Contemporary Fiction Recent Picks
November 2009
The underlined titles will take you directly to our catalogue.
Some featured items are linked via a book cover to enable you to read more reviews.
Glasshopper, Isabel Ashdown. (2009)
Thirteen-year-old Jake’s world, Portsmouth in 1984, is unravelling as his father and older brother leave home, and his mother plunged into alcoholic freefall. Despite his turbulent home life, Jake is an irrepressible teenager and his troubled mother is not the only thing on his mind: there’s the hi-fi he is saving up for, his growing passion for Greek mythology, and the anticipation of brief visits to see his dad. When his parents reconcile, life finally seems to be looking up. Their first family holiday, promises to be the icing on the cake until long un-spoken family secrets begin to surface. (Book cover)
Generation A, Douglas Coupland. (2009)
In the near future bees are extinct, until five unconnected individuals, in different parts of the world, are stung. Immediately snatched up by ominous figures in hazmat suits, interrogated separately in neutral Idea-like chambers, and then released as 15-minute-celebrities into a world driven almost entirely by the internet, these five unforgettable people endure a barrage of unusual and highly 21st-century circumstances. A charismatic scientist with dubious motives eventually brings the quintet together, and their shared experience unites them in a way they could never have imagined. (Amazon)
Let the great world spin : a novel, by Colum McCann. (2009)
In the dawning light of a late-summer morning, the people of lower Manhattan stand hushed, staring up in disbelief at the newly built Twin Towers. It is August 1974, and a mysterious tightrope walker is running, dancing, leaping between the towers, he is suspended a quarter mile above the ground. A hundred and ten stories below the lives of eight strangers spin towards each other. Their lives will collide in the shadow of one reckless and beautiful act, and be transformed for ever. (Book cover)
The collaborator, Gerald Seymour. (2009)
Deadlier than the Mafia, the Camorra never forget, and never forgive.
Immacolata Borelli is an accountancy student in London, and her boyfriend Eddie teaches at a language school. But the prime reason she came to Britain was to look after her gangster brother, wanted for multiple murders back home in Naples. For the Borelli clan are major players in the Camorra, a crime network more close-knit and ruthless than the Sicilian Mafia. Mario Castrolami is a senior Carabinieri investigator of the Camorra, his career dedicated to destroying the corruption and violence of the clans. When Immacolata calls from London to say she is prepared to collaborate with justice, to betray her own family, he knows she is setting in motion a terrifying and unpredictable series of events. (Amazon)
Sense and sensibility and sea monsters, Jane Austen and Ben H. Winters ; illustrations by Eugene Smith. (2009)
The Dashwood sisters are evicted from their childhood home and sent to live on a mysterious island full of savage creatures and dark secrets. While sensible Elinor falls in love with Edward Ferrars, her romantic sister Marianne is courted by both the handsome Willoughby and the hideous man-monster Colonel Brandon. Can the Dashwood sisters triumph over meddlesome matriarchs and unscrupulous rogues to find true love? Or will they fall prey to the tentacles which are forever snapping at their heels? (Amazon)
The Drowning River, Kim Byrne. (2009)
"I thought you were dead." Those were the last words Elise Moloney expected to hear when she came to Wickman College as a graduate student. Nestled along the windswept dunes and seacoast of Cape Cod, Wickman was home to a tragedy the year before when troubled Hannah McPhee fell from a bridge into the freezing currents of the Drowning River. With gasps and stares, Elise's fellow graduate students insist she is a dead ringer for Hannah.The more she explores Hannah's past, the more she loses herself in a labyrinth of deceit, betrayal, and danger, unearthing life-shattering secrets. She becomes convinced that Hannah's death was no accident. In the small town of Oceanside, everyone has something to hide. (Amazon)
Day after night, Anita Diamant. (2009)
Four young women haunted by unspeakable memories and losses, afraid to begin to hope, find salvation in the bonds of friendship and shared experience even as they confront the challenge of re-creating themselves in a strange new country. This novel is based on the extraordinary true story of the October 1945 rescue of more than two hundred Jewish prisoners from the Atlit internment camp outside Haifa. (Book cover)
The good angel of death, Andrey Kurkov ; translated from the Russian by Andrew Bromfield. (2009)
When Kolya moves into a new flat in Kiev, he finds a book hidden within a volume of "War and Peace". Intrigued by the annotations that appear on every page, Kolya sets out to discover more about the scribbler. His investigations take him to a graveyard, and more specifically to the coffin of a Ukrainian nationalist who died in mysterious circumstances and was buried with a sealed letter and a manuscript. An exhumation under cover of darkness reveals that an item of great national importance is buried near a fort in Kazakhstan. The unwanted attentions of a criminal gang force Kolya to leave Kiev for a while, so he sets off on what turns out to be a very bizarre journey. (Amazon)
Sleeper's wake, Alistair Morgan. (2009)
Forty-six-year-old John Wraith regains consciousness after a car accident to learn that his wife and five-year-old daughter died in the same accident. What is all the more traumatic for him is that he was driving the car. At the urging of his sister, John decides to recuperate in her holiday chalet in Nature's Valley, on the South African coast. It is winter and Nature's Valley is mostly deserted, except for a disturbed young woman of twenty one called Jackie, her equally strange brother and her father, who is a born-again Christian. John's uneasy yet intense involvement with this trio, particularly with Jackie, to whom he is sexually attracted, provides the novel with its driving narrative and extraordinary, shocking conclusion. (Amazon)
The innocent, David Szalay. (2009)
It is spring 1948 and Aleksandr, a major in the MGB, forerunner of the KGB, is sent to an isolated psychiatric clinic in the Ural mountains to investigate one of the patients there, Anatoly Yudin, a man long presumed dead, once a famous pianist, now a severely incapacitated veteran of the Second World War. Twenty-four years later, in the summer of 1972,the summer of Nixon's visit to Moscow, of the Fischer-Spassky chess match, of the Munich Olympics and their hostage crisis, the Cold War is entering detente, and the values that shaped Aleksandr's life are starting to dissolve into uncertainty. Haunted by the events of the past, and with his Stalinist faith once more under threat, he interrogates his memories of the Yudin case, and tries to trace its effects on himself, and on those he loved most. (Amazon)
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