Other books that might interest you

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  The Street Clinic - 10 Young...

  Dorcas Gwata

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  'Fascinating . . . While the rest of us are worrying about it, Dorcas Gwata is doing something about it' - Wendy Joseph, author of Unlawful KillingsThrough the live of ten young people an award-winning nurse reveals the impact of gang culture on mental health. Dorcas Gwata is an award-winning nurse specialising in mental health. She has worked closely with vulnerable young people exposed to the knife crime, sexual exploitation, drug use and poor mental health associated with gangs. In The Street Clinic, we accompany her in her work as she meets and cares for young people on the street and on their terms.We meet Fuz, who is on trial for aggravated assault. There's Abdul, who’s exploring his sexuality and has been humiliated online. Louise's promising future is compromised by her controlling boyfriend. And there’s Zane, whose parents’ divorce opens up an emotional hole in his life that’s plugged by an ill-chosen new friendship.Drawing on her own experiences of loss and social injustice, and twenty-five years on the NHS frontline, Dorcas offers a bird’s-eye view of London: its multicultural population, wealth inequalities, tireless healthcare professionals, and an NHS that doesn’t always work for everyone. And she asks the big questions: What lies behind London’s youth violence crisis? What is its impact on the mental health of its victims? How are the families of our young people and the wider community affected?Exposing some uncomfortable truths about British society, The Street Clinic is also a powerful story of resilience, strength and, ultimately, hope.

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  Murder in a Mill Town - Sex...

  Bruce Dorsey

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  In December 1832 a farmer found the body of a young, pregnant woman hanging near a haystack outside a New England mill town. When news spread that Methodist preacher Ephraim Avery was accused of murdering Sarah Maria Cornell, a factory worker, the case gave the public everything they found irresistible: sexually charged violence, adultery, the hypocrisy of a church leader, secrecy and mystery, and suspicions of insanity. Murder in a Mill Town tells the story of how a local crime quickly turned into a national scandal that became America's first "trial of the century." 
   
   
   
  After her death, Cornell's choices about work, survival, and personal freedom became enmeshed in stories that Americans told themselves about their new world of industry and women's labor and the power of religion in the early republic. Ordinary people gave testimony that revealed rapidly changing times. As the controversy of Cornell's murder spread beyond the courtroom, the public eagerly devoured narratives of moral deviance, abortion, suicide, mobs, "fake news," and conspiracy politics. Long after the jury's verdict, the nation refused to let the scandal go. 
   
   
   
  A meticulously reconstructed historical whodunit, Murder in a Mill Town exposes the troublesome workings of criminal justice in the young democracy and the rise of a sensational popular culture.

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  3 Stories - Without Character...

  Edgar Allan Poe, Franz Kafka,...

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  There is something about the number 3.    
   
  The Ancient Greeks believed 3 was the perfect number, and in China 3 has always been a lucky number, and they know a thing or two.   
   
  Most religions also have 3 this and 3 that and, of course, in these more modern times, three’s a crowd may be too many, except when it’s a ménage à trois.  It seems good things usually come in threes. 
   
  Whatever history and culture says WE think 3, a hat-trick of stories, is a great number to explore themes and literary avenues that classic authors were so adept at creating. 
   
  From their pens to your your ears.   
   
  01 - 3 Stories - Stories Without Character Names 
  02 - In the Penal Colony by Franz Kafka 
  03 - The Lady, or the Tiger by Frank Stockton 
  04 - The Black Cat by Edgar Allan Poe

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  A Knock at the Door

  Rob Parsons

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  ‘An incredible read. I laughed, I cried and my heart was truly touched by this beautifully written true story of hope and humanity at its best.’ Rosemary Conley CBE'An extraordinary story. Truly Inspirational' Tim Vine 
  An astonishing story of kindness, self-learning, pain, unbelievable hope and the sheer power of love to change a life. 
  Christmas 1975 and Queen’s ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ is riding high in the charts. In a residential street just outside Cardiff, a persistent knocking breaks the stillness of the evening …  
  When Rob Parsons, a young lawyer, opens his door he finds a man standing before him clutching a bag of belongings and a frozen chicken. Rob and his wife, Dianne, invite him into their home, cook his chicken and offer him shelter for the night. What happens next is an astonishing story of human kindness, self-learning, incredible pain, unbelievable hope and the sheer power of love to change a life. 
  A Knock at the Door is the true story of Ronnie Lockwood, a homeless man who entered the home of a young couple, became a dustman and lived as part of their family for over 45 years until his death. But this is not just Ronnie’s story – it is also that of Rob and his family. Outwardly the two men’s lives were worlds apart – as Ronnie emptied rubbish bins, Rob flew on Concorde – and yet, they discovered they had similar struggles. Then the day came, at the lowest moment of the couple’s lives, when they turned to the homeless man for help. 
  But there were also remarkable turnarounds. Ronnie spent much of his spare time volunteering, including at a homeless centre, and ended up having a £1.6 million well-being centre named after him. Rob left his law practice and he and Dianne began a charity that touches the lives of millions of people. 
  You will have never read a story like this before, but at its heart is a simple message: whether we are a lawyer or a dustman – tomorrow doesn’t always have to be like yesterday. 
  This inspirational autobiography is a testament to the power of kindness and the resilience of the human spirit. It's a motivational journey through poverty, homelessness, and the unexpected bonds of an unconventional family. 
  For fans of Harry Benson (Scram!), Richard Foster (The Real Bettie Page), Max Lucado (Jesus), and Bear Grylls (Never Give Up). 
  HarperCollins 2024

