The Little Paris Bookshop by Nina George

Paperback:  Monsieur Perdu can prescribe the perfect book for a broken heart.  But can he fix his own?

Monsieur Perdu calls himself a literary apothecary.  From his floating bookstore in a barge on the Seine, he prescribes novels for the hardships of life.  Using his intuitive feel for the exact book a reader needs, Perdu mends broken hearts and souls.  The only person he can't seem to heal through literature is himself;  he's still haunted by heartbreak after his great love disappeared.  She left him with only a letter, which he has never opened.

After Perdu is finally tempted to read the letter, he hauls anchor and departs on a mission to the south of France, hoping to make peace with his loss and discover the end of the story.  Joined by a bestselling but blocked author and a lovelorn Italian chef, Perdu travels along the country's rivers, dispensing his wisdom and his books, showing that the literary world can take the human soul on a journey to heal itself.

Internationally bestselling and filled with warmth and adventure, The Little Paris Bookshop (2015) is a love letter to books, meant for anyone who believes in the power of stories to shape people's lives.

The Little Paris Bookshop was translated from the German by Simon Pare.

About the author:  Born in 1973, Nina George is a journalist and the author of numerous bestselling novels, which have been translated into several languages.  The Little Paris Bookshop was a phenomenal top five bestseller in Germany and was first published around the world in 2015.  She is married to the writer Jens J Kramer and lives in Hamburg.  Her next book - The Little Breton Bistro - will be published in 2017.

Rating:  3/5

Alex (Commandant Camille Verhœven Trilogy Series) by Pierre Lemaitre

Paperback:  Alex, the first book in the Commandant Camille Verhœven Trilogy series, is the winner of the CWA International Dagger Award 2013, amidst much international acclaim and thereby catapulted Pierre Lemaitre's career into international limelight.

Alex Prevost - kidnapped, savagely beaten, suspended from the ceiling of an abandoned warehouse in a wooden cage - is running out of time.  Her abductor appears to want only to watch her die.  Apart from a shaky eyewitness report, Police Commandant Camille Verhœven has nothing to go on:  no suspects, no leads.

To find the young woman, the detective - a man with a tragic past and extraordinary abilities as an investigator - must first understand more about her.

Beautiful, tough, resourceful, always two steps ahead - the enigma that is Alex will keep Verhœven guessing till the bitter, bitter end.  Before long, saving Alex's life will be the least of Verhœven's considerable challenges.

The novel originally published in 2006 in the French language, won the "Prix du premier roman du festival de Cognac" - an award for the best debut crime novel.  This brought the novel national fame throughout France.

Alex is translated from the French by Frank Wynne.

About the author:  Pierre Lemaitre is a  Prix Goncourt-winning novelist and screenwriter, internationally renowned for the crime novels featuring the fictional character Commandant Camille Verhœven.  In November 2013, he was awarded the Prix Goncourt, France's top literary prize, for Au revoir là-haut, an epic about World War I.  The translation of another of his French novels, Camille, won the CWA International Dagger in 2015.  He worked as a teacher in literature and now devotes his time writing novels and screenplays.

Rating:  5/5

Sex And The Citadel: Intimate Life In A Changing Arab World by Shereen El Feki

Paperback:  If you really want to know a people, start by looking inside their bedrooms.

As political change sweeps the streets and squares, parliaments and presidential palaces of the Arab world, Shereen El Feki has been looking at upheaval a little closer to home - in the sexual lives of men and women in Egypt and across the region.  The result is an informative, insightful and engaging account of a highly sensitive, and still largely secret, aspect of Arab society.

Sex is entwined in religion and tradition, politics and economics, gender and generations, so it makes the perfect lens for examining the region's complex social landscape.  From pregnant virgins to desperate housewives, from fearless activists to religious firebrands, Sex and the Citadel takes a fresh look at the sexual history of the Arab region and gives us unique and timely insight into everyday lives in a part of the world that is changing in front of our very eyes.

Sex and the Citadel:  Intimate Life In A Changing Arab World (2013) has been shortlisted for the Guardian First Book award and longlisted for the Orwell Prize.

About the author:  Shereen El Feki is a British-Canadian-Egyptian academic and author, best known for her book, Sex and the Citadel: Intimate Life in a Changing Arab World. She is an  expert on the intersection of political and intimate rights in the Arab, and wider Islamic, world.

Shereen started her career in medical science, with a PhD in immunology from Trinity College, Cambridge, before going on to become a healthcare correspondent with The Economist and a presenter with Al Jazeera English.  She is the former vice-chair of the UN's Global Commission on HIV and the Law, as well as a TED global fellow.

Shereen is currently a visiting fellow at the Institute of Development Studies at the University of Sussex.  She is also incoming professor of Global Practice at the Munk School of Global Affairs, University of Toronto.  As a senior fellow with Promundo, under the aegis of UN Women, Shereen is also leading IMAGES-MENA, a pioneering study of men, masculinities and gender equality in four countries in the Arab region.

