Hobbies and Crafts

Her Sisters Gift - Isabel Jackson
While her mother is at home giving birth, eleven-year-old Isa must look after her younger siblings, but when her little sister is killed in an accident on a trainline she carries the guilt through the rest of her life.

As Isa grows up, more tragedy strikes: her mother dies of a broken heart after giving birth to a stillborn son, and her father finds solace in heavy drinking. Though Isa finds satisfaction in domestic service for an aristocratic family in London, when her father returns home from the First World War paralysed and suffering memory loss, she must return home to take care of her family once more.

Yet there is only so much Isa can endure over the years, and discovering her husband’s affair is the final straw. Believing she has failed as a sister, a daughter, a wife and a mother, she makes an irrevocable decision… but will she realise in time that her troubled past can also give her the strength to carry on?



The Girl With No Name - Diney Costeloe

A most gripping and moving novel about a child who escapes from Nazi Germany to England on the Kindertransport, by the author of bestselling The Throwaway Children.

Lisa is thirteen when she arrives in England in August 1939, with just one precious letter from the mother she will never see again. Bullied at school for being German, worse is to come when the Blitz blows her new home apart and she wakes up in hospital, with no memory of who she is or where she came from. Only the letter in her pocket gives a clue as to her identity, so the authorities give Lise a new name, make her a ward of court and despatch her to a children's home.

But one person is sure that she is still alive - Harry, the trouble-prone boy who protected her at school is determined to find and rescue Lisa again if he can

Stella is dropping out for now. Mersey will be posting later tonight so sorry folks vote won't be until tomorrow now.

A Humble Companion by Laurie Graham

Loyalty tested to the limit. Dangerous secrets to keep.
A lifelong friendship between a princess and a commoner.
Nellie Welche's life changes for ever when she's proposed as companion to Princess Sophia, daughter of mad King George III and Queen Charlotte. Taken into the heart of the family, Nellie is privy to the innermost secrets of the rotten House of Hanover.
From the first rumblings of the French Revolution to the beginnings of the railway age, Nellie charts their story as she and Sofy support each other through the ups and downs of their extraordinary lives.

A Man Called Ove by Fredrik Backman

At first sight, Ove is almost certainly the grumpiest man you will ever meet. He thinks himself surrounded by idiots - neighbours who can't reverse a trailer properly, joggers, shop assistants who talk in code, and the perpetrators of the vicious coup d'etat that ousted him as Chairman of the Residents' Association. He will persist in making his daily inspection rounds of the local streets.
But isn't it rare, these days, to find such old-fashioned clarity of belief and deed? Such unswerving conviction about what the world should be, and a lifelong dedication to making it just so?
In the end, you will see, there is something about Ove that is quite irresistible...

My first suggestion is -
The Stone Cutter. by Camilla Lackberg.

The remote island of Fjallbacka has sent its share of tragedy, though perhaps none worse than that of the little girl found in a fisherman's net. But this was no açcidetal drowning......

Local detective Patrol Hedstrom has just become a father. It's his grim task to discover who could be behind the murder of a child both he and his partner Rica knew well.

What he does not know is how this case will reach into the dark heart of Fjallbacka and tear aside its adylic façade, perhaps forever...



Second suggestion -

Middlemarch by George Eliot

Miiddlemarch is an acclaimed picture of life as it was lived at the time of the 183 Reform Bill and the coming of the railways.
At yhre heart of the novel are the questions of vocation and marriage, sacrifice and dedication, compromise and ambition.
Its heroine is Dorothea, whose passionate nature and disillusionment in her marriage to Casaubon reach tragic proportions.
Her position is mirrored by that of young Dr. Lydgate, whose aims are frustrated not only y his own weakness and the egotism of his beautiful wife Rosamond, but also by the jealousies, intrigues and political squabbles of Middlemarch itself.

Their parallel experiences, along with Bulstrode the banker and Will Ladislaw, the cousin and antithesis of Casaubon, are central threads in the 'web of relationships' that is the substance and theme of Midlemarch.

Greaders suggestions March – april 2016-03-10
The taming of the queen by Philippa Gregory

Kateryn Parr, a thirty-year-old widow in a secret affair with a new lover, has no choice when a man old enough to be her father who has buried four wives - King Henry VIII - commands her to marry him.

Kateryn has no doubt about the danger she faces: the previous queen lasted sixteen months, the one before barely half a year. But Henry adores his new bride and Kateryn's trust in him grows as she unites the royal family, creates a radical study circle at the heart of the court, and rules the kingdom as Regent.

But is this enough to keep her safe? A leader of religious reform and the first woman to publish in English, Kateryn stands out as an independent woman with a mind of her own. But she cannot save the Protestants, under threat for their faith, and Henry's dangerous gaze turns on her.The traditional churchmen and rivals for power accuse her of heresy - the punishment is death by fire and the king's name is on the warrant...

From an author who has described all of Henry's queens comes a deeply intimate portrayal of the last: a woman who longed for passion, power and education at the court of a medieval killer

Leaving Time by Jodi Piccoult
. Alice Metcalf and her husband Thomas run an elephant sanctuary in Tennessee. Alice is a scientist who was studying elephants in Botswana when she met Thomas from Tennessee who visited to see the elephants there to see if their behaviour in the wild was different to that in captivity.
Jenna Metcalf is their daughter, she was with her mother the night she disappeared but she remembers nothing. Her father is in an asylum and she now lives with her grandmother who finds it too painful to talk about what happened.
Ten years on Jenna is the only one who still seems to care and she is determined to seek the truth.
To find her mother Jenna enlists the help of Serenity, a psychic with spirit guides, and Virgil an ex detective.

From Perse
will recommend two but will not be able to vote but will look in after 16th to see what I can read

What Doesn't Kill Her by Carla Norton

Reeve LeClaire is a college student, dammit, not Daryl Wayne Flint’s victim. Not anymore—not when Reeve is finally recovering a life of her own after four years of captivity.

Flint is safely locked up in Olshaker Psychiatric Hospital, where he belongs. He is walking the grounds of the forensic unit, performing his strange but apparently harmless rituals. It seems that he is still suffering the effects of the head injury he suffered in the car crash that freed Reeve seven years ago. Post-concussive syndrome, they call it.

For all that Flint seems like a model patient, he has long been planning his next move. When the moment arrives, he gets clean away from the hospital before the alarm even sounds. And Reeve is shocked out of her new life by her worst nightmare: Her kidnapper has escaped.

Less than 24 hours later, Flint kills someone from his past--and Reeve's blocked memories jolt back into consciousness. As much as she would like to forget him, she knows this criminal better than anyone else. When Flint evades capture, baffling authorities and leaving a bloody trail from the psychiatric lock-up to the forests of Washington state, Reeve suddenly realizes that she is the only one who can stop him.

and

The Quality of Silence by Rosamund Lupton (author of Afterwards and Sister which most of us have read)

On 24th November Yasmin and her deaf daughter Ruby arrive in Alaska. Within hours they are driving alone across a frozen wilderness Where nothing grows Where no one lives Where tears freeze And night will last for another fifty-four days. They are looking for Ruby's father. Travelling deeper into a silent land. They still cannot find him. And someone is watching them in the dark.

Two books as usual please. Vote will be when all suggestions are in. Persephone won't be able to vote as she is internetless Aaaw!!! Come back soon Perse. :-)