Other books that might interest you

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  Dickensland - The Curious...

  Lee Jackson

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  The intriguing history of Dickens's London, showing how tourists have reimagined and reinvented the Dickensian metropolis for more than 150 years 
   
   
    
  Tourists have sought out the landmarks, streets, and alleys of Charles Dickens's London ever since the death of the world-renowned author. Late Victorians and Edwardians were obsessed with tracking down the locations—dubbed "Dickensland"—that famously featured in his novels. But his fans were faced with a city that was undergoing rapid redevelopment, where literary shrines were far from sacred. Over the following century, sites connected with Dickens were demolished, relocated, and reimagined. 
   
   
    
  Lee Jackson traces the fascinating history of Dickensian tourism, exploring both real Victorian London and a fictional city shaped by fandom, tourism, and heritage entrepreneurs. Beginning with the late nineteenth century, Jackson investigates key sites of literary pilgrimage and their relationship with Dickens and his work, revealing hidden, reinvented, and even faked locations. From vanishing coaching inns to submerged riverside stairs, hidden burial grounds to apocryphal shops, Dickensland charts the curious history of an imaginary world.

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  Lord Byron and Lord Tennyson:...

  Charles River Editors

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  Lord Byron’s very name conjures up visions of the Romantic movement and outlandishly dressed bohemians, for if Alfred, Lord Tennyson was the poetic darling of the masses, Byron was the hero of the hedonists. While the traditional English literary hero was a nobleman rescuing a damsel in distress, Byron created the anti-hero, a man plagued by self-doubt and hidden sorrow. At the same time, his hero was also capable of facing reality once he had wrestled through his own angst, and even of occasionally acting nobly in the great tradition of the author’s Puritan forebears. 
  Whereas poets like Wordsworth and Browning were easy to love, Lord Byron inspired a certain amount of fear among the upper classes, and pious mothers were reluctant to let their daughters read his work. In a manner more appropriate to the 21st century than the 19th, Lord Byron was a man true to his own beliefs, supporting the rights of the oppressed even while enjoying all the benefits offered to him as a member of the British aristocracy.  
  Born to a father plagued by bouts of drinking and depression, and surrounded by siblings with similar ailments, Alfred Tennyson grew up believing that he must be a victim of hereditary illness, to the point that he believed he must never marry or father children less he perpetuate the suffering on future generations. With these thoughts always in his head, he turned his mind towards a near worship of romantic love, while at the same time repeatedly painting a tragic ending for his most cherished characters, many of whom seemed to die of a broken heart or some illness or accident related to it. In fact, by the time Tennyson began to prosper, he was so accustomed to sorrow that he felt compelled to seek it out, focusing his attention in his middle years not on the comfortable home and growing family he had been blessed with, but instead on the tragic losses experienced by his country during the Crimean War.

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  Gauntlets and Conches - A Short...

  Gordon Bonnet, Marlon S Hayes

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  Since the beginning of human interaction, there have been storytellers who have spun tales to inspire and capture the imagination. In homage to Golding's Lord of the Flies and the act of flinging a gauntlet before a duel, these two writers, Gordon Bonnet, and Marlon S. Hayes, have shown their multi-genre talents. 
  Two guys in a bar, grandmas, fathers and sons, and myths are a few of the themes in this collection, and the results are noteworthy, entertaining, and soul filling. What if an opportunity arose to have a conversation with one's younger self? Or, what if the pictures on the wall started whispering warnings? Ever imagined how an orc might view humans? What about an epic road trip across America's heartland where anger and grief also ride along? Exactly. 
  It's a duel of well-written short stories, with each writer inspiring the other to continue to ascend with their storytelling skills. It's not a competition, simply an acknowledgement of each other's talents.

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  The Ghosts That Haunt Me

  Steve Ryan

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  After years working in homicide, retired Toronto detective Steve Ryan reflects on six cases he will never forget.Retired detective Steve Ryan worked in Toronto’s homicide squad for over a decade. For Ryan, the stories of Toronto’s most infamous crimes were more than just a headline read over morning coffee — they were his everyday life.After investigating over one hundred homicides, Ryan can never forget the tragedies and the victims, even after his retirement from the police force. In The Ghosts That Haunt Me, he reflects on six of the many cases that greatly impacted him — seven people whose lives were senselessly taken — and that he still thinks about nearly every day. While the stories are hard to tell for Ryan, they were harder to live through. Yet somewhere between the crimes and the heartache is a glimmer of hope that good eventually does prevail and that healing can come after grief.

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  Ashes - a story about cigarettes...

  Mala Mukherji

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  Ashes is a memoir by the firstborn child of Bengali immigrants from Calcutta, India, that brings forth universal life lessons that transcend ethnicity. With raw honesty and simple prose, Ms. Mukherji depicts her childhood of cultural confusion, schoolyard bullies, and the demands of her brilliant, abusive alcoholic father. She offers her mother's stoic wisdom and love for all to share.
  
  By her early 20s, Ms. Mukherji seeks clarity instead of pity and details her search for herself through psychotherapy and spiritual studies. The result of that search costs her everything. The suicide of her mother leaves Ms. Mukherji in the thick darkness of grief and sorrow. Both propel her into destructive yet illuminating choices.
  
  In time, she gathers her experiences and uses them to transform her life into the one she wants and the one she may claim in her mother's absence.
  
  Ashes shows the listener they are not alone in their struggles and that they can look within themselves to survive and grow from life's precious and painful surprises.

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  Time Come - Selected Prose

  Linton Kwesi Johnson

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  A Financial Times Music Book of the Year 2023'Key to understanding black British history' - Sunday Times'Sharp and still relevant' - Zadie SmithRecognized as one of the great poets of modern times, and as a deeply respected and influential political and cultural activist and social critic, Linton Kwesi Johnson is also a prolific writer of non-fiction. In Time Come, he selects some of his most powerful prose – book and record reviews published in newspapers and magazines, lectures, obituaries and speeches – for the first time. Written over many decades, it is a body of work that draws creatively and critically on Johnson’s own Jamaican roots and on Caribbean history to explore the politics of race that continue to inform the Black British experience.Ranging from reflections on the place of music in Caribbean and Black British culture as a creative, defiant response to oppression, to his penetrating appraisals of music and literature, and including warm tributes paid to the activists and artists who inspired him to find his own voice as a poet and compelled him to contribute to the struggle for racial equality and social justice, Time Come is a panorama of an exceptional life. A collection that ventures into memoir, it underscores Johnson’s enduring importance in Britain’s cultural history and reminds us of his brilliant, unparalleled legacy.With an introduction by Paul Gilroy, author of There Ain't No Black in the Union Jack'A mosaic of wise, urgent and moving pieces' - Kit de Waal'As necessary as ever' - The Observer'A book to be savoured and re-read' - Derek Owusu'An outstanding collection' - Caryl Phillips'A necessary book from a writer who continues to inspire' - Yomi Sode'Incisive, engaging, fearless' - Gary Younge

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