Not all modern fiction is classified as 'chick lit'!! See below for: Just an Odd Job Girl, Flights of Fancy, Angela's Ashes, Memoirs of a Geisha, Labyrinth, The Last Time they Met, On Green Dolphin Street. If you have any books to recommend, or would like to submit a review, please email info@frontofhousemagazine.co.uk
Just an Odd Job Girl
by Georgina Cronin
Publisher: Moyhill Publishing (25 April 2007)
ISBN-10: 1905597126
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When purchasing "Just an Odd Job Girl" put the code FOH1 in the special instructions and you will receive a personalised, signed copy.
Book Description
Imogen was fifty.
She had been married to Peter for over twenty years and having brought up her children she was living in a wonderful house, with money and time to spare.
Suddenly, she finds herself “traded-in” for a younger model, a 'Fast-Tracker'.
Completely devastated, she retreats to a small house on the edge of Epping Forest, where she indulges in binge eating and self-deprecation.
Finally, when she can no longer fit into her clothes, and there seems to be no hope, she discovers a way forward.
Helped by a new friend, she rediscovers herself, making a journey to her past that enables her to move on to her future.
Flights of Fancy
by Georgina Cronin
Publisher: Moyhill Publishing
ISBN-10: 978-1905597-079
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When purchasing "Flights of Fancy" put the code FOH1 in the special instructions and you will receive a personalised, signed copy.
Book Description
Flights of Fancy is a collection of six short stories about life.
Some are inspired by events or history in my own family and others are just flights of fancy.
Curtains
A Distant Shore
A New Beginning
The Psychic Parrot
Father Christmas
Flights of Fancy
Size Matters - 3rd edition
by Georgina Cronin
Publisher: Moyhill Publishing
ISBN-10: 1-905597-02-9
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When purchasing "Size Matters" put the code FOH1 in the special instructions and you will receive a personalised, signed copy.
Book Description
Georgina Cronin lost 154lbs and developed a successful program to show others how to lose weight successfully.
She is not a "thin expert"- she understands the real challenges of being overweight.
Over the past few years she has inspired many and has individually guided over 1,000 others through her program.
Size Matters tells her personal story and uses it to guide you through the design of your own program for successful weight loss.
Angela's Ashes
by Frank McCourt
Publisher: Flamingo (5 Feb 2001)
ISBN-10: 0007117477
ISBN-13:978-0007117475
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Book Description
In this memoir, Frank McCourt looks back with sadness and affection at his first 18 years growing up in New York and Ireland. The book combines stories of hunger, poverty and social deprivation with a celebration of the human spirit, laughter and human kindness.
Memoirs of a Geisha
by Arthur Golden
Publisher: Vintage; Film Tie-in Ed edition (1 Dec 2005)
ISBN-10: 0099498189
ISBN-13:978-0099498186
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Book Description
A seductive and evocative epic on an intimate scale, that tells the extraordinary story of a geisha girl. Summoning up more than twenty years of Japan's most dramatic history, it uncovers a hidden world of eroticism and enchantment, exploitation and degradation. From a small fishing village in 1929, the tale moves to the glamorous and decadent heart of Kyoto in the 1930s, where a young peasant girl is sold as servant and apprentice to a renowned geisha house. She tells her story many years later from the Waldorf Astoria in New York; it exquisitely evokes another culture, a different time and the details of an extraordinary way of life. It conjures up the perfection and the ugliness of life behind rice-paper screens, where young girls learn the arts of geisha - dancing and singing, how to wind the kimono, how to walk and pour tea, and how to beguile the most powerful men.
Labyrinth
by Kate Mosse
Publisher: Orion; New Ed edition (11 Jan 2006)
ISBN-10: 0752877321
ISBN-13: 978-0752877327
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Book Description
'The author has combined an ingenious adventure story with a wonderfully detailed account of the historical background of the Languedoc ... the result is entirely compelling and full of incidental pleasures.'
