Newest Literary Fiction Reviews
Literary fiction
Raised from the Ground by Jose Saramago
Domingos is a feckless man, a man often neglecting his family, and hitting his wife due to too much drinking, a man often leaving everyone behind as he chases work and flees his debts. He calls himself a shoemaker but really he's little different from those around him, who actually do have to move about, chasing what seasonal agricultural work is available. Certainly his children and their children in turn will mostly be bound to the land they sprang from - the 'latifundio' – and the spirit of both all of them, and of it, throughout the Portuguese twentieth century, are the subjects of this early Jose Saramago novel, in English for the first time after a thirty-year wait. Full review...
Professor Andersen's Night by Dag Solstad
A Christmastime in Norway. Spending his Christmas Eve alone, yet celebrating the age-old occasion the traditional way just by and for himself, is Professor Andersen. While taking time to muse on the party-hosting neighbours lit up in their own apartments across the way, he sees a young woman get roughly manhandled by what he thinks is a young man, after which their curtains are closed and suspicion is allowed to mount in the Professor's mind. He attends a dinner party – arriving far too early, to have the opportunity to talk the case over with his best friend – and goes away, spending many hours with his colleague, yet carries on doing nothing about reporting what he is sure was a murder. He and the relationship to the criminal in his mind are the basis of this short novel. Full review...
The Human Part by Kari Hotakainen and Owen F Witesman (translator)
Salme Malmikunnas attends a literary fair with her daughter, Helena but before going inside, Salme meets an author who offers her a small fortune in exchange for her story. He seeks inspiration and feels that Salme's biography is it. Salme agrees only after a fee increase and so their regular meetings begin. The author gets a story and Salme unloads her past and present onto this stranger. Meanwhile, Salme's family continues speeding towards a devastating event. Full review...
Desolation Island by Adolfo Garcia Ortega
In Madeira, in the first months of the new millennium, a man named Oliver Griffin collars a total stranger to explain his lifetime’s obsession with a South American island called Desolation. Griffin is a narrator as gabby as Melville’s Ishmael but twice as rambling, and what he recounts is less a coherent story than a neverending cabinet of curiosities. This magical realist take on the history of a place involves forbidden love, sixteenth-century automatons, mysterious Balkan castles, war crimes, death at sea, Jewish folklore, the personal lives of French authors and the sexual conduct of famous Spanish explorers, each bizarre strand twisted together by the novel’s own weird internal logic into one astonishing and delightful pattern. Full review...
Monsieur by Emma Becker
She is a twenty-year old student, with an average cleavage and a big bum. He is 45, a married cosmetic surgeon, and a friend of the family, having worked with her uncle for years. They might be an unlikely couple – at least outside the realms of erotic fiction they are – but as she puts it, she wants him to show me what a man was like, a real man, a man who could fill my body and my mind. The consequences are in this novel. Full review...
The Daughters of Mars by Thomas Keneally
Expectations ahead of Thomas Keneally's 'The Daughters of Mars' are understandably high. He regularly features on the Booker shortlist and has won the prize in the past with Shindler's Ark. While his subject matter, World War I, is hardly the most original, his slant on the story is, and this is a book that deserves to sit with the very best of the many books on that subject, including All Quiet on the Western Front and Birdsong. It's that good and that powerful. Full review...
Where Have You Been? by Joseph O'Connor
Irish novelist Joseph O'Connor has had quite a 2012. Earlier in the year he joined the ranks of such authors as Edna O'Brien, Roddy Doyle and Seamus Heaney when he became a recipient of the PEN award for his outstanding contribution to Irish literature. What could possibly top that for a sense of achievement? Well this, his first book of short stories in 20 years, must come pretty close to at least equalling it, amply illustrating the reasons for the panel's decision. Full review...
The Crime of Julian Wells by Thomas H Cook
American travel writer Julian Wells walks out of the house he shares with his sister, wanders down to the garden lake, rows himself out to the centre and slits his wrists. He dies alone as he silently watches his life drip into the water. Devastated, his friend and frequent travel companion Philip Anders, tries to come to terms with the loss the only way he can: by attempting to understand. Julian dedicated a book to Philip, mentioning a 'crime' that Philip had witnessed. Philip had always thought it to be a flip reference to his comment from years before that it would be a crime for Julian to waste time writing a certain piece, but, in the light of tragic events, is this actually the case? Is there a crime in the author's past? As Philip retraces the essence of Julian through his words, the places they visited and people they encountered he slowly uncovers secrets and a dangerous obsession. Full review...
