Book picks similar to
The Inheritance of Things Past by Ben J. Dutton


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The Bloodaxe Book of 20th Century Poetry: From Britain and Ireland


Edna Longley - 2001
    

Orison


Daniel Swensen - 2014
    But when her stash of money is stolen by her brother, she finds herself faced with a death sentence from her crime lord boss.Desperate to pay off her debt, she searches for a score big enough to earn her freedom. Instead, she finds the orison, a magical artifact that could tip the balance of power between the city and the Empire seeking to conquer it.The power to change the world is now in the hands of a sneak thief — if it doesn’t kill her first.

Careless


Anne Cassidy - 2007
    Lesley Cozens wrote Nicky a letter before she died, the contents of which the reader does not know until much later in the novel, but the letter triggers a rage in Nicky that could have had tragic consequences if Chloe had not got involved. When Nicky begins hanging around Chloe's house with a mixture of curiosity and anger that she has had a happy life compared with his, he is prepared to hate her, but instead the two of them form a strange kind of bond. Chloe is her mother's daughter, and finds herself wanting to help Nicky find his real mother, the one who abandoned him at birth. Ironically, the clues she pieces together about what happened lead her back to her mother's home town, and to her childhood friend, Sonia, who is keeping a painful secret of her own. Chloe finds comfort in helping Nicky, a boy who is almost like a brother in that her own mother looked out for him for so long, and Nicky discovers that sometimes you have to trust in people in order to move on and build a life...

A Cottage Full of Secrets


Jane Lovering - 2022
    But for all the lovingly handmade curtains, and the hot dinners ready on the table for her husband, Stella’s dreams of married life jar painfully with the truth.Fifty years later, the cottage is a new beginning for Tamzin. Determined to get away from her previous life, she makes the move to the wild and vast Yorkshire countryside. When Tamzin finds a sepia photo of a woman, Stella, standing in the cottage’s garden, there’s a sadness in her eyes that Tamzin recognises.  As the cottage reveals more of its secrets, Tamzin is desperate to find out whether Stella got her happy ending.  And as she gradually makes new friends, and starts to win over her mysterious neighbour Euan, Tamzin dares to dream about her own happy ending too…

Wedding Party


Sophie King - 2008
    Will the couple make it down the aisle? And will the guests end up better or worse?

A Love for Life


Penny Hancock - 2000
    Fanella and five-year-old Ellie get off to a rocky start, but Fanella patiently steers their relationship on to more solid ground. Meanwhile, her relationship with Rod, Ellie's teacher and a married man, is a little more complicated.

81 Austerities


Sam Riviere - 2012
    Initially conceived as a response to the 'austerity measures' implemented by the coalition government in 2011, the poems quickly began taking on a life in kind: 'cutting' themselves on levels of sentiment, structure and even subject matter. Not content to merely build a series of freethinking poems, these remarkable pieces seem eagerly and mischievously to analyze their moment of creation, then weigh their worth, then consign their excess to the recycling bin thereafter. Experience is speedy, the poems seem to say, so dizzyingly fast that the poetry will inevitably be running to catch up - often arriving at a scene the moment after the moment has gone. The effect is as funny and it is startling, beguiling as it is surprising, and makes 81 Austerities a vivid reminder that deprivation, as Leonard Cohen put it, can be the mother of poetry.

A Midsummer's Night Dream (Shakespeare Stories)


Leon Garfield - 1993
    A retelling of Shakespeare's light-hearted comedy of mistaken identity, tangled lovers, meddling fairies, and bumbling amateur actors, set in a wood on a midsummer night.

