Books from 2008

A Changed Man

by Francine Prose Would you believe a Swastika-tattooed neo-Nazi who walks into a humanitarian organisation run by a Holocaust survivor, announcing he wants to make a radical change in his life and help their cause?

A Close Run Thing

by Allan Mallinson As the war against Bonaparte rages to its bloody end upon the field of Waterloo, a young officer goes about his duty in the ranks of Wellington’s army. He is Cornet Matthew Hervey of the 6th Light Dragoons – a soldier, gentleman and man of honour, who suddenly finds himself allotted a hero’s role.

A Complicated Kindness

by Miriam Toews Nomi Nickel, the charismatic sixteen-year-old narrator, is a sort of female Holden Caulfield. She struggles with the strict conventions imposed by her tightly knit religious community and dreams of running away to the city, but knows that this would break her father’s heart. ..

A Small Part of Me

by Noelle Harrison Christina has been abandoned by her mother at the age of six, and has been brought up by Angeline, her mother’s bohemian best friend. It is an unusual childhood in a world which she doesn’t really understand. Now in her thirties, Christina’s marriage is in trouble, and against all better judgement, she leaves her husband and eldest son and flees to Canada.

A Sunday in the Pool in Kigali

by Gil Courtemenche At the heart of the novel lies one of the darkest chapters in human history, the attempted genocide of the Tutsis by the Hutus in 1994. Despite the book’s bleakness, it is also an extraordinary love story, one that no reader could fail to be ensnared by and reduced to a sobbing wreck.

Aberystwyth Mon Amour

by Malcolm Pryce Through the labyrinth of intrigue that is Aberystwyth walks a man; a latter day knight in tarnished armour – Louie Knight. The town’s only private eye; no one else dares. Two investigations for less than a tenner, every time. That’s how tough he is.

Adept

by Robert Finn Adept creates a new world where magic apparently exists, and is being used by a group of people with an ancient secret. But magic is just technology that the viewer doesn’t understand...

Afterlands

by Steven Heighton Afterlands is inspired by the true story of a thwarted expedition to the North Pole, begun in 1871, which left nineteen survivors on an ice floe off the coast of Greenland, drifting further and further out to sea during the long, bitterly cold Arctic winter.

Astrid and Veronika

by Linda Olsson Veronika, a young writer in her early thirties, arrives in the dead of winter in a small hamlet – there’s just one other farmhouse – in the Swedish countryside. Her aim is to recover from the great trauma that has befallen her and to reignite her writing career. Her eighty-year-old neighbour, the gaunt, unfriendly and forbidding Astrid, also lives alone and ignores her arrival. There are clearly some secret tragedies in her life too.

August

by Gerard Woodward Ever since Aldous Jones careened over the handlebars of his bicycle in 1955 and landed next to Farmer Evans's first field, it has become a tradition for him to take his family camping in Wales. Aldous has started to feel that a certain symbiosis has developed between their North London home and the Welsh village that they only ever see in August.