Huracan by Diana McCaulay
1986 – 30-year-old Leigh McCaulay (White gal!) is returning to Jamaica, the land of her birth. Her mother is dead and there is an estate to be settled. Her estranged father is somewhere on the island. Her brother is in England. This isn't the closest of grieving families. Leigh doesn't even know how her mother died. Indeed, she's a bit surprised to find out she'd gone back to Jamaica. The residual family had left the island not long after the father's desertion. Full review...
The Confidant by Helene Gremillon and Alison Anderson (translator)
It's 1975 and Camille, having lost her father a while ago, is now coming to terms with the recent death of her mother. After plucking up courage and strength, she goes through the condolence cards but there's one item in the correspondence pile that's out of place. It's addressed to her but from Louis (whom she doesn't know) about Annie (of whom she's never heard). As Louis pours out his story, reminiscing about his youth in wartime France, Camille is convinced it's a mistake; she shouldn't have received it. However the envelope is definitely addressed to her and, what's more, this won't be the last instalment of Louis' sad memoir that comes through the post. Full review...
Alone In The Classroom by Elizabeth Hay
'Other children were out picking that morning, but she passed them by in her light-blue dress and sandals... she had an empty kettle in each hand and was alone, despite having three sisters.'
Coming back to Hay's writing is like a kind of homecoming. She has such a soft way of words: a gentleness that gathers you up like a story-time school teacher asking if you're sitting comfortably. Full review...
The Guard by Peter Terrin
Harry and Michel are very good at their job, even if we might think their job is not that great. They and they alone are responsible for protecting the building they live in. Designed as an impregnable fortress containing many immense, palatial apartments inhabited by the ultra-rich, the only way in is through the basement carpark, where they reside in their own small patch of territory. They are certainly diligent – inspecting their stash of munitions twice a day, even if nothing could possibly interfere with their supply of bullets, and navigating around the large expanse of space where each of the forty floors above them has space for three supercars. But while one seems to be dreaming of things he might not get to witness – promotion to guarding villas in Elysian fields with becoming owner's wives, the other seems to be hearing things that might not actually be there to be heard… Full review...
Canada by Richard Ford
Richard Ford's Canada opens with one of the best opening lines that I've read in a long time:
'First, I'll tell about the robbery our parents committed. Then about the murders, which happened later. The robbery is the most important part'. Full review...
The Yellow Birds by Kevin Powers
Daniel Murphy ('Murph') is 18, in the American army and about to embark on his first tour of duty in Iraq. By his side is John Bartle, three years older and more experienced in the army. However neither of them has any notion of the sort of life or job they will face when they get there. The fighting is dirty, unpredictable and not set out in any text book. Their commanding officer, Sergeant Sterling, is sadistic and without any apparent humanity. But everything will be alright: Bartle has made a promise to Murph's mother, a promise that will ricochet from the US to Iraq and back again. Full review...
Sweet Tooth by Ian McEwan
Ian McEwan's Sweet Tooth is part spy novel but more a love story and a tale of deception and half truths. It's also, more subtly, a book about the power, role and importance of fiction. Set in the 1970s, with frequent musical and political references to the UK at that time, Serena Frome is a beautiful, Cambridge-educated daughter of an Anglican bishop with a taste for unsuitable romances. From an early affair with a man who turns out to be homosexual, to an affair with an older lecturer she moves on to a surprise job at MI5 where she had a crush on one of her bosses, again and awkward, repressed and unattractive individual before encountering talented author Tom Haley as part of her job with whom she once again falls in love. Few of these men are what they seem, and neither for that matter is Serena when she has to hide her job from Haley. Full review...
