[rating=4]
Viking • March 10, 2012 [HB]

Tom Bullough’s Konstantin is a impressionistic novel about the opening of a young mind to a world of wonders and possibilities.

“Konstantin opens in 1867 and tells the story of how the young boy Kostya grows up to become Konstantin Tsiolosky, the father of Russian rocketry and astronautics (1857-1935).”

[rating=4]
307 pages • Paradise Press • June 23, 2012 [PB]

Tim Bennett-Goodman finds Rod Shelton’s first novel fast-paced, picaresque romp which is funny, sexy and intriguing by turns.

“In this blackly-comic novel, high drama meets high camp and the reader is rewarded with raunchy gay sex amongst a bevy of beautiful boys, in every imaginable position, on almost every other page.”

[rating=1]
296 pages • Campus Ministry USA • 2nd ed, 1996 [PB]

Walter Beck takes a look at Jed Smock’s right-wing Christian manifesto, which is still doing the rounds and trying to spoil impressionable minds.

“He can’t even talk about them like they’re human beings calling them “sodomites” and even stating, ‘A favorite trick of homosexuals is to get young men drunk and seduce them’.”

[rating=4]
246 pages • Quartet • June 7, 2012 [PB]

Allan Massie’s Dark Summer in Bordeaux, the sequel to Death in Bordeaux, is a worthy successor.

“Massie evokes this increasingly unstable society exceptionally well and provides the reader with a real sense of the anxiety and insecurity that must have ruled the lives of all who lived in Pétain’s ‘French State’.”

[rating=4]
307 pages • Bloomsbury • May 10, 2012 [PB]

An endearing and thought-provoking tale of a forty year old man who joins the circus to become an aerialist.

“This novel moves by turns from the bleak and alienating to the humorous and life-affirming, with its message that, through all life’s adversities, struggle can overcome and bring its own rewards.”

[rating=5]
112 pages • Pindrop Press • May 20, 2012 [PB]

Cherry Smyth’s third collection is proof positive of poetry’s ability to combine the toughness and beauty of language in concentrated form, to expand brief moments and explore their possibilities.

“Smyth’s language is sometimes fibrous and stringy, at other times silky smooth. Her work is by turns deeply personal, overtly political and socially aware, without being polemical or ‘worthy’..”

[rating=5]
564 pages • Picador • May 24, 2012 [PB]

An historical, family saga; a monumental novel that is greater than Hollinghurst’s works to date.

“At the risk of sounding an irreverent note (and without wishing in any way to belittle Hollinghurst’s towering achievement) there is more than a fleeting suggestion of Brideshead Revisted-meets-Downton Abbey in The Stranger’s Child.”

[rating=4]
323 pages • Picador • May 7, 2010 [PB]

Tim Bennett-Goodman is gripped by this thriller set in the seamier side of Rome.

“The narrative maintains a breathtaking pace, making it utterly gripping reading. It is also a dark, dangerous, brooding, and (perhaps because of that) very sexy novel.”

[rating=5]
352 pages • Bloomsbury • April 12, 2012 [PB]

Sad and fatalistic, yet ultimately satisfying and strangely comforting, the tragic love story of Achilles and Patroclus is in Madeline Miller’s hands a life-affirming one.

“When the long-postponed and hoped-for moment arrives, just after Achilles’ sixteenth birthday, the release of tension is palpable. But one is also acutely aware that this is to be a fateful moment, and that the die, once cast, will irrevocably shape the rest of their lives.”

[rating=4]
233 pages • Accent Press • May 9, 2012 [HB]

Tim Bennett-Goodman is angered and moved by this between-the-wars tale of homosexuality and prejudice.

“All the Beauty of the Sun, whilst far from being a polemic, serves as a salutary warning not to judge those who went before us by contemporary standards.”