Difference between revisions of "Forthcoming Publications"

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[[image:Bookbag-banner-obooko1.jpg|center|link=https://www.obooko.com/]]
 
 
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=='''21 JULY'''==
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=='''13 JUNE'''==
 
{{Frontpage
 
{{Frontpage
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|isbn=1529125790
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|isbn=1635866847
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|title=The Family Remains
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|title=The Lavender Companion
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|author=Lisa Jewell
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|author=Jessica Dunham and Terry Barlin Vesci
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|rating=4
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|rating=4.5
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|genre=Thrillers
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|genre=Lifestyle
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|summary=In July 2019, Jason Mott was mud larking on the banks of the River Thames when he came across a bag of what appeared to be human bones. Detective Inspector Samuel Owusu and Saffron Brown from forensics were there to investigate.  The bones were indeed human: a young woman had been killed by a blow to the head many years ago - probably as long as twenty-five - but the bones had not been in the river longer than a year.  There was no identification but the bag contained vegetation, some of which was quite unusual.
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|summary=It's strange, the things that make you ''immediately'' feel that this is the book for you.  Before I started reading ''The Lavender Companion'', I visited the author's [https://www.pinelavenderfarm.com/ website] and there's a picture of a slice of chocolate cake on the homepage.  I don't eat cakes and desserts - but I wanted that cake viscerally.  (There's a recipe in the book, which I'm avoiding with some difficulty!!) Then I started reading the book and I was told to make a mess of it. Notes in the margins are sanctioned.  You get to fold down the corners of pages.  You suspect that smears of butter would not be a problem.  I ''loved'' this book already.
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{{Frontpage
 
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|author=Will Carver
 
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|title=The Daves Next Door
 
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|rating=4
 
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|genre=General Fiction
 
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|summary= Five strangers come together in one moment as a suicide bomber prepares to detonate his vest on a London tube line. As their fates overlap, the story is told in backwards order, leading up to the fateful moment.
 
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|isbn= 1914585186
 
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}}
 
 
}}
 
}}
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=='''28 JULY'''==
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=='''4 JULY'''==
 
{{Frontpage
 
{{Frontpage
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|isbn=1408712172
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|author=Max Boucherat
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|title=The Cliff House
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|title=The Last Life of Lori Mills
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|author=Chris Brookmyre
 
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|rating=5
 
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|genre=Thrillers
 
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|summary=''Many of them didn't know each other, one of them didn't know anybody, including Jen, one of them quite possibly hated her, and two of them definitely hated each other.  What could possibly go wrong?''
 
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That's the round-up for Jen's hen party which is to take place on Clachan Geal an island just south of Barra.  They're all staying in The Cliff House, hosted by Lauren, and it's the utmost in luxury living but then Jen can afford it.  She's just sold her muffin business for millions but is staying on to run it.  She's got her doubts about the long weekend: fiance Zaki Hussain has been acting a little strangely of late and wouldn't explain to her what the email he was hurriedly deleting was about.  Added to that, he's just about forced her to bring his sister, Samira, whom Jen's never met, on the trip, on the grounds that she's been stuck at home with newborn twins for the last six months and desperately needs the break.
 
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}}
 
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=='''2 AUGUST'''==
 
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{{Frontpage
 
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|isbn=0760379912
 
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|title=Super Easy Quilting for Beginners
 
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|author=Editors of Quarry Books
 
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|rating=4
 
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|genre=Crafts
 
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|summary=I learned patchworking from necessity: old or outgrown clothes needed to be turned into something new and usable when I was in my twenties.  It would be a while before it became a pleasure rather than a chore but I've never felt completely at home with quilting.  I needed something a little more stylish than my usual buttons or knots.  ''Super Easy Quilting for Beginners'' seemed like a good place to start.  So, how did it stack up?
 
