Birkenhead Bookchat March 2011

This book is an extensively researched anthology of more than 350 quotations and extracts from a wide selection of writers and thinkers all on the subject of books. The witty, wise and evocative words cover every aspect of bookishness including hoarding, buying, borrowing, arranging, stealing, choosing, losing, reviewing and displaying and comprise memoirs, poetry, journalism, fiction and philosophy. The sources of the extracts range from Erasmus to Edith Wharton to Umberto Eco, from Dante to Descartes to Dickens, from Edward Gibbon to Kenneth Grahame to Groucho Marx. Celebrating the timeless pleasures of reading, casting an irreverent eye over the foibles and eccentricities of booklovers and revealing the reading habits of a host of famous writers.

Describes the socialised horror of a futuristic utopia devoid of individual freedom. Human beings, graded from intellectuals to manual workers, are hatched from incubators and brought up in communal nurseries and learn by conditioning to accept their social destiny. The story develops around an unorthodox AlphaPlus, who visits a New Mexican Reservation and brings a savage back to London.

Living in Rome with his daughter, Jack McCall finds his grief following his wife's suicide interrupted by the arrival of his sister-in-law and two friends seeking his help in tracking down a classmate who went underground as a Viet protestor.

What do you do when your husband leaves you for another woman and 'she' turns out to be him? Tara Whitehead finds out the hard way when her husband decides he'd rather be a woman. With no money, she's about to lose her gorgeous home, and her 'friends' no longer return her calls!

Coronation Street first hit British screens at the end of 1960, a groundbreaking show based on real life and using accents that had never been heard on British television before. It was an instant hit, and has remained consistently one of the UK's most popular shows ever since. The book includes profiles of fifty Coronation Street icons from Ena Sharples to David Platt and the author has had unprecedented access in order to include interviews with all of those still with us. There are also hilarious extracts from the script and classic lines remembered.

Daisy Phillips is tired of being treated like an old lady. Her son Dennis is pushing her to sell the family home and move into a retirement community. But the unflappable Daisy won't go down without a fight. What she needs to boost her spirits is an adventure. A long-forgotten watch found in a box in the basement provides the perfect start. The watch belonged to her first love, an American soldier stations in England during World War II. With a decades old Brooklyn address as her only clue, Daisy embarks on a trip to New York City with plans to track him down and return the valuable keepsake, and maybe get a peek at the life she mght have had.

Nina Landry's birthday will be full of surprises, not all of them welcome ... Nina is supposed to be taking her two children on holiday today with her new boyfriend. But the road away from the isolated winter bleakness of Sandling Island seems to be littered with obstacles, frustrating her plans at every turn. Most pressingly of all, her fifteen-year-old daughter, Charlie, has yet to return from a night out . . . Minute by minute, as Nina's unease builds to worry and then panic, every mother's worst nightmare begins to unravel. Has Charlie run away? Or has something more sinister happened to her? And why will nobody take her disappearance seriously?

A phone call late on a hot Dublin evening. An anxious mother, enquiring about her daughter. Then a week later, the dreadful truth begins to unfold. The policeman, McLoughlin, watches as the green cover is pulled back from the mortuary slab. The young woman's battered, mutilated body is exposed, and for Margaret comes the dull, aching realization that this is not can never be allowed to be the end. Margaret is a psychiatrist, recently returned to Dublin to nurse her dying mother, an now her daughter Mary is dead.

Paul Klee is indisputably one of the 20th century's most important and admired artists. Along with an in-depth biography, three essays examine his versatility, place him in context with his contemporaries and discuss his process for cataloguing his works.

Annie and Tom's marriage is in mid-life crisis. On the surface they have everything. But all is not well. They share a painful secret guilt which ensures they sleep in separate beds. Then Tom comes home one evening and drops a bombshell that threatens to finish them off for good. As Annie and Tom's family rally together for the first time in years, their home is filled with people, conversation, tears and laughter. And little by little they start to open up to one another about the terrible, painful truth they have lived with all these years.

Can the secrets of one woman's past change another woman's future? Endsleigh House stands, crumbling and gracious, on the south-west coast of England, its rooms shut up and dusty. But what secrets do they hold? Cate, an exile from New York, is sent to help value the contents of the once-grand Georgian house. Cataloguing its contents with Jack a man with his own dark past, she comes across a hidden shoebox containing an exquisite pair of dancing shoes from the 1930s, along with a mysterious collection of objects: a photograph, a dance card and a Tiffany bracelet. Returning to London, rather than face the questions lingering in her own life, Cate immerses herself in piecing together the clues contained in the box to uncover a story, that of Irene Blythe and her sister Diana two of the most famous debutantes of their generation. The tale that unfolds is one of dark, addictive love, and leads Cate to face up to secrets of her own. Can the secrets of Baby Blythe's past change Cate's own ability to live and love again?

Forty years ago, Harriet Vanger disappeared off the secluded island owned and inhabited by the powerful Vanger family. There was no corpse, no witnesses, no evidence. But her uncle, Henrik, is convinced that she was murdered by someone in her own family, the deeply dysfunctional Vanger clan. Journalist Mikael is hired to investigate.

Beyond high iron gates fastened shut with a length of chain, lies stark, beautiful Trawbawn. Here, haunted by a dark, mysterious past lives the frail Lydia Beauchamp. But old Ma Beauchamp's private existence is interrupted when a stranger arrives a young man called Adam. When Lydia sets her new confidant a challenge, he accepts: Adam must travel to Dublin to find her estranged daughter. But it is a task tainted by an air of menace. For what terrible past has driven a daughter from her mother? And what true motive lies behind Adam's generous act?

Interweaves the events of Tom Wingo's summer in New York and his relationship to Susan Lowenstein, his sister Savannah's beautiful psychiatrist, and the complex history of the South Carolinian Wingo family, from World War II through Vietnam.

"Her daughter Hope was killed in a hit-and-run accident six months ago, and now Sam, her beloved husband, has walked out. Left alone with her grief, Marion has begun to contemplate the unthinkable. However, a strange chance encounter makes her realise that life can be worth living. But can she convince Sam to give their marriage a second chance? -Publisher description.