Book picks similar to
A Fish Supper and a Chippy Smile: Part 1 by Hilda Kemp


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Gladys Reunited


Sandi Toksvig - 2002
    The school production that year was Thornton Wilder’s The Skin of Our Teeth, and she was among the three girls chosen to play the lead role of Gladys Antrobus. Before long, the three “Gladyses” were inseparable friends, and by the time the play debuted, “The Gladys Society” had stretched to twelve members. Thirty years on and living in England, Sandi decided to return to the States to discover what had happened to her eleven fellow Gladyses and, in the process, revisit America. By turns hilarious and moving, this is a delightfully engaging story of friends united and a country rediscovered.

An Outback Nurse


Thea Hayes - 2014
    A year later she was catapulted out of the safety of her city life into the unknown world of the Outback.Thea knew nothing of the place she was soon to call home, Wave Hill Station in the Northern Territory, the second largest property in the world under one management. It covered four million acres!With nervous excitement, Thea accepted the job and flew to the Northern Territory where her life was about to change dramatically.This is a story of growing up, falling up in love and finding your home.

Survivors: One Brave Detective's Battle to Expose the Rochdale Child Abuse Scandal


Maggie Oliver - 2019
    Instead, she launched a one-woman campaign to bring down these sickening gangs.This is the heart-breaking and shocking story of how the actions of one determined detective secured convictions in what is now one of the most notorious grooming cases in the UK. Along the way Maggie discovered countless examples of how the authorities were letting down our most vulnerable children. She blew the whistle, losing her job and at times her mind at times, in a bid to stop others from experiencing the same.This is the first ever account from a police insider on the endemic problem of child sexual exploitation across the nation and how these cases are handled by the authorities put in place to protect us.It tells the story of a woman brave enough to speak out and a group of girls who found the strength to fight for justice after having their lives completely shattered by their abusers; together they show in shocking detail why this must never happen again.

Eye of the Beholder


Lowell Cauffiel - 1994
    A detailed exploration into the murder of TV anchorwoman Diane Newton King in 1991 describes how her husband was convicted of the crime a year later only after playing mind games with the police and leading them on several wild goose chases.

Four Nights With The Devil: A True Story Of Deliverance From Evil


Peter Hockley - 2013
    Unhappy with life and driven by the search for lasting peace and contentment, a young man walks through the religion section of a local bookstore, looking for answers. One book stands out among all others: an author who claims his written messages to the spirit world are answered by an invisible entity that takes control of his mind and body; an entity that calls itself "God". Reading the entire book in one night, the young man is captivated by every word. Only one question remains: How can he know the truth? Taking a pen and paper the man writes his own letter and is amazed when "God" responds. For the next three nights the man encounters the supernatural, with vivid trance-like experiences and intense spiritual manifestations that tear the veil between this world and the next. When he confides in the only person he trusts with the story, the friend challenges the young man about "God's" real identity and declares that the visitor is not the benevolent companion he thinks. That night, the man confronts the spirit and becomes the victim of a terrifying waking-nightmare, where his life is endangered and he comes face to face with the violent personification of darkness and evil. Four Nights with the Devil isn't fiction. Peter Hockley's dramatic story really happened. This is his gripping account of demon possession and the powerful deliverance that followed. An ordinary, non-religious man who found himself between God and the Devil and his incredible journey from darkness to light.

Always In Our Hearts: The Story Of Amy Grossberg, Brian Peterson, The Pregnancy They Hid And The Baby They Killed


Doug Most - 1999
    But in November of their Freshman Year, the two young lovers spent a night in a Delaware motel room where, after hiding her pregnancy from her family and her friends for nine months, Amy gave birth to a baby boy. Only she and Brian knew the child even existed . . . until the next morning when the newborn's corpse turned up in the motel dumpster. The case caused a countrywide outrage, and the teenagers ended up in court, desperately fighting for their lives and ultimately against each other...

An Omnibus: Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant / The Accidental Tourist / Breathing Lessons


Anne Tyler - 1990
    This first omnibus edition of three full-length novels, all set in the respectable Baltimore streets she has made so particularly her own, encompasses the range of eccentricities and compromises to which they are driven. Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant follows the disintegration and eventual reaffirmation of the Tull family - fierce, embittered Pearl, left by Beck to raise handsome, thrusting Cody, Jenny, the pediatrician losing herself in devotion to others, and docile Ezra, whose attempts to unite them all around a table at his eccentric Homesick Restaurant are the focus of their differences and their bond. In The Accidental Tourist, Macon - a man of habit and routine, who writes guide books for businessmen who hate to leave home - is confronted by chaos in his own family life. Between aching sadness and glorious absurdity, Macon hesitantly emerges from his sage cocoon into the vibrant, unpredictable world of the outrageous Muriel...And Breathing Lessons, which won the Pulitzer Prize, lays bare the anatomy of a marriage. On the round trip to a friend's funeral, Maggie and Ira Moran make detours literal and metaphorical - into the lives of grown children, old friends, total strangers and their own past - and, despite Ira's disappointments and Maggie's optimistic determination to rearrange life as she would like it to be, an old married couple fall in love all over again.

