Reasons to read ...

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The Flying Man by Roopa Farooki

Maqil is an incorrigible con man, handsome, charming and addicted to gambling,
beautiful women. Despite his shameless sefishness, Maqui is not immune to real
love. His travel takes him on a whirlwind voyager around the world taking in
casinos, clubs, from Biarritz to Cairo. But his world changes irrevocably when he
successfully schemes to get his wife pregnant.
Powerful reading ...

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The Pleasures of Men
by
Kate Williams

Catherine Sorgeuil is incarcerated in the oppressive home of her eccentric uncle.
following the death of her parents and brother. Historian Kate Williams successfully
makes the move from non-fiction creating a sinister picture of society, and
protagonist, on ther brink of hysteria. Interesting ..

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The Buddha in The Attic
by Julie Otsuka





Novels written in the first person plural are rare. It's a narrative device that gives The Buddha In the Attic
a melancholy quality. The story opens with a group of Japanese picture brides on a ship-bound for San Francisco
where they will be met by their new husbands. The women are apprehensive but excited about starting
prosperous new lives with handsome doctors, bankers and entrepreneurs. But the men turn out to bear
no resemblance to their photos...
Powerful, lyrical and almost unbearably sad.

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The Quality Of Mercy by Barry Unsworth



It's 1767 and Frederick Ashton is trying to abolish the slave trade.
The detail Unsworth gives is astonishing, each scene is describe
meticulously, and each character is brought richly to life. It is
not the easiest of reads, b ut the more you learn about the characters
motivations, the more intriguing the story becomesd.
A stand-alone sory ity is still a masterpiecve.

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Remainder by Tom McCarthy

A brilliant yet disturbing novel about personal
narratives and what happens when they go wrong.

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GHOSTS BY DAYLIGHT
Janine de Giovanni

Having first met and fallen in love as young reporters besieged in Sarajevo,
Janine and Brunen later settled in Paris. Their struggle for sanity is told with
a tough and tender honesty that speaks directly to the heart of love's strength.

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SOMEBODY: Marlon Brando by Stefan Kanfer

The book charts how this actor would do anything, no matter how outlandish or unflattering, to
make the character credible and had never attempted to be a Hollywood star. Brando the actor
and Brando the man were one and the same complicated, dangerous, vulnerable'... read the book
if you're a Brando fan.

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SUCH A LONG JOURNEY
by
Rohinton Mistry

Gustard Noble is a hardworking bank clerk and devoted family man living in Bombay in the early
1970S. But his life gradually starts to unravel - his young daughter falls ill and his promising
son defies his father's ambitions for him. One day he receives a letter from an old friend asking
him to help in what at first seems like a heroic mission. But soon finds himself unwittingly drawn
into a dangerous network of fraud and betrayal. Exciting reading ...

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CONVERSATIONS WITH MYSELF
by
Nelson Mandela


The name of Nelson Mandela is one of the best known and most revered in the world, the hero of an age and
one of the great figures of the 20th century. After a long lifetime of putting pen to paper to record thoughts,
events, hardships and victories, in Conversation With Myself he opens wide the Mandela archive, offering a
hitherto unprecedented level of access and insight into his remarkable life.

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The book sold over one million copies in he first year and TV audiences exceed over 130 million people. When he was a boy in Henning, Tennessee, Alex Haley's grandmother used to tell him stories about their family going back to their great, great grandparents all the way back to the man she called The African. She said he had lived across the ocean near what he called the Kamby Bolongo and had been out in the forest one day chopping wood to make a drum when he was set upon by four men. Beaten, chained and dragged aboard a slave ship, he was sent to Colonial America. An astonishing feat of genealogical detective work, Haley discovered not only the name of the African, Kunta Kinte, but the precise location of Jessure, the very village in The Gambia, West Africa, from which he was abducted in 1767 at the age of 16 and taken on the Lord Ligoner to Maryland and sold to a Virginia planter. Haley met and talked in Africa with six cousins and set about writing the monumental two-century drama of the slaves and freedmen, farmers and blacksmiths, architects and one author that came in the six generations after Junta Kinte. Stunning ...

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The book sold over one million copies in he first myear and tv audiences exceede over 130 million people. When he was a boy in Henning, Tennessee, ASlex Haley's grandmother used to tell him stories aboutm their family going back to their great, great grandparents all the way back to the man she called The African. She said he had lived across the ocdean near what he called the Kamby Bolongo and had been out in the forestm one day chopping wood to make a drum when he was set upon by four men. Beaten, chained and dragged ab oard a slave ship, he was sent to Colonial America. Am astonsihng feat of genealogyical dete4ctiove work, Haley discovered not onl;y the name of the African, Kunta Kinte, b ut the precise location of Jessure, the very village in The Gambia, West Africa, from which he was abducted in 1767 at the age of 16and taken on the Lord Ligoner to Maryland and sold to a /virginia planter. Haley met and talked in Africa with six cousins and set about writing the monumental two-century drama of the slaves and frredmen, dfarmers and blacksmiths, arcvhitects and one author that came in the six generations after Junta Kinte. Stunning ...

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Set during the siege of Troy, the epic poem tells of Troilus, a Trojan prince who has fallen hopelessly in love
with Cressida, the daughter of a Trojan priest who has defected to the Greeks. Remarkable for his beauty and
bravery, Troilus who lives and eventually dies for Cressida, a virtuous and tender-hearted young woman driven
to infidelity by circumstances. regarded by man as Chaucer's most notable work of art.

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War and Peace is a vast epic centred on Napoleon's war with Russia. While it expresses Tolstoy's views
that history is an inexorable process which man cannot influence, he peoples his great novel with a cast
of over five hundred characters. Three of these, the artless and delightful Natasha Rostov, the world-
weary Prince Andrew Bolkonsky and the idealistic Pierre Bezukhov illustrate Tolstoy's philosophy in this
novel of unquestioned mastery. A masterpiece.

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AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR.
edited by Clayborne Carson


Beginning with the Early Years, and goes through Seminary Life, Boston University, meeting and falling in love with the attractive singer Coretta Scott, Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, The Montgomery Movement beginning, The Violence of Desperate Men, The Birth of a New Nation, A Brush with Death, A Pilgrimage for Non-Violence, The sit-in Movement, Atlanta Arrest and Presidential Politics, the Albany Movement, the Birmingham Campaign, Letter from Birmingham Jail, the March to Washington, the Mississippi Challenge, the Nobel Peace Prize, Malcolm X, the Chicago Campaign, Black Power, Beyond Vietnam, the Unfulfilled Dreams in some of the chapter readings,
Here was the mild mannered, inquisitive child and student who rebelled against segregation, the dedicated young minister who constantly questioned hiis faith, the loving husband and father and the reflective, world-famous leader. Includes his views on John F, Kennedy, Mahatma Gandhi and Richard Nixon.

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RULES OF CIVILITY
by
Amor Towles

A narrative that sparkles with sentences so memorable you'll stop and re-read them again.

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Charles Dickens is of a Victorian powerhouse. But his life was riddled with paradoxes.
His parents sent their eldest daughter to the Royal Academy of Music, Dicken spent a
year working in a qualid factory, like his fictional David Copperfield. Most shocking,
when he fell in love with an 18-year old actress, his treatment of his wife was not just
loveless, but openly cruel and vindictive. A complex character...