'''Read [[Features|new features]].'''
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{{newreview
|author=Jean Rhys
|title=Wide Sargasso Sea
|rating=5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=In the late eighteen thirties the father of an English gentleman conspires to marry him off to a landed Jamaican Creole as a means of giving his second son an estate and stopping him being a burden on the family. Written in the nineteen sixties, 'Wide Sargasso Sea' was inspired by Rochester's first wife in ''Jane Eyre'', and is an impressionistic, hallucinatory account of that woman's alienation and subsequent descent into madness that can be read as a prequel to the Bronte novel. The book covers Antoinette's childhood in Jamaica and her honeymoon on a small Caribbean island with her new husband and their domestic servants, and the point of view shifts between Antoinette and her husband.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0241951550</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Margaret James
|summary=Apparently there's a saying that 'time's a goon' - no, I'd never heard of it and to be fair, neither had the first character to whom it is said in Jennifer Egan's 'A Visit from the Goon Squad', but together with a pair of epigraphs from Proust, it's clear that time is very definitely what is being explored here. Egan's subject area is all loosely based around the music world. Her central character, if one can be said to exist, is Bennie Salazar, a music mogul who we encounter both directly and tangentially at various stages of his up and down career. ''Goon Squad'' is also the title of an Elvis Costello track, continuing the music theme as Egan uses the music industry as a lens to examine time.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1849010331</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=John E Flannery
|title=Toby's Little Eden
|rating=3.5
|genre=Short Stories
|summary=John E Flannery's debut collection contains four short stories (although one is more of a novella) and a series of amusing sketches about the ground staff at a new Golf Course in north Manchester. They're more varied than they might appear at first glance and demonstrate Flannery's ability to get straight to the heart of the story without wasting words and to develop character as economically as possible, whilst still holding the reader's imagination. I knew as soon as I began ''The Ghostwriter'' that I wasn't going to be disappointed as a man who has written successful thrillers is possessed by the spirit of Charles Dickens. It's a neat riff on John Braine's idea that novelist wait for an idea to descend on them and Graham Greene's belief that novelists are like mediums.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1445777940</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Susan Wiggs
|title=Summer at Willow Lake
|rating=4
|genre=Women's Fiction
|summary=Olivia Bellamy does not seem to have a lot of luck with men. When we meet her she's just about to put her third broken engagement under her belt and head of into the wilderness of the Catskills with Freddy. Don't get excited – he really is just a friend. They're going to revamp the family's old summer camp in readiness for her grandparents' fiftieth wedding anniversary celebrations and right now it seems like the best way to forget about her love life. Things turn from bad to worse though when she finds herself not only stuck up a flagpole but having to be rescued by the man who was her first boyfriend some nine years before.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0778304760</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Simmone Howell
|title=Notes From the Teenage Underground
|rating=4
|genre=Teens
|summary=Gem, only child of arty mother Bev and an absent haiku-obsessed father always found fitting in difficult until the mysterious Lo turned up at school. The trio of her, Lo and Mira have been inseparable for a while now but as they plan their summer project – an Andy Warhol inspired underground film – she starts to feel pushed out by the other two. Can she deal with exams, romance co-worker Dodgy, save her friendship with Mira and Lo and cope with her father’s reappearance?
