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These books are all available from Medway Libraries. Select the title and it will open up in a new window on the book's page on the Amazon website, which gives a review of the book and often the first few pages.
Select the link above to return to the index of books grouped aphabetically by the author's name.
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Author
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Title
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Copies
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Notes
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Davies, Peter Ho
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The Welsh Girl
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12
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In 1944, a German Jewish refugee is sent to Wales to interview Rudolf Hess; in Snowdonia, a 17-year-old girl, the daughter of a fiercely nationalistic shepherd, dreams of the bright lights of an English city; and in a nearby POW camp, a German soldier struggles to reconcile his surrender with his sense of honour.
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Dash, Mike
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Batavia's Graveyard
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12
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In 1628, the Batavia, the newest ship in the Dutch East India Company's fleet set sail on its maiden voyage to Java, with its hold crammed full with gold, silver and precious stones.
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Davies, Martin
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The Conjuror's Bird
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12
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It seems a long time ago that Fitz and Gabby were together, with his work on extinct species about to make him world-famous. Now, it’s his career that is almost extinct.
Suddenly, though, the beautiful Gabby reappears in his life. She wants his help in tracing the history of The Mysterious Bird of Ulieta, a creature once owned by the great 18th-century naturalist Joseph Banks.
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Dawson, Jill
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Fred and Edie
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9
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In the winter of 1922 Edith Waters and her younger lover, Freddy Bywaters, were found guilty of murdering Percy Waters, Edith's boorish husband. The two lovers were executed in a whirl of publicity in 1923.
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Dickason, Christie
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The Principessa
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12
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Robert Cecil, Secretary of State to James I, has a problem. He owes a vast and secret debt to the Prince of La Spada, who is dying and has called in the loan - and Cecil cannot pay.
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Deane, Seamus
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Reading in the Dark
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9
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Ghosts haunt the stairwells of apartment buildings, a curse follows two families down through the generations, close friends turn out to be police informers and the police are as likely to persecute an innocent man as protect him.
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Dickens, Charles
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Bleak House
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12
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As the interminable case of Jarndyce and Jarndyce grinds its way through the Court of Chancery, it draws together a disparate group of people:
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Donnelly, Jennifer
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A Gathering Light
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12
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When Mattie Gokey is given a bundle of letters to burn she fully intends to execute the wishes of the giver, Grace Brown. When Grace Brown is found drowned the next day in Big Moose Lake, Mattie finds that it is not as easy to burn those letters as she had thought.
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Doyle, Roddy
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A Star Called Henry
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6
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Born in the Dublin slums of 1902, his father, a one-legged whorehouse bouncer and settler of scores, Henry Smart, has to grow up fast. By the time he can walk he's out robbing and begging, often cold and always hungry, but a prince of the streets.
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Drapes, Jonathan
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Never Admit to Beige
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11
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Trigg Harvey has lost his job, his flat, his friends and his trousers. Now, he wants his luck back. Trigg's search takes him to Australia's Gold Coast.
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Duffy, Carol Ann
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The World's Wife
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10
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A collection of poems, each of which takes a famous male person or character - Midas, Darwin, Quasimodo, Pontious Pilate, King Kong - and presents their story from the perspective of the lesser-known wife.
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Eggers, Dave
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How we are Hungry
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12
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These stories will make you appreciate that Dave Eggers and the short story were made for each other.
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Ellis, Bret Easton
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Glamorama
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6
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Set in 1990s Manhattan, Victor Ward, a model with perfect abs and all the right friends, is seen and photographed everywhere. On the eve of opening the trendiest nightclub in New York history, he’s living with one beautiful model and having an affair with another. Now it’s time to move to the next stage. But the future he gets is not the one he had in mind.
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Equiano, Olaudah
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The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano or Gustavus Vassa, the African
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9
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Olaudah Equiano recounts his remarkable life story, which begins when he is kidnapped in Africa as a boy and sold into slavery and culminates when he has achieved renown as a British antislavery advocate.
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Esquivel, Laura
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Like Water for Chocolate
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11
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Tita, the youngest daughter of the house, has been forbidden to marry, condemned by Mexican tradition to look after her mother until she dies. But Tita falls in love with Pedro, and he is seduced by the magical food she cooks.
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Faulkner, William
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The Sound and the Fury
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12
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Depicting the gradual disintegration of the Compson family through four fractured narratives, this novel explores intense, passionate family relationships where there is no love, only self-centredness.
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Faulks, Sebastian
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Birdsong
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12
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A 20-year-old Englishman named Stephen Wraysford finds his true love on a trip to Amiens in 1910. Unfortunately, she's already married, the wife of a wealthy textile baron.
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Faulks, Sebastian
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Charlotte Gray
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10
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In 1942, Charlotte Gray, a young Scottish woman, goes to Occupied France on a dual mission: to run an apparently simple errand for a British special operations group and to search for her lover, an English airman called Peter Gregory, who has gone missing in action.
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Faulks, Sebastian
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On Green Dolphin Street
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12
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It's 1959 and the presidential battle between Kennedy and Nixon is heating up. Just as the country stands between two men so does Mary van der Linden, the wife of a British embassy employee in Washington and lover of political newspaper reporter Frank Renzo.
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Fforde, Jasper
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The Eyre Affair
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7
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Thursday Next lives in a world where time and reality are endlessly mutable--someone has ensured that the Crimean War never ended for example--a world policed by men like her disgraced father, whose name has been edited out of existence.
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Flanders, Judith
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A Circle of Sisters
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12
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A collective biography of the four Macdonald sisters, two of whom married the famous painters Edward Burne-Jones and Edward Poynter, while the other two married Lockwood Kipling and Alfred Baldwin and produced between them a poet laureate and a prime minister.
