Category: Fiction
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Dead Animals
by Phoebe Stuckes Paperback, £9.99 It can be nerve-wracking when a well-remembered former colleague writes a book. Will we be in it? Will it be good? Declaration of interest: Phoebe Stuckes is that colleague, our former bookseller extraordinaire. And having been wowed by Phoebe’s poems in Platinum Blonde, I knew that her novel would be…
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I Who Have Never Known Men
by Jacqueline Harpman Paperback, £9.99 SISTERHOOD. SECRETS. SURVIVAL. Discover the haunting, heart-breaking post-apocalyptic TikTok sensation. Deep underground, thirty-nine women are kept in isolation in a cage. Above ground, a world awaits. Has it been abandoned? Devastated by a virus?Watched over by guards, the women have no memory of how they got there, no notion of…
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Greek Lessons
by Han Kang Paperback, £9.99 Beautifully written, this slender book offers a quiet yet haunting narrative. I particularly enjoyed the books meditation on language abd our individual relation to it, and how it connects us to each other not only in metaphorical but also quite tangible ways. Readers who enjoyed Kang’s ‘The White Book’ cannot…
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Mongrel
Promising violinist Yuki leaves her native rural Japan for London at 18 to start a new life. There, she falls in love with her teacher, over ten years her senior. Meiko grows from child to teen to adult, grieving her mother, falling in love with her best friend and losing her connection to her Japanese…
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Cold Comfort Farm
By Stella Gibbons Paperback £9.99 An unsubtle satire on the genres of the turgid, overwrought and overwritten considered important literature (Gibbons tartly highlights the passages she considers most characteristic of such); an outright attack on its many clichés (the doom, tragedy and vapid characterisation, all of which face the brunt of Gibbon’s put down’s and…
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Clear
Carys Davies is once again showing her talent in crafting the perfect short novel that combines enough action and character building to satisfy the most demanding reader. If you loved West, published in 2019, you must read Clear. Davies has carefully chosen each word to perfectly describe the remote Shetland Island and its only inhabitant,…
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Caledonian Road
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Greta & Valdin
By Rebecca K Reilly Paperback £9.99 This is a quirky, funny, easy-to-read novel about millennial siblings Greta and Valdin, living together in Auckland. Greta is a master’s student in comparative literature who is secretly in love with fellow tutor Holly. Valdin is a former astrophysicist who, after a breakdown, lost his boyfriend and became a…
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Onyx Storm
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Death at the Sanatorium
Ragnar Jónasson Paperback Need a pleasing mystery-to-curl-up-with on an autumn evening? I’ve just had the pleasure of reading Death at the Sanatorium. It fulfils all my criteria for a book to read as the equinox passes, trees change colour, and squirrels become frantic. It’s 2012 and Helgi, a young Icelandic criminologist, is writing his dissertation…
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Blessings
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Yellowface
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Less
By Andrew Sean Greer Paperback £9.99 This book made me laugh out loud while alone on the Tube, despite my best efforts (Londoners will know what a travel faux pas this is). Several sections took me a while to get through, due to crying with laughter and being unable to see the text. Arthur Less…
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Orbital
By Samantha Harvey Paperback £9.99 Orbital is a novel where nothing happens, in the best way. It is meditative and lyrical. It follows 24 hours in the lives of six astronauts on an international space station orbiting around Earth. They follow their routine (exercise, science experiments). They look out the windows. They reminisce. They wonder…
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Brandy Sour
by Constantia Soteriou Paperback £11.99 Blending fact and fiction, this is essentially a collection of short stories all connected to the real Ledra Palace Hotel located in Nicosia, during a turbulent time in Cyprus’s history. This is a gem by new small press Foundry Editions, specialized in Mediterranean writing in translation – modern, poetic, and…
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Murder Under the Mistletoe
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The City and Its Uncertain Walls
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Before the Coffee Gets Cold
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