Book picks similar to
The Book Thief's Heartbeat by Philip Davison
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Temple of Gold
A.J. Stewart - 2019
An SAS soldier with a healthy disregard for authority. Tales of slaves and temples in the Kampuchean jungle. The First Lenny & Lucas Adventure Lenny Cox joined the Marines to protect the innocent. The adventure was a bonus. So lying in the humid Southeast Asian jungle watching over a CIA supply drop is his idea of a good day out. That's until he sees the recipient of the drop is an ex-Khmer Rouge unit, four years after the killing fields. Lenny does what he should never do—he searches for the truth. But in this place the truth is slippery, and everybody has dirty hands. Even the peasants taken as slaves. He figures there's not much a lone Marine can do, until a chance encounter with an Australian SAS soldier who might know as much as Lenny knows, and might be just as unhappy about it. Together they take on their own governments, spies, and the Khmer Rouge, in a part of the world that the rest of the world just wants to forget.
Softgoods: All the Pretty Things Women Are Dying to Wear
Consuelo Saah Baehr - 2012
American Blood
John Nichols - 1987
American Blood is a timely and fiercely moral statement on violence and loss.
What We Did On Our Holiday
John Harding - 2000
She senses her biological clock ticking away and wants children while he doesn't. Not because he doesn't like children but because he feels a child would be just one responsibility too many.Nick's problem is his parents. He's devoted to them of course, but sometimes even he finds his patience wearing a little thin which in turn brings on the guilt. But they are rather a handful. They're conservative, highly eccentric and increasingly infirm. His Mum's so enormously overweight that her heart's now a bit dicky and she is certainly no longer up to looking after Dad by herself. He's got Parkinson's Disease - not the shaking kind, as Mum's always reminding people - but he's unable to do even the simplest task himself and needs constant care and attention.Nick knows the time has come to take the matter in hand but things need to be handled carefully. And so he and Laura take them to Malta for what they hope will be a happy final family holiday. Nick thinks his only problem is going to be avoiding Laura's amorous advances but this particular island turns out to be a sun-kissed cupboard with more than its fair share of skeletons...Tackling a taboo subject with sensitivity, understanding, great affection and good humour, What We Did On Our Holiday is a remarkably uplifting, moving and reassuring novel about a time in our lives when it seems roles are reversed and we find ourselves looking after the very people we'd always assumed would be there to look after us.
The Woody
Peter Lefcourt - 1998
But when he is stricken with an ill-timed case of ED (Erectile Dysfunction), the desperate player faces his biggest campaign killer of all and goes to hilarious extremes to keep himself in the running. Peter Lefcourt holds a perfectly cracked mirror to the spin-filled world of Washington's sexual politics and asks a penetrating question: How hard does a politician have to be?
The Alchemist's Apprentice
Jeremy Dronfield - 2001
And yet you've never heard of him. Or his book. The whole thing is a little hard to explain. To unravel the tangled threads of reality you have to go back to the beginning. To a New Year's Eve party in Cambridgeshire in 1996. Or earlier, when an unsuccessful novelist called Roderick Bent embarked on a train journey that turned into a nightmare. Actually, it doesn't matter where you start from. The point is that you'll soon understand why there's never been another book like it. And, more importantly, why you can't remember that you've already read it.
A Private Place
Amanda Craig - 1991
With its progressive curriculum, complacent staff and beautiful grounds, it looks like Paradise. But the clever, the odd and the bookish are relentlessly persecuted as pupils make their own rules in a bubble of privilege and prejudice. When Alice, the Headmaster?s intellectual step-daughter, and the much-expelled American millionaire Winthrop T Sheen join forces against the school bully, Grub Viner, a gifted pianist and school ?joker?, has to choose between love and loyalty, and black comedy escalates to murder. Savagely funny, compelling and a cult classic, A Private Place has struck a chord with generations. `A viciously clever satire on progressive schools... Will cause distress in liberal circles? Independent `Bitingly funny and horribly accurate? Daily Telegraph `A genuinely gripping novel? Spectator `Craig writes with ruthless honesty and jet black wit? Cosmopolitan
Mainly by Bike: A Senior Cyclist Tours the World
Ann Wilson - 2017
Her first bike was stolen in Bulgaria, she was knocked down by a buffalo cart in India and battled with a parasitic illness in Malaysia. These were some of the challenges she had to deal with, but above all, what stood out for Ann was the depth of human kindness she experienced throughout her travels.
Harvest Moon
Judith Saxton - 1995
But when Lady Clifton dies soon after giving birth, Sir George hands the child over to be brought up on Beeswing Farm. John Hoverton and Laurie Clifton are raised as brothers.
Fireworks
Elizabeth Hartley Winthrop - 2006
Still haunted by the death of his young son, stalled in his writing career and overfond of the bottle, he finds himself abandoned by his wife for the summer - or, if he doesn't shape up, for good.
Miracles, Inc.: A Novel
T.J. Forrester - 2011
Oliver, still a young man, lives in a six-by-ten cell in a Florida prison. He has chosen the needle over the chair, has no desire to smell burned flesh on the day the state snuffs out his life. When his attorney suggests he write an autobiography to generate funds to cover legal fees incurred during the appeals process, Vernon sits down to pencil and paper and begins his narrative. Miracles, Inc., Forrester's debut novel, tells the story of a charismatic slacker in love with Harley Davidson motorcycles and Rickie Terrell, a beautiful woman who quotes poetry and will not discuss her past. They live in an RV, smoke weed and drink beer, play Scrabble late into the night. His boss, a brilliant businesswoman with a far-reaching vision, offers him the chance to make more money than he ever thought was possible. He buys into the faith-healing scheme without reservation, and so begins the journey that leads to the stunning event that changes his life forever.
Naked Sleeper
Sigrid Nunez - 1996
To do whatever is the work before her, letting nothing distract her, expecting nothing, fearing nothing -- the way of the Stoics -- this is her ideal. But despite all her stratagems, this ideal constantly eludes her. Life is too unpredictable, her sense of self too fragile and human relationships are too tenuous. She muddles along, a victim of her own anxieties and resentments, her behavior often as mystifying to herself as it is to others. Why though, happily married, does she fly across the country to pursue a man she hardly knows, whom she intuitively mistrusts and does not even much care for? In the aftermath of this calamity, Nona separates from her husband and undergoes a period of intense self-examination. Meanwhile, she struggles to complete a book about her father, a painter, who died when she was a child. Out of both projects -- her work of introspection and her work of memory -- arise thorny questions about love, identity and destiny. Unexpected support appears in the form of one of her father's old lovers, whom Nona now meets for the first time. But while this new friendship thrives, relations between Nona and her husband, and between Nona and her mother, with whom she shares an anguished history, seem to be coming apart. Nona has barely achieved a somewhat surer sense of herself and her way in the world when a series of grave, unforeseeable events threaten her precarious equilibrium.Compelling, emotionally charged and written with the psychological precision and exquisite detail that are among the hallmarks of Nunez's work, "Naked Sleeper" is aboutinescapable and sometimes unendurable complexities of love and the family drama. It is the story of a woman's search for self-knowledge, for understanding of others and for an answer to the imperative question: "How should she live?"