The Last Time They Met
by Anita Shreve
Publisher: Abacus; New Ed edition (3 Dec 2001)
ISBN-10: 0349113602
ISBN-13: 978-0349113609
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Book Description
The Last Time They Met is based on a tale of childhood sweethearts and a theme Shreve writes about so passionately and with such conviction one can't help wonder if she spends her nights dreaming of her first love. Ambitiously, she tells her tale of Thomas and his lover (Linda) from the present backwards, travelling from a poet's convention in Toronto via politically repressive Nairobi to Massachusetts and small-town 1960s' schooldays. The grand passions, the loveless marriages, abuse, lost children and, most heart-wrenchingly, the utterly wasted lives unfold majestically and with intense pathos. If the greatest test of a good book is not just that you can't put it down, but that it haunts your memory for far longer than it takes to read, then this is a cracking read with an end that will leave you reeling.
On Green Dolphin Street
by Sebastian Faulks
Publisher: Vintage (27 May 2002)
ISBN-10: 009927583X
ISBN-13: 978-0099275831
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Book Description
It's 1959 and the presidential battle between Kennedy and Nixon is heating up. Just as the country stands between two men so does Mary van der Linden, the wife of a British embassy employee in Washington and lover of political newspaper reporter Frank Renzo. All three are damaged by their experiences of war; death and decay are everywhere: through the men's memory of war, Mary's dying mother, van der Linden's declining health and the readers' knowledge that in only a few short years Kennedy will be dead and Nixon disgraced.
The Tea Rose
by Jennifer Donnelly
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers Ltd (2 May 2006)
ISBN-10: 0007208006
ISBN-13: 978-0007208005
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Book Description
Set in Whitechapel in 1888, "The Tea Rose" is a tale of a love lost and won, of a family's destruction, of murder and revenge - and one young woman's quest to escape the poverty of her childhood and make her fortune in the tea trade. Fiona Finnegan is the spirited, ambitious daughter of an Irish dock worker. She longs to break free from the squalid lanes and alleys of Whitechapel, where she has a job in a tea factory. With the love of her life, Joe Bristow, she dreams of escaping the poverty and opening her own tea shop. But one by one her dreams fall apart as her father is killed in a dock accident, Joe is seduced by another woman, and her mother is viciously murdered - a suspected victim of Jack, the Ripper. Devastated, her life in tatters, Fiona flees to New York where she sets up home with her alcoholic uncle. Slowly, she builds his small grocery shop into a thriving tea house, and her new life flourishes. After years of hard work, she establishes herself as the head of her own powerful tea empire. But she cannot forget London - or Joe. Convinced that her father was murdered by his brutal employer, Fiona vows to seek revenge and ruin him once and for all. Making her way back to the streets of her impoverished childhood, Fiona must start her fight again. From the bleak poverty and filthy back streets of London to the glossy sophistication of Fifth Avenue, from East End dock workers to New York socialites, "The Tea Rose" is a charming, heart warming and ultimately life-affirming novel.
The Winter Rose
by Jennifer Donnelly
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers Ltd (6 Nov 2006)
ISBN-10: 0007191324
ISBN-13: 978-0007191321
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Book Description
This is another strong, satisfying novel, full of rich storytelling, by the author of the favourite "The Tea Rose". Set in London and Africa in the early days of the twentieth century, "The Winter Rose" introduces some remarkable new characters. India Selwyn-Jones is one of the rare new breed: a lady doctor. Her family, her eligible, ambitious fiance, the male medical establishment all object but she insists on defying convention and finds a post in London's East End. There she meets a gangland boss called Sid Malone. Criminal he may be but he also has a hidden charm, and a devastatingly attractive personality, and when India is called to treat him after a dockside brawl, their friendship becomes more intense. But Sid Malone is not his real name: and he has a past and enemies by the score, including India's determined and ruthless fiance whose intention is to marry into the family money as well as becoming a leading political figure. The stormy, noisy, brawling docklands are a natural home to the political fight as the fledgling Labour Party gets underway, and the struggle for the women's vote becomes more strident. But the East End is also a place for those who have a past to hide, a new beginning to find. And so the complicated strands of betrayal and pretence, of ambition and family, are woven again into a new drama, in a new country. Jennifer Donnelly, author of "A Gathering Light" as well as "The Tea Rose", has a wonderful gift for sweeping storytelling, with a lively cast of vivid characters, rich and detailed backgrounds. Her writing has a warmth and energy that takes all readers completely into her world.
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