Book picks similar to
Sophie by Judith Saxton
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Gray Mountain: A Novel by John Grisham - Reviewed
J.T. Salrich - 2014
Salrich.Gray Mountain by John Grisham is finally here! If you’d like to enhance your experience while reading Gray Mountain then this book review and study guide is perfect for you! Yes, in Gray Mountain, John Grisham once again takes us on an action packed roller coaster ride that you’re sure to enjoy. When you read Gray Mountain by John Grisham - Reviewed you will get a deeper understanding of the characters and plot found in Gray Mountain as well as the themes and symbolism included in the novel. You also get a detailed chapter by chapter breakdown and analysis of the events as they unfold along with a glossary of the important characters and terms used in the original book. Just in case that’s not enough for you I’ve also included a list of possible study questions (book club discussions topics) and quotes from the book that I found interesting. Wrapping it all up is a discussion of the critical reviews for Gray Mountain as well as my overall opinion of the book. Plus much more! Whether you’re reading this for a book club, school report, or just want to find out what happens before diving into the full length book, you can use this book review and study guide to get most out of your experience reading Gray Mountain by John Grisham.
See Mommy Run
Laura Kennedy - 2012
Set in the 1980s, she endures a sub-zero marriage to Mike, Assistant Manager of Friendly Finance, as well as the impossible role of mother to fifteen-and-a-half-year-old Kim and fourteen-year-old Molly. Adding to her misery, is the job she loathes at Big Brother Insurance Company. Life in the San Fernando Valley in Southern California is a soap opera. Kim and Molly skip school, smoke pot, and call each other bitch, while Mike loan sharks by day and guzzles Coors by night. Eventually a line is drawn across the matted shag carpet when Mike sides with the girls.Pushed to her limit when Kim's truancy draws the attention of the State Attorney's Office, Margie flees to San Francisco and a new life.
At Long Last Love
Milly Adams - 2017
A motley crew of friends has replaced the family she’s not spoken to in years. That is until the evening Kate’s sister Sarah walks back into her life. Sarah has a favour to ask: she needs Kate to return home to Dorset for one month to look after her daughter, Lizzie. Reluctantly Kate agrees, even though it means facing the troubled past she hoped she’d escaped. Kate is confronted once again by the prejudice and scrutiny of the townsfolk, including the new village vicar. As the war continues, Kate must fight her own battles and find not only the courage to forge a future but perhaps, at long last, love.'Milly Adams' readers will find the story and its rich cast of characters very appealing.'Lizzie Lane
The Hoarder's Widow
Allie Cresswell - 2016
The hoard is endless, stacked into every room in the house, teetering in piles along the landing and forming a scree up the stairs. It is all part of Clifford’s waste-not way of thinking in which everything, no matter how broken or obscure, can be re-cycled or re-purposed into something useful or, if kept long enough, will one day be valuable. He had believed in his vision as ardently as any mystic in his holy revelation but now, without the clear projection of his vision to light it up for her as what it would be, it appears to Maisie more grimly than ever as what it is: junk. As Maisie disassembles his stash she is forced to confront the issues which drove her husband to squirrel away other people’s rubbish; after all, she knows virtually nothing about his life before they met. Finally, in the last bastion of his accumulation, she discovers the key to his hoarding and understands – much too late – the man she married. Then, with empty rooms in a house which is too big for her, she must ask herself: what next?
Lily's War: An uplifting WWII saga of women on the home front
Shirley Mann - 2019
1942, Manchester World War Two is in full swing and Lily Mullins is determined to do her bit for the war effort. Her friends and sweetheart have all joined up and Lily's sure there must be a role for her that goes further than knitting socks for the troops! When she decides to volunteer for the Women's Auxiliary Air Force, Lily soon discovers that she has a talent as a wireless operator. Helped along the way by a special gang of girls, she finds strengths she didn't know she had and realises that the safety of the country might just be in her hands . . . Meanwhile, Danny is determined to marry Lily, but his letters home become more and more distant. Will a long separation mean the end of their love story?An uplifting and inspiring novel of women on the home front. '[The story] read so true to me and I really didn't want to put it down . . . It may be fiction but those things could, and did, happen.' Vera Morgan, wartime WAAF 'An impeccably researched and uplifting story of love, loss and courage: a heartwarming read that will captivate all those who love a good war story.' Clare Harvey, author of The Gunner Girl'A wonderful, inspiring story. I can't wait to read more from Shirley Mann.' Sheila Newberry
Girlfriend, Interrupted: From carefree twenty-something to instant mother-of-two...
