BOOKSIMO

Description The story of your life never starts at the beginning. Don't they teach you anything at school? So says 104-year-old Ona to the 11-year-old boy who's been sent to help her out every Saturday morning. As he refills the bird feeders and tidies the garden shed, Ona tells him about her long life, from first love to second chances. Soon she's confessing secrets she has kept hidden for decades. One Saturday, he doesn't show up. Ona starts to think he's not so special after all, but then his father Quinn arrives on her doorstep, determined to finish his son's good deed. The boy's mother is not so far behind. Ona is set to discover that even at her age the world can surprise you, and that sometimes sharing a loss is the only way to find yourself again. Review This really is a remarkable book I totally forgot I was reading a story - how Monica Wood ever came up with this story line is just amazing to me. The back story to Ona, who is now 1...

Description Eliade Jencks knows the only reason people call at midnight is to tell you someone has died. Professor Solete was one of her few friends. Perhaps her only friend. But his friends don't think much of her - a vague, scruffy waitress, impatient with philosophical onanism at parties. Naturally, they're horrified to find out that Solete has left her his Field Guide to Reality. The Guide has taken on legendary proportions among the celebrated minds of Oxford. The work of a lifetime, it purportedly advances Solete's great philosophical Theory of Everything and even defines the very nature of reality. A big, important book. Only, they can't find it. So, baffled, grieving, and slightly annoyed, Eliade sets out on a quest for the missing manuscript, and falls down a rabbit-hole of metaphysical possibility. From a psychotropic tea party to the Priests of the Quantum Realm, she trips her way through Solete's wonderland reality and, without quite meaning to...

Description This book of dark secrets opens with a blaze. On the morning of her daughter’s wedding, June Reid’s house goes up in flames, destroying her entire family – her present, her past and her future. Fleeing from the carnage, stricken and alone, June finds herself in a motel room by the ocean, hundreds of miles from her Connecticut home, held captive by memories and the mistakes she has made with her only child, Lolly, and her partner, Luke. In the turbulence of grief and gossip left in June’s wake we slowly make sense of the unimaginable. The novel is a gathering of voices, and each testimony has a new revelation about what led to the catastrophe – Luke’s alienated mother Lydia, the watchful motel owners, their cleaner Cissy, the teenage pothead who lives nearby – everyone touched by the tragedy finds themselves caught in the undertow, as their secret histories finally come to light. Lit by the clarity of understanding that true sadness brings,  Did You Ever Ha...

Description Private Investigator Drake Sanders is having a difficult day. Not only has he been press-ganged by an old police colleague into investigating a murder that he is somehow the main suspect for, but he's been hired by two different people to search for an ancient artefact that doesn't appear to be missing.  As business has been slow, he effectively agrees to do the same job twice, assuming that he might be able to plug a widening hole in his finances. As he digs deeper into both cases he discovers that his involvement may not have been as coincidental as it had first appeared. His investigations reveal that his employer’s intentions aren't as benign as they claim, that what he is searching for has a significance far beyond being an important historical curiosity. This is borne out when he begins to attract the attention of high-ranking officials, conspiracy theorists, burglars and hired thugs who all seem intent on hindering his progress.  Figuring out he has ...