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Recommended
Reading - selection of recent bestsellers and
releases
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| Small Island by Andrea Levy |
| It is 1948, and
England is recovering from a war. Queenie Bligh's neighbours do not approve
when she takes in Jamaican lodgers. Gilbert Joseph was one of the several
thousand Jamaican men who joined the RAF to fight against Hitler. Returning to
England as a civilian he finds himself treated very differently. |
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| '...It’s an engrossing read - slyly funny, passionately angry
and wholly involving.. ' |
| The Kite Runner
by Khaled
Hosseini |
 |
A wonderful, beautiful epic of a
novel. Set in Afghanistan and the United States between the 1970s to the
present day. It is a heartbreaking tale of a young boy, Amir, and his best
friend who are torn apart. It describes how political events affect the life
and perceptions of a twelve year-old boy. |
| ... Rich in
warmth and humour … full of haunting images … vivid and engaging
... |
| Brick Lane by Monica Ali |
| At the tender age
of eighteen, Nazneen's life is turned upside down. After an arranged marriage
to a man twenty years her elder she exchanges her Bangladeshi village for a
block of flats in London's East End. In this new world she struggles to make
sense of her existence - and to do her duty to her husband. |
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| '...Brick Lane has everything: richly complex characters, a gripping
story and it's funny too.. ' |
| The Da Vinci
Code
by Dan Brown |
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Robert Langdon, Harvard Professor
of symbology, receives an urgent late-night call while in Paris: the curator of
the Louvre has been murdered. Alongside the body is a series of baffling
ciphers. Langdon and a gifted French cryptologist, Sophie Neveu, are stunned to
find a trail that leads to the works of Da Vinci - and further. |
| Unless Landon and
Neveu can decipher the labyrinthine code and quickly assemble the pieces of the
puzzle, the Priory's secret - and a stunning historical truth - will be lost
forever. |
| To order any of these books
click here to fill in a form or call us on 44 07
09 |
| The Piano
Tuner by Daniel
Mason |
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On a misty London afternoon in
1886, piano tuner Edgar Drake receives a strange request from the War Office:
he must leave his wife, and quiet life to travel to the jungles of Burma to
tune a rare piano. So begins the journey across Europe, the Red Sea, India,
Burma, and the remote highlands of the Shan States. |
| ... Sensuous
and lyrical, rich with passion and adventure, The Piano Tuner is a hypnotic
tale of myth, romance and self-discovery. It is an unforgettable and haunting
novel ... |
A Bend in the
River
by V.S.Naipul
When Salim, a young Indian man, is offered a small
business in Central Africa, he accepts. As he strives to establish himself, he
becomes closely involved with the fluid and dangerous politics of the
newly-dependent state. |
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| Y: The Descent
Of Man by Steve
Jones |
 |
This book is about science
not society; about maleness not manhood. The condition is, in the end, a matter
of biology. We understand from hormones to hydraulics how man's machinery
works, why he dies so young and how his brain differs from that of the rest of
mankind. |
| "This is
science communication at its best: authoritative, witty and packed with human
interest."
|
| Life of
Pi by Yann
Martel |
 |
Life of Pi is a tale of disaster
at sea. The only survivor from the wreck of a cargo ship on the Pacific, 16
year old Pi spends 221 days on a lifeboat with a hyena, a zebra (with a broken
leg), a female orang-utan and a Tiger called Richard Parker ... |
Yann Martel’s third work of fiction, Life of Pi, is a
terrific book. It's fresh, original, smart, devious, and crammed with absorbing
lore... Margaret Atwood.
|
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Bad Blood
by Lorna Sage
Winner of the Whitbread Prize for Biography, this
is the story of her childhood in the Welsh Borders, her difficult adolescence
and the trauma of an unplanned pregnancy in the 1960's. |
| "Not
just an exquisite personal memoir, it is a vital piece of our collective
past."
