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My not so perfect life
Katie Brenner has the perfect life: a flat in London, a glamorous job and a super-cool Instagram feed. OK, so the truth is that she rents a tiny room with no space for a wardrobe, has a hideous commute to a lowly admin job and the life she shares on Instagram isn’t really hers. But one day her dreams are bound to come true, aren’t they? Until her not-so-perfect life comes crashing down when her mega-successful boss Demeter gives her the sack. All Katie’s hopes are shattered. She has to move home to Somerset, where she helps her dad with his new glamping business. Then Demeter and her family book in for a holiday and Katie sees her chance. But should she get revenge on the woman who ruined her dreams - or try to get her job back? Does Demeter – the woman who has everything – actually have such an idyllic life herself? Maybe they have more in common than it seems. And what’s wrong with not-so-perfect, anyway? Everybody loves Sophie Kinsella: "I almost cried with laughter" Daily Mail "Hilarious . . . you'll laugh and gasp on every page" Jenny Colgan "Properly mood-altering . . . funny, fast and farcical. I loved it" Jojo Moyes "A superb tale. Five stars!" Heat.
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Shopaholic To The Stars
Becky Brandon (nee Bloomwood) has stars in her eyes. She and her daughter Minnie have joined husband Luke in LA-city of herbal smoothies and multimillion-dollar yoga retreats and the lure of celebrity.
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Peaches for Monsieur Le Cure
A welcome return to the village in rural France that was the setting for Joanne Harris's remarkable and much-loved number one bestseller Chocolat It isn't often you receive a letter from the dead. When Vianne Rocher receives a letter from beyond the grave, she has no choice but to follow the wind that blows her back to Lansquenet, the village in south-west France where, eight years ago, she opened up a chocolate shop. But Vianne is completely unprepared for what she finds there. Women veiled in black, the scent of spices and peppermint tea, and there, on the bank of the river Tannes, facing the square little tower of the church of Saint-Jerôme like a piece on a chessboard – slender, bone-white and crowned with a silver crescent moon - a minaret. Nor is it only the incomers from North Africa that have brought big changes to the community. Father Reynaud, Vianne's erstwhile adversary, is now disgraced and under threat. Could it be that Vianne is the only one who can save him?
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In One Person
Spanning fifty years, In One Person is an breathtaking examination of sexual identity A compelling novel of desire, secrecy, and sexual identity, In One Person is a story of unfulfilled love tormented, funny, and affecting and an impassioned embrace of our sexual differences. Billy, the bisexual narrator and main character, tells the tragicomic story (lasting more than half a century) of his life as a ‘sexual suspect’, a phrase first used by John Irving in 1978 in his landmark novel of ‘terminal cases’, The World According to Garp. His most political novel since The Cider House Rules and A Prayer for Owen Meany, John Irving’s In One Person is a poignant tribute to Billy’s friends and lovers a theatrical cast of characters who defy category and convention. Not least, In One Person is an intimate and unforgettable portrait of the solitariness of a bisexual man who is dedicated to making himself ‘worthwhile’.
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No Place for a Man
Jess has just waved goodbye to her darling son, off backpacking to Oz. She's left with two teenage daughters and husband Matt - all of whom find themselves regularly featured in her popular and lighthearted newspaper column in which she conveys to her readers an enviably cheery muddle of family life. Things become less rosy when Matt, after twenty years with the same firm, is made redundant. Only Jess sees the potential calamity in this. Matt is delighted with his new freedom and takes to hanging out at the local bar with others of the male barely-employable tendency, drinking and drifting and dreaming up hopeless schemes to make them all rich. Daughter no. 1, meanwhile, has taken up with a mysterious boy living in an abandoned car on the allotment, and her younger sister is over-burdened with a surfeit of secrets. For Jess, trying to hold everything together and missing her first-flown child, it becomes ever-harder to maintain the carefree façade for her readers. Of course she could just tell them the truth...
