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===[[Underwater Breathing American Royals by Cassandra ParkinKatharine McGee]]===
[[image:4star.jpg|link=Category:{{{rating}}} Star Reviews]] [[:Category:General Fiction|General Fiction]] Two and a half centuries ago, America won the Revolutionary War and General George Washington was offered the crown. Today, the House of Washington still sit on the thrown with Princess Beatrice next in line. Beatrice's whole life has been building up to her ruling the United States and the time for her reign is imminent. [[American Royals by Katharine McGee|Full Review]] <!-- Mulligan -->|-| style=''width: 10%; vertical-align: top; text-align: center;''|[[image:1784742716.jpg|link=http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/1784742716/ref=nosim?tag=thebookbag-21]]  | style=''vertical-align: top; text-align: left;''|===[[Train Man by Andrew Mulligan]]=== [[image:2.5star.jpg|link=Category:{{{rating}}} Star Reviews]] [[:Category:General Fiction|General Fiction]], [[:Category:Literary Fiction|Literary Fiction]] I came to this book thinking I knew just what to expect, even though it is [[:Category:Andy Mulligan|the author's]] debut in the adult novel market (hence the more mature name – he used to be an Andy). I thought it simple to sum up, the tale of a middle-aged man who knows too much about train travel having his life turned around in the most pleasant way. I hadn't opened it when I'd shelved it alongside [[:Category:Chris Cleave|Chris Cleave]], and [[:Category:David Nicholls|David Nicholls]]. I expected some whimsy, some warmth and some affirmative loveliness.
A tumble-down Edwardian house that will sooner rather than later tumble down the mud cliffs and away into the sea is where we meet Jacob and Ella. They share a bathroom in the turret, old and cold and not really supposed to be used…but this is where they hide away from the shouts of their parents' arguments. Here they play the Underwater Breathing game, submerging themselves in the water holding their breath for as long as they can. For sixteen year old Jacob it's just a way of drowning out the arguments…but for Ella it is more than that. She is terrified of the sea, of the fact that it will come and swallow their house. She needs to know that she can survive under water. She has to practiceMore fool me. [[Underwater Breathing Train Man by Cassandra ParkinAndrew Mulligan|Full Review]]
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===[[The Great Believers Girl at the Window by Rebecca MakkaiRowan Coleman]]===
[[image:5star.jpg|link=Category:{{{rating}}} Star Reviews]] [[:Category:LGBT General Fiction|LGBT General Fiction]], [[:Category:Paranormal|Paranormal]]
''The Great Believers'' follows Trudy Heaton is going home, to a group of friends whose lives are devastated by house where her roots burrow back through the AIDS crisis in Chicago during the late 1980’scenturies and to a mother she hasn't spoken to for sixteen years. Beginning in 1985 Home, the reader follows Yale her refuge, Ponden Hall, where she can heal herself and his friends as they try to come to terms with the increasingly virulent illness spreading throughout their community, alongside their demonisation at the hands traumatic loss of a conservative Americaher husband. Thirty years later Fiona, a devoted friend She needs to Yale, build bridges with her mother and convince her grieving son that his father is searching for her estranged daughter on dead. Where better than the streets house full of Parislight and shadow, trying to rebuild a relationship beset by memories and old hurt. that nurtured her throughout her childhood? [[The Great Believers Girl at the Window by Rebecca MakkaiRowan Coleman|Full Review]]
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===[[The Brighton Mermaid We Are Not Okay by Dorothy KoomsonNatalia Gomes]]===
[[image:4.5star4star.jpg|link=Category:{{{rating}}} Star Reviews]] [[:Category:Teens|Teens]], [[:Category:General Fiction|General Fiction]]
In 1993, two teenagers stumble across Set in a horrific scene on the beach as they're sneaking home after an un-authorised night out: a body of a young woman, partially strippedtypical American town, totally deceased. The find hits the girls in different ways. Nell becomes obsessed with finding the identity of the girl – who she calls ''the Brighton MermaidWe Are Not Okay'' because tells the story of four teenage girls facing the difficulties brought on by high school and growing up as a distinguishing tattoo – whereas Jude just wants to forget it ever happenedgirl in today's society. Fast forward 25 years and Nell The novel is still haunted by what happened that night. With few leads to go on, the Police closed the case without cracking ittold from four