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A Sister's Shame


Carol Rivers - 2012
    Eighteen-year-old twins Marie and Vesta Haskins work at the local shoe factory to bring in a few pennies for the family, but they've never given up on their dream of treading the boards in the West End. When a brand new East End club opens its doors, the girls audition for the show and are over the moon to land two nights a week with their cabaret act. But little do they realise that the villainous Scoresby brothers are using the club as a front for a very different line of business.Seeing what is going on behind the smoke and lights of the stage, sensible Marie vows to leave her job at the club before it is too late, but headstrong Vesta has fallen for the Scoresby's handsome right-hand man, Teddy, and unwittingly leads her whole family into the Scoresby's clutches. Will Marie be able to save her family from disaster? Or will Vesta's determination to become a star tear the Haskins family apart?

Lawyer X: A True Story


Jake Banks - 2015
     A bright, young Texas lawyer determined to make it on his own leaves the DA's Office to pursue a career as a criminal defense attorney. Just months later, he finds himself at the center of an international Ecstasy drug trafficking ring. As a charismatic negotiator, Lawyer X ignores danger and resurrects a deal gone bad. Caught red-handed in Paris, France, he lands in prison indefinitely. Isolated from his culture and marked as l'Américain, he is focused on staying alive at a time when Anglo – Franco relations are at an all time low. Facing years in French prison and multiple life terms in the United States, Lawyer X must protect his best friend’s innocence and salvage his own dignity. His mentor, a legendary Dallas attorney, fights to keep him from becoming a casualty in the War on Drugs. A TRUE STORY Hardcover available in 2016

Lake of Slaves (The Lion and the Leopard Trilogy, #2)


Brian Duncan - 2014
    Livingstone's 'Lake of Stars' has become a 'Lake of Slaves'. Alan Spaight is among a handful of British men fighting the slavers. After a year as a trader he starts a coffee plantation, while torn between the enticement of his doctor’s wife and his neighbour’s attractive daughter. He is drawn repeatedly into conflicts with the slavers, in company with mission-educated Goodwill, a former slave who escaped to return to his village. A new Consul, Harry Johnston, brings in British officers and Sikh soldiers in 1891, and the tide turns. After another five years of bitter fighting the slave trade is finally destroyed.

Woman at Point Zero


Nawal El Saadawi - 1977
    Society's retribution for her act of defiance - death - she welcomes as the only way she can finally be free.

The Danish Girl


David Ebershoff - 2000
    Uniting fact and fiction into an original romantic vision, The Danish Girl eloquently portrays the unique intimacy that defines every marriage and the remarkable story of Lili Elbe, a pioneer in transgender history, and the woman torn between loyalty to her marriage and her own ambitions and desires.The Danish Girl is an evocative and deeply moving novel about one of the most passionate and unusual love stories of the 20th century.

The Chocolate Money


Ashley Prentice Norton - 2012
    Babs plays by no one’s rules: naked Christmas cards, lavish theme parties with lewd installations at her Lake Shore Drive penthouse, nocturnal visits from her married lover, who “admires her centerfold” while his wife sleeps at their nearby home. Bettina wants nothing more than to win her mother’s affection and approval, both of which prove elusive. When she escapes to an elite New Hampshire prep school, Bettina finds that her unorthodox upbringing makes it difficult to fit in with her peers, one of whom happens to be the son of Babs’s lover. As she struggles to forge an identity apart from her mother, Bettina walks a fine line between self-preservation and self-destruction. As funny as it is scandalous, The Chocolate Money is Mommie Dearest, Prep, and 50 Shades of Gray all rolled into one compulsively readable book.

Half Broke Horses


Jeannette Walls - 2008
    Now, in Half Broke Horses, she brings us the story of her grandmother, told in a first-person voice that is authentic, irresistible, and triumphant. "Those old cows knew trouble was coming before we did." So begins the story of Lily Casey Smith, Jeannette Walls's no nonsense, resourceful, and spectacularly compelling grandmother. By age six, Lily was helping her father break horses. At fifteen, she left home to teach in a frontier town -- riding five hundred miles on her pony, alone, to get to her job. She learned to drive a car ("I loved cars even more than I loved horses. They didn't need to be fed if they weren't working, and they didn't leave big piles of manure all over the place") and fly a plane. And, with her husband Jim, she ran a vast ranch in Arizona. She raised two children, one of whom is Jeannette's memorable mother, Rosemary Smith Walls, unforgettably portrayed in The Glass Castle. Lily survived tornadoes, droughts, floods, the Great Depression, and the most heartbreaking personal tragedy. She bristled at prejudice of all kinds -- against women, Native Americans, and anyone else who didn't fit the mold. Rosemary Smith Walls always told Jeannette that she was like her grandmother, and in this true-life novel, Jeannette Walls channels that kindred spirit. Half Broke Horses is Laura Ingalls Wilder for adults, as riveting and dramatic as Isak Dinesen's Out of Africa or Beryl Markham's West with the Night. Destined to become a classic, it will transfix audiences everywhere.

Black Swans


Eve Babitz - 1993
    Babitz prowls California, telling tales of a changing world. She writes about the Rodeo Gardens, about AIDS, about learning to tango, about the Hollywood Cemetery, about the self-enchanted city, and, most important, about the envy and jealousy underneath it all. Babitz’s inimitable voice propels these stories forward, corralling everything that gets in their way: sex, rage, the Château Marmont, youth, beauty, Jim Morrison, men, women, and black swans. This exciting reissue further celebrates the phenomenon of Eve Babitz, cementing her reputation as the voice of a generation.