Narcopolis by Jeet Thayil
Novels about narcotic substances are notoriously hard to pull off. The challenge is to make the induced events interesting and meaningful to the, presumably, non-induced reader. In Narcopolis, Jeet Thayil pulls this off surprisingly well for me, although it's fair to say that it won't be everyone's taste. It's not a book that the Bombay/Mumbai tourist office will be keen to promote. A cover quotation links the book to a similar vein (OK, that's a poor choice of words in the circumstances) to Trainspotting and that's not far from the mark. Full review...
NW by Zadie Smith
Fans of Zadie Smith have had a seven year wait since her last book On Beauty. In NW, Smith returns to more of the issues addressed in her brilliant debut novel White Teeth. Set in parts of London that should be obvious from the title, the book takes the lives of four people who grew up on a rough estate and looks at how they have moved on - or not. All four still live nearby the estate where they grew up. There's multi-cultural tension and the have and have nots of power and money and Smith looks at how much individuals are in control of their destiny and ability to rise out of their upbringing, and how chance encounters can bring you back to your past with a bump. Full review...
The Thief by Fuminori Nakamura
The Thief is content roaming the streets of Tokyo, living on the contents of its wealthier citizens' pockets until, his original partner in crime (literally) introduces him to Kizaki, a local shady big shot. Kizaki wants the Thief's help on a straightforward job. He will just be one of a team tasked with breaking into a rich speculator's home, scaring him a little, taking the contents of his safe and departing. No rough stuff and the financial settlement Kizaki offers will more than compensate the pickpocket for his time. Full review...
The Potter's Hand by A N Wilson
The man of clay that A N Wilson throws onto his storytelling wheel in The Potter's Hand is the great Josiah Wedgwood, but this is much more than a historic telling of his life. Indeed, Josiah already has a thriving business at the start of the book. What Wilson does particularly impressively is to put Wedgwood's achievement and works into the context of the politics and social philosophy of the times, sandwiched between the two great revolutions in America and France. In order to do this, Wilson has to play slightly loose with artistic licence by altering dates and time lines a bit, but it works well. He also balances the real historic figures with several key figures of his own invention and where the historic figures don't quite fit with his narrative, he alters their ages and invents 'facts' to the benefit of the fictional narrative. Full review...
The House of Rumour by Jake Arnott
Jake Arnott sees to be one of those authors - like Will Self whom you'll love or loathe. Occasionally, you'll swing from one extreme to the other and I'll confess to being a little nervous when I opened the book. We really weren't that keen when we read The Devil's Paintbrush. Using the deck of Tarot cards as the structure of the book we look at the twentieth century through the life of Larry Zagorski. Imagine history being gently folded together like a cake mixture with episodes sliding against each other, flavouring that which they touch. Imagine the real - Aleister Crowley (reprising his appearance in The Devil's Paintbrush), Rudolf Hess, Ian Fleming, Cyril Connolly, Jim Jones and L Ron Hubbard blended with a transexual prostitute, a British pop singer and Larry, who writes pulp science fiction. Full review...
The Lighthouse by Alison Moore
When we first meet Futh he's on a North Sea ferry on his way to a walking holiday in Germany. There's no sense of enthusiasm or anticipation: Futh's middle aged and recently separated, seemingly without friends or family. He always wanted a dog, but keeps stick insects. The holiday seems to be something which, when it is over, he will have done it and will then return to his new flat. It begins and will end at Hellhaus, a guesthouse run by Bernard and his wife Ester. He gets on well enough with Ester but is at a loss to understand a rather hostile encounter with Bernard. He sets out the following morning for a week of walking, thinking and remembering. Meanwhile Ester - untouched by her meeting with Futh - continues her lonely life punctuated by the occasional casual sexual encounter which she barely hides from Bernard. Full review...
The Yips by Nicola Barker
Stuart Ransom is a golfing has-been and he's the only one who doesn't realise it. If his recollections are anything to go by (and who can tell?) he was on a par with the best. Times have changed though; the handicap isn't what it once was and age and alcohol have taken their toll. However, hope springs eternal and there's always one more match, so perhaps this is it. Meanwhile Gene, who splits his time between working at the hotel in which Stuart is staying and reading electricity meters, encounters an agoraphobic, exotic tattooist. Valentine is a woman struggling with an unhealthily precocious 2 year-old, a brother flirting with criminality and a brain-injured mother who has become more than a little eccentric. Add Gene's wife Rev Sheila and her personal crisis into the mix and it becomes a recipe for disaster, it's just a case of waiting for it to erupt. Full review...
