|summary=As he has done before on several occasions, Peter Carey offers us two parallel stories in his intriguingly titled 'The Chemistry of Tears'. The two elements of the title reflect that this is a book about grief, but also about science. It's also a book about human's relationship with machines and dependence that we have grown to have on them, and the ugliness of life and the beauty of, at least some, machines. In one strand of the story, Catherine is a modern day horologist working in a London museum whose world is shattered by the death of a married colleague with whom she was having an affair. Put to work on restoring a mysterious clockwork bird, she discovers the journals of Henry Brandling, the nineteenth century wealthy man who commissioned the construction of the toy for his consumptive son.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>057127997X</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Laurent Binet
|title=HHhH
|rating=5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=First, the title. ''HHhH'' is short for ''Himmlers Hirn heisst Heydrich'' - Himmler's brain was called Heydrich. In other words, it's not a case of 'behind every great Nazi there's a greater woman', but behind Hitler's own deputy was a major strength to the party. Reinhard Heydrich was the ruler of what practically corresponds to the Czech Republic, led the SS and more, and bossed the workings of the Final Solution. Any good biography of this compelling character in those interesting times - given too the subplot of those who would assassinate him - is bound to be an excellent history book. But, despite this getting a high rating, this isn't one. Why not? The author says so.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1846554799</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Anne Tyler
|title=Breathing Lessons
|rating=4.5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=This Pulitzer Prize winning novel revolves around 24 hours in the lives of Maggie and Ira Moran as they attend a friend's funeral and make a detour on the way home. As the couple spend the day together they share events from their past that put their present in context. I know this seems a somewhat sparse structure for a story but don't be put off. Somewhere between [[:Category:Anne Tyler|Anne Tyler's]] idea and its execution, something very good happens.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0099201410</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Jacques Chessex
|title=The Tyrant
|rating=4
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Jean Calmet, teacher of Latin in a lycee of the 1960s in Switzerland, is confronting his father's death. He can hardly be said to be coming to terms with it, for Calmet pere was and remains a crushing force in Jean's life, and although the death would in many similar novels be a release, here his father's cremation serves to batter Jean into a beaten state. His relations with his work, his lover, his students are all suffused with not a sense of loss but a sense of continuing and growing dominance by the ghost of his father. The authoritian presence seems to grow as a spectre rather than diminish through his death.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>190473894X</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Kitty Aldridge
|title=A Trick I Learned from Dead Men
|rating=4.5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Kitty Aldridge's ''A Trick I Learned from Dead Men'' is a touchingly written, quirky story set in the world of funeral homes. The narrator is twenty-something Lee Hart. He's not the sharpest tool in the box, but his life has been tough. His father left when he was young and his mother has recently died of cancer leaving him, his step-father, a sofa-bound television make-over show addict and his deaf and wayward younger brother, Ned to fend for themselves. Lee lands a job as a trainee at the local funeral home helping Derek prepare the dead for burial or cremation. Far from being a dead end job though, it is here that he learns, ironically, about life and love, in the form of the delivery girl from the local florists.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0224096435</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Roland Vernon
|title=The Good Wife's Castle
|rating=5
|genre=Crime
|summary=We start with a father's suicide, a child watching as he steps of the chair in the milking room with the noose around his neck. A father who died for shame.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0552775533</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Charlotte Rogan
|title=The Lifeboat
|rating=4.5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Charlotte Rogan's debut novel ''The Lifeboat'' takes an unexpected look at life on a lifeboat of a sunken liner, midway between the sinking of the ''Titanic'' and the ''Lusitania''. In many ways, a lifeboat presents an ideal situation for a novelist. You have a set number of characters and clear boundaries. But there's only so much interest in 'we were scared' and 'oh, look here comes another big wave'. Her solution is to take the story as one of moral and ethical choices rather than an out and out adventure. As her narrator, Grace Winter, concludes 'it was not the sea that was cruel, but the people'.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1844087522</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Zoya Pirzad
|title=Things We Left Unsaid
|rating=4.5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Life in Iran is good for Armenian Clarice Ayvazian. She lives comfortably in an oil company town, devoting her middle class life to her engineer husband, teenage son and young twin daughters. Her mother and sister, Alice, drop in from time to time during the course of the day, but are perfectly manageable for her (in small doses). However, when an elderly woman, her middle-aged son and his tween-age daughter move in across the road they bring turmoil in their wake and Clarice's perception of her happiness is torn apart.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1851689257</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Mark Haddon
|title=The Red House
|rating=4.5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Richard and Angela - brother and sister - are reunited at their mother's funeral. Richard is well-to-do and recently remarried with a teenage stepdaughter. Angela is the main breadwinner in her family as her husband scrapes a wage by working in Waterstones and somehow they and their three children get by. Richard is aware that he hasn't much left in the way of family and tries to build some bridges with Angela by way of offering that the eight of them should have a week's holiday in a cottage on the Welsh borders. So, there's four adults, four children and a lot of emotional baggage. Oh, and there's Karen - Angela's stillborn daughter who would have been eighteen that week.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0224096400</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Knud Romer and John Mason (translator)
|title=Nothing But Fear
|rating=5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=The Danish writer/actor Knud Romer has a gallery of fascinating relatives which collectively feature in ''Nothing But Fear''. This biographical novel is a collection of memories from his grandparents' era, moving forward, to that of his parents, including World War II and his own childhood in 1960s and 70s small town Denmark. The vignettes aren't in chronological order but that's because memories normally aren't. The stories are narrated almost as if they're fresh from the mind, ensuring a natural flow. The interesting thing is that no matter how fascinating his other relatives are my mind's eye always seemed to return to one: his mother, Hildegard.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1846687144</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Gwendoline Riley
|title=Opposed Positions
|rating=3.5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=There is a reason why Gwendoline Riley has something of a cult following. She is technically innovative and very good at what she does, but the subject matter is invariably dark and downbeat which prevents mass market appeal. In that respect Opposed Positions is very much business as usual then. The subject matter most evident here is misogyny and the damaging impact it has both directly and indirectly on people. It's painful to read at times; it feels as if the narrator, an occasional novelist, Aislinn Kelly, is picking at the scab of her life and her family in a way that feels shocking and, for all the wry observations, remains uncomfortable to read.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0224094238</amazonuk>
}}
