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Star of the Sea By Joseph O’Connor
In the bitter winter of 1847 the Star of the Sea sets sails for New York from an Ireland torn by injustice and natural disaster. On board are hundreds of fleeing refugees. Among them are a maidservant with a devasting secret, bankrupt Lord Merridith and his family, an aspiring novelist, a maker of revolutionary ballads, all braving the Atlantic in search of a new home. All are connected more deeply than they can possibly know. But a camouflaged killer is stalking the decks, hungry for the vengeance that will bring absolution.
Here's what our celebrity reviewers thought...
"I actually do think Star of the Sea is a modern masterpiece... every single phrase is so considered and weighted... the language is absolutely gorgeous." Bob Geldolf
"You can't put Star of the Sea down once you start." Bonnie Greer
Joseph O’Connor was born in Dublin. He has written ten widely acclaimed and best-selling books including the novels Cowboys and Indians, shortlisted for the Whitbread Prize, Desperadoes, The Salesman and, most recently, Inishowen. His work has been published in eighteen languages.
(ISBN: 0099469626) Published by Random House
>>Buy Star of the Sea By Joseph O’Connor
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Lucia, Lucia By Adriana Trigiani
Lucia Sartori is the beautiful 25-year-old daughter of a fine Italian immigrant family in Greenwich Village, New York, in 1950. Fuelled by the post-war boom, in which talented girls with ambition are encouraged to follow their dreams, Lucia becomes an apprentice for a clothing designer at a chic department store on Fifth Avenue. When a handsome stranger comes to the story and catches her eye, it is love at first sight for both of them. In order to win Lucia's hand, he must first win over her traditional family and make the proper offer of marriage. Their love affair takes an unexpected turn as secrets are revealed, Lucia's family honour is tested, and her own reputation becomes the centre of a sizzling scandal.
Here's what our celebrity reviewers thought...
"For any woman that thinks that feminism might not have done anything for them, they should read this book." Amy Lamé
"Lucia, Lucia is not just a valentine's card to the 1950s, you look at it as though you are watching The Wizard of Oz and Dorothy gets hurt." James Sherwood
Adriana Trigiani grew up in Big Stone Gap, Virginia, and now lives in New York. In addition to being the author of Big Stone Gap, Big Cherry Holler and Milk Glass Moon, Adriana is an award-winning playwright, television writer and documentary filmmaker. She has written the screen adaptation of her novel Big Stone Gap, which she will also direct.
(ISBN: 0743239261) Published by Simon & Schuster
>>Buy Lucia, Lucia By Adriana Trigiani
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Brick Lane By Monica Ali
Nazneen's inauspicious entry to the world, an apparent stillbirth on the hard mud floor of a Bangladeshi village hut, imbues in her a sense of fatalism that she carries across continents when she is married off to Chanu. Her life in London's Tower Hamlets is, on the surface, calm. Yet Nazneen walks a tightrope stretched between her daughters' embarrassment and her husband's resentments. Into that fragile peace walks Karim. He sets questions before her, of longing and belonging; he sparks in her a turmoil that reflects the community's own; he opens her eyes and directs her gaze - but what she sees, in the end, comes as a surprise to them both.
Here's what our celebrity reviewers thought...
"There were some really good characterisations. Nazneen (the protagonist) - she's wonderfully drawn." Shobna Gulati
"The father is, I think, the strongest character. You feel more for him... this yearning to go back and yet of course his children have no interest whatsoever in giving up electricity and rock 'n' roll." Eve Pollard
Monica Ali was born in Dhaka, Bangladesh, and grew up in England. She lives in London with her husband and two small children. She is a Granta Best of Young British Novelist 2003. Brick Lane was one of this year’s nominations for the Man Booker Prize.
(ISBN: 0552771155) Published by Transworld
>>Buy Brick Lane By Monica Ali
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Starter For Ten By David Nicholls
The year is 1985 and Brian has just started his first term at university, armed with the obligatory CND membership and a complete set of Kate Bush albums. But he also has a dark secret - a long-held, burning ambition to appear on University Challenge and now, finally, it seems the dream is about to become reality. He's made the team, they've successfully completed the qualifying rounds and are limbering up for their first televised match in January. Surely it's only a matter of time before Brian is shaking hands with Bamber Gascoigne and holding aloft the silver-plated commemorative plaque? But Brian has a whole lot of living to do before then and when he falls in love with his team-mate, the off-puttingly posh Alice, he finds there's more than a spanner in the works.
