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  Our Georgia - The devastating...

  Lynette Williams, Robin Eveleigh

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  Georgia Williams’ murder at the hands of college pal Jamie Reynolds was a crime that shocked the nation: chillingly executed and horrific in its sexual depravity. 
  But when Georgia’s devastated mother, Lynnette, and father, Steve, questioned the events leading to their daughter’s death, they discovered it was also entirely preventable. 
  At the time of Georgia’s disappearance, Steve was – ironically – a highly-commended murder squad detective serving with West Mercia Police. 
  The same force, Steve and Lynnette discovered, had had Reynolds in its sights for years before Georgia’s murder, but let him slip their net. 
  Drawing on Steve’s inside police knowledge, the couple exposed the litany of failures that let Reynolds infiltrate their daughter’s life, and allowed him to kill. 
  Now, in her powerful and moving memoir, Lynnette tries to get beyond the platitudes of ‘mistakes made and lessons learned’ to effect real change, and also details the heartbreaking aftermath of a crime that should never have happened.

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  Portrait of a Bomber Pilot

  Christopher Jary

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  During the Second World War RAF Bomber Command produced a handful of remarkable pilots who won fame and high honors: Gibson, Cheshire, Martin, Tait, and Searby. The majority of aircrew, however, were young sergeants, many of whom did not survive to complete a first tour of thirty operations. Between the two extremes, there were, on every squadron, one or two senior captains who had survived one tour and whose experience, skill, courage, and example made a vital contribution to their squadron's life, training and operational success. This book is about one such captain, Flight Lieutenant Jack Wetherly, DFC. It traces his development from novice second pilot of a Wellington in the pioneering days of 1940 to senior captain of a Halifax in Wing-Commander Leonard Cheshire's squadron in what MRAF Sir Arthur Harris called his 'Main Offensive'. It deals also with his pre-war life and service, flying tiny bi-planes with the RAFVR, and with his career as a flying instructor at the RAF College Cranwell and as an instructor of instructors at RAF Montrose.Above all, it is a personal book, inspired by the sacrifice made nearly half a century ago by a young man of twenty-eight. Acclaim for the work:''Reading Portrait of a Bomber Pilot, I felt that I was living with Jack Wetherly through the last few years of his young life. He is a good man to be with  honorable, selfless, and an exceptional pilot...Christopher Jary has written of Jack Wetherly carefully, unsentimentally, and very movingly. He has added a chapter to the brave, sad story of World War Two''.

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  Nothing to Be Frightened Of

  Julian Barnes

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  A memoir on mortality as only Julian Barnes can write it, one that touches on faith and science and family as well as a rich array of exemplary figures who over the centuries have confronted the same questions he now poses about the most basic fact of life: its inevitable extinction. If the fear of death is “the most rational thing in the world,” how does one contend with it? An atheist at twenty and an agnostic at sixty, Barnes looks into the various arguments for, against, and with God, and at his own bloodline, which has become, following his parents’ death, another realm of mystery.Deadly serious, masterfully playful, and surprisingly hilarious, Nothing to Be Frightened Of is a riveting display of how this supremely gifted writer goes about his business and a highly personal tour of the human condition and what might follow the final diagnosis.

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  The Spartacus Road - A Personal...

  Peter Stothard

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  A classicist retraces the ancient journey taken by the Spartacus and his army of rebels through Italy in the first century BC Gladiator War. 
   
  In the final century of the first Roman Republic, an army of slaves undertook a historic revolt. Led by the gladiator Spartacus, its success was something no one before had ever known. The Spartacus Road is the route along which this rebel army outfought the Roman legions between 73 and 71BC, bringing both fears and hopes that have never wholly left the modern mind. It is a road that stretches through 2,000 miles of Italian countryside and out into 2,000 years of world history. 
   
  In this inspiring and original memoir, the former editor of The Times, Peter Stothard, takes us on an extraordinary journey. The result is a book like none other: at once a journalist’s notebook, a classicist’s celebration, a survivor’s record of a near fatal cancer and the history of a unique and brutal war. As he travels along the Spartacus road—through the ruins of Capua to Vesuvius and the lost Greek cities of the Italian south—Stothard illuminates conflicting memories of times ancient and modern, breathing new life into one of the greatest stories of the ages.

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  Confessions of an English...

  Thomas de Quincey

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  “Thou hast the keys of Paradise, O just, subtle, and mighty Opium!”Though apparently presenting the reader with a collage of poignant memories, temporal digressions and random anecdotes, the Confessions is a work of immense sophistication and certainly one of the most impressive and influential of all autobiographies. The work is of great appeal to the contemporary reader, displaying a nervous (postmodern?) self-awareness, a spiralling obsession with the enigmas of its own composition and significance. De Quincey may be said to scrutinise his life, somewhat feverishly, in an effort to fix his own identity.The title seems to promise a graphic exposure of horrors; these passages do not make up a large part of the whole. The circumstances of its hasty composition sets up the work as a lucrative piece of sensational journalism, albeit published in a more intellectually respectable organ – the London Magazine – than are today’s tawdry exercises in tabloid self-exposure. What makes the book technically remarkable is its use of a majestic neoclassical style applied to a very romantic species of confessional writing - self-reflexive but always reaching out to the Reader. (Summary by Martin Geeson)

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  Our Mutual Friend

  Charles Dickens

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  A satiric masterpiece about the allure and peril of money, Our Mutual Friend revolves around the inheritance of a dust-heap where the rich throw their trash. When the body of John Harmon, the dust-heap's expected heir, is found in the Thames, fortunes change hands surprisingly, raising to new heights "Noddy" Boffin, a low-born but kindly clerk who becomes "the Golden Dustman." Charles Dickens's last complete novel, Our Mutual Friend encompasses the great themes of his earlier works: the pretensions of the nouveaux riches, the ingenuousness of the aspiring poor, and the unfailing power of wealth to corrupt all who crave it. With its flavorful cast of characters and numerous subplots, Our Mutual Friend is one of Dickens's most complex—and satisfying—novels

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