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My Pain, My Country
It is May 1998, and riots have sprung up across Indonesia with attacks targeting the ethnic Chinese. Buildings are being set alight all around as helpless crowds watch their communities burn to the ground. Nina, a young Indonesian woman of Chinese descent, feels compelled to help her fellow student activists but finds herself in harm's way amid the mass gang-raping of Chinese women. Despite the government's best efforts to deny these allegations, the lives of many were dramatically changed by the traumatic events. Nina's heart-breaking experience is laced with cultural imagery and an emotional depth that will leave you awed. 'A powerful and engaging story about a national scandal the nation prefers to deny or forget. A must-read for anyone interested in contemporary Indonesia and her recent past.'Ariel Heryanto, Monash University, Melbourne, Australia 'Dewi Anggraeni creates poignant, interweaving plots of three generations of women in a family struggling to come to terms with a tragedy, which blends unspeakable violence, tormenting guilt, and lingering shame with the beauty of the batik-making art and the poetics of writing, to open up a slippery path toward a healing process that refuses to forget while continuing to move on. The life journey of each of the characters allegorizes the growing pain a nation must experience to fulfil its destiny as a diverse, multilingual and multi-ethnic society against deeply rooted prejudice and bigotry.' Manneke Budiman, Universitas Indonesia, Jakarta, Indonesia
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Marian
King Richard is on a crusade. Prince John will do anything to take England from him. Someone must take a stand. Marian has been running from her past and started a new life in Nottingham. When the Sheriff dies unexpectedly, her world changes forever. The new Sheriff puts not only Marian but the whole of Nottingham in danger. She must confront her past and step up to protect Nottingham when no one else will. Along the way, Marian makes friends as well as enemies. She meets an old acquaintance, Robin Hood, but things are not what they used to be. They have vastly different lives and responsibilities. Can they overcome their differences and work together? Can Marian be the leader everyone needs? Will she finally find peace?
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Malory's Quest
March 1471, Rogue Malory is dead. His friends, the Newgate Three, set out to fulfil their promise to him to deliver the finished manuscript of Le Morte D’Arthur to the friars of Winchester. But national events intrude and the three find themselves cast out from England. Advised by their old friend, Sir Anthony Tanner, and his betrothed, Margaret Limpsett, they set out to Bruges in Flanders where they seek advice on how to proceed to protect the manuscript. New characters are introduced, including William Caxton who becomes integral to their lives. Previous friends – and enemies – reappear and play their parts. But not all is well. At the end, there is a shocking discovery. Will the quest be fulfilled?
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Leaves in a Holocaust Wind
The Holocaust, the final solution for Jews, is infamous in history. Robert Dawson's Leaves in a Holocaust Wind is the story of another community that suffered in the Holocaust: the Gypsies. Told by Demeter Fox and Zuzzi, Leaves in a Holocaust Wind follows their journey to freedom in the German occupied territory of Slovakia. From the horrors of slaughter in the woods, the lies of a safe future, the concentration camp of Majdanek and the hiding away in the countryside, Fox and Zuzzi must come to terms with what they have witnessed and find the courage to survive until freedom comes. It is a novel of the playful mind-set and culture of the Romanies in the face of a most brutal regime, and in which most of the major events are based on real incidents.
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Lady
On his eighteenth birthday David is given a six-month-old German Shepherd puppy, and immediately a bond is formed between David and Lady, as he calls her. They become inseparable, working together on the family farm in Yorkshire.It is, however, 1944, and the country is still engaged in World War Two so it is only a short time before David receives his call up papers to fight for his country. He wants to do his duty but is worried about leaving Lady behind, David then discovers he is able to enlist her as a guard dog to work alongside him.Although the Germans are in retreat there is still fierce fighting and David, along with Lady, is taken as prisoner of war. Whilst in the camp Lady offers comfort to the internees, and is even a link between the internees and the German guards, and the bond between her and David becomes even stronger.This bond, indeed love, for each other makes them even more inseparable right to the very end.
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Into the Skies: A World War I Aviator Story
This story portrays an American who gets caught up in World War One as an ‘aviator' from the beginning to the end, an unusual achievement, which makes for an absorbing tale. The author has taken elements from the memoirs of aviation pioneers, most of which began in the last years of the war, modified them to reflect changes that occurred from 1914 to 1918, and added other adventures. The back story includes some instances from the infancy of flight and the inspiration it provided a boy as he grew up in Dayton, Ohio. As a ‘memoir' of the Great War the book is an exciting and enjoyable read, whilst also providing a chronology of the War from the point of view of a German-American pilot who joined the French Aéronautique Militaire and flew on the side of the French for the duration of the conflict.
