All that I am by Anna Funder The most intriguing opening line I have ever read – ‘When Hitler came to power, I was in the bath… It was Monday afternoon.’ A fascinating insight into Nazism and its long fingers, love, betrayal and risk-taking by a group of German escapees, some real, some fictional, working […]
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How to be Both by Ali Smith In this dual-novel, George’s and Francesco’s stories intertwine despite George being a 20th century girl and Francesco a real-life 16th century Italian artist. This is a textual hall of mirrors in which the dead interweave with the living and nothing is certain. Both stories are told in separate
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The Swerve, How the Renaissance Began by Stephen Greenblatt As a student, the author (now a Harvard professor) discovers a translation of 2000-year-old poem by Lucretius which describes ‘an infinite number of random atoms’ as the basis for life and the universe without need for God or gods. The re-emergence of this radical idea in
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The Library Book by Susan Orlean An in-depth look at the role of libraries in today’s local communities, this book revolves around the unsolved mystery of who started the fire in the Los Angeles’ city library in 1986 which ultimately destroyed 400,000 books, and the author’s later re-examination of its investigation. It is a mystery
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The Dictionary of Lost Words by Pip Williams A beautifully crafted and gentle tale of love, loss and liberation of women from bondmaid in the 1880s to Emeritus Professor in the 1980s, via the vehicles of the creation of the Oxford English Dictionary, the suffrage movement and the First World War. A personal tale of
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The Second Sleep by Robert Harris Set in 1468 in a rural English village, the title is based on the idea that we sleep, then wake for a usable space of time, then sleep again. But what actually happens during that awake period? And is it 1468 as we know it? A young priest arrives
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Boy Swallow Universe by Trent Dalton A new Aussie classic. Set in 1983 in one of Brisbane’s violent working-class suburbs, this is a heart-warming story of love, brotherhood and the most unlikely of friendships. Eli has a lost father, a mute brother, a mum in jail, a heroin dealer for a stepfather and a notorious
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The Silent Patient by Alex Michaelides A real page turner with the most unforeseen twist and dubbed by one reviewer as thee ‘perfect thriller’. Alicia lives a sophisticated, grand and seemingly perfect life until one day, out of the blue, she shoots her husband in the face. After that she speaks not a single word.
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The Ringing Cedars series by Valdimir Megre This set is the rare first edition in English, published from 2005. The knowledge in the books is attributed to a beautiful woman named Anastasia, the embodied form of a deity, who dwells in the Siberian taiga, whom the author met during a trade expedition. The books offer a holistic worldview, teaching
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A story of father-son-brother dynamics set in Franco-era Spain and later in exile in Switzerland. An aristocratic Spanish banker is nearing the end of a long and very successful life, but hallucinations carry him back to dark days of deeply hidden family secrets. His estranged sons return as he tries to put his house in
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