Mother Country: Britain, the Welfare State, and Nuclear Pollution

Mother Country: Britain, the Welfare State, and Nuclear Pollution

Marilynne Robinson

Fiction / Religion / Essays

At the time when Robinson wrote this book, the largest known source of radioactive contamination of the world's environment was a government-owned nuclear plant called Sellafield, not far from Wordsworth's cottage in the Lakes District; one child in sixty was dying from leukemia in the village closest to the plant. The central question of this eloquently impassioned book is: How can a country that we persist in calling a welfare state consciously risk the lives of its people for profit.
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The Girl Next Door

The Girl Next Door

Jack Ketchum

Horror / Literature & Fiction

Suburbia. Shady, tree-lined streets, well-tended lawns and cozy homes. A nice, quiet place to grow up. Unless you are teenage Meg or her crippled sister, Susan. On a dead-end street, in the dark, damp basement of the Chandler house, Meg and Susan are left captive to the savage whims and rages of a distant aunt who is rapidly descending into madness. It is a madness that infects all three of her sons and finally the entire neighborhood. Only one troubled boy stands hesitantly between Meg and Susan and their cruel, torturous deaths. A boy with a very adult decision to make.
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The Man Who Was Poe

The Man Who Was Poe

Avi

Children's Books / Young Adult

The Old City Lay Dark And Cold...It is night. And Edmund is alone. His mother is gone. His aunt, who went in search of her, is dead. His sister has disappeared. Edmund has no one. Except for a stranger of the night.A dark, mysterious stranger who flees from demons of his own...who follows Edmund with grim determination through the cold and shadow city, promising to help, but often hindering. A stranger who needs Edmund for purpose of his own!
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Diary of a Short-Sighted Adolescent

Diary of a Short-Sighted Adolescent

Mircea Eliade

Spirituality / Travel / Religion

The short-sighted adolescent is a passionate reader who takes various cultural figures as models, trying to emulate both their lives or their works. The pupil protagonist is a poor student, who likes science and reads a lot of books, sometimes staying up all night to do so. At the age of 17, he decides to write a novel to demonstrate to his teachers that he is not as mediocre as his other classmates, and that he is prepared to give up everything he holds dear in order to do so. The novel is written in a number of notebooks - the 'diary' of the title - but our myopic hero ultimately fails 3 subjects and has to repeat the school year. Set in the Romanian capital in the early 20th century, from the perspective of a schoolboy’s diary of his daily life, - his teachers, his classmates' academic and amorous rivalries, his first sexual experiences - we are introduced to the themes of religion, self-knowledge, erotic sensibility, artistic creation and otherness, ideas which would preoccupy him until the end of his life. Diary of a Short-Sighted Adolescent was written by the young Mircea Eliade - one of Romania's greatest writers and intellectuals. The book can be viewed as an early 20th century 'Catcher in the Rye', and allows us an intimate view of the developing genius, whose literary output has been neglected in the English language for too long.
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Blood and Sand

Blood and Sand

Rosemary Sutcliff

Fiction / Children's Books / Memoir

Why on earth, in the Year of Our Lord 1807, was he in Egypt fighting the Turks? Like many a soldier before him and after, Private Thomas Keith of the 78th Highlanders had very little idea of why and his comrades were about to be thrown into battle against superior forces, far away on a foreign field. And later, lying wounded and a prisoner in a village headman’s house, one of a pitiful handful of survivors, he could have had no idea at all that he was at the start of an extraordinary series of adventures that would see him rise to become Emir of the holy Islamic city of Medina…. Based on a true story
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Sharpe's Revenge

Sharpe's Revenge

Bernard Cornwell

Historical Fiction / Mystery & Thrillers

It is 1814 and the defeat of Napolean seems imminent - if the well-protected city of Toulouse can be conquered. For Richard Sharpe, the battle turns out to be one of the bloodiest of the Peninsula Wars, and he must draw on his last reserves of strength to lead his troops to victory. But before Sharpe can lay down his sword, he must fight a different sort of battle. Accused of stealing Napolean's personal treasure, Sharpe escapes from a British military court and embarks on the battle of his life - armed only with the unflinching resolve to protect his honor.
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Oath of Gold

Oath of Gold

Elizabeth Moon

Science Fiction / Fantasy

Paksenarrion-—Paks for short-—was somebody special. Never could she have followed her father's orders and married the pig farmer down the road. Better a soldier's life than a pigfarmer's wife, and so though she knew that she could never go home again, Paks ran away to be a soldier. And so began an adventure destined to transform a simple Sheepfarmer's Daughter into a hero fit to be chosen by the gods.
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The General in His Labyrinth

The General in His Labyrinth

Gabriel García Márquez

Literature & Fiction / Short Stories / Magical Realism

The General in his Labyrinth is the compelling tale of Simon Bolivar, a hero who has been forgotten and whose power is fading, retracing his steps down the Magdalena River by the Nobel Laureate Gabriel Garcia Marquez, author of One Hundred Years of Solitude and Love in the Time of Cholera. 'It was the fourth time he had travelled along the Magdalena, and he could not escape the impression that he was retracing the steps of his life' At the age of forty-six General Simon Bolivar, who drove the Spanish from his lands and became the Liberator of South America, takes himself into exile. He makes a final journey down the Magdalene River, revisiting the cities along its shores, reliving the triumphs, passions and betrayals of his youth. Consumed by the memories of what he has done and what he failed to do, Bolívar hopes to see a way out of the labyrinth in which he has lived all his life. . .. 'An exquisite writer, wise, compassionate and extremely funny' Sunday Telegraph 'An imaginative writer of genius' Guardian 'The most important writer of fiction in any language' Bill Clinton
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Arthur: Book Three of the Pendragon Cycle

Arthur: Book Three of the Pendragon Cycle

Stephen R. Lawhead

Fantasy / Science Fiction / Historical Fiction

In a forgotten age of darkness, a magnificent king arose to light the land They called him unfit to rule, a lowborn, callow boy, Uther’s bastard. But his coming had been foretold in the songs of the bard Taliesin. And he had learned powerful secrets at the knee of the mystical sage Merlin. He was ARTHUR—Pendragon of the Island of the Mighty—who would rise to legendary greatness in a Britain torn by violence, greed, and war; who would usher in a glorious reign of peace and prosperity; and who would fall in a desperate attempt to save the one he loved more than life. ARTHUR “Evocate . . . intriguing . . . enthralling.” –Locus
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