
In his own mind, bond trader Sherman McCoy is a 'Master of the Universe'. He has a pleasant wife, a beautiful mistress, and a sweet six year old daughter. Henry Lamb is a black student from the projects. Under normal circumstances, it's clear that McCoy's world and Lamb's world would never overlap. But when McCoy and his mistress Maria Ruskin end up lost in the Bronx, and an accident leads to Lamb being hit by McCoy's Mercedes, a chain of events start which will lead to his downfall. Full review...
Walking to the Moon by Kate Cole-Adams
We meet the main character Jessica, or Jess as she is usually called, deep in an emotional black hole. She can see no light at the end of the tunnel. And right from the start, right from page one, we have a sense of the beautiful and poetic language of Cole-Adams. '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 one. Full review...
A Disobedient Girl by Ru Freeman
A Disobedient Girl follows two women struggling to retain control of their lives in the face of servitude. Latha is a servant girl to the affluent Vithanage family, whose daughter, Thara, is Latha's age. As children, the girls are the best of friends, but they are destined to be separated by class, which is made painfully obvious when boys come into 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 the arms of Thara's boyfriend and this sets off a chain of events that will echo far into her future. Full review...
Catch by Simon Robson
Catharine's husband Tom is away on business in Birmingham, and so Catharine awakes alone for the first time in their little cottage at the end of their lane. They moved there a few months previously, and since then Catharine has spent her days quietly awaiting her husband's return from work. She is sure that she will figure out, some day, what her purpose in life is. She thought it might be to have a baby, but they have been trying for some time and it hasn't happened as yet. Meanwhile she waits, and thinks, and waits. In the lounge stands her piano, a stark reminder of the life she didn't manage to realise because although she studied music she found, quite quickly, that in spite of being passionate she lacked any kind of talent for it whatsoever. So, on this day, alone at home, Catharine finds herself tormented by the piano's presence and over-thinking every second of the day. She worries away at who she is, and what her life is, as her loneliness and the day itself unravel around her. Full review...
The Great Perhaps by Joe Meno
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 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. Full review...
The Swan Thieves by Elizabeth Kostova
1999 – A renowned painter, Robert Oliver, goes mad, attacking a painting with a knife. He's arrested, and sent to a psychiatrist who is also an artist. The psychiatrist, Andrew Marlowe, can't get his patient to talk to him, but tries to investigate what drove him to this by talking to his wife and his girlfriend, and reading some letters Oliver seems obsessed with.
1879 – Beatrice de Clerval, aspiring artist, corresponds with her uncle-by-marriage Olivier Vignot, a more experienced painter. Their letters will be found by Robert Oliver, 120 years later, and will lead to his loss of sanity. Full review...
The Patience Stone by Atiq Rahimi
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. Full review...
A Fair Maiden by Joyce Carol Oates
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. Full review...
