Rachel & Kirsty are thrilled to be spending the week at Golden Palace
- where real kings & queens once lived! Whilst they are settling
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Evacuation Stations is not only an acutely observed recollection of a child evacuee it is also about a boys growing into self-awareness during the 1940s beginning the journey that would take him from his Catholic working-class roots to a history scholarship at Christs College Cambridge. The centre of his world is his mother Dorrie. With evacuation in 1939 her values & the norms of life he has learned came to be set alongside the other adults who enter his life: the country stationmaster; Auntie Ethel who coolly controls him & his brothers as she does her husband; the piano-playing medical student Gilbert & his Spanish-born mother who gave him a love of music & a lifelong interest in Europe; Vincent Bywater the young Jesuit who teaches him to master a bicycle & map-reading sources of independence & adventure; & Father Delahunty the complete teacher who singlehandedly created a miniature Jesuit grammar school with a rump of evacuee boys. His mother Dorrie sometimes near & sometimes far away remains a constant influence but as he grows up Peter awakens gradually to her experience of the war as something quite different from his own. The end of the war leaves him something of a displaced person seeking a rebirth of pre-war life but aware he was attempting the impossible. ...

The Evacuee is for those who know ALL about the 1939-45 war
- & for those who should know about it September 1939: five year old
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Evan Walters (1893-1951) is perhaps the great hidden secret of Welsh painting in the twentieth century an outstanding artist who awaits discovery beyond Wales. This book presents for the first time a generous selection of colour reproductions of his paintings
- portraits landscapes still lives
- with a biographical essay on the artist. The bulk of the book however is taken up by a host of responses to the paintings by leading artists writers poets & academics including Shani Rhys James Iwan Bala Mary Lloyd Jones Jan Morris Twm Morys Nigel Jenkins Rowan Williams Dannie Abse Peter Stead Prys Morgan Gillian Clarke Tim Davies Mererid Hopwood John Barnie Jon Gower Peter Finch Joe Dunthorne & many others. The result is revealing of both Walters & the respondents & becomes a fascinating commentary on creativity & inspiration. The book is unique in one other respect in that all the royalities are being donated to the Noahs Ark Appeal for the Childrens Hospital of Wales.

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Can an orthodox Christian committed to the historic faith of the Church & the authority of the Bible be a universalist? Is it possible to believe that salvation is found only by grace through faith in Christ & yet to maintain that in the end all people will be saved? Can one believe passionately in mission if one does not think that anyone will be lost forever? Could universalism be consistent with the teachings of the Bible? Gregory Mac Donald argues that the answer is yes to all of these questions. Weaving together philosophical theological & biblical considerations Mac Donald seeks to show that being a committed universalist is consistent with the central teachings of the biblical texts & of historic Christian theology. ...

An exceptional page-turner. Escapism doesn't get more thrilling than this. Love has never had much of a place in the life of 16-year-old Evening Spiker but being the daughter of a billionaire genetic scientist has other perks. Like a private hospital where you can recover from near-fatal road accidents. & a hot surfer boy to push your wheelchair. While Eve is healing her mother sets her an unexpected challenge: to use a cutting-edge virtual reality system to design the perfect boy; everything from the colour of his eyes to the level of his IQ. It's the chance of a lifetime. The chance to play God. But what Eve doesn't realise is that she isn't just playing. Because her mother's research is about more than just saving human lives.. . It's about creating them. ...

With the death of a mother & the abduction of a young girl Susan Fletcher has written a vividly beautiful novel about the innocence & terror of childhood. Following the loss of her mother eight-year-old Evie is sent to a new life in rural Wales
- a dripping place where flowers appear mysteriously on doorsteps & people look at her twice. With a sense of being lied to she sets out to discover her familys dark secret
- unaware that there is yet more darkness to come with the sinister disappearance of local girl Rosemary Hughes. Now many years later Eve Green is waiting for the birth of her own child & when she revisits her past something clicks in her mind & her own reckless role in the hunt for Rosies abductor is revealed...A truly beautiful & hypnotic first novel this is both an engaging puzzle & an enchanting work of literature.

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January 1928 the Isle of Dogs. Following the mysterious disappearance of her sailor husband (missing presumed drowned) young widow Eve Kumar struggles to provide for herself & her twin sons. But her flower-selling business is destroyed overnight when the Thames floods its banks wrecking Eve's ramshackle riverside cottage & forcing her to take refuge with the lecherous Harold Slygo & his drunken wife. As Eve's home life turns from bad to worse she is befriended by a young police constable Charlie Merritt who shares Eve's growing suspicions that her husband's death was no accident. But Eve & Charlie's investigations are attracting unwelcome attention
- & when Eve herself disappears Charlie realizes there are those who would go to any lengths to ensure the truth remains buried. Will he be able to save the woman he has grown to love?
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Eve Was Framed offers an impassioned personal critique of the British legal system. Helena Kennedy focuses on the treatment of women in our courts
- at the prejudices of judges the misconceptions of jurors the labyrinths of court procedures & the influence of the media. But the inequities she uncovers could apply equally to any disadvantaged group
- to those whose cases are subtly affected by race class poverty or politics or who are burdened even before they appear in court by misleading stereotypes.

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The technology to download the consciousnesses of pilots into multiple clones the Capsuleers has finally delivered the dream of immortal soldiers. Train a soldier just once & then however many times he dies he will keep on getting more experienced more battle toughened as his brain is downloaded into a ready supply of cloned bodies. But no-one anticpated the effects of the multiple traumas the multiple stresses of multiple lives & deaths on the battle field. War is hell. & now it can last forever for everyone. A fast-moving action-packed novel of interstellar war & high-tech combat backed by massive cross promotion. ...