She can hear their five-year-old daughter Charlie crying, then sees injuries on the little girl which cannot be ignored. Anna reports the family to the police and social services but when no one comes to Charlie's aid, Anna understands that she is alone with her fears for the child's life.So when Charlie comes to her door asking for help, the only thing Anna can think to do is take the girl and run.Raising delicate but deeply felt questions about our individual responsibility for the children around us, Promise is a novel that obliges the reader to ask: if Charlie were my neighbour, what would I do?PRAISE FOR HIS OTHER HOUSE"Extraordinarily compelling...To elaborate on Sarah Armstrong's seemingly simple plot would be to betray the book's deep, intertwining roots...A tour de force." Australian Women's Weekly"You can feel the weather, the damp of northern NSW, seep through the story just as a secret creates rot in a relationship." Herald Sun"Armstrong's prose is striking and clear; there is a tenderness to how her characters are portrayed...Instead of pitting one character against another, she undertakes the task of asking us to understand them...Instead of giving us someone to blame, it shows us how easy it is to inadvertently cause harm." Weekend Australian

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    “Worthy to sit beside Conrad and Dostoevsky’s excursions into the twisted world of secret agents. Joseph Roth is one of the great writers in German of this century; and this novel is a fine introduction to this view of intrigue, necessity, and moral doubt.” The London Times

    IngemannEllinor is seventy. Her husband Georg has just passed away, and she is struck with the need to confide in someone. She addresses Anna, her long-dead best friend, who was also Georg's first wife. Fully aware of the absurdity of speaking to someone who cannot hear her, Ellinor nevertheless finds it meaningful to divulge long-held secrets and burdens of her past: her mother's heartbreaking pride; Ellinor's courtship with her first husband; their seemingly charmed friendship with Anna and Georg; the disastrous ski trip that shattered the two couples' lives.

    He becomes a puppeteer in the Warsaw ghetto, but when his talent is discovered, Mika is forced to entertain the occupying German troops instead of his countrymen.It is also the story of Max, a German soldier stationed in Warsaw, whose experiences in Poland and later in Siberia's Gulag show a different side to the Second World War. As one of Mika's puppets is passed to the soldier, a war-torn legacy is handed from one generation to another.

    When Robert is killed in a freak accident, Helen begins to rekindle relationships with old friends and close family.

    His nurse, charged with the twenty-four-hour care of his patient, is blissfully unaware that his colleagues are using their various positions to skim money, in extraordinarily creative ways, from the top of their employer’s seemingly inexhaustible riches.But when a family tragedy means that the nurse suddenly needs to find a fantastical sum of money fast, the dacha’s chef lets him in on the secret world of backhanders and bribes going on around him, and opens his eyes to a brewing war between the staff and the new housekeeper, the ruthless new sheriff in town.A brilliantly cast modern-day Animal Farm, The Senility of Vladimir P. is a coruscating political fable that shows, through an honest man slipping his ethical moorings, how Putin has not only bankrupted his nation economically, but has also diminished it culturally and spiritually. It is angry, funny, page-turning, and surprisingly moving.

    During the four meals, which take place over several decades, Zayde slowly comes to understand why these three men consider him their son and why all three participate in raising him. A virtuoso performance of spellbinding storytelling, this is a deeply satisfying read—sensuous, hilarious, compassionate, and profound.

    But this is the 1920s and he lives in Stilbourne, a small English country town where everyone knows what everyone else is getting up to, and where love, lust and rebellion are closely followed by revenge and embarrassment.

    Despite his brilliance, Paul Skoglund hasn't held a steady job for years, partly because of his Tourette's syndrome. When his eccentric, wealthy aunt asks him to take on the repairs of her magnificent hunting lodge, he is in no position to refuse. But then he finds that the rambling old house has been savagely vandalized: he discovers a scene of almost superhuman destruction, a violence mirrored by a series of disappearances and grisly deaths haunting the region. Paul delves into the wreckage, wondering what dark passion—and what strength—could cause such chaos. As state police investigator Mo Ford pursues the mystery through official channels, escalating events force Paul deeper into his family's past and into the darker aspects of his own nature.

    It follows the passage of strange, gentle Abel Tiffauges from submissive schoolboy to "ogre" of the Nazi school at the castle of Kaltenborn, taking us deeper into the dark heart of fascism than any novel since The Tin Drum. Until the very last page, when Abel meets his mystic fate in the collapsing ruins of the Third Reich, it shocks us, dazzles us, and above all holds us spellbound.

    But his inconsistencies are interrupted when he meets two men who are the epitome of order and regulation.

    Marrying Moira in the hopes that her expected inheritance will save the family farm, widower Hector sees his family fall apart when the inheritance falls through, a situation that is complicated by an act of senseless violence.

    Why does Ana bear such a close resemblance to the model for Goya's famous Maja paintings? What is the significance of the Joker as he steps out of his pack of cards? As the action moves from Fiji to Spain, from the present to the past, unfolding further stories within the stories, the novel reveals an astonishing richness and complexity. As bold and imaginative in its sweep as Sophie's World, it shows again that Jostein Gaarder's unique and special gift is to make us wonder at the awe-inspiring mystery of the universe.

    But on one thing the four of them agree: they are determined to find the mysterious china cat and learn its sinister secret