Category: Fiction
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Ethel Rohan – The Weight of Him

The blurb on the back of this book made me immediately want to buy this and read it – a man struggling with both the loss of someone close to him, and also struggling with his health and appearance – he’s extremely overweight and feels alienated from his family. I felt like I would be
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Diana Gabaldon – Outlander

We went on holiday to Scotland for our anniversary this year, and gifts/souvenirs for Outlander were absolutely everywhere. I’d watched the first episode of the Amazon TV series with my friend, but I decided I wanted to read the book before I watched any further. I LOVE Scotland, and a book set in such beautiful
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Paula Gooder – Phoebe

I picked this book up after seeing an advert for a talk with the author at Southwark Cathedral which just so happened to be while I was in London (this never happens!). I booked onto the event straight away, and the kindle version of the book was only 99p, so I dug straight in. Unfortunately,
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Shari Low – With or Without You

An interesting premise, a story that starts with a life-changing decision. Then we split into two parts – one where Liv says Yes, and one where she says No. But is your life actually pre-destined to end up a certain way no matter what decisions you choose? That’s what is explored in this book. I
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Giovanna Fletcher – Dream a Little Dream

Giovanna Fletcher is one of my favourite people to follow on the internet, and I have always loved her books, but if I’m honest, I found this one really hard to get into. I think I was probably about half way through before I felt like the pace picked up enough for me to be
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Onjali Q. Rauf – The Boy at the Back of the Class

A warm, engaging and inspiring look at an all too relevant topic, I would recommend this book to everyone, but particularly as a very engaging and relatable way to introduce the topic of the refugee crisis to young children. I first heard of this book when it started winning awards, namely the Waterstones Children’s Book
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Paige Toon – The Last Piece of My Heart

Another E-book by an author that I’ve heard of but never read before, picked up because the e-book is currently free on Amazon, and the perfect book for a long train ride home. However, I did have extremely mixed feelings about the book, which you might understand as you hear more. In the book, we
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Cathy Bramley – We’ll Meet Again

What a sweet, perfectly romantic book. It was less than 50 pages long so you wouldn’t think you would have much time to become invested in the characters, but the way this was written made the characters feel like friends almost immediately. I’ve never read any of Cathy Bramley’s books before, but I decided to
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Sarah Bennett – Spring at Lavender Bay

I’m in two minds over how to review this book – on one hand, I read the book in just a few hours and I felt really invested in how Beth’s story would turn out. But what was really jarring for me was that there were so many editorial mistakes that I kept being jolted
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Rainbow Rowell – Fangirl

It would be really easy to judge this book by the title and assume it’s ‘just’ young adult fiction and doesn’t have a serious point. But although this might be young adult fiction, it showed that the only way to get through social-anxiety and other mental health problems is to open up to people and
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Ann Weisgarber – The Glovemaker

For our anniversary, Cameron and I decided to start a new tradition where we will buy each other books related to whatever the anniversary is supposed to be represented by that year. Apparently, year 2 is cotton, so we spend a good hour in Waterstones in Oban looking for books that were cotton related. For
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Bill Clinton & James Patterson – The President is Missing

It’s been quite a while since I listened to an audiobook, but over the last week, Cameron and I have been on our anniversary holiday to Scotland which has involved a LOT of driving. Rather than listen to the same music over and over again, we decided that we’d spend the time listening to a
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Christina Dalcher – Vox

Wow. Just Wow. This book was totally chilling. Set in the not too distant future, women’s rights have been completely stripped away. No bank accounts, no jobs, they are forced to stay at home like a good wife should. But worst of all, they are limited to 100 words a day. Go over that limit
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Brandon Sanderson – Mistborn: Secret History

Oh how I wish I had time for a Mistborn re-read. After reading this short novella, it really made me want to read again the stories of Vin and Kelsier. I think the second set of Mistborn books would also have made a bit more sense having read this novella too. In this book, we
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Fiona Lloyd – The Diary of a (Trying to be Holy) Mum

I picked this book up on our church book stall a little while ago – the cover caught my eye – I’ve always liked diary style books. At first, I thought it was a biography style book, but some of the characters in the book were such caricatures of characters you see in a church