Here's what our celebrity reviewers thought...
"I sniggered, I snorted and I hooted. I always know when I've enjoyed a book when it goes lumpy because I've taken it into the bath with me." Jenny Eclair
"Starter For Ten is more than a comedy, it's like exquisite farce." Paul Morley
David Nicholls is one of the most successful young screenwriters working in television. His credits include the third series of Cold Feet (for which he received a BAFTA nomination for his writing), I Saw You and Rescue Me, which he also created. In the past he has worked as an actor and script-editor, before starting work as a full-time writer in 1999, when he co-wrote the screenplay for the film Simpatico, an adaptation of a Sam Shepard play, which starred Jeff Bridges and Sharon Stone, Albert Finney and Nick Nolte. Starter For Ten is David’s debut novel.
(ISBN: 0340734868) Published by Hodder
>>Buy Starter For Ten By David Nicholls
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The Lovely Bones By Alice Sebold
Susie Salmon, raped and murdered at the age of 14, watches from heaven as her friends and siblings grow up and do all the things she never had the chance to do herself. But then she finds that life is not quite finished with her yet. The Lovely Bones is a luminous and astonishing novel about life and death, forgiveness and vengeance, memory and forgetting. It is, above all, a novel which finds light in the darkest of places, and shows how even when that light seems to be utterly extinguished, it is still there, waiting to be rekindled.
Here's what our celebrity reviewers thought...
"The Lovely Bones really was a profoundly all incompassing book that I found totally engrossing. It's actually the only book I have ever read in one day." Kevin O'Sullivan
"I was in tears quite a few times because it really struck a chord - this hopelessness, this helplessness, not being able to do anything, just having to deal with the tradegy." Anne Diamond
At the age of 18 as a college student, Alice Sebold was beaten and viciously raped by a stranger. The police said she was very lucky not to have been killed because another girl was found dismembered in the same place. Alice’s memoirs, Lucky, was published at the same time as The Lovely Bones and follows her dreadfully difficult path to recovery and justice - including taking the man to court and seeing him locked up behind bars. The Lovely Bones is her debut novel and in the US has become the most successful debut novel since Gone with the Wind. Alice lives in California with her husband, Glen David Gold.
(ISBN: 0330485385) Published by Pan Macmillan
>>Buy The Lovely Bones By Alice Sebold
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White Mughals By William Dalrymple
Set in and around Hyderabad, India at the beginning of the nineteenth century, White Mughals tells the story of the improbably romantic love affair and marriage between James Achilles Kirkpatrick, a rising star in the East India Company, and Khair-un-Nisa, a Hyderabadi princess. As Kirkpatrick gradually goes native (adopting local clothes and undergoing circumcision) he becomes a secret agent working for his wife's royal family against the English, as he tries to balance the interests of both cultures.
Here's what our celebrity reviewers thought...
"White Mughals does take a lot of concentration because William Dalyrymple is immaculate as a historian... but once you really get over that hump you are so seduced by the detail of the world he reveals that it doesn't feel like work anymore... it is so worth it." Meera Syal
"White Mughals is a monumental work of history." Robert Elms
Dalrymple is steeped in India, having lived there for six years, and written a series of remarkable travel books chronicling its past and present, including City of Djinns and The Age of Kali. Having already earned comparisons with great travel writers like Chatwin and Theroux, Dalrymple has now produced a meticulously researched and beautifully written historical narrative on one of the most colourful but neglected aspects of British colonial rule in India. William Dalrymple’s first book In Xanadu won the Yorkshire Post Best First Work Award. His second City of Djinns won the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award and the Sunday Times Young British Writer of the Year Award. His third From the Holy Mountain was shortlisted for the Duff Cooper Prize and the Thomas Cook Award. He also wrote and presented the television series Stones of the Raj and Indian Journeys, which won the Grierson Award for Best Documentary Series at BAFTA in 2002.