Poverty and Wealth

Happiness

Madeleine L'Engle (1918-2007), American Writer

Ode To Autumn (First Verse, 1819) by John Keats

(Illustrated by Robert Anning Bell)

Second Day of Autumn

Blackwater (DI Nick Lowry) by James Henry

Hardback:  A paranoid is someone who knows a little of what's going on.  A psychotic is a guy who's just found out what's going on. - William S Burroughs

Blackwater (2016) is the new Essex-based crime series from the best-selling author of the DI Jack Frost prequels.

January 1983, Colchester CID

A new year brings new resolutions for Detective Inspector Nicholas Lowry.  With one eye on his approaching 40th birthday, he has given up his two greatest vices:  smoking and the police boxing team.  As a result the largest remaining threat to his health is now his junior colleague's reckless driving.

If Detective Constable Daniel Kenton's orange sports convertible is symbolic of his fast track through the ranks, then his accompanying swagger, foppish hairstyle and university education only augment his uniqueness in the department.  Yet regardless of this, it is not DC Kenton who is turning station heads.

WPC Jane Gabriel is the newest police recruit in Britain's oldest recorded town.  Despite a familial tie to top brass, Gabriel's striking beauty and profound youth have landed her with two obstacles:  a young male colleague who gives her too much attention and an older one who acts like she's not there.

January 1983, Blackwater Estuary

A new year brings a new danger to the Essex shoreline.  An illicit shipment bound for Colchester - 100 kilograms of powder that will frantically accelerate tensions in the historic town and leave its own murderous trace.

Lowry, Kenton and Gabriel must now develop a tolerance to one another and show their own substance to save Britain's oldest settlement from a new, unsettling enemy.

Perfectly structured, authentically bred from its bleak and watery setting, Blackwater gives us a new Essex reimagined as a noir landscape. - Lawrence Osborne

About the author:  James Henry is the pen name for James Gurbutt, who has written three prequels to R D Wingfield's popular Frost series.  He works in publishing and enjoys windsurfing and long lunches.

Rating:  5/5

A Different Class of Murder: The Story of Lord Lucan (Non-Fiction/True Crime) by Laura Thompson

Hardback:  Law!  What law can search into the remote abyss of Nature, what evidence can prove the unaccountable disaffections of wedlock?  Can a jury sum up the endless aversions that are rooted in our souls, or can a bench give judgment upon antipathies? - George Farquhar, The Beaux' Stratagem, 1707.

Do earls commit murder?

It is an incendiary question, in a country obsessed with class.  Why shouldn't a peer of the realm be a murderer, the same as anybody else?

Why not indeed;  yet murdering is something that they seldom do.

Domestic murder?  Not at all.

On 7 November 1974, a nanny named Sandra Rivett was bludgeoned to death in a Belgravia basement.  A second woman, Veronica, Countess of Lucan, was also attacked.  The man named in a coroner's court as the perpetrator of these crimes, Richard John Bingham, 7th Earl of Lucan, disappeared in the early hours of the following morning.  The case, solved in the eyes of the law, has retained its fascination ever since.

Laura Thompson, acclaimed biographer of Agatha Christie, narrates the story that led up to that cataclysmic event, and draws on her considerable forensic skills to re-examine the possible truths behind one of postwar Britain's most notorious murders.

The murder of Sandra Rivett symbolized, with an absolute clarity, the collision of worlds.  If Lord Lucan were guilty then he had killed with an aristocratic contemptuousness but also with a desperate, secretive brutishness.  If he had indeed made a failed attempt at domestic wife-murder, he had done so through lack of money.  An earl without means, like the 7th Earl of Lucan, was a peculiarly vulnerable creature, naked beneath his ermine.  But in the public consciousness his background became a confirmation of guilt.

For he had lived like a lord, even in 1974, traversing the terrain of Belgravia and Berkeley Square with all the old casual grandeur of his forebears.  He had looked like a lord, although the pockets of his Savile Row suits were filled only with IOUs.  Perhaps the difference between then and now is that, today, even the luxury of his aristocratic delusions would be impossible.  He was the last of his kind.  The murder of Sandra Rivett made that clear, too.

A Different Class of Murder (2014) is a portrait of an era, of an extraordinary cast of characters, of a mystery, of a modern myth.  Part social history, part detective story, it tells in masterly style one of the great tales of our collective living memory.

About the author:  Laura Thompson is author of Somerset Maugham Award-winning The Dogs:  A Personal History of Greyhound Racing (1995), Newmarket (2000), Life in a Cold Climate:  A Biography of Nancy Mitford (2003) and Agatha Christie:  An English Mystery (2007).

Lost by David Wagoner

So Clever

Time To Sit And Watch The Leaves Turn

He Was My Working Week