A is for Angelica by Iain Broome
Gordon and Georgina Kingdom spent years being like many other couples. They had jobs, friends, holidays, a springer spaniel named Kipling and a life together. Then Georgina became ill and Gordon took early retirement to nurse her better. He treats retirement with the same methodical efficiency he employed at work. He records Georgina's care, her progress and shares her waking moments, feeding her and sitting with her. However, as she spends a lot of time asleep, Gordon is left to entertain himself and so, the same man who led the local Neighbourhood Watch, watches his neighbours, noting points of interest and visible activities in alphabetically filed dossiers. They're all there: Don across the road who borrows garden tools on a more permanent basis than Gordon would like, art award winner young Benny who paints with his eyes shut, the lady next door who throws footballs over the fence and the new woman across the road, Angelica. Except, when Angelica moves into the street, Gordon's interest becomes more focused than usual. Full review...
Umbrella by Will Self
Will Self's Umbrella spans a century taking three interwoven strands. One features Audrey Dearth, who in 1918 is a munitions worker who falls ill with encephalitis lethargica, a brain disease that spread over Europe after the Great War rendering many of its victims speechless and motionless. She is incarcerated in Friern hospital where, in the early 1970s a psychiatrist, Zach Busner wakes her from her stupor using a new drug. In the final thread, in 2010 the asylum has closed and the now retired Busner travels across north London seeking the truth about his encounter with his former patient. While that sounds like a fascinating story in its own right, be warned. Self's approach is ambitiously modernistic making this a very heavy going tome even by Self's standards. Full review...
Sleeping Patterns by JR Crook
Anneli Strandli lives with insomniacally introverted Berry Walker, among others but not in a romantically co-habiting way. They all share student accommodation complete with attendant noise and comings and goings. Berry isn’t the most forthcoming of people but Anneli discovers a manuscript in his desk and so, sneaking into his room to read it, she hopes to discover from his writings the essence of Berry that his private nature hides. Meanwhile Berry is falling in love but has difficulty communicating it to the person concerned. Full review...
The Dog Stars by Peter Heller
We are in North America in a near but post-Apocalyptic future. Those few humans to survive a pandemic have to be treated as carriers, and/or armed and desperate, and so are particularly of note to military-minded survivalist Bangley. And climate and eco-problems have killed off many common species, something closer to narrator Hig's heart, as he's a more placid, huntin', shootin' and fishin' guy. These two solitary men are an unlikely partnership, but both look out for each other in complementary ways. Bangley has his watch-tower, while Hig takes off in his Cessna to get away from it all, and his flights act as a first line of defense. But is it all life could be, for Hig and his dog and Bangley? What is Hig still to make of the last inviting contact he heard on his plane's radio - even if that was three years ago? Full review...
The Vanishing Act by Mette Jakobsen
Minou lives on a sparsely occupied, temperate island. In fact the only occupants apart from Minou and her Papa are Priest (the Priest), Boxman (a maker of magical boxes) and a dog called No Name. Minou’s mother used to live there too. She arrived on a boat with a bowl containing a peacock (a real live one called… yes… Peacock). But then one day Mama disappeared completely apart from one shoe. Minou misses her and the way that she encouraged Minou’s imagination, completely at odds with her father’s logical philosophical outlook. Papa doesn’t believe that Mama will return and so has symbolically buried the shoe but Minou thinks differently: Mama will come back. Full review...
The Teleportation Accident by Ned Beauman
It's hard to know where to start in reviewing Ned Beauman's Booker long-listed The Teleportation Accident. Reading it, you feel like the parent of an ADHD-suffering child. At times it is lovable, brilliant and entertaining, at others you just want to reach for the Ritalin and tell it to sit in a corner quietly while it composes itself. A clue to both the brilliance and frustration of Beauman is in the vast range of writers to whom he has been compared in both this and his first novel Boxer, Beetle. There are hints of people as wide ranging as David Mitchell, P G Wodehouse, Douglas Adams, Raymond Chandler even Angela Carter to name just a few. Beauman takes a huge range of styles and genres and pushes them and bends them often to glorious effect, but it can be a challenge keeping up with him at times. Full review...