different perspectives, and so it remains one of those unsolved mysteries that become part of local folkloreLucy, but Nell struggles to let sleeping dogsUlana, or even sleeping mermaidsTrina and Sophia, liewhose friendship statuses vary from BFFs to sworn enemies. As for JudeThe reader is presented with a glimpse into each of their lives, well no one knows if but more importantly their minds, and at times the discovery still haunts her because no one knows where she isthoughts of those characters could have been taken directly from my own. Shortly after Gomes has created a heartbreakingly real and relevant novel that fateful nightfocuses on prominent topic areas which are becoming ingrained in our society, she too disappeared, never particularly in relation to be seen or heard from againthe ''Me Too Movement''. There's more to Brighton than Stag Dos and Gay Pride, it seems'We Are Not Okay'' reminds the reader of the importance of phrases like ''I'm With Her''. [[The Brighton Mermaid We Are Not Okay by Dorothy KoomsonNatalia Gomes|Full Review]]
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===[[Falling Short Keep Walking Rhona Beech by Lex CoultonKate Tough]]===
[[image:4star4.5star.jpg|link=Category:{{{rating}}} Star Reviews]] [[:Category:General Fiction|General Fiction]], [[:Category:Humour|Humour]], [[:Category:Women's Fiction|Women's Fiction]]
Lex CoultonLife has just hidden behind a corner and stuck a foot out as Rhona Beech came past. She and Mark had been together for nine years and it was beginning to feel ''settled''. Then Mark announced that he's debut novel is d got a story about mistakes, failures, job in Canada and relationshipshe was going whether Rhona wanted to come with him or not. The main protagonist, Frances Pilgrim, is a sixth form English teacher who has recently fallen ''not'' bit of the sentence was the way it worked out with and Rhona was left on her best friend Jacksonown. Well, a work colleagueshe wasn't completely on her own: she had friends and family, and is grappling with but it's not the increasingly eccentric behaviour same as having that special someone in your life, that someone who makes you part of her mothera couple. This relationship is complicated by So Rhona had to start again, rejoining a world that bore little resemblance to the fact that Francesone she'd left nine years ago - and there's father disappeared at sea when she was five years olda lot of difference between being in the middle of your twenties and the middle of your thirties. [[Falling Short Keep Walking Rhona Beech by Lex CoultonKate Tough|Full Review]]
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===[[Go Ask Fannie Farmer Equator by Elisabeth HydeAntonin Varenne and Sam Taylor (translator)]]===
[[image:43.5star.jpg|link=Category:{{{rating}}} Star Reviews]] [[:Category:Historical Fiction|Historical Fiction]], [[:Category:Literary Fiction|Literary Fiction]], [[:Category:General Fiction|General Fiction]]
Eighty-one-year-old Murray Blaire hoped for It strikes me that nobody can speak well of the Wild West outside the best when he waited for his three children to arrive one Friday nightwalls of a theme park. He might be a retired lawyerOur agent to see how bad it was here is Pete Ferguson, who bristles at the indignity of white man against Native 'Indian', who spends days being physically sick while indulging in a state legislatorbuffalo hunt, elected congressman and now who hates the way man – and woman, of course – can turn against fellow man at the bat of an amateur farmer but he knew that there could be trouble when Ruth and George arrivedeyelid. RuthBut this book is about so much more than the 1870s USA, a corporate lawyerand the attendant problems with gold rushes, would find fault pioneer spirits and want to talk about him going into a retirement homeracial genocide. GeorgeHe finds himself trying to find this book's version of Utopia, a nursenamely the Equator, where everything is upside down, people walk on their heads with rocks in their pockets to keep them on the ground to counter the anti-gravity, would argue and Lizzie, a professor of English Literaturewhere, who lived locally and kept and visited him regularlyknows, would things might actually be unpredictablebetter. Murray hoped But that all would go smoothly, but that simply wasnequator is a long way away – and there't going to happen. s a whole adventure full of Mexico and Latin America between him and it… [[Go Ask Fannie Farmer Equator by Elisabeth HydeAntonin Varenne and Sam Taylor (translator)|Full Review]]
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===[[The Particular Wisdom of Sally Red Shoes Needlemouse by Ruth HoganJane O'Connor]]===