(ISBN: 0006550967) Published by Harper Collins
>>Buy the White Mughals By William Dalrymple
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Notes on a Scandal By Zoe Heller
Pottery teacher Sheba lets herself be talked into an affair with 15-year-old pupil Connolly; part of what is admirable about this novel is that there is no real attempt to extenuate this - it's wrong and she knows this from the start, enough to lie to herself and others about it. It's an abuse of her very limited power - he is one of the few of her pupils interested in art, not interested in perpetually disrupting her lessons. Sheba is not alone in abusing power, though, and Heller forces us to confront this unpleasant truth about the moralising, managerial headmaster, the husband freed by Sheba's action to seduce his own very slightly older students, and the relatives who never liked her much and can now disown her. Above all, she devotes much of the novel to Barbara, the older colleague who becomes Sheba's confidante and slowly manipulates the situation to make Sheba entirely dependent on her. This is a brilliantly gloomy study in obsession - and the obsession in question is not actually Sheba's with her underage lover.
"It's beautifully written... and because it's seen through female eyes it's not - in my view - lacivious at all." Esther Rantzen
"I loved the book." Liz Lawrence
Zoe Heller’s first novel, Everything You Know, was published by Viking in 1999. She writes a column for the Daily Telegraph and was Columnist of the Year for 2002. She lives in New York. Notes on a Scandal was one of this year’s nominations for the Man Booker Prize.
(ISBN: 0141012250) Published by Penguin
>>Buy Notes on a Scandal By Zoe Heller
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The Bookseller of Kabul By Asne Seierstad
Two weeks after September 11th, award-winning journalist Asne Seierstad went to Afghanistan to report on the conflict there. In the following spring she returned to live with an Afghan family for several months. For more than 20 years Sultan Khan defied the authorities - be they Communist or Taliban - in order to supply books to the people of Kabul. He was arrested, interrogated and imprisoned by the Communists, and watched illiterate Taliban soldiers burn piles of his books in the street. He even resorted to hiding most of his stock in attics all over Kabul. But while Khan is passionate in his love of books and hatred of censorship, he is also a committed Muslim with strict views on family life. As an outsider, Seierstad is able to move between the private world of the women - including Khan's two wives - and the more public lives of the men. And so we learn of proposals and marriages, suppression and abuse of power, crime and punishment. The result is a moving portrait of a family and a clear-eyed assessment of a country struggling to free itself from history.
"One of the most iconic images for all of us in the West is the burka and this really gives you a chance to peek beneath the veil, which is amazing." Andrea Catherwood
"I really liked the bookseller in the beginning, he seemed quite caring and he wanted to sell his books and increase the culture of Afghanistan. But in the end he was just a pig." Shazia Mirza
Asne Seierstad was born in 1970 and studied Russian, Spanish and the History of Philosophy at Oslo University. She has worked as a war correspondent, first in Russia between 1993 and 1996, then in China in 1997. Between 1998 and 2000 she reported on the war in Kosovo for Norwegian television, and in 2000 she published With Their Backs to the Wall: Portraits from Serbia. In autumn 2001 she spent three months in Afghanistan, reporting for a number of major Scandinavian newspapers. In spring 2003 she reported on the war in Iraq from Baghdad.
(ISBN: 1844080471) Published by Time Warner
>>Buy the Bookseller of Kabul By Asne Seierstad
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NATIONAL LIBRARY FOR THE BLIND
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Imagine not being able to get hold of the book all your friends are saying you must read. Newspapers, magazines and TV shows are telling you it’s one of the best books they’ve ever read, but you can’t read it, let alone express your views or vote for it.
Thankfully that is not the case with Richard and Judy’s Best Read!
The National Library for the Blind (NLB) worked closely alongside Richard and Judy to make sure blind and partially sighted people could take part in the Best Read.
NLB has produced the short-listed books in Braille and these are now available to borrow or buy by contacting the charity on 0161 406 2525 or emailing the National Library for the Blind here
However, it is a disturbing fact that only 5% of the books published in the UK each year are available for blind and partially sighted people to read in Braille, audio or large print.
This is because, amazingly, it is largely down to charities to make sure that books are produced in formats that visually impaired people can read. It costs NLB around £1,000 to produce each new book in Braille. NLB are only a small registered charity and receive no regular government funding and the entire library is stocked only because of the generosity of their donors.
Blind NLB Member, Joyce Illingworth says, ‘I’ve had always loved reading and I hated the thought that I was going to miss out on books just because now I couldn’t see. NLB has given the pleasure of books back to me. It’s a fantastic resource which opens doors and unlocks the world of books for people like me who can no longer read print.’
Blindness should not be the end to a love of books and a joy of reading. However, it’s a sad reality, that without NLB many visually impaired people would find it impossible to continue reading.
Your help is urgently needed to keep the world of reading open to blind people. To find out more or a make gift, visit their website at NLB Online
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