Book picks similar to
The Windmill Girls by Kay Brellend
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Pachinko
Min Jin Lee - 2017
He promises her the world, but when she discovers she is pregnant — and that her lover is married — she refuses to be bought. Instead, she accepts an offer of marriage from a gentle, sickly minister passing through on his way to Japan. But her decision to abandon her home, and to reject her son's powerful father, sets off a dramatic saga that will echo down through the generations.Richly told and profoundly moving, Pachinko is a story of love, sacrifice, ambition, and loyalty. From bustling street markets to the halls of Japan's finest universities to the pachinko parlors of the criminal underworld, Lee's complex and passionate characters — strong, stubborn women, devoted sisters and sons, fathers shaken by moral crisis — survive and thrive against the indifferent arc of history.
The Long Way Home
Audrey Howard - 2008
Until Amy is torn from her home by her rich aunt, a woman obsessed by religion and snobbery who wants a girl she can mould as she wishes. Clever and pretty, ten-year-old Amy is perfect for her purposes. It is the beginning of a long journey for Amy, as she desperately searches for the family she lost, and a home where she can be free at last from her aunt's possessive tyranny. But she will have to endure a forced marriage and a tragic war before she can at last find what she seeks.
The Lost Coast: A Homecoming Serial
Eli Horowitz - 2017
The Lost Coast is a six-part novella, written to accompany the six episodes of the second season of Homecoming, an audio series starring Catherine Keener, David Schwimmer, and Oscar Isaac.The two works are designed to be read in alternating installments - Episode One of the podcast, then Chapter One of the book, then Episode Two, and so on - but other sequences are probably fine too.
A Girl in Wartime
Maggie Ford - 2016
Instead, she applies for a job at the London Herald, where she meets the handsome editor Stephen Clayton.Nine years her senior, she knows her family won’t approve. She is helplessly drawn to him, and despite a past he won’t talk about, he is undeniably attracted to her. But as the war rages on, will Stephen be forced to enlist, and can their union survive the consequences?
The Locklear Letters
Michael Kun - 2003
His innocent letter requesting an autographed picture begins a bizarre turn of events that eventually costs him his job, foils his romantic intentions toward a coworker, drains his finances, and generally ruins his life. Sid, a Don Quixote character with large blind spots regarding the fate of his one-sided correspondence with the movie star and his own behavior, cannot escape the wrath of lawyers, public relations bulldogs, angry bosses, and ex-girlfriends that drags his life down the tubes. Until he fights back.
Blood at the Premiere
R.R. Haywood - 2016
At a film premiere she tries engaging a producer about a new project… before everything goes terribly wrong.Soon Swallow finds herself on the run amidst the full horror of the Undead. Along with a small band of survivors, and one miserable producer, Swallow must do everything just to stay alive on the blood-soaked streets.As the Undead get more numerous, can she run, beat and hack her way out of trouble?
The Liars' Gospel
Naomi Alderman - 2012
This is the story of Yehoshuah, who wandered Roman-occupied Judea giving sermons and healing the sick. Now, a year after his death, four people tell their stories. His mother grieves, his friend Iehuda loses his faith, the High Priest of the Temple tries to keep the peace, and a rebel named Bar-Avo strives to bring that peace tumbling down. It was a time of political power-play and brutal tyranny. Men and women took to the streets to protest. Dictators put them down with iron force. In the midst of it all, one inconsequential preacher died. And either something miraculous happened, or someone lied.Viscerally powerful in its depictions of the period - massacres and riots, animal sacrifice and human betrayal - The Liars' Gospel makes the oldest story entirely new.
The Doorstep Girls
Valerie Wood - 2002
Friends since early childhood, they have supported each other in bad times and good. But their families are bound together by more than friendship, and secrets from the past threaten to make their lives even more difficult. The local cotton mill has provided work for Ruby and Grace since they were nine years old, and now years later both girls find themselves the object of attention from the mill owner's sons. As times grow harder, and money ever scarcer, Grace becomes involved in campaigns against poverty and injustice, while Ruby is tempted into prostitution. The two girls are searching for something that could take them far away . . . But what price will they pay to find it?If you like books by Katie Flynn and Dilly Court, you'll love Val's heartwarming stories of triumph over adversity.
The Stanford Lasses
Glenice Crossland - 2006
They lost. They lived.