[[image:4star5star.jpg|link=Category:{{{rating}}} Star Reviews]] [[:Category:General Fiction|General Fiction]], [[:Category:Women's Fiction|Women's Fiction]]
Masha's son Gabriel died some years ago. She'd been a single parent with help from We first meet Sylvia Penton on her birthday and her friendboss, Edwardthe Prof, who had grieved as much as Masha and whilst Edward has moved on (his boyfriend moved is taking her out in the immediate aftermath to lunch. This is her favourite day of the drowningyear, not because it's her birthday but therebecause of the special time she gets to spend with the man she loves. He's now a new love interest) Masha told her that he and his wife are going to divorce - Martha is apparently having an affair - and Sylvia is still stricken, feeling convinced that it would somehow the Prof will then declare his love and they can be disloyal to Gabriel if together. She hasn't fully constructed 'together' in her own mind - she was envisages it as romantic, but her imagination hasn't yet progressed to be happythe sexual part of the relationship. An independent, rebellious woman has somehow There's time though - she's only been diminishedthe prof's PA for fifteen years. [[The Particular Wisdom of Sally Red Shoes Needlemouse by Ruth HoganJane O'Connor|Full Review]]
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===[[The Gradual Disappearance of Vintage 1954 by Antoine Laurain, Jane Ashland by Nicolai Houm Aitken (translator) and Anna Paterson Emily Boyce (translator)]]===
[[image:4.5star.jpg|link=Category:{{{rating}}} Star Reviews]] [[:Category:General Fiction|General Fiction]], [[:Category:Literary Fiction|Literary Fiction]]
Jane Ashland is dying. That's a description of a very early scene here – but also, of courseVintage 1954 starts by thrusting several completely different characters upon us, before deciding to run with them and formulate a platitude that can apply to all of usplot. Jane's lifeSo we have an American biker, if anything, is going up and down just landing in levels Paris but unfortunately not with the wife who shared his dream of pleasure, energy – sobriety – in these pagesvisiting the city together. We have a goth girl who everyone recognises from an American crime show, but we soon learn that it recently found actually is a very deeply dark down placehumble restorer of antiques. Here then, scattered through We have a timeline-bending narrativecocktail barman, we infatuated with the goth girl. We also have her days finding a Lincolnesque lover as man ruling the roost over a student in New Yorkwhole suite of individual apartments fabricated from the Haussmann-era mansion his family once owned. Finally something conspires to get them together, glimpses and drinking from the same bottle of therapya rare 1954 red wine. Only, one of them has a drive to find her ancestors bizarre incidence in his family history that takes her from rural America to Norway also features the same plonk – where a grandfather imbibed, and a trip there with a new-found friend to watch walked out the musk oxendoor one rainy morning, never to be seen again. But of all things. And nowhere in sight is anything like a platitude… course nobody will be doing any disappearing now, though – will they? [[The Gradual Disappearance of Vintage 1954 by Antoine Laurain, Jane Ashland by Nicolai Houm Aitken (translator) and Anna Paterson Emily Boyce (translator)|Full Review]]
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===[[Tale of a Tooth The Van Apfel Girls are Gone by Allie RogersFelicity McLean]]===
[[image:5star4star.jpg|link=Category:{{{rating}}} Star Reviews]] [[:Category:Thrillers|Thrillers]], [[:Category:General Fiction|General Fiction]]
Danny lives When Tikka Molloy was eleven and one-sixth years old, the Van Apfel sisters disappeared. In the long hot summer of 1992, in a small Sussex town with his motheran isolated suburb of Australia surrounded by Bushland, Nataliethe girls vanished during the school's Showstopper concert at the riverside amphitheatre. Life is poorDid they run away? Were they taken? While the search for the sisters united the small community, but they manage - until they're threatened by a benefits sanctionwere never found. A Job Centre employee looks to be their salvation - but Returning home years later, Tikka must make sense of that strange moment in time – of the summer that shaped her impact on the family goes far beyond what they first expect, and the resulting changes are described to the reader through the naive yet perceptive and wholly original eyes of four-year-old Dannygirls she never forgot. [[Tale of a Tooth The Van Apfel Girls are Gone by Allie RogersFelicity McLean|Full Review]]
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===[[Claudia The Department of Sensitive Crimes by Anthony TrevelyanAlexander McCall Smith]]===
