Book picks similar to
Parnell: A Novel by Brian J. Cregan


politics
1-colonialism
2-ireland
4-christianity

Private Peaceful


Michael Morpurgo - 2003
    I have the whole night ahead of me, and I won't waste a single moment of it . . . I want tonight to be long, as long as my life . . ." For young Private Peaceful, looking back over his childhood while he is on night watch in the battlefields of the First World War, his memories are full of family life deep in the countryside: his mother, Charlie, Big Joe, and Molly, the love of his life. Too young to be enlisted, Thomas has followed his brother to war and now, every moment he spends thinking about his life, means another moment closer to danger.

Every Time I Think of You


Tracey Garvis Graves - 2014
    But when Daisy’s grandmother is killed in a seemingly random act of violence, Daisy must take steps to protect herself and her child. Despite a thriving career in San Francisco, thirty-six-year-old Brooks McClain has returned home to spend what little time his mother has left before she succumbs to the deadly disease that is ravaging her. The seasoned investigative reporter has taken a position with the local newspaper and been on the job less than twenty-four hours when he’s summoned to cover the death of Pauline Thorpe. Brooks is all business, but the more time he spends with Daisy DiStefano, the more invested he becomes; there’s something about a single mother, a defenseless child, and an unsolved crime that has stirred Brooks’s protective instincts like nothing ever has before. And when the unthinkable happens, Brooks will do whatever it takes to clear the name of the woman he’s fallen for and the child he’ll protect at any cost. Romantic and suspenseful, Every Time I Think of You shows how far two people will go to fight for the ones they love, and the life they’ve always imagined.

The Best Gift of All


Julie Lessman - 2017
    He just longs for his wife. Until they receive ... the best gift of all. Everyone knows Lizzie and John Brady have the perfect marriage. But when Lizzie’s desire to be a good mother eclipses her desire for her husband, the honeymoon is definitely over. Can the spirit of Christmas heal their hearts when Lizzie gives John the best gift of all?

Before I Die


Jenny Downham - 2007
    a brilliantly crafted novel, heartbreaking yet life-affirming.Tessa has just months to live. Fighting back against hospital visits, endless tests, drugs with excruciating side-effects, Tessa compiles a list. It’s her To Do Before I Die list. And number one is Sex. Released from the constraints of ‘normal’ life, Tessa tastes new experiences to make her feel alive while her failing body struggles to keep up. Tessa’s feelings, her relationships with her father and brother, her estranged mother, her best friend, and her new boyfriend, all are painfully crystallised in the precious weeks before Tessa’s time finally runs out.

The Shadow Year


Hannah Richell - 2013
    For Kat and her friends, it offers an escape; a chance to drop out for a while, with lazy summer days by the lake and intimate winter evenings around the fire. But as the seasons change, tensions begin to rise and when an unexpected visitor appears at their door, nothing will be the same again.Three decades later, Lila arrives at the same remote cottage. With her marriage in crisis, she finds solace in renovating the tumbledown house. Little by little she wonders about the previous inhabitants. How did they manage in such isolation? Why did they leave in such a hurry, with their belongings still strewn about? Most disturbing of all, why can t she shake the feeling that someone might be watching her?The Shadow Year is a story of secrets, tragedy, lies and betrayal. It’s a tale that explores the light and dark of human relationships and the potential the past has to not only touch our present, but also to alter our future.

Harm


Hugh Fraser - 2015
     ‘What makes an innocent girl become a contract killer?’ Acapulco 1974: Rina Walker is on assignment. Just another quick, clean kill. She wakes to discover her employer’s severed head on her bedside table, and a man with an AK 47 coming through the door of her hotel room. She needs all her skills to neutralise her attacker and escape. After a car chase, she is captured by a Mexican drug boss who needs her radiant beauty and ruthless expertise to eliminate an inconvenient member of the government. Notting Hill 1956: Fifteen-year-old Rina is scavenging and stealing to support her siblings and her alcoholic mother. When a local gangster attacks her younger sister, Rina wreaks revenge and kills him. Innocence betrayed, Rina faces the brutality of the post-war London underworld - a world that teaches her the skill to kill... “Hugh Fraser’s Harm is the perfect combination of action, mystery and intrigue. It also features some superbly constructed characters, who develop over the course of the story - which is a rarity in mystery novels.” (Benjamin Maio Mackay)

I Know My Love


Catherine Gaskin - 1962
    The story of two women - and a man; of Emmy and Rose, bound to each other irrevocably by ties of friendship and love, and still locked in a ceaseless struggle for the same man, Adam.

Just Like That


Gary D. Schmidt - 2021
    Elene's Preparatory Academy for Girls, where she struggles to navigate the venerable boarding school's traditions and a social structure heavily weighted toward students from wealthy backgrounds. In a parallel story, Matt Coffin has wound up on the Maine coast near St. Elene's with a pillowcase full of money lifted from the leader of a criminal gang, fearing the gang's relentless, destructive pursuit. Both young people gradually dispel their loneliness, finding a way to be hopeful and also finding each other.

