Monthly Archives: February 2022

The Honey Guide by Richard Crompton

The Honey Guide by Richard Crompton

Set against the backdrop of Kenya’s December 2007 turbulent and corrupt election for a new president,  The Honey Guide by Richard Crompton brings Nairobi and its tribal tensions to life. The Honey Guide by Richard Crompton The Honey Guide introduces Mollel, a former Maasai warrior, who was once a homicide detective but was moved to traffic after a nervous breakdown ...

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The Ruin by Dervla McTiernan

It is 1993. Young and inexperienced Garda Cormac Reilly answers a call for help and  witnesses  a scene that will haunt him forever. Two silent, neglected children – fifteen-year-old Maude and five-year-old Jack – are waiting for him at a crumbling country house. Upstairs, their mother Hilaria Blake lies dead from an apparent drug overdose. Fast forward 20 years to 2013. Surgical resident ...

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The Wife and the Widow by Christian White

Set against the backdrop of a fictional island named Belport Island in Australia, The Wife and the Widow by Christian White is a thriller told from the perspectives of two women: Kate, a Melbourne widow, and Abby, an island local. The story begins with Kate and her daughter waiting at the airport for her husband John to return from London. But he isn’t on the plane at all. ...

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Two Can Play by Kate Kessler

I started reading Two Can Play by Kate Kessler without realising that it is the second book in the series.  Usually books in a crime series can stand alone without reading the earlier books, but Two Can Play makes quite a lot of reference to the first book It Takes One that I felt lost at times. You will enjoy ...

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Repeat After Me by Rachel DeWoskin

Repeat After Me by Rachel DeWoskin is a bittersweet cross-cultural tragic love story between two persons whose lives briefly intertwine but are changed forever. The story follows the relationship between Aysha Silvermintz, a young neurotic ESL teacher in Manhattan, and Da Ge, her student who is a Chinese dissident who comes to the U.S. just after the Tiananmen Square uprisings. Both Asyha and Da Ge come from ...

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February Flowers by Fan Wu

February Flowers by Fan Wu

Set in modern China, February Flowers by Fan Wu is a coming of age story of two young women in a society torn between tradition and modernity, focusing on the bond between the two girls. Innocent seventeen-year-old Chen Ming and worldly and flashy twenty-four-year-old Miao Yan have very little in common other than studying at the same university. Ming lives in her own world ...

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The Housekeeper and the Professor by Yoko Ogawa

The Housekeeper and the Professor (博士の愛した数式) by Yoko Ogawa is a short read, mesmerising in its heart-warming story about unlikely friendships, mathematics and baseball. It has sold in excess of 4 million copies in Japan alone. This is a beautifully-written story about an old maths professor, his housekeeper and her young son. After a traffic accident in 1975, the professor’s memory post-1975 lasts only 80 minutes. ...

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