[[image:4star.jpg|link=Category:{{{rating}}} Star Reviews]] [[:Category:General Fiction|General Fiction]]
When Claudia is called to Long-time followers of The Bookbag will know I'm a die-hard fan of AMS. So you can imagine my excitement at reading a brand new book in a brand new series, described by the reception of her Manchester Office block author himself as Scandi Blanc (as opposed to Scandi Noir)! Here we meet a visitornew detective named Ulf Varg, she doesn't expect it to be her father figure – a man she hasn't seen who works in the Department for fifteen yearsSensitive Crimes, solving those crimes that perhaps fall outside the usual police parameters. Samson Glaze – otherwise known as Wild Samson This particular book deals with crimes including someone who is stabbed in the knee, the disappearance of an imaginary boyfriend, The Aztec and The Sun King, walked out a case of Claudiapotential werewolves. They's life re the crimes that perhaps nobody else would bother to deal with, and into a world I rather enjoyed them, especially the stabbing where you find that actually, you identify with the person who committed the crime, rather than the victim. [[The Department of success as a solar panel salesman – but now heSensitive Crimes by Alexander McCall Smith|Full Review]] <!-- Kennedy -->|-| style="width: 10%; vertical-align: top; text-align: center;"|[[image:0993202349.jpg|link=http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/0993202349/ref=nosim?tag=thebookbag-21]]  | style="vertical-align: top; text-align: left;"| ===[[The Things That are Lost by Alan Kennedy]]=== [[image:4star.jpg|link=Category:{{{rating}}} Star Reviews]] [[:Category:General Fiction|General Fiction]]  The final novel in Alan Kennedy's returned WW2 trilogy sees Captain Alex Vere taken off active duty and he needs Claudiabanished to Scotland, providing trade craft spy training. It's helpstifling and suffocating and feels as much like a prison to Alex as anything the Germans would provide. Reggie, SamsonAnd where is Justine? Alex hasn's son, has joined a mysterious cult called t seen her since he went to ''Tarantulathat''disastrous meeting with John Cabot, a group who prepare for the end instigator of the world disinformation campaign, and encourage humanity returned to embrace their impending doomfind her missing. A failed mission is one thing but no Justine is quite another. ClaudiaAlex can's journey takes her far from her home in Manchester to the end t get Justine out of his head. Has she left the world – where encounters with hammer-wielding assassins make things very difficult indeed… service? Does she know too much? Is she even still alive? [[Claudia The Things That are Lost by Anthony TrevelyanAlan Kennedy|Full Review]]
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===[[The Man I Think I Know A Danger to Herself and Others by Mike GayleAlyssa Sheinmel]]===
[[image:5star4star.jpg|link=Category:{{{rating}}} Star Reviews]] [[:Category:Teens|Teens]], [[:Category:General Fiction|General Fiction]]
James DeWitt and Danny Allen are both men in their early thirties whose lives haven't taken them where they were supposed 'They needed someone to goblame, and I was the only available scapegoat. At an all time low time for both of them, Their daughter was my best friend. Playing the scapegoat was the least I could do under the two men reconnect and slowly find theycircumstances.''re exactly what the other needsSeventeen year old Hannah Gold was born mature – or so her parents tell her. TogetherShe has dined in fancy restaurants, they help each other put their lives back together. This is explored the most sophisticated corners of the globe and lived a beautiful story about friendship and what it really means to help another personlife of luxury. [[The Man I Think I Know A Danger to Herself and Others by Mike GayleAlyssa Sheinmel|Full Review]]
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===[[The Curious Heart of Ailsa Rae Louis and Louise by Stephanie ButlandJulie Cohen]]===
[[image:4star5star.jpg|link=Category:{{{rating}}} Star Reviews]] [[:Category:General Fiction|General Fiction]], [[:Category:Women's Fiction|Women's Fiction]]
