Other books that might interest you

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  Off the Tracks - A Meditation on...

  Pamela Mulloy

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  Train travel is having a renaissance. Grand old routes that had been canceled, or were moldering in neglect, have been refurbished as destinations in themselves. The Rocky Mountaineer, the Orient Express, and the Trans-Siberian Railroad run again in all their glory. 
  		 
  Pamela Mulloy has always loved train travel. Whether returning to the Maritimes every year with her daughter on the Ocean, or taking her family across Europe to Poland, trains have been a linchpin of her life. As COVID locked us down, Mulloy began an imaginary journey that recalled the trips she has taken, as well as those of others. Whether it was Mary Wollstonecraft traveling alone to Sweden in the late 1700s, or the incident that had Charles Dickens forever fearful of trains, or the famous actress Sarah Bernhardt trapped in her carriage in a midwestern blizzard in the 1890s, or Sir John A. Macdonald’s wife daring to cross the Rockies tied to the cowcatcher at the front of the train, the stories explore the odd mix of adventure and contemplation that travel permits. 
  		 
  Thoughtful, observant, and fun, Off the Tracks is the perfect blend of research and personal experience that, like a good train ride, will whisk you into another world.

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  Delusions of Paradise - Escaping...

  Maiwand Banayee

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  When Maiwand Banayee was 16, he wanted to become a suicide bomber for the Taliban.
  
  
  
  In this inspiring tale of survival and self-discovery, the reader will follow Maiwand's journey down a dark path and his ultimate redemption. Growing up in Kabul amid the Afghan wars, he witnessed atrocities that no child should ever see - rotting corpses, starving families, a neighbourhood torn apart. He escaped to a refugee camp in Pakistan, where religious militants began the gradual grooming of Maiwand and other Afghan boys. These confused and traumatised children were indoctrinated, radicalised and prepared to die in the name of a religious war. But Maiwand escaped this life. Fleeing Afghanistan, he had a life-altering crisis of faith, confidence and meaning, finding new purpose and rebuilding himself.
  
  
  
  Maiwand taught himself how to read and write in English, and here tells his astonishing story in crystalline prose. Delusions of Paradise offers a powerful warning about the dangers of radical religion, and is a stunning celebration of self-determination and redemption from an important new voice.

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  Anguish The double secret

  Max Dorra

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  The words of others, as an unpleasant remark ("You’re not hardworking") or a medical diagnosis ("You’re bipolar"), have the power to plunge us into anguish whenever they show an image of ourselves that we do not recognize: "In a world where words become viruses, certain sentences can kill." 
  The reductive identity that is thus assigned to us creates the illusion that our life can be summed up by these few words, allowing others to exercise the tyrannical power of anxiety over us. 
  Max Dorra explains how this illusion, created temporarily by the gaze of others, is just a montage-effect of our memory—as in a movie—and that it is enough to understand the mechanisms of this illusion in order to free ourselves from it: "To become aware of the fact that one is held captive by a montage is to be freed from a false confinement."
  In virtuosic and sensitive language ("The affects—shapeless and promising, wonderful clouds"), the author journeys through music, painting and cinema, appealing to sociology, psychoanalysis and philosophy, while remaining firmly rooted in reality: "There are more things in a hospital elevator than in all of philosophy." 
  He shows us that trusting our imagination allows us to tame anxiety without fearing it, and understanding that "another montage is possible" allows us to go towards the other without losing ourselves.

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  Bodies from the Library 5:...

  Tony Medawar

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  Classic crime fiction's 'Indiana Jones' Tony Medawar unearths more unpublished and uncollected stories from the Golden Age of suspense. 
  ‘Five books in, and the selection here might well be the strongest yet. This series continues to delight with the high standard of forgotten gems that Medawar uncovers, and there’s sufficient range to ensure that all fans of the genre will find something to enjoy. Book 6 can’t come soon enough.’ 
  Jim Noy, author of The Red Death Murders 
  The end of the First World War saw the rise of an insatiable public appetite for clever and thrilling mystery fiction and a new kind of hero – the modern crime writer. As the genre soared in popularity, so did the inventiveness of its best authors, ushering in a “Golden Age” of detective fiction – two decades of exemplary mystery writing: the era of the whodunit, the impossible crime and the locked-room mystery, with stories that have thrilled and baffled generations of readers. 
  The Golden Age still casts a long shadow, with many of the authors who were published at that time still hugely popular today. Aside from novels, they all wrote short fiction – stories, serials and plays – and although many have been republished in books over the last 100 years, Bodies from the Library collects the ones that are impossible to find: stories that appeared in a newspaper, magazine or an anthology that has long been out of print; ephemeral works such as plays not aired, staged or screened for decades; and unpublished stories that were absorbed into an author’s archive when they died . . . 
  Complete with fascinating biographies by Tony Medawar of all the featured authors, this latest volume in the annual Bodies from the Library series once again brings into the daylight the forgotten, the lost and the unknown, and is an indispensable collection for any bookshelf. 
  The historical thrillers in this collection are top-notch, showcasing the traditional storytelling techniques that made the Golden Age of detective fiction so beloved. Each story is a journey back in time, a thrilling ride filled with suspense and intrigue. 
  For fans of Carter Dickson (The White Priory Murders), E.C.R. Lorac (Death of an Author), John Dickson Carr (The Black Spectacles), Christianna Brand (Suddenly at His Residence), and Tony Medawar (Ghosts from the Library). 
  HarperCollins 2022

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  Fancies versus Fads

  G K Chesterton

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  The last volume of Chesterton's collected essays, Gathered from the London Mercury, the New Witness, and the Illustrated London News, it is the only volume from after WWI, and is most serious, philosophical, and socially direct collection. 
  "The problem is not so much Prohibition with a large P as prohibition with a small one. I mean, I am interested not so much in liquor as in liberty. I want to know on what principle the prohibitionists are proceeding in this case, and how they think it applies to any other case. And I cannot for the life of me make out. They…do not attack liquor; they do quite simply attack liberty. I mean that they are satisfied with saying about this liberty what can obviously be said about any liberty – that it can be, and is, abominably abused. If that had been a final objection to any form of freedom, there never would have been any form of freedom." 
  "So long as we combine ceaseless and often reckless scientific speculation with rapid and often random social reform, the result must inevitably be not anarchy but ever-increasing tyranny. There must be a ceaseless and almost mechanical multiplication of things forbidden. The resolution to cure all the ills that flesh is heir to, combined with the guesswork about all possible ills that flesh and nerve and brain-cell may be heir to – these two things conducted simultaneously must inevitably spread a sort of panic of prohibition. Scientific imagination and social reform between them will quite logically and almost legitimately have made us slaves."

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  Angel in Disguise An - From...

  T S Arthur

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  The bookshelves of American literature are incredible collections that have gathered together centuries of very talented authors.  From this continent their fame spread and whilst among their number many are now forgotten or neglected their talents endure.  Among them is T S Arthur.

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