General Chat

As this isn't due to go up until tomorrow I'll give it until Tuesdaypm before the vote.

Two books as usual please.

The Thread by Victoria Hislop

The Thread is set in Greece's second city Thessaloniki with a prologue set in the present day. A young Anglo-Greek hears for the first time the story of his Grandparents and this story starts in 1917. A fire rages out of control and most of the citizens are left homeless. A baby boy is born that night and The Thread follows the story of that child - Dimitri Komninos. As a small boy Dimitri plays on the street with Katerina who is a refugee from Asia Minor, she fled when the Turks invaded her homeland. she learns to do delicate needlework and embroidery.

This is a story of long-lasting, enduring love. It is also the story of a nation and particularly a city. A city that originally housed Muslim Jews and Christians in harmony with each other. Following the turbulent events of the twentieth century. Fires, wars, invasions, dictatorship and earthquakes this country and it's people went through so much. There are heartbreaking scenes within the story - the brutality and violence that happened during the German occupation - the fierce civil war and fighting between the Government and the rebel communists.

The French Affair by Susan Lewis
When Natalie Moore is killed in a freak accident in France her mother knows instinctively there is more to it. However Natalies father is so paralysed by the horror of losing his daughter that he refuses to even discuss his wife's suspicions.

In the end when their marriage is rocked by yet another terrible shock, Jessica decides to go back to France alone in search of some answers. When she gets to the idyllic vineyard in the heart of Bergundy she soon finds a great deal more than she was expecting in a love that is totally forbiddden and a truth that will almost certainly devastate her life.

Hope greaders are looking in.

I'll be back in a few hours (after work) with my suggestions

From Perse
Sisters by Nancy Jensen

All families have secrets, and those kept by the Fischer family are particularly shameful and life changing. In 1927, sisters Mabel and Bertie are separated for life when their stepfather commits suicide and Mabel runs off with Bertie's boyfriend. Following each sister, this multigenerational novel introduces readers to two strong matriarchal families. While the women in each generation fight with their mothers to follow their individual dreams, one granddaughter, aptly named Grace, finally learns most of the family history and creates a necklace that reunites the two clans in a work of beauty.


and

Cemetery Girl by David Bell

Tom and Abby Stuart had everything: a perfect marriage, successful careers, and a beautiful 12 year old daughter Caitlin. Then one day Caitlin vanished without a trace. For a while they grasped at false hope and followed every empty lead, but the tragedy ended up changing their lives, overwhelming them with guilt and dread, and shattering their marriage.
Four years later Caitlin is found alive - dirty and disheveled yet preternaturally calm. She won't discuss where she was or what happened. Then the police arrest a suspect connected to her disappearance, but Caitlin refuses to testify, leaving the Stuarts with a choice: Let the man who may be responsible for destroying their lives walk away, or take matters into their own hands. And when Tom decides to try to uncover the truth for himself, he finds that nothing that has happened yet can prepare him for what he is about to discover.


Persie

Will post mine in a bit
x Jill

The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller

A captivating retelling of the Iliad and events leading up to it through the point of view of Patroclus: it's a hard book to put down, and any classicist will be enthralled by her characterisation of the goddess Thetis, which carries the true savagery and chill of antiquity

and

Love .... From Both Sides by Nick Spalding

Sometimes, the hardest part of finding love is keeping a straight face...

For Jamie Newman, being a single guy isn't proving to be much fun, especially when confronted with a sexually belligerent divorcee and a goddess so far out of his league she might as well be a different species.
Mind you, being a girl in search of love isn't a bowl of cherries either. Just ask Laura McIntyre, who's recently contended with a horny estate agent on a quest for light relief and a rabid mountain bike enthusiast with a penchant for displaying his genitals.
When Jamie and Laura bump into one another (quite literally) it looks like their luck may have changed - but sometimes finding the right person is only the start of your problems...

Will be back

Jan

Recommended this by a friend

Bedpans and Bobby Socks, by Barbara Fox

True story, 3 nurses in the 1950's take the road trip of a lifetime, by working and travelling in the USA and going places that you wouldn't have thought of then .Always hinted at but never told, the daughter of one of the nurses decided to write the book, has been aclaimed as Call the midwife in the USA, but without the nuns or the poverty !!

50 Shades of Grey by E.L.James,

The book of the moment it seems, everyone is talking about it so here is the basics.

literature student goes to interview entrepreneur Christian Grey, finds him attractive but over powering. Convinced that the meeting went badly, she is shocked when he turns up at her part time job and asks her out......what happens next.