Patricia Caliskan - 2018
Enjoys walking barefoot across shards of broken home. Likes loaded silences, resentment and insomnia. Dislikes romantic weekends, lie-ins and any chance of future happiness. Former GSOH. Developing PTSD. Ella Shawe was undomesticated, unattached and uninhibited. Until she met Dan. Sexy, charming and funny, Dan ticked all the right boxes and Ella threw herself head-first into the whirlwind romance. But now she’s moved into his family home, complete with two demanding children and a hyperactive dog. Throw in Dan’s impossibly perfect ex-wife, Ella’s interfering sex therapist mother and the snooty and dismissive mother-in-law from Hell, and Ella is almost ready to throw in the towel. But, ready or not, Ella is part of the family now, and getting it right for Dan’s kids means getting it right for everyone. She just needs to figure out how to include herself in the mix… Girlfriend, Interrupted will have you laughing-out-loud, gasping in embarrassment and rooting for Ella all the way. This British romantic comedy is packed full of humour and has a delightful contemporary heroine at its heart.
The Dublin Girls: A powerfully heartrending family saga
Cathy Mansell - 2020
To save them from the workhouse, Nell returns to the family home - a mere two rooms at the top of a condemned tenement.Nell finds work at a biscuit factory and, at first, they scrape through each week. But then eight-year-old Róisín, a delicate from birth, is admitted to hospital with rheumatic fever and fifteen-year-old Kate, rebellious, headstrong and resentful of Nell taking her mother's place, runs away.When Liam finds work in London, Nell stays to struggle on alone - her unwavering devotion to her sisters stronger even than her love for him. She's determined that one day the Dublin girls will be reunited and only then will she be free to follow her heart.
Look for more gripping, heartwrenching
page-turners from Cathy Mansell - don't miss A Place to Belong, out now.
Down From The Mountain (Clint Hunter: Mountain Man #1)
Mike Mackessy - 2019
With degrees in both Medicine and Law, at the age of seventeen, Clint still felt empty and dissatisfied. He struck up a bargain with his father, to be allowed four years to go West and see the lands, experience life, then return to follow in his father’s footsteps and become a doctor in the family practice. When he boarded the train west with fifty thousand dollars set up in a bank account, Clint had no way of knowing just how much his life would turn in a completely different way.
The Bluebeard Club: A 1920's Historical Murder Mystery (Lord Kit Aston Book 6)
Jack Murray - 2021
Roses Have Thorns
Beverley A. Hughesdon - 1992
But it is there she is given a chance: for a brief, magical interlude in her otherwise harsh existence Amy finds joy in her new position as a lady’s maid. It seems as though her future might finally be assured. But Amy's introduction to the glittering Warminster family comes with its price: it's not long before Amy loses her innocence, and in the most cruel way imaginable. Subsequently caught in a horrid feud between a father and son, she is trapped between the pull of love and duty.Betrayed and alone, Amy is left facing a heartbreaking choice…
A poignant and passionate love story from the author of Song of Songs, this is perfect for fans of Diney Costeloe and Margaret Dickinson.
Praise for Roses Have Thorns “Good, long, satisfying… full of detail and good characterisation” Bella
The American Girl
Rachael English - 2017
Rose Moroney is seventeen, smart, spirited – and pregnant. She wants to marry her boyfriend. Her ambitious parents have other plans. She is sent to Ireland, their birthplace, to deliver her daughter in a Mother and Baby home. Against Rose's will, her baby is taken for adoption. Dublin 2013. Martha Sheeran’s life has come undone. Her marriage is over, and her husband has moved on with unsettling speed. Under pressure from her teenage daughter, she starts looking for the woman who gave her up for adoption more than forty years before. Martha's search for her birth mother leads her to the heart of long-buried family secrets and forces her to question everything she thought she knew. When her first love, Paudie Carmody, re-enters the frame, she's also forced to take a hard look at her own life. From Boston to rural Ireland; from Dublin back to Boston, The American Girl is a heart-warming and enthralling story about mothers and daughters, love and cruelty and, ultimately, the struggle for acceptance – and the embrace of new horizons.