Train Man


Andrew Mulligan - 2019
    profoundly affecting. A beautiful story.' Ruth Jones, author of Never GreenerMichael is a broken man. He’s waiting for the 09.46 to Gloucester, so as to reach Crewe for 11.22: the platforms are long at Crewe, and he can walk easily into the path of a high-speed train to London. He’s planned it all: a net of tangerines (for when the refreshments trolley is cancelled), and a juice carton, full of neat whisky. To make identification swift, he has taped his last credit card to the inside of his shoe.What Michael hasn’t factored in is a twelve-minute delay, which risks him missing his connection, and making new ones. He longs to silence the voices in his own head: ex-girlfriends, colleagues, and the memories from his schooldays, decades old. They all torment him. What Michael needs is somebody to listen.A last, lonely journey becomes a lesson in the power of human connection, proving that no matter how bad things seem, it's never too late to get back on track.Journeys intersect. People find hope when and where they least expect it. A missed connection needn’t be a disaster: it could just save your life.

Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám and Salámán and Absál Together With A Life Of Edward Fitzgerald And An Essay On Persian Poetry By Ralph Waldo Emerson


Omar Khayyám - 2010
    You may find it for free on the web. Purchase of the Kindle edition includes wireless delivery.

Samaritans


Jonathan Lynn - 2017
     The chairman of the board, billionaire arms dealer and part-time philanthropist David Soper, decides that it's time to kill or cure. Business School alumnus and Las Vegas hotel genius Max Green is the perfect man for the job. A man of vision. A man with a mission. A man who knows that wealth-care is smarter than healthcare. He's going to make Samaritans great again. Andrew Sharp, star cardio-thoracic surgeon, turns his back on the NHS and buys in to this brave new world of Porsches and payola. But when his American Dream turns into a living nightmare, Andrew discovers that even the new-found love of his assistant, Cathy, may not be enough to save him… Samaritans is the new novel from the co-creator and writer of Yes Minister and Yes, Prime Minister. Praise for Samaritans 'A book George Orwell would have approved of.' The Sunday Times ‘It’s wonderful! I was hooked, mouth open, heart pounding. The catastrophic state of medical care is his story but Samaritans can be read too as a wider allegory, a discourse on a politics of greed, dis-entitlement, deregulation and social brutality that has run quite mad.’ Stephen Fry ‘It is with the highest confidence that I recommend this book, with particularity, to those Members of Congress who remain committed to making access to life saving care far too difficult for far too many people. It is my fondest hope that they might laugh their way to the education they so sorely require.’ Rick Ungar ‘Jonathan Lynn tackles the US healthcare system in satirical splendour. I laughed out loud. It is both hilarious and scary at the same time! Nobody does it better.’ Barbara Broccoli 'There is reason to believe Jonathan Lynn was not born in the US and, while probably not a spy, he has spent some little time observing Americans in the wild. His observations are not always flattering—he’s talking Big Medicine, Big Insurance, Big Business and their cousin, Small Ethics—but he certainly seems to have our number. Samaritans is smart, dark, and very, very funny. Stay healthy, America!' Michael McKean, Better Call Saul, Spinal Tap ‘Jonathan Lynn's Samaritans does for hospitals what Evelyn Waugh's The Loved One did for cemeteries. The book is laugh-aloud funny, but also deadly serious--because it deals with the lethal effect profit-minded health care can have on patient lives...I haven't read satire this hilarious and powerful since Riotous Assembly, the late Tom Sharpe's indictment of apartheid in South Africa. This is essential reading for anyone who has a body and wants to keep it alive.' M.G Lord ‘Comedy genius...as politically and socially important as is it is entertaining.’ Muriel Gray Jonathan Lynn is the multi-award winning author of The Complete Yes Minister and The Complete Yes, Prime Minister, which were drawn from the phenomenally successful BBC series which he created and wrote with Antony Jay, and which sold more than a million copies in hardback.

District Nurse


Patricia Jordan - 1977
    She leaves behind a close-knit family and a failed romance in Ireland to begin training in Barnet and Middlesex. She early on treats a patient who eventually becomes her husband and means that she accepts a job in the north of England that takes her first by bicycle and then in an unreliable little car, into the homes of the people who need her care. In DISTRICT NURSE, she brings to life everyone she encounters, from the doctors and other nurses to the diverse and always compelling patients. It is a captivating personal account of a life spent helping others.

