It is 1947, & Beit Daras, a quiet village in Palestine surrounded by olive groves, is home to the Baraka family. Eldest daughter Nazmiyeh looks after her widowed mother, prone to wandering & strange outbursts, while her brother Mamdouh tends to the village bees. Their younger sister, Mariam, with her striking mismatched eyes, spends her days talking to imaginary friends & writing. When Israeli forces gather outside the town`s borders, nobody suspects the terror that is about to descend. Soon the village is burning &, amidst smoke & ash, the family must take the long road to Gaza, in a walk that will test them to their limits. Sixty years later, Mamdouh`s granddaughter Nur is living in America. She falls in love with a married man, a doctor who works in Palestine, & follows him to Gaza. There she meets Alwan, the mother of Khaled
- a boy trapped in his own body, unable to wake up from a deep blue dream. It is through her that Nur will at last discover the ties of kinship that transcend distance
- & even death. The Blue Between Sky & Water is a story of powerful, flawed women; of relocation, separation & heartache; of renewal, family, endurance, & love. Susan Abulhawa brings a raw humanity & delicate authority to the story of Palestine in this devastatingly beautiful tale.

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It is 1947, & Beit Daras, a rural Palestinian village, is home to the Baraka family
- oldest daughter Nazmiyeh, brother Mamdouh,
...

You are crossing the Atlantic on a liner with your boyfriend who may or may not be planning to propose. You are fleeing the past
-
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'1942: It was towards the middle of the year when my friends started disappearing...' On the island of Java, the stirrings of the Second World War in Europe & the angry-looking man called Hitler seem a million miles away from Norwegian-born Lise & her siblings. Then one day, her friends & neighbours start to disappear, & she begins to realise that they are not safe after all. Through ten-year-old eyes, Lise tells of her family's two-year imprisonment in POW camps & the brutal treatment received at the hands of their Japanese captors. For respite from the rat-infested floor of their shelter they adopt a blue door, which sits on concrete posts in the ground. They live on it during the day as young Lise plots ways to protect her family from disease, starvation & the desperate behaviour of fellow prisoners. This is a little girl's heartbreaking tale of survival. 'A devastating portrayal of a child's loss of innocence to humiliating cruelty' Observer ...

Sjon`s The Blue Fox takes place in the year 1883
- the stark Icelandic winter is the backdrop. We follow the priest, Baldur Skuggason,
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Can a son be forgiven for the sins of his father? Adrian Ormache is a prosperous lawyer living in Lima. He has the perfect life: a great career, beautiful wife, two doting & intelligent daughters. But when his mother dies a series of events devastate his entire view of the past, his parents, & his country. Adrian's mother leaves a letter indicating that she was being blackmailed. Confused, Adrian talks to his brother, who tells him that their long dead father Colonel Ormache, who led military operations against the ' Shining Path' guerrillas during the terrible Peruvian Civil War of the 1980's, was not quite the hero Adrian had always considered him to be: he routinely had POWs & civilian women raped, tortured & executed. His mother's blackmailer is revealed to be one of the Colonel's former subordinates. When Adrian confronts him the man gives him the name of the one prisoner whom the Colonel spared & kept as a lover
- Miriam. Adrian becomes obsessed with finding Miriam. His search is cathartic & all-consuming, a journey that takes him into a country that is a far-cry from the stable, civilised Lima he's used to, a people still haunted by a harrowing, ongoing war, & some truths about his family
- & himself
- that he could never have imagined.


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Tintin has been summoned to Shanghai, but corruption, kidnap & espionage await him there. Should Tintin heed the terrible warning from the famous fakir Ramacharma? & can he find an antidote to the terrifying `poison of madness` before he is given a taste himself? ...

The mile-deep gorge made by the Blue Nile as it flows out of the highlands of North West Ethiopia into the broad plains of the Sudan is one of the greatest natural features in the world. It remained virtually unexplored until 1968. That summer an expedition supported by the Army, The Daily Telegraph & the Royal Geographical Society set out to investigate this gorge. It also aimed to navigate 500 miles of the crocodile-infested river--known in Ethiopia as the Great Abbai--200 miles of which had not been visited by Europeans, except at occasional fording places. The climax of the expedition, the penetration of the Northern gorge, was unhappily marked by the death of an expedition member by drowning, & by two attacks by bandits. In these harsh conditions a group of scientists--mainly zoologists--were able to carry out a valuable investigation of the area. In The Blue Nile Revealed Richard Snailham, one of those directly involved, tells the story of Great Abbai expedition. While covering the technical & scientific

Dimensions of the expedition, he also provides a deeply human account of this exciting adventure. First published in 1970, this book has become a classic of African exploration.

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James A. Levine's first novel, tells the haunting story of Batuk, a 15-year old girl whose family, living in the Indian countryside, is in such poverty & debt that she is sold into sexual slavery & lives in a cage on the streets of Mumbai. Batuk is just one of many girls forced into prostitution, but against the odds, she manages to put pen to paper, writing stories of her life that help her transcend & make a certain sense of her daily existence. The novel is powerfully told in Batuk's voice, through the words she writes in her journal. Searing, moving, & surprisingly hopeful, The Blue Notebook explores how people, in the most difficult of circumstances, can use stories to understand & give meaning to their lives. ...

Stunning book to accompany the BBC series of the same name. The team responsible travelled to all of the different ocean habitats in the world in order to provide the first complete & comprehensive portrait of the whole ocean system. You are led from the coastal edges to the deepest abysses & shown all of the wonders of the sea, many for the first time. Detailed text & extraordinary images combine to offer a unique insight into the world beneath the waves, affording us a glimpse of the vast treasure trove of rich & diverse life which resides there. ...