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The Small Boat of Great Sorrows
Hugely satisfying. This book has all the power of a great thriller, with the intelligence and humanity of the best serious fiction.' Acclaimed by Fergal Keane and Val McDermid, the eagerly awaited second novel by CWA John Creasey Award winner Dan Fesperm Vlado Petric, former detective in war-torn Sarajevo, has left his beloved homeland to join his wife and daughter in Germany, where he scratches a meagre living in the building sites of the new Berlin. When Petric returns to work one evening, he finds an enigmatic American investigator waiting for him in the small apartment he and his wife share. The investigator (Pine) works for the International War Crimes Tribunal, and he tells Petric that they want him to return to Croatia. It doesn’t take Petric long to accept, especially when Pine tells him they are after a big fish: the man whom they think is responsible for a terrible massacre in Srebrenica. What Petric doesn’t know is that he is also being used as a bait to lure a murderer from the previous generation into the open; a man whose activities in the Second World War makes the current generation of killers look like amateurs. The Small Boat of Great Sorrows is a wonderful, thought-provoking, gripping novel; crime in so much as it needs a label, international thriller in its scope and narrative drive. Like John Le Carre and Robert Harris, Fesperman moves seamlessly between time schemes as the past informs and impacts on the present – and nowhere is this more evident than in the Balkans with its traumatic history. In Fesperman, we have a quality author, writing novels packed with authentic detail, and characters who are totally believable
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Shopaholic Ties the Knot
Rebecca Bloomwood has the dream job. She's a personal shopper, so is able to spend other people's money all day instead of her own. And she gets paid for doing it. The perfect job, the perfect man gorgeous Luke Brandon and now... the perfect wedding. Yes, Luke has proposed and wedding bells are in sight. No excuses are needed to start the shopping trip of all time. And Becky's parents are just assuming that the wedding will be at home a marquee in the garden and Becky in her mum's wedding dress, which she's been saving specially for the occasion. But Luke's mother has very different ideas a huge affair in New York in a forest glade setting or perhaps a Venetian Ball, or a fin de-siecle extravagance? Now Becky's getting confused. She doesn't want to say 'no' to anyone. The plans are going ahead, and soon it will be too late to turn back from either wedding.
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Before I Go To Sleep
'As I sleep, my mind will erase everything I did today. I will wake up tomorrow as I did this morning. Thinking I'm still a child. Thinking I have a whole lifetime of choice ahead of me ...' Memories define us. So what if you lost yours every time you went to sleep? Your name, your identity, your past, even the people you love - all forgotten overnight. And the one person you trust may only be telling you half the story. Welcome to Christine's life.
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The Mistress Of Spices
Tilo, an immigrant from India, runs an Indian spice shop in Oakland, California. While she dispenses the classic ingredients for curries and kormas, she also helps her customers to gain a more precious commodity: whatever they most desire. For Tilo is a Mistress of Spices, a priestess of the secret, magical powers of spices.nnThrough those who visit and revisit her shop - Ahuja’s wife, caught in an unhappy, abusive marriage; Jagjit, the victim of racist attacks at school; the noisy bougainvillaea girls, rejecting the strict upbringing of their tradition-bound Indian parents; Haroun who drives a taxi and dreams the American dream - we get a glimpse into the life of the local Indian expatriate community. To each Tilo dispenses wisdom and the appropriate spice: coriander for sight; turmeric to erase wrinkles; cinnamon for finding friends; fenugreek to make a rejected wife desirable again; chillies for the cleansing of evil. But when a lonely American comes into the store, a troubled Tilo cannot find the right spice, for he arouses in her a forbidden desire, and following her own desires will destroy her magical powers.nnCompelling and lyrical, full of heady scents and with more than a touch of humour, this novel explores the clash between East and West even as it unveils the universal mysteries of the human heart. About the Author Born in India, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni lives near San Francisco with her husband and two children. She teaches creative writing at a local college, and is the coordinator for a helpline for South Asian women. She is the author of several award-winning volumes of poetry, as well as Arranged Marriage, her acclaimed collection of short stories, a bestseller in America and winner of the PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Prize for fiction, an American Book Award, and the Bay Area Book Reviewers Award for fiction. She is also the author of two novels, The Mistress of Spices and Sister of My Heart. Table of Contents A splendid novel, beautifully conceived and crafted','A marvellous combination of myth and romance, social critique and poetry','A dazzling tale of misbegotten dreams and desires, woven with poetry and storyteller magic','Fascinating stuff…appealingly flavoured and colourful','Divakaruni's magic [is] her ability to craft such a complex tale written so exquisitely without overwhelming her reader'
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Cocktails For Three
Three women, smart and successful, working in the fast and furious world of magazines, meet for cocktails and gossip once a month.Roxanne: glamorous, self-confident, with a secret lover - and hoping that one day he will leave his wife and marry her.Maggie: capable and high-achieving, until she finds the one thing she can't cope with - motherhood.Candice: honest, decent, or so she believes - until a ghost from her past turns up, and almost ruins her life.A chance encounter in the cocktail bar sets in train an extraordinary set of events which upsets all their lives and almost destroys their friendship.
