Uplifting reads

Jennet Mallow is born in Yorkshire in the 1920s but her interest in art and creativity alienates her from her family, her father who is a priest, her conventional sister and her emotionally stunted mother. Jennet moves to London in search of a more exciting life and finds it in her new environment and in the handsome and enigmatic figure of the painter David Heaton. When Jennet falls pregnant, her parents more or less force the two to marry. In the postwar austerity of the 1940s, the young couple struggles to make ends meet and Jennet finds that her home life is gradually eroding everything she has fought to achieve. Aware that David is becoming increasingly reliant on drink and tired of the dank and drab bedsit in which they live, Jennet suggests they move to Spain. There, the bright blue skies, warm air and sunlit beaches give the couple and their children a new lease of life. Jennet begins to paint again and an agent takes an interest in her work. But as Jennet's own career begins to take off, her relationship with David sours and the two enter a destructive spiral with tragic consequences.

"Angel Tungaraza has recently moved to Rwanda from her native Tanzania. With her husband Pius and the five orphaned children of their late son and daughter, she is hardly short of things to do. But she still finds time to pursue her hobby and her passion: her small but increasingly successful business, baking individually-designed cakes for the parties and celebrations of her neighbours and their friends... As her customers tell her their stories, she comes to realise how much each of them has to mourn as well as how much they have to celebrate. And, finally, she comes to accept how much that is true of her too..."--Publisher description.

Ruby was born while her father was in the pub. Her mother, Bunty, had never wanted to marry him, and dreamed of being swept off to America by a romantic hero, but instead, was stuck in a flat with her three children. This is the family's story.

A chance meeting in St. James's Park begins young Lorna and Matt's intense relationship. Wholly in love, they leave London for a cottage in a rural Somerset village. Their intimate life togetherMatt's woodcarving, Lorna's self-discovery, their new baby, Mollyis shattered with the arrival of World War II. In 1960s London, Molly happens upon a forgotten newspapera seemingly small moment that leads to her first job and, eventually, a pregnancy by a wealthy man who wants to marry her but whom she does not love. Thirty years later, Ruth, who has always considered her existence a peculiar accident, questions her own marriage and begins a journey that takes her back to 1941and a redefinition of herself and of love.

A funny, ironic story of a collection of misfits in contemporary Paris - a near-anorexic artist, a chef, his granny, and a sad-sack aristocrat - who together become something more than the sum of their parts. This novel is about despair, love, and the virtues of ensemble-playing in a naughty world.

"On the day Lola Dearborn vowed to never attend another funeral, she was deliberately present at three Lola Dearborn marries into Dearborn Zander, a family of funeral directors, when she falls for Sam Dearborn at a dance. But when Sam, and her friend Alice Zander, injured in a freak accident, die, Lola devotes the rest of her life to exploration. She takes up residence in an art-deco hotel, she befriends the members of the Sylvester Quartet after gate-crashing a rehearsal. She reflects on the different kinds of love offered by men: Luigi the Italian undertaker who buries a dog with its owner, and Charles the retired surgeon with his disruptive daughter, Brandy. Lola's themes underpin an exploration of love and death (including pet cemeteries) music and friendship. Set between Australia and New Zealand, it is a story both acute and amusing, knowledgeable and questing much like Lola herself" -Publisher's description.

"In the early nineteenth century, a windswept beach along the English coast brims with fossils for those with the eye! From the moment she's struck by lightning as a baby, it is clear Mary Anning is marked for greatness. When she uncovers unknown dinosaur fossils in the cliffs near her home, she sets the scientific world alight, challenging ideas about the world's creation and stimulating debate over our origins. In an arena dominated by men, however, Mary is soon reduced to a serving role, facing prejudice from the academic community, vicious gossip from neighbours, and the heartbreak of forbidden love. Even nature is a threat, throwing bitter cold, storms, and landslips at her. Luckily Mary finds an unlikely champion in prickly, intelligent Elizabeth Philpot, a middle-class spinster who is also fossil-obsessed. Their relationship strikes a delicate balance between fierce loyalty and barely suppressed envy. Despite their differences in age and background, Mary and Elizabeth discover that, in struggling for recognition, friendship is their strongest weapon..."-- Publisher description.

Twelve-year-old Frankie Parsons has rather large, quirky family. Until now they've been the centre of his universe, but now Frankie's view of his world begins to change. There's a new arrival at school- a dredlocked girl called Sydney who becomes perplexingly fascinating to him. She even starts to draw him away from his best friend, Gigs.

Young, bright Taylor Greer leaves her poverty-stricken life in Kentucky and heads west, picking up an abandoned Native American baby girl whom she names Turtle and finds a new home in Tucson with Mattie, an old woman who takes in Central American refugees.

Sarajevo. As the mortars fall and the snipers conduct their deadly chess manoeuvres, a cellist sits at his window. The piece he plays, Albinoni's Adagio in G Minor, is all that restores his hope. On this day a bomb falls in the street below him. For the next twenty-two days he plays the Adagio in the crater below, in memory of the dead.

Young, bright Taylor Greer leaves her poverty-stricken life in Kentucky and heads west, picking up an abandoned Native American baby girl whom she names Turtle and finds a new home in Tucson with Mattie, an old woman who takes in Central American refugees.

Publisher: New York : Europa Editions, c2008. In an elegant Parisian apartment building inhabited by bourgeois families, Renée, the concierge, is witness to their lavish but vacuous…

It's a book club born as a spur-of-the-moment alibi when its members are discovered breaking curfew by the Germans occupying their island. Juliet Ashton, a London writer, converses in letters with the Society's members, learning about their lives, their island, their taste in books, and the impact that the recent German occupation has had on all of them. Captivated by their stories, she sets sail to meet these people with whom she has found connection.

Limited and persecuted by racial divides in 1962 Jackson, Mississippi, three women, including an African-American maid, her sassy and chronically unemployed friend, and a recently graduated white woman, team up for a clandestine project.

On the face of it, Delia's got it all good marriage, two great kids, dream job writing witty, practical house and garden books. But when she is diagnosed with terminal cancer, she is forced to view her life in an entirely new light. There are things she must do, there are wrongs to be put right, and there are mysteries from the past that demand resolution. But there is just so little time. Summoning all her strength, she returns to the tiny country town which she fled from, pregnant and unmarried, 14 years before and comes to terms with a loss no mother should ever have to endure. She finishes writing her ultimate how-to book. And she tries, as best she can, to prepare herself and her family for the inevitable.

He is a brilliant math professor with a peculiar problem, since a traumatic head injury, he has lived with only 80 minutes of short-term memory. She is an astute young housekeeper with a 10 year-old son who is hired to care for the professor. Between them a strange and beautiful relationship blossoms.

When Glyn Peters chances upon an old photograph of his wife holding hands with another man his mind is filled with questions. As he investigates the truth, even his work as a historian doesn't prepare him for the ensuing radical shift in perception as certainties of past and present slip away.

Fanny and Gérard fall in love in a way that surprises even them as their lives fill with good sex and loving companionship. But they long for a child to complete their happiness. Two of Fanny's lesbian friends feel similarly driven by the need to have a child. But how to make that possible? Jean-Marie is an internationally regarded professor of philosophy whose adoring students are willing sexual partners fulfilling the tenets of his libertarianism. But perhaps philosophy can't bear the weight of human emotion. When Gérard buys a beautiful old house in the suburbs, the disturbing contents of the attic binds the stories into an intriguing and darkly disturbing knot.