Contemporary Fiction Recent Picks
July 2007
The underlined titles will take you directly to our catalogue.
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Because the rain, by Daniel Buckman. (2007)
"Set on the rain-slicked streets of Chicago this novel explores the unfocused longing and unfulfilled expectations of two men balanced precariously on the edge. Mike Spence is a dreamer who ends each evening staring out his darkened window into the apartment of an alluring Vietnamese woman. Donald Goetzler is a veteran who feels alive only when reliving his memories of the war with the call girl whose haunting beauty echoes the landscape of his life as a young soldier. As the two men construct their elaborate fantasy worlds around the same woman, these three souls are unaware of the explosive consequences that the intersection of their lives will bring." (Amazon)
Our horses in Egypt, by Rosalind Belben. (2007)
"Philomena, fat and lazy when she is requisitioned from an English field at the start of the First World War, sails for Egypt with the territorial regiment, the Dorset Yeomanry. She serves faithfully, charging the dervishes in the Western Desert and enduring the privations of Allenby's great campaign in Palestine. She recovers from wounds to swelter through a summer in the Jordan Valley. She takes part in the triumphant advance on Damascus, only to be sold off in Cairo among the 22,000 horses left behind by the War Office after the Armistice. By 1921, the forceful Griselda Romney, a war widow has discovered that her old hunter, Philomena, could be still alive. With her six-year-old daughter, and of course Nanny, Mrs Romney sets out to Egypt, to find Philomena and to rescue her." (Amazon)
Falling man : a novel, by Don DeLillo. (2007)
"There is September 11 and then there are the days after, and finally the years. This novel begins in the smoke and ash of the burning towers and traces the aftermath of this global tremor in the intimate lives of a few people. First there is Keith, walking out of the rubble into a life that he'd always imagined belonged to everyone but him. Then Lianne, his estranged wife, memory-haunted, trying to reconcile two versions of the same shadowy man. And their small son Justin, standing at the window, scanning the sky for more planes. These are lives choreographed by loss, grief and the enormous force of history." (Amazon)
Consequences, by Penelope Lively. (2007)
"This is a touching novel about a young woman, her daughter and her granddaughter, their contrasting lives and their achievement of love. Lorna escapes her conventional Kensington family to marry artist, Matt. They settle in a small cottage in Somerset, where their daughter Molly is born. But, World War II puts an end to their immense happiness. Molly will have to wait longer to find love as she gamely grapples with work and sex in 1960s London; while Ruth, Lorna's granddaughter, has to wait even longer still." (Amazon)
Death of a murderer, by Rupert Thomson. (2007)
"Billy Tyler, a police constable in his mid-forties, is summoned to the mortuary of a hospital in Suffolk. For the next twelve hours, from seven in the evening till seven in the evening, he is responsible for guarding the body of the notorious child-killer, Myra Hindley. In the face of public hostility and media frenzy, Billy's job, as his superior puts it, is to 'make sure nothing happens'. As a seasoned police officer, Billy's approach is utterly professional, but as the night wears on, in the eerie silence of the hospital, the dead woman's presence begins to assert itself and Billy's own problems and anxieties, a stalled career, a fractious marriage, a disabled daughter, gradually acquire a new and unexpected significance." (Amazon)
The Nazi hunter : a novel, by Alan Elsner (2007).
"Set in 1994, a German-accented woman named Sophie Reiner appears at the desk of Marek Cain, a Nazi hunter in the U.S. Justice Department's Office of Special Investigations, and tells Marek that she can deliver revealing documents concerning Belzec, an extermination camp in Poland where half a million Jews were murdered in 1942. Marek is extremely interested, both professionally and personally: his own grandparents perished at Belzec. The next day, Sophie is found dead in her hotel room. There police find a CD of Argentinean baritone Roberto Delatrucha singing Schubert lieder. The possible Argentinean connection sets off alarms for the veteran investigator, and soon he's hot on the trail of the famous singer." (Amazon)
Love falls, by Esther Freud. (2007)
"It is July, three months after Lara's seventeenth birthday and a week before Charles and Diana's Royal Wedding, when Lara's father, a man she barely knows, invites her to accompany him on a holiday to Italy. In the sun scorched hillsides of Tuscany, evenings are spent listening to her father and his old friend Caroline exchanging cool, sardonic banter about a past Lara knows nothing about. One night Lara is taken for dinner at the Willoughbys, their nearest neighbours, and finds herself irresistibly drawn to the carelessly beautiful only son of the family, a boy with five older sisters, who seems, fleetingly, unbelievably, to be interested in her too. But the Willoughbys are a family rife with conspiracies and vendettas, and the more embroiled Lara becomes with them the more consumed she is with doubt, curiosity and dread." (Amazon)
When we were Romans, by Matthew Kneale. (2007)
"Nine-year-old Lawrence is the man in his family. He watches protectively over his mother and his wilful little sister Jemima. He is the one who keeps things in order, especially when, quite suddenly, his mother decides the three of them must leave their life in England behind. Their destination is Rome, where she lived when she was young, and as they drive through the night in a car filled to bursting, the excitement takes them back to those happier days. For Lawrence, fascinated by stories of popes and emperors, Rome is an adventure. Though short of money, and passed from one to another of his mother's old friends, it seems that little by little their new life is beginning to take shape. But the mystery that brought them to Italy will not quite leave them in peace." (Amazon)
Moths, by Karl Manders. (2007)
"Beginning in the 1930s, this stunning novel tells the parallel stories of a father and son whose lives take the reader through critical moments of mid 20th-century European history, in miniature, from WWII and its aftermath to the Siberian Gulag. A self-indulgent Dutch businessman finds himself caught up in the liberation of Auschwitz, imprisoned as a spy by the liberating Russian army, shipped off to Minsk and Moscow to play in a bizarre jazz band, and then, when jazz becomes 'decadent' once more, to the Gulag, where his estranged son, a long-distance runner, finally catches up with him." (Amazon)
South of the river, by Blake Morrison. (2007)
"This novel begins on the 'new dawn' of Labour's election victory in 1997, and ends five years later, this is a sharp and sexy portrait of a dysfunctional group of characters, and all different yet connected. There's Nat, failed dramatist and reluctant lecturer, falling for a younger woman; Anthea, an eco-friendly lost soul obsessed with foxes; Libby, hardworking mother and advertising executive, the family breadwinner; Harry, Nat's friend and ex-pupil, a journalist on a local paper, with a guilty secret of his own; and Jack, Nat's blimpish but unexpectedly poignant uncle, who lives for fox-hunting, and runs a failing engineering company in East Anglia. Beneath the bright familiar world of Blair's Britain, there's a dark undertow of political and personal disillusion, of mythologies and urban myths that circle round our apparently comfortable lives." (Amazon)
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