|
Berlin:The Downfall 1945
by Anthony Beevor |
| On 16 April, 1945, along the Oder Neisse front, 2.5
million Soviet troops attacked 1 million Germans. Hitler had sworn that Germany
would never be invaded. With scores to settle from the 1941 German invasion of
Russia, the battle was a terrifying example of fire and sword, with mass rape,
murder, pillage and destruction. |
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| The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger |
| The
extraordinary story of Clare and Henry, who have known each other since Clare
was six and Henry thirty-six, and married when Clare was twenty-two and Henry
thirty. Impossible but true, because Henry is one of the first people to be
diagnosed with Chrono-Displacement Disorder. |
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| Periodically his genetic clock resets and he finds himself suddenly
pulled into his past or future. His disappearances are spontaneous and his
experiences are both harrowing and amusing. |
| Pompeii by Robert
Harris |
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Harris takes a familiar
historical event, the volcanic obliteration of an Italian city in AD79, and
seamlessly weaves a labyrinthine plot in and around the existing facts. As the
famous catastrophe approaches, we are immersed in the sights, sounds and smells
of the Ancient World. |
| ... as
explosive as Etna, as addictive as a thriller, as satisfying as great history
... |
| The Curious Incident Of The Dog In The Night-Time
by Mark Haddon |
| Christopher
Boone is fifteen and has Asperger's, a form of autism. He loves lists, patterns
and the truth. He hates the colours yellow and brown and being touched. He has
never gone further than the end of the road on his own, but when he finds a
neighbour's dog murdered he sets out on a terrifying journey which will turn
his whole world upside down. |
 |
... A murder mystery novel like no other ...
... Both funny and deeply moving
... |
| Fingersmith by Sarah Waters |
| 
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London, 1862. Sue Trinder,
orphaned at birth, grows up among petty thieves - fingersmiths - under the
rough but loving care of Mrs Sucksby and her 'family'. But from the moment she
draws breath, Sue's fate is linked to that of another orphan growing up in a
gloomy mansion not too far away. |
| A chilling,
ingenious, erotic thriller - unputdownable. |
 |
White
Family
by Maggie Gee
This ambitious, groundbreaking novel takes on the
taboo subject of racial hatred as it looks for the roots of violence within the
family and within British society. |
| "... complex, many-layered
and as readable and quickly satisfying as a television
soap..." |
| The Lovely
Bones by Alice Sebold |
 |
A story of life, death,
forgiveness and vengeance, told from the perspective of a murdered girl. Susie
Salmon, murdered at the age of 14, watches from heaven as her friends and
siblings grow up and do all the things she never had the chance to do herself.
But then she finds that life is not quite finished with her yet.
|
| "Sebold
has given us a fantasy fable of great authority, charm and daring. She's a
one-of-a-kind writer" - Jonathan Franzen |
| Unless by Carol Shields |
The dazzling
Booker-shortlisted novel from Carol Shields, author of The Stone
Diaries, winner of the Pulitzer prize, and Larry's Party, winner of
the Orange prize.
Unlessis a dazzling and daring novel from
the undisputed master of extraordinary fictions about so-called 'ordinary'
lives.
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| '...Breathtaking... a masterpiece.. ' |
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Daughter of Fortune
by Isabel Allende
A beautifully written romance set in Chile and
California, this is being hailed as the finest book to date from Isabel
Allende. |
Things My Mother Never Told Me
by
Blake Morrison |
 |
Blake Morrison writes about his
mother with the mind of a poet, the eye of a detective and the heart of a
loving son. This is her startling and touching story; the truth about the
remarkable Kerry girl who qualified as a doctor in Dublin in 1942, worked in
British hospitals throughout the war, and reinvented herself again to adapt to
a quiet post-war family life. |
| Any Human
Heart by William
Boyd |
Through the
intimate journals of Logan Mountstuart we travel from Uruguay to Oxford, Paris,
the Bahamas, New York and West Africa, and meet his three wives, his family,
his friends and colleagues, his rivals, enemies and lovers, including the Duke
and Duchess of Windsor, Ernest Hemingway and Virginia Woolf.
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Atonement
by Ian
McEwan
Paperback edition of McEwan's finest work to date
- a beautifully evoked tale of love, betrayal, and ultimately, the atonement
suggested by the title.
...a fascinatingly strange, unique and gripping
novel...
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