BookBubble Favourites – One for the Weekend

Summer 1976. Mrs Creasy is missing and The Avenue is alive with whispers. As the summer shimmers endlessly on, 10 year olds Grace and Tilly decide to take matters into their own hands. But as doors and mouths begin to open and the cul-de-sac starts giving up its secrets, the amateur detectives will find more than they could have imagined.

Memoir. Tara grew up preparing for the end of the world. She was never put in school, never taken to the doctor. She did not have a birth certificate until she was 9 years old. At 16, to escape her father’s radicalism and a violent older brother, she left home. What followed was a struggle for self-invention, a journey that gets to the heart of what education is and what it offers: the perspective to see one’s life through new eyes and the will to change it.

Memoir. In this behind-the-scenes, no holds barred account of life on Newsnight, before, during and after going on air, Emiliy Matilis describes the wranglings, bust-ups, blow-ups, pleading, last-second script-shreddings, scoops, walk-outs and unexpected love-ins that we never see on screen. A brilliant exposé of the stories that never make the news.

Crime/thriller. When a gunshot rings out during morning rush-hour at a busy London café, the lives of a group of strangers will never be the same again. But there is more to the situation than meets the eye. And as the captives grapple with their own inner demons, the lines between right and wrong begin to blur. Will the secrets they keep stop them from escaping with their lives?

Gothic fiction. Emmett is a binder’s apprentice. His job is to hand-craft beautiful books and with each to capture something unique and extraordinary – a memory. If you have something you want to forget, or a secret to hide, he can bind it and you will never have to remember the pain it caused. In a vault under his mentor’s workshop, row upon row of books and secrets are meticulously stored and recorded. Then one day he discover that one of the volumes has his name on it.

October 1966 and William is having the time of his life at his first black-tie do. But as the evening unfolds, news hits of a landslide at a coal mine. It has buried a school: Aberfan. He decides he must act, so he stands and volunteers to attend. It will be his first job as an embalmer and one he never forgets. His work that night will force him to think about the little boy he was and the losses he has worked so hard to forget. But compassion can have surprising consequences because – as he discovers – giving so much to other others can sometimes help us heal ourselves.

Non-fiction. Memoir. Joanna Cannon tells her powerful story of her time as a junior doctor in visceral, heart-rending snapshots, and shows us why we need to take better care of those who care for us.

August 1944. For a young girl, blind since the age of 6, the world is full of mazes. The miniature of a Paris neighbourhood made by her father to teach her the way home. The microscopic layers within the invaluable diamond that her father guards in the Museum of Natural History. The walled city by the sea where they take refuge when the Nazis invade Paris. And a future which draws her closer to a German orphan, destined to labour in the mines until a broken radio fills his life with possibility and brings him to the notice of the Hitler Youth.

RomCom. Their friends think they are crazy but it’s the perfect solution. He has the one bed flat while she is at work in the day and she has the run of the place the rest of the time. But with obsessive ex-boyfriends, wrongly imprisoned brothers and the fact they haven’t; met yet, this flatshare is more complicated than expected…

Mexico. When a bullet destroys her world, a mother is left with no other way to protect her son than to flee and make the dangerous journey north to the border. It’s a perilous journey,  fraught with risk, and knife-edge decisions about who to trust as she discovers what she is prepared to do to protect her son and get him to safety.

London. Political thriller.  A mother, well-thought of MP, accused of murder but innocent. Or is she a liar? Tabloid media, trolling and page-turning courtroom drama makes for a tense, topical thriller.