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Holes in the Ground: War and Ore
When Thomas Longois Lefoy is sent to Tangiers to investigate a German plot involving Moroccan phosphates, he uncovers a sinister Soviet Union involvement in the Asturias miners’ strike of 1934 and its unforeseen consequences for Andoni Arriola, a Basque metallurgist. As he delves deeper into the case, he finds himself caught in a web of intrigue involving the Spanish Civil War, the injury and death of British intelligence agents, and the protection of Britain’s interests in the iron and copper mining industries. As he travels from Tangiers to Gibraltar, Huelva, and Bilbao, he witnesses the devastating effects of civil war and the destruction of open-cast mining. Along the way, he encounters Heinrich Rathenau, a German industrial chemist seeking refuge, and becomes embroiled in a dangerous game of espionage and political maneuvering that reveals the high stakes of international trade and the human cost of war.
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Gunner's Island
Gunner’s Island is a post-war novel that will engage dog lovers, military veterans, history enthusiasts, and undoubtedly anyone who is all three. Set in the small town on a tiny Canadian maritime island, the story unfolds with the return of World War II pilot Linus, following a plane crash that left him irrevocably altered. Linus is grappling with PTSD and acclimation back into civilian life, when he is mysteriously befriended by Gunner, a full grown and affable Newfoundland dog.
With a wide array of detailed characters and scenes that jump between flashbacks and present life, Gunner’s Island is both a drama and comedy. It is earnest yet jocular, weighty yet wholesome, and meant to set sail the reader into the story as effortlessly as its northern ocean waves.
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Grasp the Nettle
Set in a remote district of Western Australia in the 1920s, an era which outlawed suicide, an unidentified body has been found and police are treating the death as suspicious. The story presents a chance for strangers (the reader) to peruse the very private diaries of the protagonists. Intriguingly, this is like peeping through the coin slot of a piggy bank to count the wealth inside. Elsie has married Tom in an arrangement brokered by her brother. Tom’s job is delivering the Royal Mail, and it takes him away from home for weeks at a time. Vivacious, imaginative young Elsie must entertain herself in their isolated, unsophisticated bush hut. Married women were not allowed to be financially independent. Grasp the Nettle is not a fairytale ‘lived happily ever after’ romance, but a lode of accurate historical data balanced by details of underlined moral standards of life before the advent of reliable contraceptives, and acknowledgement of gender diversity. In those harsh times, things that are commonplace for us today were yet to be invented: like mobile phones, internet communications, and GPS. There were not even engineered roads through country districts in this vast nation, Australia. Grasp the Nettle poses the question: how did people cope with life’s challenges?
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George (The Teenage Years)
This is an introduction of George to the masses. He is the representative of a whole lost generation (lost to the government and the British public) who have recently been in the news as the revelation of who they are comes out.
George tells the story of an 11-year-old Windrush boy who arrived in England from the island of Jamaica in 1965. The story is narrated in third-person and speaks of the boy’s first experience of being in a cold country, the absence of an introduction to his new family, the difficulties he faces as a new boy in a new school, the struggles to find his place, his resistance in conforming to stereotypical expectations and his fights to maintain the self-pride and independence he learnt from his early years in Jamaica.
As George progresses through the school and struggles to assimilate, he moves from being the outsider to become a cultural educator and a facilitator of his peers and brings together the different groups within his association. However, he has difficulty reconciling his family and church life with his secular associates. Through the boy’s eyes, the narrator depicts how it was at that time for the West Indian immigrant community in London and the group of unnoticed children whom they brought from the islands, how they mixed and associated with each other, their embryonic family and the indigenous population.
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For All Time
Would the actions of someone born nearly two hundred years ago affect the lives of those today? Writer Ellie Fuller was about to find out as she sifted through the journals, letters and keepsakes of Liza Marchant, and as she wrote, she began to sense all the magic of a bygone age.
Was Liza the scarlet woman that she had been labelled or was she someone who had many twists and turns in her life, one who subsequently became an inspiration to those around her and continued to do so from beyond the grave?
Ellie begins to see her, feel her and even smell her, and she becomes quite unnerved by the experience, but when her brother Eddy has the same dreams, they both know that they must lay Liza to rest by accurately piecing together her life story and following the routes that she took so many years ago.
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Bright Shadow
This is the story of Katherine Plantagenet, self-proclaimed “daughter, sister and aunt of kings” who endures extraordinarily traumatic reversals of fortune, as her life swings through wealth and adversity. A glittering future as an English princess is swept away by the untimely death of her father, Edward IV, and the usurpation of her brother Edward V's throne. Surrounded by murderous intrigue, conspiracy and ambition, Katherine and her sisters fear what lies in store … The pragmatic marriage of the eldest, Bessy, to the victor of Bosworth, Henry Tudor, brings an uneasy peace to Katherine's young life but the shadows of suspicion and rebellion continue to swirl around her.
Katherine witnesses first hand the events that plague her brother-in-law's reign. As a political expedient, she is given in marriage to William Courtenay, heir to the Earl of Devon, but Henry Tudor's paranoia soon falls upon her beloved young husband who is imprisoned in the Tower. An intelligent and resilient woman, in a world where men hold all the power, Katherine fights her way alone through a tense decade that ends in personal tragedy. With a vow of celibacy as her chosen route of self-preservation, Katherine continues to tread a wary path of survival ... until the charming Benedict Haute enters her life. However, the failure of Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon to produce a living son changes the way any Plantagenet is viewed by the king; Katherine knows her royal blood could cause trouble for her family.
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A Slaver’s Tide
When George Tyler, captain of the slave ship Charlotte, is becalmed in the middle of the Atlantic, time is not on his side. In the cargo hold are hundreds of thirsty slaves, and water supplies are low. Running out of options Tyler orders the crew to do the unthinkable and throw many of the slaves overboard to drown.
As Tyler sails back into Bristol, the story of the Charlotte ignites a debate about the future of slavery. On one side are the abolitionists, determined to force the government to end slavery; on the other, the traders themselves, uncaring about anything except maintaining the wealth the trade brings. And in the middle, imprisoned and awaiting trial for murder, Tyler must confront his own morality and pick a side – the abolitionists or the traders.
Told from the perspective of the men who ran the trade and the sailors who participated in it, and those who worked to end slavery, A Slaver’s Tide is at times confronting, shocking and moving. It is the story of the best and worst of humanity and one man’s journey through guilt and damnation to what lies beyond.
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A Fine Line
A story of the extraordinary lives of ordinary people.
Set between Victorian Liverpool and Dundee and the battlefields of the First World War, three families face the perils of life on the economic cliff-edge, where a single misstep can send lives plunging out of control.
Crossing a century of dramatic change, their journey begins in the aftermath of the slave trade, moving through the era of Empire expansion and Industrial Revolution to a time of religious strife and global conflict.
The world they navigate is one fraught with hazard in which exploitation, zealotry and violence lead to rape, prostitution, fraud, and murder.
At its heart, two indomitable women – lifelong friends – choose very different paths as they strive to hold their worlds together, and to survive.