Wicked and Weird: The Amazing Tales of Buck 65


Rich Terfry - 2015
    Born in a small town in Nova Scotia to a mother who begins yelling at him the moment he is born and a father who keeps his own counsel, Buck imbibes fear and insecurity like other kids guzzle milk. Hobbled by his fears and demons, Buck almost disappears into the “evil in the woods” that lurks just beyond the town's border . . . until he is saved by three gifts: baseball, romantic love and music. His epic journey­­—full of diversions, coincidences, and larger-than-life characters—out of the darkness of his suicide-plagued childhood and into the bright wide world begins with a killer pitching arm (Buck almost makes it to the pros) and continues with his transformation into hip hop artist Buck 65. Along the way, Buck develops into a hopeless romantic and an obsessively creative, shape-shifting man who both fears life and dives into it with abandon. Wicked and Weird is a lively, sometimes shocking portrait of a life lived on the edge, by turns funny and heartbreaking.

Let Me Die in Ireland, the True Story of Patrick


David W. Bercot - 1999
    Patrick and presents the authentic, stirring account of one of the greatest missionaries who ever lived. Patrick gave up a comfortable life as an upper-class citizen of Roman Britain to live in poverty, suffering, and constant danger in Ireland. Although ridiculed and rejected by his own people in Britain, Patrick changed the course of an entire nation.

My Sister's Child


Caroline Finnerty - 2015
     Jo is the elder sister, responsible and hardworking. Isla is carefree and has always avoided being tied down. The sisters have always had a strained relationship, but when Isla asks Jo for something that rocks the very foundations of the family that Jo has worked so hard to have, she is horrified. And, as Isla persists in her pleas, Jo fears she will lose the one thing she holds most dearly. Thought-provoking and compelling, this is a layered and moving story of sisterhood, love and lies and the finely-woven link between nature and nurture that will challenge the way you think about motherhood.

Sudden Fury


Leslie Walker - 1989
    One of the couple's three adopted children, he was shy and emotionally undemonstrative. His background and the circumstances leading to murder are the thrust of this searching study by Baltimore Evening Sun reporter Walker, less a true-crime re-creation than the story of a tortured being. Larry was given up by his birth mother when he was two and shunted from family to family, none of them willing to cope with his increasing insecurity and alienation. At age six, he was adopted by Bob and Kay Swartz, a model church-going Catholic couple but severe and demanding of their children, the father's temper sometimes growing into physical abuse.

After Mandela: The Battle for the Soul of South Africa


Alec Russell - 2009
    But despite Mandela’s mission of reconciliation, rampant inequality remains; race relations are uneasy, violence is endemic and many in the ANC appear to have lost sight of the liberation ideals. With the election in 2009 of Jacob Zuma, a charismatic populist embroiled in scandal, uncertainty over the trajectory of the nation has only intensified. South Africa now stands at a crossroads, and award-winning journalist Alec Russell draws on his deep knowledge of the country to tell us how it got there and to give us a compelling account, revised and updated for this edition, of the journey from Mandela to Zuma.

Soldier: Respect Is Earned


Jay Morton - 2020
    Drawing on his extraordinary personal experience, it provides in-depth, comprehensive lessons and practical takeaways.Whether serving as an elite soldier, training as a high-level shooter or becoming an expert in HALO (high-altitude, low-opening) and HAHO (high-altitude, high-opening) parachuting, Jay has always strived to be at the very top of the game.More than most, Jay knows that military service develops skillsets you’d never dreamed of having, and which can be applied to our day-to-day lives. We are prone to underestimating ourselves, but physical and mental endurance and resilience – as well as realising our own full potential – are well within our reach.

Robert Black: The True Story of a Child Rapist and Serial Killer from the United Kingdom


C.L. Swinney - 2015
    Starting at the age of five, he recalls being sexually curious and began placing items in his anus at the age of eight. He'd sexually assault hundreds of little girls before committing his first murder. Sadly, as law enforcement stumbled along with no leads or evidence, Robert Black would strike repeatedly destroying families and preying on innocent little girls in the United Kingdom.

Kerry Katona Too Much, Too Young


Kerry Katona - 2006
    By the age of 13 she could beat grown men at pool and knew how to look after her mother during a breakdown. By the age of 15 she had lived in womens life.