The Pakistan Conspiracy, A Novel Of Espionage
Francesca Salerno - 2014
Kate Langley, a CIA officer based in Pakistan, must put her life on the line, for the second time in six months, to prevent AQ from detonating the weapon in a Western city to avenge OBL’s death. The Pakistan Conspiracy, A Novel Of Espionage opens in the tension-fraught days right after the capture and death of Osama Bin Laden at the hands of SEAL Team Six in Abbottabad. Kate is a young, ambitious CIA agent tethered to a desk at the American Embassy in Islamabad, Pakistan’s capital. Though she had little to do with the action in Abbottabad, Kate finds herself “PNG’d” by the Pakistani Foreign Ministry in the wake of OBL’s death—declared persona non grata in the euphemistic language of diplomacy, for “activities incompatible with diplomatic status,” code words for having been outed as a spy. With Langley soon back in Washington, DC, it becomes apparent that something far worse than 9/11 is on the Al Qaeda drawing boards, now on an accelerated timetable as payback for OBL’s martyrdom. Kate gets wind of Al Qaeda’s purchase of a highly portable tactical nuclear weapon in the former Soviet RA-211 series, a small device, by the standards of nuclear weapons, that can fit in a footlocker. But this bomb has an energy release of 17 kilotons, which is sufficient to turn to dust everything within a radius of 2.5 kilometers. Set off in the center of Manhattan, this weapon would kill millions of people, flatten skyscrapers, and set the entire island aflame. Motivated by ambition and a desire to help her country, Kate Langley soon finds herself back in South Asia, this time not as part of the coddled staff of an American embassy, with perks, diplomatic passport, and a safety net of Marine guards, but as a NOC, or “knock,” spy-speak for a CIA agent under “non-official cover.” If caught, such an agent has no protection whatsoever—other than her wits. From Bagram Air Force Base in Afghanistan, Kate Langley is soon on the trail of Yasser Khalidi Al-Greeb, who appears to be the AQ mastermind behind the acquisition of the nuclear weapon. With her sometime ally, Pakistani Brigadier Mahmood Mahmood, Kate Langley tracks the weapon from Moscow, to Tashkent, to Karachi, where Al-Greeb’s terrorist Al Qaeda plotters get the weapon aboard ship smuggled in an intermodal container headed for the Port of Long Beach. This is a story as contemporary as tomorrow’s headlines, as frightening as 9/11, and as compelling and exciting as the very best espionage fiction today.
This Family Life
Jon Rance - 2014
Perfect for fans of Mike Gayle, Matt Dunn and David Nicholls. SYNOPSIS Things that might happen during your first year of parenthood: 1. You’ll get covered in a ‘nuclear’ poo. 2. You’ll be convinced your son is talking with a Japanese accent. 3. You’ll worry that when your son waves, it looks like a Nazi salute. Of course, this might just be Harry Spencer. Taking up where 'This Thirtysomething Life' left off, Harry Spencer and is wife Emily are back and trying to survive their first year of parenthood. It has its ups and downs (and a few bits in the middle), but along the way they begin to understand the true meaning of family and what it takes to be a parent. Featuring a hilarious cast of extras including Harry’s father-in-law Derek, who has a unique problem with Scotch, Steve and Fiona, the parents from children’s entertainment hell, and a yoga instructor with a prominent camel-toe, 'This Family Life' is the ultimate comedy for anyone who is a parent, has a parent, or is thinking about becoming one.
Dreams of a Little Cornish Cottage
Nancy Barone - 2021
But having kicked out her adulterous ex-husband, her house is filled with nothing but echoes and Nat yearns for the coziness and bustle of seaside living. In particular, the rundown Lavender Cottage that has gone up for sale.But when her mother has a fall, Nat's dream of a quiet new life crumbles as she instantly brings her into her home to care for her. With her two energetic nieces then dumped on her doorstep and her recently heartbroken daughter moving back into the nest, Nat can't possibly abandon her family... Lavender cottage will just have to wait.That is until Irishman Connor enters Nat's life and makes her realize that it's okay to put herself first, and she's allowed to wish for more.