Ailsa Rae has What would you be like, right now, if you'd been born a different gender? Would it simply be a matter of genetics, and your life would still have unfolded in the same way? Or would the way you had been sick her whole raised affect who you became in life? This latest novel by Julie Cohen looks at all of the above, covering the stories of Louis and just as she was edging closer Louise, born on the same day, to death she finally, finally got the call that she neededsame parents, that but in one storyline Lou is a heart was available for her to have boy, and in the other a transplantgirl. Previously she had felt so helpless that she had used her blog to Does it really make decisions for hera difference, running polls amongst her readers to decide on her actions. But with her new heartthe gender box that is ticked when we arrive in this world? We all know that men and women are treated differently, she has but this story really highlights how things have been given a new life. Can Ailsa manage to start to live on her ownin the past, how they still are, and will her mother let her do that? prompts you to think about how they could be... [[The Curious Heart of Ailsa Rae Louis and Louise by Stephanie ButlandJulie Cohen|Full Review]]
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===[[Falling Leaves M for Mammy by Stefan MohamedEleanor O'Reilly]]===
[[image:5star4star.jpg|link=Category:{{{rating}}} Star Reviews]] [[:Category:General Fiction|General Fiction]], [[:Category:Fantasy|Fantasy]],
When your best friend vanishesThe Augustts are, how can you begin to move on? How can you live your life not knowing whether they're okay? And what would you do if they reappeared in your life? like all families, a bit complicated. A loving irish family, their love binds them together – but all questions express that Vanessa faces every dayin very different ways. However, even seven years after her best friend Mark vanished. When he reappearswhen misfortune strikes the family they are forced to work together in order to understand each other again, sheas with a family as complicated as the Augustts it's shocked not only by his presence back always what is spoken that makes the most sense. Things are shaken up further when Granny Mae-Anne moves in her lifeand takes charge. Full of stern words and common sense, but also by the fact that he hasnshe't aged s a day – for him, no time has passed since his disappearance. Shocked, confused and emotionally reeling, Vanessa force of nature who must return to try her home town in order hardest to help Mark find hold the answers he so desperately cravesfamily together. But what's waiting for them is far more surprising than either of them could ever have dreamt… [[Falling Leaves M for Mammy by Stefan MohamedEleanor O'Reilly|Full Review]]
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===[[Dyed Souls Queenie Malone's Paradise Hotel by Gary SantorellaRuth Hogan]]===
[[image:4.5star.jpg|link=Category:{{{rating}}} Star Reviews]] [[:Category:TeensGeneral Fiction|General Fiction]], [[:Category:Humour|TeensHumour]], [[:Category:General FictionParanormal|General FictionParanormal]]
The USATilda returns to Brighton, early 1980s. Charlie (or Charles, if heto tidy away the remains of her mother's feeling belligerentlife after her death. Whilst there, and he often is) is being taken back she returns to his home by his drop-outthe Paradise hotel, slutty mothera haven for eccentrics and misfits. The home is called a CottageA place where people can be themselves, and while the book doesn't guide us to understand it perfectly, it seems to mean he has a private room in let go of thoughts that torment them elsewhere. Little wonder that Tilda cannot forgive her mother for banishing her as a large self-contained bungalowchild, on a gated compound with round-the-clock adult supervisionfrom this place of wonder. There's a paddock with horses for With the kids to ridehelp of Queenie Malone, their own school – and all the adults are armed with Thorazine to calm the kids down. Charliecaring, despite his obvious bookish intelligence, is struggling to get to grips with why and how he's ended up where he isgregarious, but it must have something Tilda begins to do with his single parent mother being violent, pick apart the tricky and the fact he is no longer allowed to stay with his grandfather. This book is a slightly woozy look at his thoughts, as he tries to build a uncertain relationship she had with a girl in a different Cottage, her sometimes cruel and work out his lot. He certainly has a lot on his plate for a thirteen-year-olddistant mother. [[Dyed Souls Queenie Malone's Paradise Hotel by Gary SantorellaRuth Hogan|Full Review]]
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===[[Two Steps Forward by Graeme Simsion and Anne Buist]]===
===[[The Man Who Came to London by A S Cookson]]=== [[image:5star4star.jpg|link=Category:{{{rating}}} Star Reviews]] [[:Category:General Fiction|General Fiction]] ''In 1948, the first set of Caribbean nationals arrived in Great Britain on a ship called "Empire Windrush". They struggled to find housing. They worked as labourers. They faced open discrimination, forcing them to quickly form their own community. Decades later, Freddy makes the same journey.'' ''Does he find a place to live? Does he face stereotypes? Has Britain moved forward?''