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Susan Fletcher
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Eve Green
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12
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Following the loss of her mother, eight-year-old Evie is sent to a new life in rural Wales where flowers appear mysteriously on doorsteps and people look at her twice.
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Forster, Margaret
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Is There Anything You Want?
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12
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What do Mrs H., Rachel, Edwina, Ida, Sarah, Dot, Chrissie have in common? They're all women, but they're fat, thin, old, young, professional, incompetent - and appear as diverse as human nature can be.
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Forster, Margaret
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Good Wives: Mary, Fanny, Jennie and Me, 1845-2001
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11
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In 1848, Mary Moffatt became the devoted wife of the missionary and explorer, David Livingstone, in Africa and it eventually killed her. In 1960, 112 years later, Margaret Forster married her high school sweetheart, Hunter Davies, in a London Register Office and 40 years later, they are still married.
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Frayn, Michael
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Spies
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11
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In the quiet cul-de-sac where Keith and Stephen live there is very little evidence of the Second World War. But the two friends suspect that the inhabitants of the Close are not what they seem.
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Fyfield, Frances
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Blind Date
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10
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Everyone loved Emma Davey. That is, until someone put a bin liner over her head and kicked her to death. Elisabeth, her sister, finds the quest for love harder. She is haunted by Emma's death and her own attempts to lure the killer into a confession.
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Garcia Marquez, Gabriel
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One Hundred Years of Solitude
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12
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This is the story of seven generations of the Buendi, a family, and of Macondo, the town they have built.
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Gardam, Jane
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Old Filth
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12
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Filth, in his heyday, was an international lawyer with a practice in the Far East. Now, only the oldest QCs and Silks can remember that his nickname stood for Failed In London Try Hong Kong. Long ago, Old Filth was a Raj orphan - one of the many young children sent 'Home' from the East to be fostered and educated in England.
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Gardam, Jane
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Faith Fox
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12
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When sweet, healthy hearty Holly Fox dies suddenly in childbirth, the Surrey village in which she lived reverberates with shock. She leaves behind her a helpless, silent husband, and a tiny daughter, Faith.
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Gaskell, Elizabeth
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Cranford
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12
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This is a comic portrait of an early Victorian country village and its genteel inhabitants, mostly women, whose social attitudes remain firmly unchanging against the modernising world, and whose domestic details dominate conversation.
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Gaskell, Elizabeth
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North and South
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12
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When her father leaves the church, Margaret Hale is uprooted from her comfortable home in Hampshire to move with her family to the North of England.
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Gaskell, Elizabeth
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Wives and Daughters
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11
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Set in the mid-19th century in the small village of Hollingford, in rural England, the Industrial Revolution hasn't yet thrown the country into turmoil, and the railway is just beginning to cut a swathe through the land.
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George, Elizabeth
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A Traitor to Memory
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12
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Viriuoso violinist Gideon Davies has lost his memory of music and his ability to play the instrument he mastered at the age of five. One fateful night at Wigmore Hall, he lifted his violin to play in a Beethoven trio and everything in his mind related to music was gone.
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Gibbons, Stella
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Cold Comfort Farm
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8
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When sensible, sophisticated Flora Poste is orphaned at 19, she decides her only choice is to descend upon relatives in deepest Sussex.
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Gilmour, David
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The Long Recessional: The Imperial Life of Rudyard Kipling
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12
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Rudyard Kipling was a unique figure in British history, a great writer and at the same time a great imperial icon.
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Golden, Arthur
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Memoirs of a Geisha
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10
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A seductive and evocative epic on an intimate scale, that tells the extraordinary story of a geisha girl.
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Grazebrook, Sarah
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Crooked Pieces
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12
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Maggie seems to be going up in the world. Compared to living with her large and impoverished East London family and watching her mother being worn down by life and childbearing, working as a maid is a big improvement.
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Greene, Graham
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The Human Factor
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10
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The main character in this novel, is a double agent, and Greene goes to great pains to bring him to life and try to make his inevitable defection to Russia believable.
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Greene, Graham
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Monsignor Quixote
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12
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With Sancho Panza, a deposed Communist mayor, his faithful Rocinate, an antiquated motorcar, Monsignor Quixote roams through modern-day Spain in a brilliant picaresque fable.
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Gregory, Phillipa
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The Other Boleyn Girl
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9
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This fabulous historical novel is set in the court of King Henry VIII. Mary Boleyn attracts the attention of the young king and becomes his mistress; when he tires of her, she sets out to school her sister, Anne, as a replacement.
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Greig, Andrew
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That Summer
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12
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It is late June and the summer of 1940 is about to become the myth that will define a generation. When Len Westbourne, an inexperienced fighter pilot falls in love with Stella Gardam, a radar operator with a far more worldly attitude, they are all too aware that their time may be short as the War becomes an epic struggle between the Luftwaffe and the RAF - The Battle of Britain.
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Grenville, Kate
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The Secret River
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10
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This story is set in London, 1807. William Thornhill, happily wedded to his childhood sweetheart Sal, is a waterman on the River Thames. Life is tough but bearable until William makes a mistake, a bad mistake for which he and his family are made to pay dearly.
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Griffin, Gwyn
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An Operational Necessity
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6
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To save his boat could the U-boat captain be justified in his actions which involved destroying the wreckage of a recently-torpedoed freighter on which the suvivors were taking refuge.
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Grossmith, George and Weedon
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The Diary of a Nobody
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12
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Humourous fiction of the Edwardian period from the Grossmith brothers, Mr Pooter is an office clerk and upright family man in a dull 1880s suburb.
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