WASP Sting


Lee A. Sweetapple - 2016
    As a Women Airforce Service Pilot (WASP), Trudy is one of the most knowledgeable flyers of the P-51 Mustang. She is in full command of one of the fastest airplanes ever made, but she is forbidden from going into combat because of her gender. Trudy is shocked when her dream of going to the front lines is fulfilled. The Office of Strategic Services (OSS) needs a pilot to sneak into German-occupied Lithuania and rescue a professor whose work could have international implications. But first, Trudy will have to get there. As Trudy crosses the United States and Canada with her handsome traveling partner, Major Rod Jackson, she sees the many different ways Americans and Canadians are helping on the home front. Her new base of operations in Duxford, England, will also give her a front-row seat to the violent, deadly aerial battles of the European theater. Trudy is determined to fight to protect the Allies, but will she make it out of her first operation alive?

The Long Road to Auschwitz


Anthony Vincent Bruno - 2019
    Max is a British Territorial soldier and Zia is a Jewess from the south of France. Zia's grandmother is a wealthy socialite who owns a painting that could embarrass the Nazis. Zia is kidnapped by the Gestapo and Max is hospitalised on the same day. He awakes to find no trace of his beloved who he had planned to marry in England. The Red Cross reported that it was almost certain that Zia was trafficked across the border and delivered to Sachsenhausen Labour Camp at Oranienburg, not far from Berlin on the night of May 26th, 1939. A criminal act, regardless of the forthcoming war. The first warring Germans to step over the border onto French soil did not do so until May 13th, 1940. The Gestapo had kidnapped her 343 days before they attacked France.June 6th, 1944 - four years later, Max is one of 150,000 Allied troops headed towards the Normandy beaches. He has two options - find the woman he could never forget or kill the people responsible for her death. From the very beginning, Berlin had ordered SS Hauptsturmführer Dieter Baumann to deal harshly with their VIP captive but never to kill her. Through three concentration camps, ending in Auschwitz, Zia wishes she had been killed many times over. Traumatized, she has no idea that Max and a few unlikely friends are battling their way through Nazi occupied Europe in a crazy attempt to rescue her. Berlin tries one last ploy to get their hands on her grandmother's painting. Zia's life hangs in the balance when Max meets his own personal nemesis in the guise of an undercover Gestapo officer. This novel explores the dark depths that humans can sink to in times of war. It is for adults only and even then; it is not for readers of a sensitive disposition. Whatever you read in this novel of extraordinary graphic Holocaust content, consider this – it was immeasurably worse, a hundred thousand times so.

Liberating Belsen Concentration Camp


Leonard Berney - 2015
    T.D. is the only book to be published that recounts the events that led up to the British Army’s uncovering of the Bergen-Belsen Concentration Camp and its 60,000 prisoners, how the Army dealt with the unprecedented horror that existed in the camp, how the surviving prisoners were rescued, how the inmates were evacuated, how the Royal Army Medical Corps established the world’s largest hospital to care for the many thousands of sick and emaciated ex-inmates, how the survivors were rehabilitated and cared for, how they were repatriated to their own countries, why many thousand refused to return ‘home’ and the eventual establishment of the Belsen Displaced Persons camp, the largest DP camp in Germany. The author of this book was a senior British Army officer who participated in the liberation of the Camp, who was in charge of evacuating the ex-prisoners to the vast Rehabilitation Camp that the Army set up, and who was then appointed as the Commandant of that Camp until its management was handed over to the United Nations, and who gave evidence against the SS guards at the Belsen War Crimes Trial. Forewords by Nanette Blitz Konig, Belsen survivor and former classmate of Anne Frank, and Major-General Nicholas Eeles CBE, with the introduction by the Oscar®-nominated film director, Joshua Oppenheimer.