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  The Road to Riverdance

  Bill Whelan

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  Riverdance exploded across the stage at Dublin's Point Theatre one spring evening in 1994 during a seven-minute interval of the Eurovision Song Contest hosted by Ireland. It was a watershed moment in the cultural history of a country embracing the future, a confident leap into world music grounded in the footfall of the choreographed kick-line. It was a moment forty-five years in the making for its composer.
  In this tenderly unfurled memoir Bill Whelan rehearses a lifetime of unconscious preparation as step by step he revisits his past, from with his Barrington Street home in 1950s Limerick, to the forcing ground of University College Dublin and the Law Library during the 1960s, to his attic studio in Ranelagh. Along the way the reader is introduced to people and places in the immersive world of fellow musicians, artists and producers, friends and collaborators, embracing the spectrum of Irish music as it broke boundaries, entering the global slipstream of the 1980s and 1990s. As art and commerce fused, dramas and contending personalities come to view behind the arras of stage, screen and recording desk.
  Whelan pays tribute to a parade of those who formed his world. He describes the warmth and sustenance of his Limerick childhood, his parents and Denise Quinn, won through assiduous courtship; the McCourts and Jesuit fathers of his early days, the breakthrough with a tempestuous Richard Harris who summoned him to London; Danny Doyle, Shay Healy, Dickie Rock, Planxty, The Dubliners and Stockton's Wing, Noel Pearson, Seán Ó Riada; working with Jimmy Webb, Leon Uris, The Corrs, Paul McGuinness, Moya Doherty, John McColgan, Jean Butler and Michael Flatley.
  Written with wry, inimitable Irish humour and insight, Bill Whelan's self deprecation allows us to to see the players in all their glory, vulnerability and idiosyncracy. This fascinating work reveals the nuts, bolts, sheer effort and serendipities that formed the road to Riverdance in his reinvention of the Irish tradition for a modern age. As the show went on to perform to millions worldwide, Whelan was honoured with a 1997 Grammy Award when Riverdance was named the 'Best Musical Show Album.' Richly detailed and illustrated, The Road to Riverdance forms an enduring repository of memory for all concerned with the performing arts.

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  The Prison Angel - Mother...

  Kevin Sullivan, Mary Jordan

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  The winners of the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for international reporting tell the astonishing story of Mary Clarke. At the age of fifty, Clarke left her comfortable life in suburban Los Angeles to follow a spiritual calling to care for the prisoners in one of Mexico's most notorious jails. She actually moved into a cell  
  to live among drug king pins and petty thieves. She has led many of them through profound spiritual transformations in which they turned away from their lives of crime, and has deeply touched the lives of all who have witnessed the depth of her compassion. Donning a nun's habit, she became Mother  
  Antonia, renowned as "the prison angel," and has now organized a new community of sisters—the Servants of the Eleventh Hour—widows and divorced women seeking new meaning in their lives. "We had never heard a story like hers," Jordan and Sullivan write, "a story of such powerful goodness." 
   
  Born in Beverly Hills, Clarke was raised around the glamour of Hollywood and looked like a star herself, a beautiful blonde reminiscent of Grace Kelly. The choreographer Busby Berkeley spotted her at a restaurant and offered her a job, but Mary's dream was to be a happy wife and mother. She raised  
  seven children, but her two unfulfilling marriages ended in divorce. Then in the late 1960s, in midlife, she began devoting herself to charity work, realizing she had an extraordinary talent for drumming up donations for the sick and poor.  
   
  On one charity mission across the Mexican border to the drug-trafficking capitol of Tijuana, she visited La Mesa prison and experienced an intense feeling that she had found her true life's work. As she recalls, "I felt like I had come home." Receiving the blessings of the Catholic Church for her mission, on  
  March 19, 1977, at the age of fifty, she moved into a cell in La Mesa, sleeping on a bunk with female prisoners above and below her. Nearly twenty-eight years later she is still living in that cell, and the remarkable power of her spiritual counseling to the prisoners has become legendary. 
   
  The story of both one woman's profound journey of discovery and growth and of the deep spiritual awakenings she has called forth in so many lost souls, The Prison Angel is an astonishing testament to the powers of personal transformation.

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