🌟🌟🌟🌟 A compassionate and heart-felt memoir, written by a retired forensic psychiatrist, whose thirty-two year career exposed her to more diversity, challenges, risks, and yes, opportunities, than many of us can even imagine. As a psychiatrist who works with mentally-ill criminals (and not dead bodies, as is a common misconception),…
🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟+ At just over six-hundred pages this is not a book for the faint of heart, but oh, please stick with it! This literary masterpiece is so meticulously plotted, so intricate, and so dense with living/breathing characters, evocative time periods and locations, and of course, thematic ideas and plot devices,…
🌟🌟🌟🌟💫 Part murder-mystery, all character-based slow reveal, this story oozes sweetness and danger in a delectable unwind, a gradual pooling of cloying tension, fear, and poignant urgency as we are forced to question - what do we really know, after all, about those we cannot help but love? Set in…
🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟+ A rapturous read, filled with human stories, memories, hopes, dreams and imaginings, and as in the plants so wondrously carried within, this is a book we gardeners (botanists, plant and nature-lovers) must all agree on. A treasure, “glossy and its flowers abundant”, - this book is pure goodness for…
🌟🌟🌟🌟 Based on the true-life story of two remarkable women, Mary and Eliza Chulkhurst, in the Kent township of Biddenden, in and around the early twelfth-century, this book takes the tale of what may be the first documented case of conjoined twins. In this case, joined at the hip, with…
🌟🌟🌟🌟💫 Quite likely the most uniquely-textured female heroine one is likely to meet between the pages, Dr Lily Robinson is a rare treat. A brilliant and beautiful pathologist and toxicologist, Dr Lily is one smart cookie - albeit one who is also deeply morally conflicted and suffering from a buried…
🌟🌟🌟🌟 Lushly illustrative, in many ways, of the works set in motion by Rosamund Pilcher, this sweeping cross-generational family saga follows the lives and loves of two key women: Florence Baudin, a naive yet sensible young woman (dealing with a horrific past), and her long-estranged aunt, Rosalie Delacroix, a glamorous…
🌟🌟🌟🌟 A quick and interesting read, this story has the feel of a longish short-story - a fable of sorts - telling the tale of a complicated family, steeped in love, sacrifice, loss and ultimately redemption, but of a form as unexpected as it is long and exceptionally overdue. Told…
🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟 A gorgeously-written emotional mine-field, so impeccably crafted these characters will sit with you, telling their stories and holding your heart, long after the final reading. Told from alternating third-person POVs, the story opens us to the world of our main protagonist, Yasmin Ghorami, a London-based junior doctor of Bengali…
🌟🌟🌟🌟💫 A sweet and touching children’s picture-book, illustrated with charming and whimsical images, that tells the story of our main protagonist, Charlie, and his special relationship with his Grandpa Jack. Sharing a cup of cocoa, Grandpa Jack reminisces in answer to Charlie’s observation and question about the giant oak tree…