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}}
 
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{{Frontpage
 
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|isbn=0760379874
 
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|title=Super Easy Knitting for Beginners
 
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|author=Carri Hammett
 
 
|rating=4.5
 
|rating=4.5
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|genre=Crafts
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|genre=Confident Readers
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|summary=I learned to knit in the nineteen-fifties: it wasn't a choice, it was a requirement.  Girls learned to knit and to embroider and boys did wood and metal work. My knitting wa accompanied by a lot of criticism and quite a few tears: it was a long time before I realised that there was pleasure to be had in the skill.  Nearly seventy years later it's the only thing that keeps my hands at all supple.  The turning point was a booklet published by Patons which gave all the basics and some patterns.  I've been looking for something simple to recommend to people who'd like to master the skill.  So, how did ''Super Easy Knitting For Beginners'' work out?
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|summary=We meet Lori on the first evening she's got the house to herself – no neighbour to pop in, babysitter poorly, mother at work, just an avidly rule-breaking eleven year old, on her lonesome.  What could possibly go wrong? Snuggled in a blanket fort, she has one main intention, and that is to log on to Voxminer, the world-building, critter-collecting game that is a hit in Lori's world.  But first Lori has a tiny inkling that this stormy night doesn't find herself entirely on her own, and then she finds something even more spooky.  For the server she and her bestie and nobody else should be able to enter shows signs of tampering.  When malevolent eyes spark up on her phone screen, and her safe place in the game has been doctored – well, where is a girl to turn?
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|isbn=0008666482
 
}}
 
}}
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=='''4 AUGUST'''==
 
 
{{Frontpage
 
{{Frontpage
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|author=Sarah Todd Taylor
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|author=Jenny Lecoat
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|title=Alice Eclair, Spy Extraordinaire! A Recipe for Trouble
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|title=Beyond Summerland
 
|rating=4
 
|rating=4
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|genre=Confident Readers
 
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|summary=Meet Alice Eclair.  A perfect eye and very careful hands have made her one of Paris's best young cake makers and decorators, making sure her mother's establishment is a classy affair.  Not bad for a thirteen year old.  Oh, and a perfect eye and a very careful handler and remote trainer have also made sure she is a very competent young spy.  Her first real mission will be to chase a traitor across the country – working behind the scenes on a posh sleeper train to the south of France, and hoping against hope that she can prevent documents allowing foreign agents to creep into the country from getting into nefarious hands.  But while nobody would have her down as a spy, can she possibly leave behind her rookie status and find the baddy?
 
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|isbn=1839940956
 
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}}
 
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=='''15 AUGUST'''==
 
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{{Frontpage
 
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|isbn=B0B2N7MVYM
 
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|title=The Calculations of Rational Men
 
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|author=Daniel Godfrey
 
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|rating=5
 
 
|genre=General Fiction
 
|genre=General Fiction
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|summary=It's the 10th of December 1962 when we first meet Dr Joseph Marr.  Just to put what happens in context, the Cuban missile crisis is still very fresh in people's minds.  The world has barely had a chance to breathe out.  But for Joe Marr, it's not the missile crisis that's at the front of his mind.  He's been convicted of murder.  With the current state of medical knowledge, it's hard to think otherwise than that the prosecution would never have been brought but Joe Marr has spent his first few days in HMP Queen's Bench, a relatively new prison.  He's just getting used to his roommate, Mervyn, and learning to be wary of the McArthur brothers.
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|summary=Jean lives on Jersey with her mother where they are celebrating the end of the occupation.  During the war, Jean's father was arrested for listening to a banned radio and soldiers took him away one night, leaving Jean and her mother waiting for years for news of him. As the British finally free the Channel islands from the Nazis, and the war is finally over, their hopes rise that they will finally learn what became of him.  But will the truth come as a relief, or will it raise further questions around what else happened during the war? Who was the informer who told the Nazis about the radio? And what other secrets have been kept throughout the occupation?
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}}
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|isbn=1846976537
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=='''18 AUGUST'''==
 
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{{Frontpage
 
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|author= Kit De Waal
 
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|title= Without Warning and Only Sometimes
 
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|rating= 4
 
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|genre= Autobiography
 
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|summary= As Philip Larkin so eloquently put it, “They f*** you up, your mum and dad/ They may not mean to, but they do” Without Warning and Only Sometimes by Kit De Waal focuses on this idea of parenthood and the bonds that bind family. This book is a memoir focussing on the author’s formative years as a teenager living in a lower class area of Birmingham. Her father is from St. Kitts in the Caribbean and her mother is an Irish woman ostracized by her family for becoming pregnant by and marrying a black man. This intersectionality plays a large role in the autobiography. Kit De Waal faces multiple hurdles due to her race, her class and her gender. Her parents loom large and are written with care, love, and the kind of anger only a child can express to their parents.
 
