In these stories whole lives come into focus through single events or sudden memories which bring the past bubbling to the surface. The past, as her characters discover, is made up not only of what is remembered, but also what isn't. The past is there, just out of the picture, but if memories haven't been savoured, recalled in the mind & boxed away, it's as if they have never been
- until a moment when the pieces of the jigsaw re-form suddenly, sometimes pleasurably but more often painfully. Women look back at their young selves, at first marriages made when they were naà ve & trusting, at husbands & their difficult, demanding little ways. There is in this new collection an underlying heartbreak, a sense of regret in her characters for what might have been, for a fork in the road not taken, a memory suppressed in an act of prudent emotional housekeeping. But at the same time there is hope, there are second chances
- here are people who reinvent themselves, seize life by the throat, who have moved on & can dare to conjure up the hidden memories, daring to go beyond what is remembered.

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Haunted is a novel made up of stories: twenty-three of them to be precise. Twenty-three of the most horrifying, hilarious, ...

Charles Sprawson
- himself an obsessional swimmer & diver
- explores the meaning that different cultures have attached to water.

...

High summer in Cuba, 1953, & Havana gleams with possibility. Flush with booming casinos, sex, & drugs, Havana is a lucrative paradise for everyone from the Mafia & United Fruit to pimps, porn-makers, & anyone looking to grab a piece of the action
- including the Cuban government, which naturally honours the interests of its old ally, the United States of America. Of course, where there's paradise, trouble can't be far behind. Trouble, in this case, makes its entrance in the terrifically charismatic & silver-tongued form of a young revolutionary named Fidel Castro. The Caribbean is fast becoming a strategic Cold War hub, & Soviet intelligence has taken Castro under its wing. The CIA's response is to send the one man capable of eliminating Castro: the legendary gunfighter & ex-Marine hero Earl Swagger, who proved his lethal talent in Stephen Hunter's previous bestsellers Hot Springs & Pale Horse Coming. In Cuba, Earl finds himself up to his neck in treacherous ambiguity, where the old rules about honour & duty don't apply, & where Earl's target seems to have more guts & good luck than anyone else in Cuba. Blending real-world figures into a lightning-paced narrative, Stephen Hunter once again proves himself the master of literary adventure & suspense.
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Did you know that foreigners who want to live in Britain have to pass a government test to get in? It's true, & some of the questions are harder than ' Why does everyone hate Manchester United?'

So the Have I Got News For You team have, in a moving & totally out of character display of public-spiritedness, compiled this Guide to Modern Britain to help guide you around, er, modern Britain. With reassuringly jaundiced reflections on everything from the global recession, religion & the Royal Family to the NHS, education & the media, it

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Did you know that foreigners who want to live in Britain have to pass a government test to get in? It's true, & some of the questions are harder than ' Why does everyone hate Manchester United?'

So the Have I Got News For You team have, in a moving & totally out of character display of public-spiritedness, compiled this Guide to Modern Britain to help guide you around, er, modern Britain. With reassuringly jaundiced reflections on everything from the global recession, religion & the Royal Family to the NHS, education & the media, it

...