When I read Freddie arrives in London in the early 2000s, answering the blurb call for this bookteachers. He thinks about his own Jamaican education, based on the British system, I found myself instantly interested in its premise and the way he was taught English nursery rhymes and about the River Thames. He thinks about the love of two people trying to start their lives again following serious life changescricket and football, shared by both countries. The book did not disappointAnd he thinks of the generations of the diaspora who came before him. Freddy does well in his job in East London but he does have to face down some stereotypical attitudes from his pupils - all Jamaicans smoke weed, don't they? Everybody knows that! [[Two Steps Forward The Man Who Came to London by Graeme Simsion and Anne BuistA S Cookson|Full Review]]
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===[[I Have Lost My Way Liberation Square by Gayle FormanGareth Rubin]]===
[[image:5star.jpg|link=Category:{{{rating}}} Star Reviews]] [[:Category:Thrillers|Thrillers]], [[:Category:Historical Fiction|Historical Fiction]], [[:Category:General Fiction|General Fiction]]
''I Have Lost My Way'' tells In an alternate 1952, Soviet Troops control British Streets. After D-Day goes horribly wrong, Britain is first occupied by Nazi Germany – only to be rescued by Russian soldiers from the story of three individuals who have each lost something important to them leading to them losing their way. Freya has lost her voiceEast, Harun has lost his love and Nathaniel has lost everythingAmericans from the west. HoweverDividing the nation between them, these three elements do not give justice to London soon finds itself split in two, a wall running through it like a scar. When Jane Cawson's husband is arrested for the extent murder of what each character has losthis former wife, Jane is determined to clear his name. In this expertly written noveldoing so, Gayle Forman writes about how these three dissimilar individuals each came Jane follows a trail of corruption that leads her right to lose what was most important the highest levels of the state – and soon finds herself desperate to them, causing them to all meet stay one fateful day in New York City. step ahead of the murderous secret police… [[I Have Lost My Way Liberation Square by Gayle FormanGareth Rubin|Full Review]]
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===[[One Clear Ice-Cold January Morning at the Beginning of the Twenty-First Century When You Read This by Roland Schimmelpfennig and Jamie Bulloch (translator)Mary Adkins]]===
[[image:4star4.5star.jpg|link=Category:{{{rating}}} Star Reviews]] [[:Category:General Fiction|General Fiction]]
FirstSmith Simonyi and Iris Massey worked together for four years, during which time Iris left her husband at the altar on their wedding day. Smith, meanwhile, relied on Iris, forgive me if I don't refer but his attention was on making enough money to this book with its full title often. Itcover his mother's pointedly precise, accuratenursing home fees in Wisconsin, running the branding agency in New York and rather ungainly – losing money gambling when in fact the book it describes has only the former two attributes in any quantitypressures got too much for him. What happens in January is that He was devastated when Iris developed a wild wolf walks across terminal cancer and died at the frozen river separating Poland and eastern Germanyage of thirty three. Which means He was surprised too when he discovered that, when the book starts properly, mid-February, it has Iris had time to get been writing a lot closer to Berlin – within 80 kilometres, to be precise, for that is blog in the road marker where one last six months of our main characters sees it. He her life and her final request of Smith is trying to get back to work in Berlin for the first time in a month, and to be with his girlfriend, not knowing she has had an infidelity while that he was away. Also fancying gets the bright lights and big city are blog published as a teenaged pair of love-birds, the boy and girl next door to each other in an eastern village, who flee an unhappy lot on the off-chance of a better onebook. You just know there is a chance that these characters – human and lupine alike – are sucked into one combined narrative, but you won't know quite what that will entail…[[One Clear Ice-Cold January Morning at the Beginning of the Twenty-First Century When You Read This by Roland Schimmelpfennig and Jamie Bulloch (translator)Mary Adkins|Full Review]]