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|isbn=1472284836
 
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}}
 
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{{Frontpage
 
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|author=David Lagercrantz
 
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|title=Dark Music
 
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|rating=3
 
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|genre=Crime
 
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|summary=How far from the original can a book allegedly inspired by Sherlock Holmes get before the allusion breaks?  This does have a wonder-mind at the heart of what little investigating is going on, but there is not a lot that Conan Doyle fans could really pin down as on their exact wavelength.  For one, the main focus of the narrative, Micaela, is no John Watson MD.  She's a Chilean in the Stockholm police, put on a murder squad as she knows the prime suspect of old, in a case where a referee of a junior football match was found stoned to death shortly after the match, and just outside the stadium. Beppe, the suspect, was drunkenly antagonistic to the ref during the closing minutes, but refuses to admit anything, through days and weeks of interrogation.  When some disreputable coppers (the kind who dismiss anything their superior comes up with, the kind who think they can judge Micaela from her fringe and how she might dress – that kind) are told to go and see what brainbox Professor Rekke thinks of it all, she can only smirk when he says Beppe is innocent and the investigation is a shambles.  But taken off the case, she can no longer help solve the crime, and with Rekke the most erratic, irregular kind of guy, she can't get his full verdict on it all. Until, that may be, she manages to stop him in the middle of an apparent suicide attempt...
 
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|isbn=1529413192
 
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}}
 
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=='''6 OCTOBER'''==
 
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{{Frontpage
 
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|author=Alison Hughes
 
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|title=Fly
 
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|rating=4.5
 
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|genre=Confident Readers
 
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|summary=This is a very impressive read, as it does a lot of what mainstream teen and tween fiction still struggles with.  Its focus is courtesy of the first-person narration from Fly, a secondary school lad with cerebral palsy, a down-on-her-luck single mom nearing retirement from being a cleaner, a carer while at school, and a bundle of assumptions people lay on him.  First they assume that with a broken body comes a broken mind, then they decide he's a maths savant – they even believe they can get away with calling him Fly, which isn't his real name, but everybody just uses it.
 
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|isbn=1525305832
 
 
}}
 
}}
 
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Latest revision as of 14:06, 5 June 2024

13 JUNE

1635866847.jpg

Review of

The Lavender Companion by Jessica Dunham and Terry Barlin Vesci

4.5star.jpg Lifestyle

It's strange, the things that make you immediately feel that this is the book for you. Before I started reading The Lavender Companion, I visited the author's website and there's a picture of a slice of chocolate cake on the homepage. I don't eat cakes and desserts - but I wanted that cake viscerally. (There's a recipe in the book, which I'm avoiding with some difficulty!!) Then I started reading the book and I was told to make a mess of it. Notes in the margins are sanctioned. You get to fold down the corners of pages. You suspect that smears of butter would not be a problem. I loved this book already. Full Review

4 JULY

0008666482.jpg

Review of

The Last Life of Lori Mills by Max Boucherat

4.5star.jpg Confident Readers

We meet Lori on the first evening she's got the house to herself – no neighbour to pop in, babysitter poorly, mother at work, just an avidly rule-breaking eleven year old, on her lonesome. What could possibly go wrong? Snuggled in a blanket fort, she has one main intention, and that is to log on to Voxminer, the world-building, critter-collecting game that is a hit in Lori's world. But first Lori has a tiny inkling that this stormy night doesn't find herself entirely on her own, and then she finds something even more spooky. For the server she and her bestie and nobody else should be able to enter shows signs of tampering. When malevolent eyes spark up on her phone screen, and her safe place in the game has been doctored – well, where is a girl to turn? Full Review

1846976537.jpg

Review of

Beyond Summerland by Jenny Lecoat

4star.jpg General Fiction

Jean lives on Jersey with her mother where they are celebrating the end of the occupation. During the war, Jean's father was arrested for listening to a banned radio and soldiers took him away one night, leaving Jean and her mother waiting for years for news of him. As the British finally free the Channel islands from the Nazis, and the war is finally over, their hopes rise that they will finally learn what became of him. But will the truth come as a relief, or will it raise further questions around what else happened during the war? Who was the informer who told the Nazis about the radio? And what other secrets have been kept throughout the occupation? Full Review

You can work your way through the newest review, category by category, starting here.

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