Beth

99 Reasons Why – Caroline Smailes

Apr 2, 2012
Beth

99 Reasons Why - Caroline Smailes99 Reasons Why
Caroline Smailes

99 Reasons, 11 endings, your pick.

Kate isn’t like other 22 year olds. She’s got a job to do for her Uncle Phil. Each day, she spies on The Kevin Keegan Day Nursery across the road from her bedroom window, writing down all of the comings and goings in her notebooks. That’s how she spots her little girl in the pink coat. She likes her, and it isn’t long before Kate asks her mam to get her for her. Plans are made.

But then, quite unexpectedly, Kate flashes her breasts out her bedroom window at the little girl’s father. And that’s the reason that nothing will ever be the same again…

There is no one ending to Kate’s story, instead there are eleven possible outcomes, 9 of which you can navigate through your e-reading device. Each is different, and each exposes a little more of Kate’s utterly wonky world.

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Bad Moon Rising – Frances di Plino

Mar 3, 2012
Beth

Bad Moon Rising - Frances di PlinoBad Moon Rising
Frances di Plino

Bad Moon Rising is a dark psychological thriller.

Brought up believing sex with the living is the devil’s work, a killer only finds release once he has saved his victims’ souls. Abiding by his vision, he marks them as his. A gift to guide his chosen ones on the rightful path to redemption.

Detective Inspector Paolo Storey is out to stop him, but Paolo has problems of his own. Hunting down the killer as the death toll rises, the lines soon blur between Paolo’s personal and professional lives.

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In Search of Adam – Caroline Smailes

Feb 2, 2012
Beth

In Search of Adam - Caroline SmailesIn Search of Adam
Caroline Smailes

A taut and beautifully written debut novel by an exciting and accomplished new author.

Motherless, rootless and unprotected, Jude Williams’ childhood is fractured by the horror and experience of sexual abuse, forcing her to exist somewhere and nowhere in-between childhood and adulthood. Caught within the limitations of her own language and trapped within a family secret, Jude becomes the consequence of her mother’s tragedy. As she moves through the 1980s, Jude’s life is buffeted by choice and destiny and she collects experiences that layer her personal tragedy and plunge her into the darkest of worlds.

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Hamburg 1947 – Harry Leslie Smith

Dec 30, 2011
Beth

Hamburg 1947 - Harry Leslie SmithHamburg 1947: A Place for the Heart to Kip
Harry Leslie Smith

Twenty-two years old and ready for peace, Harry Leslie Smith has survived the Great Depression and endured the Second World War. Now, in 1945 in Hamburg, Germany, he must come to terms with a nation physically and emotionally devastated. In this memoir, he narrates a story of people searching to belong and survive in a world that was almost destroyed.

Hamburg 1947 recounts Smith’s youthful RAF days as part of the occupational forces in post-war Germany. A wireless operator during the war, he doesn’t want to return to Britain and join a queue of unemployed former servicemen; he reenlists for long term duty in occupied Germany. From his billet in Hamburg, a city razed to the ground by remorseless aerial bombardment, he witnesses a people and era on the brink of annihilation. This narrative presents a street-level view of a city reduced to rubble populated with refugees, black marketers, and cynical soldiers.

At times grim and other times amusing, Smith writes a memoir relaying the social history about this time and place, providing a unique look at post-WWII Germany. Hamburg 1947 is both a love story for a city and a passionate retailing of a love affair with a young German woman.

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Snowdrops – A. D. Miller

Dec 13, 2011
Beth

Snowdrops - A. D. MillerSnowdrops
A.D. Miller

Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2011, Snowdrops is the debut of 2011: A stunning novel of moral ambiguity, uncertainty and corruption.

Snowdrops. That’s what the Russians call them – the bodies that float up into the light in the thaw. Drunks, most of them, and homeless people who just give up and lie down into the whiteness, and murder victims hidden in the drifts by their killers.

Nick has a confession. When he worked as a high-flying British lawyer in Moscow, he was seduced by Masha, an enigmatic woman who led him through her city: the electric nightclubs and intimate dachas, the human kindnesses and state-wide corruption. Yet as Nick fell for Masha, he found that he fell away from himself; he knew that she was dangerous, but life in Russia was addictive, and it was too easy to bury secrets – and corpses – in the winter snows…

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