==Literary fiction==
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{{newreview
|author=Padgett Powell
|title=You and I
|rating=3.5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=
I've often wondered how men and women of letters can pack it all in. People churn out a career of fiction, as well as reading all the classics, and offering pages and pages of diaries and letters on their death. Padgett Powell can get to be a professor of books, and therefore I assume is duty-bound to read and write lots, but still find time to knock out novels, however short. It was only a few months ago I was reading ''The Interrogative Mood'' for a review elsewhere, and here is another new release from him. Serpent's Tail will cheat in 2012 by giving the British audience Powell's debut novel, almost two decades old.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1846688167</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Art Spiegelman
|summary=For the first half or so of this book, which sees an 11 year old boy called Michael (or Mynah to his friends) leave his home of Ceylon to travel to school in England, I wasn't really sure if it even had a plot. Focusing on his journey in the 1950's aboard the ship to England, although occasionally leaping forward to his later life where he gives us tantalising glimpses as to what happened to his fellow passengers after the voyage, this originally seems to be nothing more than a series of incredibly well-drawn character sketches. In fairness, I should say that ''nothing more'' is rather harsh in this case – the men, women and children Ondaatje creates, from a supposedly cursed rich man seeking a cure, to a friendly thief, to Michael's beautiful cousin Emily, are so beautifully conjured that I could have lived without a plot perfectly happily. However, we eventually realise there's a little more to this narrative, and that this skilful author has been foreshadowing the events at the novel's climax all along.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0224093614</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Patrick McGuinness
|title=The Last Hundred Days
|rating=4.5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary='The Last Hundred Days' in question here are the final days of Ceausescu's Romania in late 1989. Narrated by an unnamed young British expat who has a job offer from the English department of Bucharest University, despite never having interviewed for the job, we get an insight into the life under communist rule as Eastern bloc countries all around start to open up after the fall of the Berlin Wall. We are told that McGuinness lived in Romania in the years leading up to the revolution, and this is no surprise as there is an authenticity here that could only have come from some level of inside knowledge.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1854115413</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Jane Rogers
|title=The Testament of Jessie Lamb
|rating=3.5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=The subject matter of 'The Testament of Jessie Lamb' ensures that this is not a comfortable read. Set in the near future, Rogers has imagined a truly terrifying virus that affects pregnant women, known as Maternal Death Syndrome or MDS. Everyone carries this illness but the effects, a cross between AIDS and CJD, ensure that all pregnant mothers will die - without exception. Scientists have found a way to save some of the unborn children, but only by placing their mothers in a chemically induced coma from which they won't recover. Now though, the scientists have also discovered a way of immunising frozen, pre-MDS embryos which, if they can be placed in a willing volunteer, may ultimately allow the survival of the human race. However, the volunteers need to be under 16½ or the likely success rates are too low. Step forward one Jessie Lamb.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1905207581</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Sebastian Barry
|title=On Canaan's Side
|rating=5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Each chapter of 'On Cannan's Side' represents a day after the death of the narrator, Lilly Bere's, grandson, Bill. Initially the reader is bombarded by a stream of half thoughts but soon Lilly begins to outline her own life story from being the daughter of a police officer in Ireland at the end of the First World War, her subsequent flight to the USA, to ultimately living in retirement as a domestic cook to a wealthy American. It's a remarkable story, full of tragic events, but for all its hardships, Lilly is from a time when such things are to be endured rather than dwelt on.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0571226531</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Chuck Palahniuk
|title=Damned
|rating=4
|genre=General Fiction
|summary='Are you there, Satan? It's me, Madison'. I'm a spunky, lively tweenage girl, except I'm a dead one, and I'm in Hell, to my surprise. While I'm here I'll find out just where it is all those cold-calling telegraphers ring you from just while you're settling down to your evening meal, and where the world's wasted sperm and discarded toenail clippings fetch up. I'll have very hairy encounters with demons of Satan's and mankind's making, and with some superlative plotting and flashbacks I'll find a clearer approach to why I was put here in the first place.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0224091158</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Alison Pick
|title=Far to Go
|rating=4.5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=At the risk of sounding trite, a story set in 1938 Czechoslovakia on the eve of Nazi occupation, centred on a Jewish family is always going to put the reader through an emotional journey. Add in a young child and it's almost certain that you are going to be reaching for the Kleenex at some point. But Alison Pick makes some interesting creative choices that add more layers to this story. Some will surprise the reader but the overall impact is a wonderfully moving story with wholly believable characters.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0755379411</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Madeline Miller
|title=The Song of Achilles
|rating=4.5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Before I started the book, I looked out my copy of Homer's ''The Iliad'' and skim-read its one page introduction (yes, yet another book in my 'must-read' pile but it's been on it for about ahem, ten years). Having said that, it is rather dry and scholarly which didn't really inspire me to get on with this book as I wasn't really looking for a 'heavy' read, especially on a nice summer's day. Onwards ...
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1408816032</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Tiziano Scarpa
|title=Stabat Mater
|rating=3
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Translated by Shaun Whiteside from Scarpa's 2008 Italian original, 'Stabat Mater' is set in a Venetian orphanage for girls run by nuns in what would have been around the 1700s. The girls at the 'Ospedale' are trained as musicians and singers who play from a hidden gallery in the adjoining church for the patrons of the Instituto della Pietà. However, this is a highly stylised little book, bordering on the almost poetic, narrated from the point of view of one of the orphans, a young violinist named Cecilia who goes on to tell of the impact of the appointment of a new in-house composer, one Don Antonio, or Vivaldi as most of us know him.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1846687691</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Christien Gholson
|title=A Fish Trapped Inside the Wind
|rating=3
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=The front cover is lovely with its blue and turquoise suggesting languid waters. The author of 'The Jane Austen Book Club' (which I've read incidentally) 'fell in love with this novel.' High praise indeed. I'm hoping to do the same.
Everything about this book stinks (and I use the word explicitly). All of the chapters have the word 'fish' somewhere or other and there's a quote right at the beginning which gives the book its quirky and unusual title. (As I'm a fishy Piscean does that bode well for a good or sympathetic review, I wonder).
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1906998906</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Patrick deWitt
|title=The Sisters Brothers
|rating=4
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Invariably, the Booker Prize longlist contains one book that is more on the side of light reading than the more worthy and overtly literary fare that it is usually associated with. 'The Sisters Brothers' is the 2011 choice. Set in the US in 1851, it details the adventures of two brothers, Eli and Charlie Sisters, who are hired hands for a mysterious boss known only as the Commodore. Narrated by Eli, who has slightly more of a conscience than his older brother, the story starts with the Commodore ordering a hit, for reasons unknown, on a certain Hermann Kermit Warm.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1847083188</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Alan Hollinghurst
|title=The Stranger's Child
|rating=4.5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Alan Hollinghurst's Booker-nominated and long-awaited 'The Stranger's Child' is without doubt, as one might expect from this writer, beautifully written. Almost every page offers something to smile about either in terms of the comments of his characters or, more often, the wry descriptions that the author offers. The structure of the book is episodic, split into five parts covering pre-World War One, the 1920s, the 1960s, the 1980s and finally the early 2000s. It offers a thoughtful and well observed picture of changes in society and culture over this period and in particular of attitudes to homosexual relationships, although admittedly Hollinghurst's subjects tend to fall into a narrow band of well educated, artistic and often aristocratic members of society. Writers, poets and artists are the subject matter rather than the man on the street. His male characters are invariably homosexual while his females mostly either remain unmarried or have dysfunctional marriages.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0330483242</amazonuk>
}}
