It had been a long, long time since I last ''confronted'' a book by Irvine Welsh, the ultimate in-your-face author.
Pakistan-born English-based author Kamila Shamsie has created a sweeping and detailed historical epic, that contains several intertwined personal stories.
Lorrie Moore is probably best known for her short story compilations Self Help and Birds of America, works that have led to her being described as the leading light in the ''new wave'' of short fiction that has proliferated through the many creative writing courses that have sprung up over the past two decades.
On the Connemara coast, Kitty Conneely sees the girl in her ways of seeing things behind her eyes and knows she is needed.
Ronan's Echo is Australian Joanne van Os's fifth novel, and while it slips convincingly enough between three main settings, the characterisation is weak and the situation entirely implausible.
The title of this novel and its close analysis of one Indian family in sickness, not health, seems to me a clear nod to Family Matters, by Indian-born literary heavyweight Rohinton Mistry.
From the personal to the epic, the third book in this round-up could not be more different again, propelling the reader as it does into the postmodern.
One of the things I have noticed while reading to my daughters is the multitude of narrators, animal, vegetable and mineral, which inhabit children's stories.
Lester Ferris, the future Tigerman of the story, is a jaded, war-weary sergeant posted to the fly-speck island of Mancreu in the Arabian Sea, due to be destroyed by Nato for the crime of having been environmentally raped.
Jeanette Turner Hospital says all her novels begin with the collision of a visual image and an intellectual or moral riddle she feels compelled to explore.
Set in France during the time leading up to and through World War 2, All The Light We Cannot See is a meticulously researched and crafted story of many lives - but four in particular - told in a way that will not be forgotten.
The Confabulist, not so much a whodunnit as a whodinit, is a fictional story about a man who kills Harry Houdini the magician.
Persist with News Pigs and you will be handsomely rewarded.
Dog Gone, Back Soon is the companion volume to the author's earlier novel, The Patron Saint of Lost Dogs. It's about a veterinary pathologist, Dr Cyrus Mills, who arrives home to, rather unwillingly, take over ''The Bedside Manor for Sick Animals''. His late father and mother's veterinary practice in small town America.
Author Ruth Reichl knows food. She's written cookbooks, food memoirs, has been a restaurant critic and was the editor-in-chief of Gourmet magazine for 10 years.
''Hey Mike ... Come Home. E xxx.''
Tooly Zylberberg's story begins in a rundown, struggling, second-hand bookshop in a Welsh village, in 2011.
My Biggest Lie is the debut novel of editor-turned-writer Luke Brown.
''She stinks'' is the first sentence in this book, and she does!
The Families, the seventh collection of stories by Vincent O'Sullivan joins the list of publications over a 50-year span that have firmly established him as one of New Zealand's leading men of letters.