Reviewed by Rachel Hore
The setting is masterfully evoked: post-war Berlin under the rough and ready control of Allied troops, the once great city reduced to a sea of rubble. Necessities are scarce and its defeated populace sift the ruins to rescue bodies and possessions while columns of gaunt, exhausted refugees trudge by. It’s a place where there’s little kindness and even less hope [Read more...] in Reviews
Reviewed by Alison Burns
‘Thanks to our cutting-edge workout facilities and well-maintained bike paths, our valued citizens live active and healthy lifestyles. Just wait until you try our Good for You! Diet Plan TM, offered in each of our six shopping districts… We want to maintain a small-town feel. Come home to us!’ No, this is not a new garden city, advertising its charms. Pines is a gated community somewhere in North America, after most of society has collapsed. In this, her debut novel, acclaimed US author Edan Lepucki, graduate of the famous Iowa Writers’ Workshop and acclaimed for her short stories, gives her take on the near future [Read more...] in Reviews
Reviewed by Elsbeth Lindner
Marc’s vision offers a misanthropic view of his fatuous, self-deluding patients – artists, writers, filmmakers and the like – especially the ugly, hairy, obese ones. Marc is also quick to spot libidinous older men with leering but often hooded observations of attractive women. His own inclination to judge female flesh does not, of course, come up for critical comment [Read more...] in Reviews
Reviewed by Shirley Whiteside
With its title taken from a Walt Whitman poem, Bradley Greenburg’s debut is a rich exploration of the relationships between fathers and sons set in an America where some people, no matter what President Lincoln might say, will never get used to the idea that humans cannot be owned, sold or traded [Read more...] in Reviews
Reviewed by Alison Coles
Joanna Briscoe’s early years were spent in Letchmore Heath in Hertfordshire – ‘the village of the damned’ as she calls it – and it is this surburban landscape that she uses to create the rural Crowsley Beck, ‘a shimmering, archetypal village’, the place where Rowena Crale believes life will be perfect. On this canvas, the author paints in the fears and events both disturbing and supernatural that haunted her own childhood [Read more...] in Reviews
Reviewed by N.J. Cooper
Another writer using professional experience as the background to fiction is Roger Pearce, once Commander of the Metropolitan Police’s Special Branch. Here an undercover officer, Melanie Fleming, is put in an impossible position during an operation in which her husband is badly injured. How she acts and how the two of them deal with the experience provide the emotional spine of this thriller, in which the police have to foil the activities of a terrorist network of extreme ruthlessness, while fighting off the devious interference of their rivals in the security service [Read more...] in Reviews
Reviewed by Alison Burns
This is the age of free education. Her university has no rules, but it also has no pastoral care. Students are the future: they must be allowed to question everything, try everything, and then sink or swim. For a while, chain-smoking, hard-faced Adele enjoys the carnival. Looking back, she knows that they were children living in a kind of Shangri-La [Read more...] in Reviews