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Iagegu

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Lets see what I can add here over the next few months.

 

 

2008

 

Score, Jilly Cooper - 31/12/08

 

2009

 

The Shell Seekers, Rosamunde Pilcher - 20/1/09

Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte - 4/2/09

The Constant Gardener, John Le Carre - 14/4/09

Handle With Care, Jodi Picoult - 30/5/09

Edited by Iagegu
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Taken from Amazon:

 

'A huge warm saga ... A deeply satisfying story written with love and confidence' -- Maeve Binchy in The New York Times Book Review 'A beautiful, haunting story ... that will tug at your heart strings' -- Prima 'Her genius is to create characters you really care about' -- Daily Express 'A long, beguiling saga, typically English ... Splendid' -- The Mail on Sunday

 

This is a traditional family story, filled with the problems and arguments most families endure (and sometimes enjoy), and set in beautiful places: the Cotswolds, Cornwall and the Mediterranean island of Ibiza. Penelope Keeling, daughter of a Pre-Raphaelite painter, has survived a Bohemian childhood, an unhappy wartime marriage, and the heartache of a love-affair that had to end. In her early sixties a mild heart-attack reminds her that she is not immortal. It is time to build bridges to her three children, who have all grown apart from her: conventional Nancy, whose conviction that she's unloved has made her bitter; devious Noel, who believes he deserves more from life than he's getting; and (Penelope's favourite) Olivia, who must choose between love and ambition. Is she, Penelope wonders, responsible for their unsatisfactory lives? Suddenly the picture by her father which hangs over her fireplace provides a catalyst. After years of bing dismissed as 'old-fashioned' a surge of interest in Victorian paintings sends 'The Shell Seekers' value rocketing. The jubilant children see the solution to all their material problems. But Penelope must decide. Her children's love - and security? Her nostalgic attachment to the picture? Or what she feels is 'right'? Twelve years after its first publication this is still a very good holiday read. (Kirkus UK)

 

Following upon Pilcher's several comfy women's novels and collection of short stories (The Blue Bedroom and Other Stories, 1985) comes this chronicle of an indomitable Englishwoman. Living in her Cotswold cottage as the novel unfolds, Penelope Keeling is in her 60s, recovering from a heart attack and dodging the clumsy attempts of her progeny - a self-satisfied matron named Nancy; hopelessly venal and immature son, Noel; and Olivia, a workaholic magazine editor - to take over her affairs. Penelope is the daughter of Victorian artist Lawrence Stern, and though Noel and Nancy encourage her to sell her small legacy of canvases, Penelope staunchly keeps them, for they remind her of her idyllic childhood on the Cornish coast and of her lover, Richard Lomax, who died scaling the Normandy cliffs in WW II. Then Penelope befriends a young couple, Antonia and Danus, whom she comes to think of as her spiritual heirs. One morning she expires neatly on a garden bench; when her will is read, her greedy children get the shock of their lives - and Danus and Antonia, a windfall. Lots of weepy sentimentalism here, Cornish coast atmosphere, and Cotswold quaintness - in fact, probably enough to compensate for the slim plot and peculiar illogic of Penelope's character: she dies a fully satisfied woman despite the fact that her life has been a long chain of dashed hopes and misfortunes. (Kirkus Reviews)

 

 

This is such a great book. I was totally hooked from the first page until the very last. Was just very disappointed that it was not longer. This is the second book I have read by this author and I shall definitely be looking for more.

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Taken from Amazon:

 

Le Carre's new novel starts backstage at the British embassy in Cairo. Sandy, an apparently decent Englishman is in a bit of a state. Tessa, an Englishwoman married to Justin, a not very impressive Embassy official, has been brutally murdered up country; her companion, a charismatic African doctor called Bluhm, has disappeared. Sandy, it emerges, was in love with Tessa and rather despised her husband. He seems to suspect Tessa's vanished friend of complicity in her death. But nastier things are going on. Tessa was working on a project which threatened to expose a major international pharmaceutical company's cynical use of the African market to dump waste product - and conduct the kind of experiments on African humans that would not usually be allowed on mice. A great many people, some of them British, wanted her and Bluhm dead. The story of this beautifully written and elegantly paced book is how national self interest and moral principle come into meaningful conflict. These concepts are represented by the initially sympathetic Sandy on the one hand, and failed career diplomat Justin Quayle,constant gardener of the title, on the other. And the conflict is meaningful. One of the things this book (perhaps his best since The Spy Who Came In From The Cold) proves is that Le Carre has not lost his subject matter just because the Berlin Wall has been demolished. His description of the corporate world's lying, bullying and killing in the interests of profit rings horribly true and the faded trappings of decency with which his British stooges, like Sandy, clothe themselves, are all the more powerful because they represent a world in which the author once believed. This is a novel that attacks the English establishment with more force, passion and intelligence than many books which display their radical credentials more publicly and proudly. A powerful, cinematic and morally complicated novel, which should not disappoint either those looking for a good read or those who want the novel to deal seriously with the world around us rather than the existential dilemma of its creators.

 

This is a book that as not really endeared itself to me at all. I found the first 200 pages difficult to the point that I almost gave up on the book several times. I then began to enjoy it and was glad that I had persevered to find that the ending was a complete let down.

 

I have read many other Le Carre books and really enjoyed them so this one will not put me off.

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Charlotte O'Keefe's beautiful, much-longed-for, adored daughter Willow is born with osteogenesis imperfecta - a very severe form of brittle bone disease. If she slips on a crisp packet she could break both her legs, and spend six months in a half body cast. After years of caring for Willow, her family faces financial disaster. Then Charlotte is offered a lifeline. She could sue her obstetrician for wrongful birth - for not having diagnosed Willow's condition early enough in the pregnancy to be able to abort the child. The payout could secure Willow's future. But to get it would mean Charlotte suing her best friend. And standing up in court to declare that she would have prefered that Willow had never been born...

 

Superb book. The author seems to be back on form. I actually found this book difficult to put down.

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