The Photograph


Penelope Lively - 2003
    The photograph is in an envelope marked "DON'T OPEN - DESTROY." But Kath's husband does not heed the warning, embarking on a journey of discovery that reveals a tight web of secrets: within marriages, between sisters, and at the heart of an affair. Kath, with her mesmerizing looks and casual ways, moves like a ghost through the memories of everyone who knew her - and a portrait emerges of a woman whose life cannot be understood without plumbing the emotional depths of the people she touched.Propelled by the author's signature mastery of narrative and psychology, The Photograph is Lively at her very best, the dazzling climax to all she has written before.

Blood Rock


James Jackson - 2007
    John stand alone on the small Mediterranean island of Malta against the tide of Islam. The Ottoman emperor, Suleiman the Magnificent, has sent the greatest armada ever to set sail to wipe them off the face of the earth. And there is a traitor among them. Time is running out and Matla’s doom is sealed. But one man will never yield. Englishman Christian Hardy will stop at nothing to save the island. With a band of close companions – the Moor, genius inventor of demonic weapons; Hubert, the would-be warrior priest; the young orphan Luqa and Maria, the beautiful noblewoman who risks all to be with him – Christian must unmask the spy within, take a stand against an unbeatable foe, and change the course of history.

Lecretia's Choice: A Story of Love, Death and the Law


Matt Vickers - 2016
    In Lecretia’s Choice, Matt tells the story of their life together, and how it changed when his proud, fiercely independent wife was diagnosed with a brain tumour and forced to confront her own mortality. The death she faced—slow, painful, dependent—was completely at odds with how she had lived her life. Lecretia wanted to die with dignity, to be able to say goodbye well, and not to suffer unnecessarily—but the law denied her that choice. With her characteristic spirit, she decided to mount a challenge in New Zealand’s High Court, but as the battle raged, Lecretia’s strength faded. She died on 5 June 2015, at the age of forty-two, the day after her family learned that the court had ruled against her. Lecretia’s Choice is not only a moving love story but compulsory reading for everyone who cares about the dignity we afford terminally ill people who want to die on their own terms. In 2015 Matt Vickers supported his wife, Lecretia Seales, in her campaign to gain the right to choose how she died. Lecretia’s Choice is his first book.

The Predictions


Bianca Zander - 2015
    It's the epitome of 1970s counterculture--a place of free love, hard work, and high ideals...at least in theory. The reality is complicated and sometimes fraught, especially as its children reach adolescence. Poppy is drawn to handsome sixteen-year-old Lukas, who's increasingly skeptical of Gaialands and the adults who shape its rules.To help 'heal' the commune's energy, new arrival Shakti harnesses her divination powers in a Predictions ceremony. All of Gaialands' teenagers receive a card outlining their futures. Poppy, predicted to find her true love overseas, joins Lukas when he follows his dream of starting a punk rock band first in Auckland and then on to London, where punk has given way to 80s pop and hair metal. Struggling simply to survive as they navigate the city's squats, pubs, and burgeoning clubs, she and Lukas drift apart. Poppy finds a life that looks very like the one her prediction promised, but is it the one she truly wants? And if not, can she define her own happiness, even if it takes her in unanticipated directions?The Predictions is a mesmerizing, magical novel of fate, love, mistakes, and finding your place.

They Called Themselves the K.K.K.: The Birth of an American Terrorist Group


Susan Campbell Bartoletti - 2010
    They pulled white sheets over their heads, hopped on horses, and cavorted through the streets of Pulaski, Tennessee. Soon, the six friends named their club the Ku Klux Klan and began patterning their initiations after fraternity rites, with passwords and mysterious handshakes. All too quickly, this club would grow into the self-proclaimed “Invisible Empire,” with secret dens spread across the South. On their brutal raids, the nightriders would claim to be ghosts of Confederate soldiers and would use psychological and physical terror against former slaves who dared to vote, own land, attend school, or worship as they pleased.This is the story of how a secret terrorist group took root in America’s democracy. Filled with chilling and vivid personal accounts unearthed from oral histories, congressional documents, and other primary sources, this is a book to read and remember.

The Lost Girls of Devon


Barbara O'Neal - 2020
    When she learns that her old friend and grandmother’s caretaker has gone missing, Zoe and her fifteen-year-old daughter return to England to help.Zoe dreads seeing her estranged mother, who left when Zoe was seven to travel the world. As the four generations of women reunite, the emotional pain of the past is awakened. And to complicate matters further, Zoe must also confront the ex-boyfriend she betrayed many years before.Anxieties spike when tragedy befalls another woman in the village. As the mystery turns more sinister, new grief melds with old betrayal. Now the four Fairchild women will be tested in ways they couldn’t imagine as they contend with dangers within and without, desperate to heal themselves and their relationships with each other.

The Beautiful Cigar Girl: Mary Rogers, Edgar Allan Poe, and the Invention of Murder


Daniel Stashower - 2006
    One year later, a struggling writer named Edgar Allan Poe decided to take on the case-and sent his fictional detective, C. Auguste Dupin, to solve the baffling murder of Mary Rogers in "The Mystery of Marie Rog�t."