==Literary fiction==
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{{newreview
|author=Maria Edgeworth
|title=Helen
|rating=3.5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Sweet-tempered Helen Stanley has been left penniless and homeless after her uncle's death. Soon her best friend Cecilia writes to encourage Helen to come and live with her and her new husband, General Clarendon at Clarendon Park. Helen soon finds herself settled in to Clarendon Park and reacquaints herself with Cecilia and more importantly with Cecilia's mother, Lady Davenant, who considers Helen a daughter, and even prefers her to Cecilia.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0956003893</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Zachary Mason
|summary=This was a surprise for me. It’s rare for a book to come to my attention from the reviewing gods that’s a rerelease of a 1930s novel, and one that surfaced a couple of years ago now. But when it strikes me as startlingly Conradian, updated for the times, and perfectly able to stand alongside one of literature’s greats, then it’s just a sign those reviewing gods are on the ball.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>184697030X</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Jim Crace
|title=All That Follows
|rating=4.5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Leonard Lessing is a sofa socialist. He avoids corporate brands both in food and in clothes. He abides by all the right-on boycotts. He signs petitions. He does free gigs at benefit concerts. He gives donations - you know the kind of thing. Once, eighteen long years ago in Texas in 2006, he came very close to some real direct action. But he bottled it. And now, the frozen-shouldered jazzman-on-sabbatical finds his less-than-glorious radical past catching up with him right there in his living room, on the TV. Maxie Lermon, he of Austin 2006 and no stranger to violent agitprop, is in the UK, just up the road from Leonard, and he's taken a family hostage as a protest against the upcoming Reconciliation Summit.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0330445642</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Ed Hillyer
|title=The Clay Dreaming
|rating=4.5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Hillyer has taken several historical facts and seamlessly blended in a big dollop of fiction to create a complex and riveting story. The title is suitably enigmatic, as is King Cole (or Brippoki). He and his fellow cricketers (who also have been given rather unkind nicknames) have sailed from the bottom of the world, to the bustling metropolis of London. Talk about extremes. And although they have all been diligently 'schooled' in all things English, nevertheless, they are the talk of the town. The novel has barely started and already the mind boggles.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0956251501</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Wendy Law-Yone
|title=The Road to Wanting
|rating=4.5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=We first meet Na Ga in her hotel room in Wanting, on the Chinese side of the border with Na Ga's native Burma (or Myanmar for the more geographically pedantic, although Burma is used throughout this book). She is attempting to commit suicide, but is interrupted by news from the hotel receptionist who tells her that her guide across the border, Mr Jiang, has just committed suicide himself. You might by now have the impression that this is not a cheery kind of book, and you'd be right up to a point, although it's certainly not without its light touches. In fact it's often quite beautiful, which makes the exposure of the seedier side so much more shocking.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0701184086</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Roddy Doyle
|title=The Dead Republic
|rating=5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Henry left in 1922, after the Irish Civil War. It is now 1951. After his long exile, nothing is as he expected. He revisits an old home to find no trace that a house ever stood there. The project that has brought him back is not as he expected. The Quiet Man will be a hugely successful film for John Ford, but the life portrayed in it is not Henry Smart's life, and the portrait of Irish politics and everyday life in the film is not one he recognises. In his late 40s, he feels he is an old man already, alone with his memories of the wife and family he lost.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0224090097</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=James Kelman
|title=If it is Your Life
|rating=3
|genre=Short Stories
|summary=''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.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0241142423</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Yoko Ogawa
|title=The Housekeeper and the Professor
|rating=5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=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.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0099521342</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Glen Duncan
|title=A Day and a Night and a Day
|rating=4.5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=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.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1847394175</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Eleanor Thom
|title=The Tin-Kin
|rating=4.5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=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.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0715639013</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Patricia Duncker
|title=The Strange Case of the Composer and His Judge
|rating=4
|genre=General Fiction
|summary=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.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1408807041</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Marilyn Chin
|title=Revenge of the Mooncake Vixen: A Manifesto in 41 Tales
|rating=5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=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.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0241144612</amazonuk>
}}