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The Wedding Girl
At the age of eighteen, in that first golden Oxford summer, Milly was up for anything. Rupert and his American lover Allan were all part of her new, exciting life, and when Rupert suggested to her that she and Allan should get married, just so that Allan could stay in the country, Milly didn't hesitate.Ten years later, Milly is a very different person. Engaged to Simon – who is wealthy, serious, and believes her to be perfect – she is facing the biggest and most elaborate wedding imaginable. Her mother has it planned to the finest detail. Milly’s dreadful secret is locked away so securely she has almost persuaded herself that it doesn't exist – until, with only four days to go, her past catches up with her.
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Sleeping Arrangements
Chloe needs a holiday. She's sick of making wedding dresses and her partner Philip has trouble at work. Her wealthy friend Gerard has offered the loan of his luxury villa in Spain -- perfect. Hugh is not a happy man. His immaculate wife Amanda seems more interested in the granite for the new kitchen than in him, and he works so hard to pay for it all, he barely has time for his family. But his old schoolfriend Gerard has lent them a luxury villa in Spain -- perfect. Both families arrive at the villa and get a shock: Gerard has double-booked. An uneasy week of sharing begins, and tensions soon mount in the soaring heat. But there's also a secret history between the families -- and as tempers fray, an old passion begins to resurface....
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A Short History Of Nearly Everthing
Bill Bryson describes himself as a reluctant traveller: but even when he stays safely in his own study at home, he can't contain his curiosity about the world around him. A Short History of Nearly Everything is his quest to find out everything that has happened from the Big Bang to the rise of civilization - how we got from there, being nothing at all, to here, being us. Bill Bryson's challenge is to take subjects that normally bore the pants off most of us, like geology, chemistry and particle physics, and see if there isn't some way to render them comprehensible to people who have never thought they could be interested in science. It's not so much about what we know, as about how we know what we know. How do we know what is in the centre of the Earth, or what a black hole is, or where the continents were 600 million years ago? How did anyone ever figure these things out? On his travels through time and space, he encounters a splendid collection of astonishingly eccentric, competitive, obsessive and foolish scientists, like the painfully shy Henry Cavendish who worked out many conundrums like how much the Earth weighed, but never bothered to tell anybody about many of his findings. In the company of such extraordinary people, Bill Bryson takes us with him on the ultimate eye-opening journey, and reveals the world in a way most of us have never seen it before.
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The Secret Dreamworld Of A Shopaholic
Retail therapy is the answer to all her problems. She knows she should stop, but she can't. She tries Cutting Back, she tries Making More Money. But neither seems to work. The stories she concocts become more and more fantastic as she tries to untangle her increasingly dire financial difficulties. Her only comfort is to buy herself something - just a little something... Can Becky ever escape from this dream world, find true love, and regain the use of her Switch card?
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Shopaholic Abroad
For Rebecca Bloomwood, life is peachy. She has a job on morning TV, her bank manager is actually being nice to her, and when it comes to spending money, her new motto is Buy Only What You Need - and she's really (sort of) sticking to it. The icing on the brioche is that she's been offered a chance to work in New York. New York! The Museum of Modern Art! The Guggenheim! The Metropolitan Opera House! And Becky does mean to go to them all. Honestly. It's just that it seems silly not to check out a few other famous places first. Like Saks. And Bloomingdales. And Barneys. And one of those fantastic sample sales where you can get a Prada dress for $10. Or was it $100? Is Becky too dazzled to care?