Best of
Slice-Of-Life

1998

Liverpool Annie


Maureen Lee - 1998
    Starting with a market stall, she discovers a talent for designing clothes that develops into a successful business.But there comes a time amid the success when Annie feel she can no longer go on. Then a chance meeting leads to events she has no control over, and at last she finds the happiness that has previously eluded her.

Tending Lives: Nurses on the Medical Front


Echo Heron - 1998
    Here she recounts narratives of real-life medical dramas experienced by nurses across the country, sharing with us the inspiring, the tragic, and the outrageously funny: a penitentiary nurse who wasresponsible for orchestrating a murderer's execution; a stroke victim who rose out of his depression when his nurses began telling him jokes; and, perhaps the most riveting testimony, moment-by-moment memories of several nurses who served in the aftermath of the Oklahoma City bombing.Filled with both tears and laughter and charged with the issues that afflict nursing care today, TENDING LIVES is a gripping, moving, inspiring book, a fitting tribute to a noble profession.

The Travellers


Ann Swinfen - 1998
    While Sofia forces herself to confront her father’s diaries, Kate must face half-remembered shadows from her childhood. Together they make an impulsive journey to Hungary, Sofia's homeland. It is a journey from which neither can return unaltered.Their meeting in Hungary with István Rudnay, also marked by the dark experiences of his youth, leads them to a discovery of the warmth and love so lacking in their own lives, whilst he in turn comes to a reconciliation with the past and hope for the future.Sharply observed and recounted with tenderness and wisdom, The Travellers delineates the intense joys and sorrows of individual lives upon a broad canvas of recent European history.‘I very much admired the pace of the story, the changes of place and time and the echoes and repetitions – things lost and found and meetings and partings.’ Penelope Fitzgerald

Fast Car


Martina Murphy - 1998
    To make matters worse, she has just been dumped on a family she hardly knows. Life gets really complicated when she falls for the maddest guy in town.