One Good Turn by Kate Atkinson

In a book that is more fun than any other book I've read all year, Kate Atkinson creates a series of bizarre characters, all involved with murder--either planning it, committing it, or trying to avoid it. Many seemingly unrelated characters, involved in several seemingly unrelated plot lines, make their appearance in the first fifty pages. During the four days in which the novel takes place, however, these characters and plots start to overlap and eventually come together, until, at the end, the reader is smiling with pleasure at the brilliant plotting and ironic twists of fate--full of admiration for Atkinson's skill in bringing it all together with such panache.


Upon Dark Waters by Robert Radcliffe

31st December 1942. In the middle of the North Atlantic, the deadly 'gap' where aircraft cannot protect them, a destroyer and 4 corvettes are shepherding a convoy of ships from America to Britain. But as midnight passes, the New Year is marked by a white flash on the horizon - a German torpedo. What follows is a night scarred forever in the memory of its survivors. But for Michael Villiers, officer on the HMS Daisy, it is just another chapter in an extraordinary life. The son of a beautiful socialite and a British diplomat, Michael is brought up in Sombreado, Uruguay alongside his guardian's daughter Maria, and the pair are inseparable. Even when he is sent to school in England, the family ranch remains Michael's home and when his schooling is complete, there is never any doubt that he will return to Sombreado, to Maria. But when Michael returns to Montevideo in 1939, his steamer crosses paths with a German warship - an ominous sign of the conflict to come. And though Uruguay is neutral in the coming conflict, Michael is to be allowed no such luxury: the British Legation want him to make the most of his family connections. In a war, the English ambassador explains, everyone has to take sides ...

x Jill

I'm back - internet connection last night was being a pain in the .....

Now You See Me - S J Bolton

Late one night after interviewing a witness, Lacey Flint, a young detective constable, stumbles onto a woman brutally stabbed just moments before. Within twenty-four hours, a reporter receives an anonymous letter pointing out alarming similarities between the murder and Jack the Ripper’s first murder—a letter that calls out Lacey by name. If it’s real, and they have a killer bent on re-creating London’s bloody past, history shows they have just five days until the next attempt.

No one believes the connections are anything more than a sadistic killer’s game, not even Lacey, whom the killer seems to be taunting specifically. But as the case unfolds, the details start reminding Lacey of a part of her own past she’d rather keep hidden. And the only way to do that is to catch the killer herself.

The Candle Man - Alex Scarrow

1912. Locked in an eerily quiet dining room on the Titanic, a mysterious man tells a young girl his life story as the ship begins to sink. It all starts in Whitechapel, London in 1888...In the small hours of the night in a darkened Whitechapel alley, young Mary Kelly stumbles upon a man who has been seriously injured and is almost unconscious in the gutter. Mary - down on her luck and desperate to survive - steals his bag and runs off into the night. Two days later, an American gentleman wakes in a hospital bed with no memory of who he is or how he got there.

Vengeance, Susan Lewis

Kirsten Meredith is a successful, rich and beautiful woman who seems to have it all. But she is also a woman haunted by her past which threatens to ruin her life - a lingering past of loneliness and rejection. And most dangerous of all, of burning vengeance.Lawrence McAllister is the man who walked out on her and broke her heart. Yet he is the only man who can help her fight her worst enemy - Dyllis Fisher, a woman who has vowed to destroy Kirsten's life at all costs. And in a world where bitter vengeance will know no limit, Kirsten needs all the help she can get...

Lost and Found – Kitty Neale

Bullied by everyone around her for years, has Mavis Jackson finally found happiness?

From Helen

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

This is a novel of the jazz age, the story of the fabulously wealthy Jay Gatsby and his love for the beautiful Daisy Buchanan, of lavish parties on Long Island at a time when The New York Times noted “gin was the national drink and sex the national obsession,” it is an exquisitely crafted tale of America in the 1920s. One of the great classics of twentieth-century literature.

The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins

Sixteen-year-old Katniss Everdeen regards it as a death sentence when she is forced to represent her district in the annual Hunger Games, a fight to the death on live TV. But Katniss has been close to death before - and survival, for her, is second nature. "The Hunger Games" is a searing novel set in a future with unsettling parallels to our present. Welcome to the deadliest reality TV show ever...