Birkenhead Bookchat September 2010

"At a remote railway station in Norfolk, Kitty Fulton runs the ticket office and her pet project is the lost and found. Nothing gives her more pleasure than to reunite possessions with their rightful owners. It is an experience that remains elusive in her own world as as with each passing day her mother's Alzheimer's pulls them further and further apart and, on top of this, she must endure the disintegration of a close relationship with a childhood friend. When Kitty feels her life can't get more complicated a series of extraordinary events challenges her notions of duty and fidelity. And in struggling to find the answers Kitty embarks on a journey that questions the importance of life and the way we must all live. Publisher description.

On Friday night, the beginning of the Jewish Sabbath Rabbi Tichmann joins his shul as usual. But this time he is not going to give a lesson, or a sermon, he is going to tell them a story about his grandfather, a shipwreck, the prostitute and a pot of honey. And so the tradition continues...ten short stories about families. An Australian book from 1999 that is no longer available at North Shore Libraries but can be requested as an interloan from Australia for a charge.

Building a successful career by helping couples to conceive, an early twentieth-century obstetrician makes a risky decision after meeting a talented opera singer whose infertility issues prompt her to leave her husband and pursue a career abroad.

A clinically efficient killer is murdering psychologists on the Continent. Psychological profiler Dr Tony Hill is drafted on to the case. DCI Carol Jordan is en route to Berlin too, on a covert police operation. Both of them have to explore a past of atrocities and a present-day full of cruelty.

In the bitter winter of 2009, following the death of their grandmother, Erica Calcott and her sister Beth return to Storton Manor, a grand and imposing Wiltshire house where they spent their summer holidays as children. When Erica begins to sort through her grandmother's belongings, she is flooded with memories of her childhood and of her cousin, Henry, whose disappearance from the manor tore the family apart. Erica sets out to discover what happened to Henry so that the past can be laid to rest, and her sister, Beth, might finally find some peace. Gradually, as Erica begins to sift through remnants of the past, a secret family history emerges; one that stretches all the way back to turn-of-the-century Oklahoma, to a beautiful society heiress and a haunting, savage land. As past and present converge, Erica and Beth must come to terms with two terrible acts of betrayal and the heart-breaking legacy left behind.

Laid out like a middle class house, this book follows the story of Victorian daily life from room to room: from childbirth in the master bedroom, through the scullery and kitchen cleaning, dining,entertaining on upwards, ending in the sickroom and death.