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0747585121</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Anna Quindlen
|title=Every Last One
|rating=5
|genre=General Fiction
|summary=Mary Beth Latham is contemplating her average, ordinary life where every day is more of less the same. Would things be better if life were more exciting, varied, newsworthy? Is that a legitimate thing to hope for? They say to be careful what you wish for, and Mary Beth never comes right out and says this is what she wants, but there are hints to this effect.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0099537966</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Jeremy Lewis
|title=Shades of Greene: One Generation of an English Family
|rating=4.5
|genre=Biography
|summary=Graham Greene's father actually had six children, and his brother six of his own. (Well, there were nine in their generation for a start...) The surprising and joyous thing about this book is that it can show that Graham Greene's remarkable life is by no means the only standout in that whole generation of family history. It can continuously throw up surprises - we know Hugh Greene was high up in the BBC, but it wasn't him who helped found Canadian public service broadcasting. We are familiar with Graham himself traipsing around the world, reporting back in fact and fiction from unusual circumstances and exotic climes with dubious systems of government, but it wasn't he who was noted for being an ardently public supporter of pro-Communist China.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0099551888</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Lauren Liebenberg
|title=The West Rand Jive Cats Boxing Club
|rating=4
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Best friends Tommy and Chris are 12 years old. It is 1958 and they are growing up in a small mining town near Johannesburg, South Africa. They are learning to box and to dance to rock and roll music.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1844084892</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=John Lawton
|title=A Lily of the Field
|rating=4
|genre=General Fiction
|summary=The book opens in the early 1930s in Vienna where we meet one of the main characters; ten year old Meret. She's gifted musically and in particular in playing the cello. Even at this tender age, people are talking about her starry future on the world stage. She is the apple of her father's eye and soon she's being given extra musical tuition by a kind but much older man. He's old enough to be her grandfather but nevertheless they strike up a rather unusual friendship with music being the common denominator. But some of their conversations are serious and quite grown-up for a young girl, not yet into puberty. The tutor, Viktor Rosen is Jewish and has already suffered at the hands of the Germans. Meret progresses at such a pace that before you know it, she's performing in public. Her life appears to be wonderful and full of future promise.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1611856019</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Jonah Lehrer
|title=Proust Was a Neuroscientist
|rating=4
|genre=Popular Science
|summary=In Troilus and Cressida, Shakespeare wrote,'Time hath, my lord, a wallet at his back, wherin he puts alms for oblivion'. This fully accords with the discoveries of modern brain science. Proust in his famous novel, 'In Search of Lost Time' anticipates such discoveries by neuroscientists, such as Rachel Hertz, that smell and taste are the only senses that connect directly to the hippocampus. Thus the taste of a petit madeleine evokes a rediscovery by Proust of Combray and a flow of associations - it is the part of the brain in which long term memory is centred. Lehrer in ' Proust was a Neuroscientist' weaves an intriguing argument about the relationship between recent neuroscientific discoveries and the novels of George Eliot, Gertrude Stein and Virginia Woolf. A scientist, who has researched with Nobel Prize-winning, [[:Category:Eric R Kandel|Eric Kandel]], has a taste for philosophy; Lehrer intends to heal the rift between what C.P.Snow termed the 'Two Cultures'. He wishes to accord respect to the truths and the intuitive discoveries, especially of modernist writers and painters.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1847677851</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Ellie Irving
|title=For the Record
|rating=4.5
|genre=Confident Readers
|summary=Luke is obsessed with records. He's so busy planning on breaking world records when he grows up, and playing world records DVD games, that he doesn't take much of an interest in what's going on around him. But that's about to change, because when the village of Port Bren is chosen to host a waste-incinerator plant his house will be demolished and the graveyard where his dad's buried will be destroyed – unless the village is too historically important for this to happen. How can they put themselves on the map in one week? Luke comes up with the idea to break 50 world records… but why won't his mum let him take part?
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0370331982</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Wolfren Riverstick
|title=While We Sleep... the Dream Snatchers Cometh!
|rating=4
|genre=Confident Readers
|summary=You could be forgiven for thinking that the Jackson family was unimaginative. Jack Jackson, the head of the household was generally known as Pa, even before he had any children to call him by that name. His wife, Jacqueline, was known as Ma. You could put all this down to accident but naming their first child Jackie (after a comic which Ma had enjoyed in her youth) and their second child Jacques might confirm your fears. It was a few years before they acquired a pet, but the cat was to be called Jackson and the Dutch Hamster Sjaak. Guess what their house was called? Yup – it was Jacksonville.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0955431433</amazonuk>
}}