In the small Yorkshire town of Cottenly - dominated by the steel works and surrounded by beautiful countryside - Isaac Stanford lives with his wife Emily and their three lovely daughters, known locally as the Stanford lasses. Alice, the eldest, lives only for her work as a secretary and chapel on Sunday. Fair and loving Lizzie is content with her job making umbrellas - until she falls in love with George Crossman and all she desires is to be a wife and mother. And headstrong Ruth, the merry one, is intent upon marrying handsome charmer, Walter Wray, despite warnings from friends and family.
Already emotionally damaged by a traumatic childhood, Alice struggles to lead a normal life. Poor but happy with her ever increasing family, with the onset of war, Lizzie faces the threat of losing all she holds dear. And Ruth soon realises she has made a terrible mistake in her marriage as she becomes trapped in a life of poverty and violence. As the years pass each sister is forced to confront her greatest challenge ...
O Positive
Joe Dunthorne - 2019
Adopting a sunny, genial tone, Dunthorne lures the reader to darker places, exploring death and dread, failure and regret - the 'lounge of our suffering'. Often, he catches us off-guard: a 'whiplash' effect where poems shift from laughter to slaughter in a moment. Impertinent owls, an immersive theatre troupe, ancient men from the Great War and idiot balloonists - such characters dramatise our human fancies and foibles, joining the protagonist in scenarios both humorously bizarre and all-too-familiar. These performances serve to probe and unpeel the layers of the self - all the way down to the raw.
Tell Me Tomorrow
Lynda Bellingham - 2013
She has a daytime show that has an audience of millions. She seems to have it all. But behind the tirelessly successful facade lies the story of a woman who nearly lost everything. This is the story of a woman who could not keep love in her life. The love of neither her father nor her mother. Who lost the love of her life the first time around, then lost the love of her own child. She could not even find love in herself. This is a story about women, about their sugar and spice, about the deep natural instincts that drive women through whatever society is trying to pin on them at the time. It is also about love, where to look for it and how to hold on to it when it is found.
What I Was
Meg Rosoff - 2007
H recalls when he himself was sixteen—his godson’s age—as they search for the site of H’s life-altering friendship with a boy named Finn. Finn lives alone on an isolated slip of land and follows no rules: he spends his days swimming, fishing, and collecting driftwood for his tiny beach hut. H, on the other hand, is an upper-class boarding school boy stifled by monotony and endless rules. They meet by chance on the beach, and H is immediately awed by (and jealous of) Finn’s way of life. They strike up an unlikely friendship but the gap between their lives becomes difficult to bridge, and before long the idyll that nurtured their relationship is shattered by heart-wrenching scandal. Meg Rosoff was formerly a YA author, but her work transcends categorization and we are delighted to bring it to adult readers for the first time. What I Was is a timeless, enthralling story destined to become a classic.
The Other Side of Paradise
Margaret Mayhew - 2009
In Singapore Susan Roper, secure in the supremacy of the British Empire, enjoys dancing,clothes and fast cars, tennis and light flirtations with visiting naval officers- her life is devoted solely to pleasure. When she meets an Australian doctor who warns her of the danger that they all face she dismisses him as an ignorant colonial.
Singapore goes on partying, oblivious to the threat of invasion. The British flag will, they believe, protect them from all enemies. But when Japan invades, Susan finds herself in grave danger. She become an ambulance driver and is taken prisoner by the Japanese. Gradually and reluctantly she realises that she has fallen in love with the tough, arrogant and totally unsuitable doctor, but she has to face many hardships and witness terrible events before she can acknowledge the truth.
You Should Have Known -- Free Preview (The First 4 Chapters)
Jean Hanff Korelitz - 2014
Devoted to her husband, a pediatric oncologist at a major cancer hospital, their young son Henry, and the patients she sees in her therapy practice, her days are full of familiar things: she lives in the very New York apartment in which she was raised, and sends Henry to the school she herself once attended. Dismayed by the ways in which women delude themselves, Grace is also the author of a book You Should Have Known, in which she cautions women to really hear what men are trying to tell them. But weeks before the book is published a chasm opens in her own life: a violent death, a missing husband, and, in the place of a man Grace thought she knew, only an ongoing chain of terrible revelations. Left behind in the wake of a spreading and very public disaster, and horrified by the ways in which she has failed to heed her own advice, Grace must dismantle one life and create another for her child and herself. For readers of the best women's fiction. This is a free preview, not the full book.
Stillwater Creek
Alison Booth - 2010
As the weeks pass, both Ilona and her nine-year-old daughter Zidra get to know the townsfolk. But a gruesome discovery shows that Jingera is not quite the utopia Ilona imagines it to be.