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The uncommon reader
by Alan Bennett
Obliged to borrow a book when her corgis stray into a mobile library, the Queen discovers a passion for reading, setting the palace upon its head and causing the royal head of Great Britain to question her role in the monarchy.
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A ladder to the sky
by John Boyne
An aspiring writer meets a celebrated novelist in a hotel in 1988 and uses the man's long-held secret.
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The Golden Land
by Di Morrissey
Natalie is a young Gold Coast mother with a loving husband, two small children and a happy lifestyle. While helping her mother move house, she finds a little box containing a Burmese artefact. When Natalie learns its unique history through a letter left by her great great uncle, it ignites an interest in its country of origin and her uncle's unfulfilled plans for this curio. Her investigations collide with her own dramatically changing circumstances and create a catalyst for a moral dilemma that challenges the core of her marriage as she finds herself immersed in two very different golden lands.
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Pretty girls
by Karin Slaughter
Estranged for years after the disappearance of their sister, trophy wife Claire and struggling single mom Lydia are reunited by the murder of Claire's husband and investigate decades of family secrets to discover the truth.
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A gentleman in Moscow
by Amor Towles
Deemed an unrepentant aristocrat by a Bolshevik tribunal in 1922, Count Alexander Rostov is sentenced to house arrest in a grand hotel across the street from the Kremlin, where he endures life in an attic room while some of the most tumultuous decades in Russian history unfold.
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Heartland
by Jenny Pattrick
Donny Mac was released at Eastertime about a month before Pansy Holloway, also known as Nightshade, disappeared for good. After a short stint in prison on trumped-up charges, the loveable simpleton Donny Mac returns to the house left to him by his grandfather in the small settlement of Manawa, in the shadow of Mt Ruapehu. Now inhabited by a handful of colourful locals, the once prosperous milling town is only bustling in the ski season when the out-of-towners arrive. Awaiting Donny's return is the drunken and pregnant Nightshade, who claims he is the father. Donny's friends keep anxiously: the lace-making Bull Howie; Vera who can be seen every evening wheeling Bull's dinner in a pram down to his house in her own version of meals on wheels; farmer George Kingi and his fey four-year-old daughter Lovey; and the strange elderly sisters who have moved in next door. Also watching is the Virgin Tracey, a sixteen-year-old hiding out in one of the abandoned houses, with her own tiny baby. When an accident threatens to put Donny back into prison, he and the Virgin Tracey come up with a solution. But can the secret remain hidden?
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The racketeer
by John Grisham
When a Federal judge and his secretary fail to appear for a scheduled trial and panicked clerks call for an FBI investigation, a harrowing murder case ensues and culminates in the imprisonment of a lawyer who imparts the story of who killed the judge and why.
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The dovekeepers
by Alice Hoffman
A tale inspired by the tragic first-century massacre of hundreds of Jewish people on the Masada mountain presents the stories of a hated daughter, a baker's wife, a girl disguised as a warrior and a medicine woman who keep doves and secrets while Roman soldiers draw near.
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Drawn Out : A Seriously Funny Memoir
by Tom Scott
A funny, sometimes sad, ripping yarn of a life spent observing and satirising key figures of New Zealand politics, sports and the arts. Tom Scott is a political commentator, political cartoonist, satirist, scriptwriter, playwright, raconteur and funny man. He's been drawing political cartoons for Wellington's Dominion Post since 1988, was in the Press Gallery and was famously banned by PM Muldoon. He's observed David Lange, Mike Moore and Helen Clark, he was a close friend of Ed Hillary and wrote and worked on a number of documentaries. His memoir covers his childhood - a tragi-comedy of a poor Irish Catholic family, his uni days when he was editor of the student newspaper and sued for blasphemous libel, his parliamentary career, his work with Ed Hillary and more. This book is multi-layered and a ripping good yarn
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A Life of Contrasts: The Autobiography
by Lady Mosley Mitford, Diana
Diana Mitford is doubtless one of the most exceptional women of the twentieth century. Perhaps the only person adored by both Churchill and Hitler, she grew up at the heart of the glamorous literary and aristocratic set surrounding the Mitfords - Evelyn Waugh was but one to fall in love with her. Divorcing her wealthy husband for the married Oswald Mosley, leader of the British Union of Fascists, she notoriously became friends with Magda and Joseph Goebbels, and Adolf Hitler. As a result she was detained during the war for three years at Holloway Prison. She has now revised her exceptional autobiography with new photographs. In five new chapters, she writes about the secret purpose of her visits to Nazi Germany, the surprise recovery from serious illness and new friends, including the Duchess of Windsor and A.N. Wilson.
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