The story is told first by a bird then by some squirrels briefly

The story is told first by a bird, then by some squirrels, briefly by a star, for a while by a black snake, and finally by a wild goose. All those narrators are commanded by the “voice that comes from deep within ourselves” to stop whatever they are doing – hunting trout, flying south for winter – and to follow and recount the story. They are present, but take no part in it.The inner voice here chimes, perhaps, with the voices of the brothers’ dead parents: the mother who insists Paulo has nothing to do with Carmen and her family; the father insisting on Paulo’s responsibility to Daniel. Chillingly, these animals take up the story when, at the insistence of the inner voice, they kill the previous narrator. The snake eats the bird, splitting open its head, and then has its own crushed in the bill of the goose.What all this signifies is hard to tell, but Two Brothers is not intriguingly elusive. Rather, it has the opacity of apprentice work revisited – which the epilogue reveals it to be.

The translation, particularly the dialogue, is not much help, but the fault does not lie there. For all his narrative ingenuity when he wrote this book, Atxaga had not yet found his voice.. The hero of a roman ?lef set in the literary circles of Eighties Manhattan, David Leavitt’s latest leading man shares much in common with his creator. Like Leavitt, the book’s young narrator, Martin Bauman, grows up on the West Coast, dreaming of a glittering future in New York City. Applying for a place on a creative-writing course run by the charismatic but terrifying Stanley Flint (“unmitigating shit” being the great man’s most familiar catchphrase), Bauman – to the astonishment of his classmates – has a short story published in The New Yorker.

Unafraid to take a story by the scruff of the neck, Victoria Clayton opens her gutsy fourth novel on a rainy night in a Dorset field where her heroine, well-heeled Londoner Elfrida Swann, is attempting to cross the path of a bull. It’s a frightening experience, but absolutely nothing compared to the recent ordeal of jilting her husband-to-be at the altar.
Set during the Seventies, though curiously timeless, this unusual novel follows the free-spirited Elfrida as she flees London in search of a new life in the country. Landing in a derelict cottage, in Pudwell Village, she is both terrified and seduced by a series of lusty squires, vagrant children, and tight-lipped serving wenches Part middle-brow romance, part literary melodrama.. Elmore Leonard’s latest novel may open in a church in Rwanda, but hard-core fans needn’t panic: it’s not long before we are back in familiar gangland territory, among the hoods and hoodlums of downtown Detroit. The novel’s unlikely hero, the Rev Terry Dunn, is an unusual priest. Visiting the States to raise money for Rwanda’s orphans, he sees no problem in hooking up with Debbie Dewey, an ex-con and stand-up comedienne, in order to hustle up a bit of extra cash on the side. It’s as slick and darkly comic as anything he’s ever written – Leonard’s inept and decidedly uncool hitmen have problems finding parking-spaces and maintaining their Mafia-style hairdos..