Swimming Home by Deborah Levy
Joe, a poet and Isabel, his war-correspondent wife and their teenage daughter Nina rent a luxurious villa in the South of France and invite their friends Laura and Mitchell to join them. On their first day there Nina finds what appears to be a naked body floating in the swimming pool, but it's Kitty Finch. She pleads a mix-up over booking dates and when told that all the local hotels are fully booked for some days Isabel offers her the use of the spare bedroom at the villa. There's no obvious reason for why she does this, but what does become clear is that Kitty suffers from depression - and she's stopped taking her medication. Full review...
The Illicit Happiness of Other People by Manu Joseph
Meet what the first chapter calls the underdog family. Tamil immigrants to Madras, they are below the breadline due to Ousep's constant drinking, and by him being a failed writer and mediocre journalist. His wife Mariamma has, shall we say, problems, their younger son is fixated on the beautiful girl next door. But their other son Unni is a cartoonist hottie - a handsome prodigy of the comic strip world - or he was until he took a nosedive off their roof three years ago, aged 17. Ousep is still tracking through his son's friends and output, trying to seek the cause of this suicide, and what we have here is the journey of the family as he struggles towards the truth. Full review...
The Liars' Gospel by Naomi Alderman
In The Liars' Gospel, Naomi Alderman gives the perspective of four people on the recent death of a Jewish man named Yehoshuah, who is more commonly known these days by the anglicized name of Jesus. These perspectives include Miryam (Mary), the teacher's mother, Iehuda of Qeriot (Judas Iscariot), a one time follower of the man, Caiaphas, the High Priest of the great Temple in Jerusalem and finally Bar-Avo, Barabbas, a rebel who is determined to bring down the occupying Roman presence. What makes this such a remarkable book is the sheer visceral nature of the story telling. Each story is vividly told, and Alderman evokes the time and place to such a level that you half expect to have developed a sun tan while reading the book. Full review...
Toby's Room by Pat Barker
Elinor Brooke and her brother Toby had always been close but one day their relationship became more intimate than is acceptable. The trick then, as Toby said, was to get back to how their relationship was before. Toby concentrated on calling her 'sis', whilst Elinor was never quite certain how they could turn the clock back to a time when they were more innocent. But looking back, the summer of 1912 would seem idyllic: in 1917 Toby was reported 'Missing, Believed Killed'. Elinor was determined to find out how Toby died and her one route to this knowledge was Kit Neville who was a fellow student of hers at the Slade School of Art and who was in the fox hole when Toby met his fate. Full review...
The Daylight Gate by Jeanette Winterson
1610s Lancashire, and Alice Nutter is the best landowner you could wish for. Single, rich and connected, she takes no sides in the religious schisms James I has inherited, and takes no bull from those trying to oppress the poor, putting them up and feeding them when no-one else will. But those poor are seen as sinful by others - amoral, dirty in mind, body and spirit, and in league with the devil. And people are beginning to question Alice's attitudes, choice of company - and ageless beauty. This, then, is the based-on-truth story of how Alice Nutter got to be one of the accused in the Pendle Witch trials. Full review...
Girlchild by Tupelo Hassman
Rory Dawn Hendrix (RD for short) lives with her mother in the ironically named Calle de las Flores or Street of Flowers; a pretty name masking a less than idyllic setting. For Calle is a trailer park for those living a life sentence of poverty, the inhabitants being as upwardly mobile as their static, seedy homes. RD has half brothers but they live with their father, leaving RD to live alone with her mother and nearby grandmother, a father being a luxury that Rory Dawn has learnt to live without. Rory Dawn is also a Girl Scout and has a handbook to prove it but she's in a troop of one, alone with the ideals of an organisation that she only glimpses through disadvantage and in the same way that she glimpses the materialistic world beyond her means. However, her mother wants more for her than the teen pregnancies that seem to have become their family heirloom and there is hope as RD is highly intelligent; but can this be enough? Full review...