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===[[W Vera Magpie by John BanksLaura Solomon]]===
[[image:4star.jpg|link=Category:{{{rating}}} Star Reviews]] [[:Category:General Fiction|General Fiction]]
On the slopes of Mt Hood in Oregon, an 1000-year old Viking is discovered frozen - ''I have murdered three thousand miles further west than any previously known Viking explorationhusbands. Josh Kinninger is inspired by the Viking discovery - three personal catastrophes having left him angry, unmoored and with his world in turmoil. Beginning a journey westward, he's filled with a desire to wreak vengeance on the individuals he finds morally corrupt. [[W by John Banks|Full Review]]'
As an opening line that must take some beating, but Vera's telling us the truth. The first two husbands, Gary and Harry were abusive, but Larry was a treasure, a keeper, and it's difficult to understand why Vera would have killed him, particularly when she was likely to get found out very quickly and now she's in prison with a mandatory life sentence. Her only friend is Shirley, a lesbian, but Vera's not one to let herself be a victim. She's not keen on having a sexual relationship with Shirley (she wouldn't risk the security of her life in prison for the sake of a fling), but she is keen on getting an education and she's studying for a degree in English Literature. [[Vera Magpie by Laura Solomon|Full Review]] <!-- Hepworth Laura Solomon -->
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===[[The Family Next Door Black Light by Sally HepworthLaura Solomon]]===
[[image:4star3.5star.jpg|link=Category:{{{rating}}} Star Reviews]] [[:Category:General Fiction|General Fiction]] Jim is a university student and, as the saying goes, he hasn't got his troubles to seek. His father committed suicide when he was young and somehow he's never really managed to connect with his step-father. His younger brother would be kindly described as having learning difficulties: if you were being honest you'd just say that he was very difficult, but Jim does his best with and for him. Jim's in love with a woman, but she finds him repulsive and you can understand why: the looks, the attitude, the (lack of) conversational ability and the clothing all leave a lot to be desired. Despite all that's he's not about to sit back and allow his life to drift: he's actually writing ''two'' novels and he reads excerpts from these to his friends in the pub. [[Black Light by Laura Solomon|Full Review]]
Pleasant Court is a cul-de-sac a few minutes from the beach in Melbourne. Kids play in the street and it's the sort of place people aspire to. Certainly that's how the families who live there feel and there's a good sense of community. Ben and Essie are glad that Essie's mother is living next door as Essie had a mental breakdown three years ago when her first daughter was having difficulty sleeping. Mia's come through that stage, but now there's Poppy, who's been the perfect baby for the first six months of her life, but is just starting to be difficult. Ben, in particular, is pleased that he can rely on Barbara to keep an eye on the situation whilst he's out at work. [[The Family Next Door by Sally Hepworth|Full Review]]
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===[[Ask For Blues Redemptor Domus by Malcolm WaltonGamelyn Chase]]===
[[image:3.5star4star.jpg|link=Category:{{{rating}}} Star Reviews]] [[:Category:Autobiography|Autobiography]], [[:Category:Entertainment|Entertainment]], [[:Category:General Fiction|General Fiction]]
Malcolm Walton's book is clearly a memoir about A young boy arrives at an exclusive faith school on the scenic North Wales coast, sent far from his introduction to family in the Trad Jazz scene of Far East. As the late 1950's and early 1960's, but he has chosen boy travels to write it in the form of school, a novel, claiming in his prologue that this would give family tragedy causes the book a different approach boy to arrive at the music memoir. His protagonist 'Martin' takes on Malcolm's mantleschool a vulnerable orphan, and begins with his first discovery of the Salvation Army band with his grandfatheran uncertain future. This catapults him Plunged into a love school full of music, initially taking piano lessonsdanger and betrayal, the boy is seen as a trophy by friends and later delving enemies alike. With them locked into his true love – their scheming and plotting, it comes to the boy to attempt to clean up the pit of filth that the trumpetschool has become. [[Ask For Blues Redemptor Domus by Malcolm WaltonGamelyn Chase|Full Review]]<br>
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