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Breaking the Flood
In Breaking the Flood, the first of four novels about the fall of Constantinople, Niccolo Gritti, a nineteen year-old scion of an aristocratic merchant dynasty in mid-15th century Venice, recounts his upbringing, his family’s impoverishment and his decision to take ship in a trading fleet to the eastern Mediterranean. Ambushed by corsairs, Niccolo is pressed as a galley slave. Soon, a fellow oarsman identifies himself as Demetrius Angelos, member of a distinguished military family in Constantinople. Demetrius is desperate to return there, threatened as his city is by the bellicose ruler of the Ottomans, Mehmet II. Eventually, the two young men escape the corsairs’ clutches and Niccolo decides to throw in his lot with Demetrius, journeying with him to the decayed Byzantine capital. At once, Bildungsroman and quest narrative, Breaking the Flood is both vivid and haunting, recreating a forgotten world with cinematic and at times hallucinatory clarity.
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A Village Betrayed
A poignant story of the impact of war on a defenceless French village during the Second World War. Four courageous villagers join the Maquis, the Resistance in Vichy occupied France, to protect their families. They are swept into a treacherous conflict where one false word or brave action can result in the torture and death of people they know and love. One old man and a young girl survive the savage destruction that wipes out the whole community.This novel uses the recorded history of the devastation of many rural villages in the Aveyron, Lot and Tarn departments of the Midi-Pyrénées. Oradour-sur-Glane in the Haute-Vienne Department is a famous memorial to the brutality of the Second World War.
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A Time to Live
1936. Clouds are looming over Europe. Uncertainty hangs in the air. It’s been less than 20 years since The Great War and there’s talk of still darker times ahead.A young Englishman caught in the middle of the Italo-Abyssinian War joins up with the Red Cross Humanitarian Ambulance Team to do what he can to help in the war effort, and forges bonds that will carry with him through the darkest days of Spanish Civil War and beyond. Bonds that will stay forged for the rest of his life.
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A River by the Window: China Remembered
A River by the Window: China Remembered is a family saga of life during China’s tumultuous history from the late 1950s. Set amidst the purges and denunciations and exiles, and the terror of the Great Cultural Revolution through to the so-called ‘Great 1980s’, are the human stories of how families and individuals coped with the crises that overtook them. Human life went on; there were births and deaths and marriages, loves bloomed and friendships formed, careers were pursued and happiness sought. It traverses China from north to south, from east to west, to the ‘Open Door’ policies of Deng Xiaoping. This allowed China access to much western culture, with its liberal values and social trends, such as an appreciation of individualism, sexual liberation, western music and fashions, all fertile soil for germinating the seeds of democratic values and ideas, with this, in turn, leading to further gradual social change.
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A Dangerous Hour for England
Fin Ross grew up working on the land in the small village of Pamphill, Dorset, as the ripples of the French Revolution began to have their impact on Britain. Bound to the ‘de Lacey’ family who owned the magnificent Great House, Fin is discovered in a place that he probably should not have been and observing something that he probably should not have seen but which would change his life.Having to flee from his home, Fin ‘volunteers’ for the army, starting a new life that leads him into adventures across Southern England but swiftly moves to Portugal and one of the greatest battles of the era. He learns to survive not only from the threat of musket, sword and cannon from the enemy, but also from those who have followed him from his home.Trusted friends become an integral part of Fin’s fight for survival as he faces up to shot, shell, accusation and treachery…
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50 Plus Recent Events which Helped Shape or Shocked the Nation
What Would Make Your List?Writer Roger Knowles has assembled a comprehensive list of the most critical events which have created modern British society. From the tumultuous political events which saw war hero Churchill being replaced by ‘peacetime politician' Attlee to the ramifications of the Poll Tax, this book seeks to tell the story of contemporary England in small, enjoyable vignettes. Written in clear prose, the 50 Plus Recent Events Which Helped Shape or Shocked the Nation is a book which educates, explains and elucidates some of the biggest tragedies and victories to befall Britain.
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