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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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Haddon, Mark
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The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
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12
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Christopher is 15 and has Asperger's, a form of autism. He knows a very great deal about maths and very little about human beings.
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Hagen, George
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The Laments
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12
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When Howard and Julia Lament adopt Will, a baby secretly switched at birth in a bizarre hospital debacle, the Laments begin a journey which takes them from Northern Rhodesia to the Persian Gulf, England and suburban America, as they search for their place in the world.
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Hardy, Thomas
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The Woodlanders
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12
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This story is about a doctor called Katie, and her husband David who undergoes a spiritual conversion, and the affect this has on the lives of herself and her children.
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Harrison, Sarah
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The Grass Memorial
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12
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Stella Carlyle is a successful singer. Quirky, talented, abrasive, sexy, she has serial casual lovers until she falls in love with Robert - an equally successful eye surgeon. But Robert is married, and the strain of their long-standing affair is beginning to tell on both.
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Hattersley, Roy
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Buster's Diaries
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12
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A unique floor-level insight into the aromatic world of the man-owning dog. Buster stepped into the limelight in April 1996 after an incident with a goose in St James's Park, a goose which happened to belong to the Queen.
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Hawks, Tony
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Round Ireland with a Fridge
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10
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A foolhardy attempt to win a drunken bet led to Tony Hawks having one of the most unforgettable experiences of his life. Joined by his trusty travelling-companion-cum-domestic-appliance, he found himself in the midst of a remarkable, inspirational and, at times, downright silly adventure.
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Hawthorne, Nathaniel
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The Scarlet Letter
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12
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Set in the harsh Puritan community of 17th-century Boston, this tale of an adulterous entanglement that results in an illegitimate birth reveals Nathaniel Hawthorne's concerns with the tension between the public and the private selves.
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Heinlein, Robert A
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Stranger in a Strange Land
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12
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The story of Valentine Michael Smith, born during, and the only survivor of, the first manned mission to Mars. Michael is raised by Martians, and he arrives on Earth as a true innocent: He has never seen a woman and has no knowledge of Earth's cultures or religions.
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Heller, Joseph
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Catch 22
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9
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A satirical indictment of military madness and stupidity, and the desire of the ordinary man to survive it. It is a tale of the dangerously sane Captain Yossarian, who spends his time in Italy plotting to survive.
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Hemingway, Ernest
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For Whom the Bell Tolls
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12
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High in the pine forests of the Spanish Sierra, a guerrilla band prepares to blow up a vital bridge. Robert Jordan, a young American volunteer, has been sent to handle the dynamiting. There, in the mountains, he finds the dangers and the intense comradeship of war.
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Hempel, Sandra
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The Medical Detective
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12
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In 1831, an unknown, horrifying and deadly disease from Asia swept across Continental Europe, killing millions in its path, and throwing the medical profession into confusion. Cholera is a killer with little respect for class or wealth, and when it arrived in Britain, its repercussions rocked Victorian England. One man uncovered the truth behind the pandemic, and laid the foundations for the modern, scientific investigation of today's fatal plagues.
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Herbert, James
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Others
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12
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Private investigator Nick Dismas follows the trail of a missing baby to a sinister rest home
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Heyman, Kathryn
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The Accomplice
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12
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One of the most shocking events of the 17th century: the wreck of the Dutch ship Batavia off the coast of Western Australia, and the extraordinary events that befell its stranded survivors.
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Highsmith, Patricia
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Strangers on a Train
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12
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Almost against his conscious will, Guy Haines is trapped in a nightmare of shared guilt and an insidious merging of personalities.
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Hislop, Victoria
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The Island
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12
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On the brink of a life-changing decision, Alexis Fielding longs to find out about her mother’s past. But Sofia has never spoken of it. All she admits to is growing up in a small Cretan village before moving to London. When Alexis decides to visit Crete, however, Sofia gives her daughter a letter to take to an old friend, and promises that through her she will learn more.
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Homes, A M
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This Book will Save your Life
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12
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An uplifting story set in Los Angeles about one man's effort to bring himself back to life. Richard is a modern day everyman; a middle-aged divorcee trading stocks out of his home.
