Membaca

Today I am thrilled to be taking part in the blog tour for A Year and a Day by Isabelle Broom. This book is a perfect winter read to get you in the festive spirit on the run up to Christmas. For Megan, a winter escape to Prague with her friend Ollie is a chance to find some inspiration for her upcoming photography exhibition. But she's determined to keep their friendship from becoming anything more. Because if Megan lets Ollie find out about her past, she risks losing everything - and she won't let that happen again . . .   For Hope, the trip is a surprise treat from Charlie, her new partner. But she's struggling to enjoy the beauty of the city when she knows how angry her daughter is back home. And that it's all her fault . . .   For Sophie, the city has always been a magical place. This time she can't stop counting down the moments until her boyfriend Robin joins her. But in historic Prague you can never escape the past . . I was won over earlier in the year by My...

Amber Raey is working all the hours God sends as assistant to one of the country's top fashion designers, and her boss is a complete nightmare. But Amber has big plans for her future so, for the time being, she just has to grin and bear it. And then opportunity comes knocking and suddenly she's on the fast track to the top. Amber adores her new life, especially as she's falling in love for the first time too. But soon the glossy exterior starts to slip and Amber begins to wonder if she's made the right decision entering this world. Then a face from her past reappears and she finds herself in real trouble. With Christmas fast approaching, Amber is drifting further away from her loved ones.  Can she get her life back on track before it's too late for a merry Christmas? With such a pretty festive cover it was impossible not to stop everything and dive in to A Christmas Kiss by Vicky Pattison. I really enjoyed All that Glitters earlier in the year so I was looking forwa...

NONFICTION Slighted heroes Honor before Glory By Scott McGaugh 304 pp. Da Capo Reviewed by William C. Crawford American exceptionalism often plays out through our sordid treatment of our most loyal but vulnerable citizens. The US under attack often creates opportunity for our wrongly maligned patriots to erase, without doubt, any question as to their commitment to America. The imprisonment of solid Japanese-American citizens during World War II is now a well-known if seamy chapter in our history. I recently visited the museum at the windswept former internment camp in California known as Manzanar. One of the most telling if ironic features on exhibit there were the faded photos of young Japanese-American GIs in uniform returning to Manzanar to visit their captive parents. The heroic stories of Nisei soldiers in the European theater and Burma are only recently an emerging theme in the annals of World War II history. Honor before Glory brings long overdue light to the little known heroi...

Father and Son, Landyn and Vale Midwinter, are Suffolk farmers, living together on land their family has worked for generations. But they are haunted there by a past they have long refused to confront: the death of Cecelia, beloved wife and mother, when Vale was just a child. Both men have carried her loss, unspoken. Until now. With the onset of a mauling winter, something between them snaps. While Vale makes increasingly desperate decisions, Landyn retreats, finding solace in the land, his animals - and a vixen who haunts the farm and seems to bring with her both comfort and protection. Midwinter is a beautifully written sensitive debut by Fiona Melrose. At the heart of the storyline is a deep raw grief that has divided father and son Landyn and Vale. After the tragic death of Cecelia the pair are both dealing with grief in their own way whilst Vale is like a boiling kettle waiting to bubble over, Landyn puts his heart into his pup and the mysterious vixen that arrives on the farm....

Nonfiction The footballingest football book ever THE PERFECT PASS: American Genius and the Reinvention of Football By S. C. Gwynne 271 pp. Scribner Reviewed by Jack Shakely I was born and raised in Oklahoma, the state that legendary coach Bennie Owens said had two favorite sports, football and spring football. I am nuts about football. I bleed crimson and cream every autumn Saturday for my beloved Oklahoma Sooners. I thought I could never get enough football. Until I read The Perfect Pass. This is the footballingest football book you will ever read outside of the Dallas Cowboys playbook. Even Vince Lombardi’s autobiography has fewer diagrams. It has more x’s and o’s than a game of tic-tac-toe. Which is surprising, given the book’s author. S. C. Gwynne is the Pulitzer-prize finalist author of the brilliant Empire of the Summer Moon, one of the best nonfiction books ever written about the Plains Indians. He has the writing chops, and he often shows them here. But not often enough. I thou...

Today it is my stop on the It's a Wonderful Life blog Tour and I am delighted to be able to share an extract from Julia William's latest release. Daniel got in late from work to find Beth cooking and the kids, as usual, in their rooms. Sometimes it felt as if they’d already left home and it was just him and Beth in the house. For all the notice the kids took of them, they might as well be invisible. Still, it was always good to come home, to Beth, to their shared life. He was lucky to have such a family, lucky to have a four-bedroomed detached house, lucky to have a garden. He could never have imagined this happening to him when he was growing up, in the small flat he and his Mum had shared in south London.             ‘Good day?’ Beth asked, giving him a welcoming hug. He pulled her to him, breathed her in. She was every bit as gorgeous to him now as she had been that first day he’d met her at teacher training, when she’d walked in...

Fiction BENEATH THE COYOTE HILLS By William Luvaas 238 pp. Spuyten Duyvil  Reviewed by David E. Hoekenga, M.D. Our hero is a writer named Thomas Aristophanus, and he has “spells.” Tommy lives in an olive grove outside the town of Hamlet, a scrappy burg in the high desert of Southern California. It is a down-at-the heels community peopled by social security retirees living in run-down trailers inherited from former retirees who died in them, ex-cons and sexual predators, evangelical shouters (a church on every corner) , recyclable collectors, and nutcase old farts tooting around in golf carts decked out with American flags. Diabetic tubbies trip out of Walmart pushing shopping carts full of cheap carbs and gizmos from China. How can they afford all that shit? Gun nuts blast holes in the mudstone cliffs in the wash below my place or take aim at the cross atop the ‘The First Church of the One True Christ,’ modeled on the Crystal Cathedral in Garden Grove. They dodged through the sageb...