A diary kept by a 27-year-old Vietnamese doctor who was killed by the Americans during the Vietnam War, while trying to defend her patients. It shows the diarist as a vibrant human being, a poetic longing for love, trying hard to be worthy of the Communist Party & doing her best to look after her patients under appalling conditions. ...

In 1954, in the cookhouse of a logging & sawmill settlement in northern New Hampshire, an anxious twelve-year-old boy mistakes the local constable's girlfriend for a bear. Both the twelve-year-old & his father become fugitives, forced to run from Coos County
- to Boston, to southern Vermont, to Toronto
- pursued by the implacable constable. Their lone protector is a fiercely libertarian logger, once a river driver, who befriends them. In a story spanning five decades, Last Night in Twisted River
- John Irving's twelfth novel
- depicts the recent half-century in the United States as 'a living replica of Coos County, where lethal hatreds were generally permitted to run their course'. From the novel's taut opening sentence
- ' The young Canadian, who could not have been more than fifteen, had hesitated too long'
- to its elegiac final chapter, Last Night in Twisted River is written with the historical authenticity & emotional authority of The Cider House Rules & A Prayer for Owen Meany. It is also as violent & disturbing a story as John Irving's breakthrough bestseller, The World According to Garp. What further distinguishes Last Night in Twisted River is the author's unmistakable voice
- the inimitable voice of an accomplished storyteller. Near the end of this moving novel, John Irving writes: ' We don't always have a choice how we get to know one another. Sometimes, people fall into our lives cleanly
- as if out of the sky, or as if there were a direct flight from Heaven to Earth
- the same sudden way we lose people, who once seemed they would always be part of our lives'.








...

Portia Davenport is the luckiest woman in the world. She & her gorgeous husb&, Andrew, have just finished ploughing a fortune into renovating her ancestral home, Davenport Hall, & are now planning to unveil it as one of the most fabulous, luxurious, five-star country house hotels in Kildare. But life never turns out like you think. ...

In 1844 Henry Lehman arrived in the US from Germany &, with his brother Emanuel, established a modest cotton brokering firm that would come to be called Lehman Brothers. In 2008 Dick Fuld, the last CEO of Lehman Brothers, filed for corporate bankruptcy. ...

Charles Mc Glinchey lived on the Inishowen Peninsula in Donegal. Never married, he outlived his brothers & sisters, none of whom left an heir. In the 1940s & '50s, Mc Glinchey visited schoolmaster & friend, Patrick Kavanagh, to talk about his life. Kavanagh wrote it down. Thirty years later Brian Friel edited the material to form a book. ...

All 19 episodes from Series 15 & 16 of Roy Clarke's long-running BBC comedy set in the Yorkshire Dales. Series 15 episodes are: ' How to Clear Your Pipes', ' Where There's Smoke, There's Barbecue', ' The Black Widow', ' Have You Got a Light Mate?', ' Concert ...

All 13 episodes from the first two series of Roy Clarke's popular comedy set in the Yorkshire Dales. In ' Short Back & Palais Glide' the friends go in search of Compo's key. ' Inventor of the Forty Foot Ferret' sees Blamire try to get Compo into church. ' ...

All 19 episodes from series 11 & 12 of Roy Clarke's long-running comedy set in the Yorkshire Dales. Series 11 episodes comprise: ' Come Back Jack Harry Teesdale', ' The Kiss & Mavis Poskit', ' Oh Shut Up & Eat Your Choc Ice', ' Who's That Bloke with Nor ...

All 17 episodes from series 13 & 14 of Roy Clarke's long-running comedy set in the Yorkshire Dales. Series 13 episodes comprise: ' Quick, Quick, Slow', ' Give Us a Lift', ' Was That Nora Batty Singing?', ' Cash Flow Problems', ' Passing the Earring', ' Pole S ...

All 16 episodes from series 3 & 4 of Roy Clarke's popular comedy set in the Yorkshire Dales. In ' The Man from Oswestry', Clegg (Peter Sallis) & Compo (Bill Owen) meet war hero Foggy Dewhurst (Brian Wilde) for the first time & a new friendship is for ...