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Hornby, Nick
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How to be Good
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10
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According to her own complex moral calculations, Katie Carr has earned her affair. She's a doctor and her husband David is the self-styled Angriest Man in Holloway. But when David suddenly becomes good - properly, maddeningly, give-away-all-his-money good - Katie's sums no longer add up, and she is forced to ask herself some very hard questions.
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Horspool, David
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Why Alfred Burned the Cakes
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12
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This brilliant book offers a memorable portrait of a great ruler and the myths that grew around him.
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Hosseini, Khaled
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A Thousand Splendid Suns
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12
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Mariam is only f15 when she is sent to Kabul to marry the troubled and bitter Rasheed, who is 30 years her senior. Nearly two decades later, in a climate of growing unrest, tragedy strikes 15-year-old Laila, who must leave her home and join Mariam's unhappy household.
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Hosseini, Khaled
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The Kite Runner
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12
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Twelve-year-old Amir is desperate to win the local kite-fighting tournament and his loyal friend Hassan promises to help him. But neither of the boys can foresee what will happen to Hassan that afternoon, an event that is to shatter their lives.
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Humphreys, John
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Devil's Advocate
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12
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Humphreys, the presenter of Radio Four's Today programme, examines the changes in Britain over the last 40 years and rails against the loss of shame and innocence, the victim culture, the confusion between caring genuinely for something and wearing a ribbon, and consumer populism.
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Hyde, Elizabeth
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The Abortionist's Daughter
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12
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Set in a small town in Colorado, this is a novel of family secrets, dark passion and, ultimately, catharsis for those whose lives have become so strangely entwined.
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Irving, John
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A Prayer for Owen Meaney
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12
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Owen Meany is a dwarfish boy with a strange voice who accidentally kills his best friend's mum with a baseball and believes that he is an instrument of God, to be redeemed by martyrdom.
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James, Henry
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Washington Square
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12
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When timid and plain Catherine Sloper acquires a dashing and determined suitor, her father, convinced that the young man is nothing more than a fortune-hunter, decides to put a stop to their romance.
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James, P D
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Time to be in Earnest
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12
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In this very personal book, part diary, part memoir, P.D. James considers the 12 months of her life between her 77th and 78th birthdays. She remembers her long and remarkable career, from 1920s Cambridge schoolgirl to governor of the BBC to bestselling author.
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Jones, Russell Celyn
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Ten Seconds from the Sun
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12
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Ray Greenland is an exemplary family man and Thames River pilot who can navigate people safely in the here and now, while his wife Lily, in her capacity as a director of a dating agency, arranges their happy futures. But what none of those around him know, including Lily and their children, is that Ray's life is not his own.
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Jooste, Pamela
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Dance with a Poor Man's Daughter
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12
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Through the sharp yet loving eyes of 11-year-old Lily we see the whole exotic, vivid, vigorous culture of the Cape Coloured community at the time when apartheid threatened its destruction.
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Joyce, James
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Ulysses
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12
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The novel deals with the events of one day in Dublin, 16 June 1904, now known as 'Bloomsday'.
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Kafka, Franz
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The Complete Novels
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8
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The Trial is a fusion of nightmare and reality, and The Castle a religious allegory. In America the innocent Karl Rossman falls gradually but unerringly into a state of often comic degradation.
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Kay, Jackie
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Trumpet
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12
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Jackie Kay's first novel is a curious and haunting story about mixed-race jazz trumpeter Joss Moody (Irish mother, black father), who turns out, on his death, to have been a woman all along.
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Keating, Barbara
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Blood Sisters
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12
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Set in Kenya, 1957. During their childhood years in the Kenya Highlands, three girls from vastly different backgrounds become blood sisters, promising that nothing will ever destroy the bond between them. But the legacy of the Mau Mau rebellion, and the tensions and upheavals of newly independent Kenya, tear their childhood dreams apart.
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Kendall, Felicity
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White Cargo
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12
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Felicity Kendal was brought up in India, touring the country as part of a troupe of actors managed by her father. Aged 17, she came to England for the first time. This book describes that exotic upbringing in India and explains what an unusual effect it has had on the rest of her life.