The Overstory


Richard Powers - 2018
    From the roots to the crown and back to the seeds, Richard Powers’s twelfth novel unfolds in concentric rings of interlocking fables that range from antebellum New York to the late twentieth-century Timber Wars of the Pacific Northwest and beyond. There is a world alongside ours—vast, slow, interconnected, resourceful, magnificently inventive, and almost invisible to us. This is the story of a handful of people who learn how to see that world and who are drawn up into its unfolding catastrophe.A New York Times Bestseller.

Band-Aid for a Broken Leg


Damien Brown - 2012
    But the town he's sent to is an isolated outpost of mud huts, surrounded by landmines; the hospital, for which he's to be the only doctor, is filled with malnourished children and conditions he's never seen; and the health workers—Angolan war veterans twice his age who speak no English—walk out on him following an altercation on his first shift. In the months that follow, Damien confronts these challenges all the while dealing with the social absurdities of living with only three other volunteers for company. The medical calamities pile up—including a leopard attack, a landmine explosion, and having to perform surgery using tools cleaned on the fire—but it's through Damien's evolving friendships with the local people that his passion for the work grows. This heartbreaking and honest account of life on the medical front line in Angola, Mozambique, and South Sudan is a moving testimony of the work done by medical humanitarian groups and the extraordinary and sometimes eccentric people who work for them.

The Cellist of Sarajevo


Steven Galloway - 2008
    He vows to sit in the hollow where the mortar fell and play Albinoni’s Adagio once a day for each of the twenty-two victims. The Adagio had been re-created from a fragment after the only extant score was firebombed in the Dresden Music Library, but the fact that it had been rebuilt by a different composer into something new and worthwhile gives the cellist hope. Meanwhile, Kenan steels himself for his weekly walk through the dangerous streets to collect water for his family on the other side of town, and Dragan, a man Kenan doesn’t know, tries to make his way towards the source of the free meal he knows is waiting. Both men are almost paralyzed with fear, uncertain when the next shot will land on the bridges or streets they must cross, unwilling to talk to their old friends of what life was once like before divisions were unleashed on their city. Then there is “Arrow,” the pseudonymous name of a gifted female sniper, who is asked to protect the cellist from a hidden shooter who is out to kill him as he plays his memorial to the victims. In this beautiful and unforgettable novel, Steven Galloway has taken an extraordinary, imaginative leap to create a story that speaks powerfully to the dignity and generosity of the human spirit under extraordinary duress.

Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk


Ben Fountain - 2012
    It explores the gaping national disconnect between the war at home and the war abroad.Ben Fountain’s remarkable debut novel follows the surviving members of the heroic Bravo Squad through one exhausting stop in their media-intensive "Victory Tour" at Texas Stadium, football mecca of the Dallas Cowboys, their fans, promoters, and cheerleaders.

In the Country of Men


Hisham Matar - 2006
    Libya, 1979. Nine-year-old Suleiman’s days are circumscribed by the narrow rituals of childhood: outings to the ruins surrounding Tripoli, games with friends played under the burning sun, exotic gifts from his father’s constant business trips abroad. But his nights have come to revolve around his mother’s increasingly disturbing bedside stories full of old family bitterness. And then one day Suleiman sees his father across the square of a busy marketplace, his face wrapped in a pair of dark sunglasses. Wasn’t he supposed to be away on business yet again? Why is he going into that strange building with the green shutters? Why did he lie? Suleiman is soon caught up in a world he cannot hope to understand—where the sound of the telephone ringing becomes a portent of grave danger; where his mother frantically burns his father’s cherished books; where a stranger full of sinister questions sits outside in a parked car all day; where his best friend’s father can disappear overnight, next to be seen publicly interrogated on state television. In the Country of Men is a stunning depiction of a child confronted with the private fallout of a public nightmare. But above all, it is a debut of rare insight and literary grace.

The Beekeeper of Aleppo


Christy Lefteri - 2019
    They live a simple life, rich in family and friends, in the beautiful Syrian city of Aleppo--until the unthinkable happens. When all they care for is destroyed by war, they are forced to escape. But what Afra has seen is so terrible she has gone blind, and so they must embark on a perilous journey through Turkey and Greece towards an uncertain future in Britain. On the way, Nuri is sustained by the knowledge that waiting for them is Mustafa, his cousin and business partner, who has started an apiary and is teaching fellow refugees in Yorkshire to keep bees.As Nuri and Afra travel through a broken world, they must confront not only the pain of their own unspeakable loss, but dangers that would overwhelm the bravest of souls. Above all, they must journey to find each other again.Moving, powerful, compassionate, and beautifully written, The Beekeeper of Aleppo is a testament to the triumph of the human spirit. It is the kind of book that reminds us of the power of storytelling.

In Search of Mary: The Mother of all Journeys


Bee Rowlatt - 2015
    From the wild coasts of Norway to a naked re-birthing in California, via the blood-soaked streets of revolutionary Paris, Bee learns what drove her hero on and what's been won and lost over the centuries in the battle for equality. On this biographical treasure hunt she finds herself consulting a witch, a porn star, a quiet Norwegian archivist and the tenants of a blighted council estate in Leeds--getting much more than she bargained for. In her quest to find a new balance between careers and babies, Bee also discovers the importance of celebrating the radiant power of love in all our lives.