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King, Stephen
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Bag of Bones
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10
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When bestselling crime writer Mike Noonan’s wife dies, he suffers from writer’s block. Until he is drawn from Derry to his lakeside retreat, Sara Laughs - a house once inhabited by a famous singer. It’s a community run by rich, tyrannical, wheelchair-bound Devore and his terrifying, skeletal female bookkeeper.
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Kingsolver, Barbara
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The Poisonwood Bible
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12
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This is a story told by the wife and four daughters of Nathan Price, a fierce evangelical Baptist who takes his family and mission to the Belgian Congo in 1959.
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Koomson, Dorothy
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My Best Friend's Girl
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12
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Best friends Kamryn Matika and Adele Brannon thought nothing could come between them - until Adele did the unthinkable and slept with Kamryn's fiance, Nate. Worse still, she got pregnant and had his child.
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Kraus, Nicole
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The History of Love
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12
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Sixty years ago in the Polish village where he was born Leo fell in love with a young girl called Alma and wrote a book in honour of his love. These days he assumes that the book, and his dreams, are irretrievably lost, until one day they return to him in the form of a brown envelope.
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Kundera, Milan
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The Unbearable Lightness of Being
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12
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A story of irreconcilable love and infidelities in which Milan Kundera addresses himself to the nature of 20th-century 'Being', offering a wide range of brilliant and amusing philosophical speculations.
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Lahiri, Jumpha
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Interpreter of Maladies
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12
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This collection of nine short stories from the Indian-American author won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the Hemingway Foundation / Pen Award.
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Lamb, Wally
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I Know This Much is True
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11
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This story is about identical twins: a paranoid schizophrenic and his brother whose life is dominated by his resentment of and love for his damaged twin. Dominick Birdsey's whole existence is coloured by the knowledge that his twin brother can never be fully responsible for his frightening behaviour, while he himself has beaten the biochemical odds to remain sane.
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Lansens, Lori
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The Girls
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12
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In 29 years, Rose Darlen has never spent a moment apart from her twin sister, Ruby. Yet, in all that time, she has never once looked into Ruby's eyes. Joined at the head, 'The Girls' (as they are known in their small town) attempt to lead a normal life, but can't help being extraordinary.
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Lawson, Mary
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Crow Lake
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11
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Orphaned young, Kate Morrison was her older brother Matt's protege, her curious fascination for pondlife fed by his passionate interest in the natural world. Now a zoologist, she can identify organisms under a microscope, but seems blind to the tragedy of her own emotional life.
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Lee, Laurie
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As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning
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12
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This simple coming-of-age autobiography is that of a young man leaving home to walk around Spain.
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Le Guin, Ursula
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A Wizard of Earthsea
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12
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This tale of wizards and dragons features the character of Sparrowhawk. Tempted by pride to try spells beyond his powers, Sparrowhawk lets loose an evil shadow-beast. Only he can destroy it and so he begins a quest which leads him to all corners of Earthsea. This is the first book in a quartet.
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Leon, Donna
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Death at La Fenice
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12
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The celebrated opera house, La Fenice, has seen its share of death, but none so horrific and violent as that of world-famous conductor, Maestro Helmut Wellauer, poisoned during a performance of La Traviata.
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Lively, Penelope
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The Photograph
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12
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Searching through a little-used cupboard at home, Glyn Peters chances upon a photograph he has never seen before. Taken in high summer, many years earlier, it shows his wife, Kath, holding hands with another man.
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Lodge, David
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Thinks...
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12
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Ralph Messenger is an international academic star in the highly trendy field of language and thought research. Novelist Helen Reed arrives at the university to teach creative writing and to recover from the unexpected death of her husband. Despite huge differences in belief and temperament, they begin a secret affair, with complicated consequences, comic and tragic, for those around them.
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Lynch, Jim
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The Highest Tide
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12
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One unforgettable night, 13-year-old Miles goes to the flats near his home in search of shellfish, only to discover something startling and remarkable: a giant squid. Instantly, he becomes a local celebrity and is pursued by TV crews urging him to explain the phenomenon.
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