The book tells the story of a room, where five year old Jack lives with his Ma. They live in a single, locked room.

They don’t have the key. Jack and Ma are prisoners.

‘This book will break your heart …It is the most vivid, radiant and beautiful expression of maternal love I have ever read’ – “Irish Times”.

‘Startlingly original and moving …Endearing and as utterly compelling as “The Lovely Bones”‘ – “Scotsman”.

‘I’ve never read a more heart-burstingly, gut wrenchingly compassionate novel …As for sweet, bright, funny Jack, I wanted to scoop him up out of the novel and never let him go’ – “Daily Mail”.

‘This is a truly remarkable novel. It presents an utterly unique way to talk about love, all the while giving us a fresh, expansive eye on the world in which we live’ – “New York Times Book Review”.

Simon Swann, a medic from one of the large teaching hospitals, is searching frantically amongst the chaos and the rubble. All around police sirens and ambulances are screaming but Simon does not hear. He is out of breath because he has been running, and he is distraught.

But who is he looking for? To find out we have first to go back thirty years to a small island in the Indian Ocean where a little girl named Alice Fonseka is learning to ride a bicycle on the beach. The island is Sri Lanka, and its community is on the brink of civil war. Alice’s life is about to change forever.

Soon she will have to leave for England, abandoning her beloved grandfather, and accompanied by her mother Sita, a woman broken by a series of terrible events. In London, Alice grows into womanhood. Trapped in a loveless marriage, she has a son.

Slowly she fulfils her grandfather’s prophecy and becomes an artist. Eventually she finds true love. But London in the twenty-first century is a mass of migration and suspicion.

The war on terror has begun and everyone, even Simon Swann, middle class, rational, medic that he is, will be caught up in this war in the most unexpected and terrible way.

To buy this book on Canny Minds click here

From the dramatic Northern wilderness’ that fired the imaginations of Turner and Wordsworth, to Constable’s idyllic Suffolk millstreams and Conan-Doyle’s ancient and mystical West, A Picture of Britain tells the stories of the featured artists, reveals intriguing facts and discusses artistic technique. A Picture of Britain – an inspirational journey through art, landscape and identity.

To buy A Picture of Britain click here

Julia and Valentina Poole are normal American teenagers – normal, at least, for identical ‘mirror’ twins who have no interest in college or jobs or possibly anything outside their cozy suburban home. But everything changes when they receive notice that an aunt whom they didn’t know existed has died and left them her flat in an apartment block overlooking Highgate Cemetery in London.

They feel that at last their own lives can begin …but have no idea that they’ve been summoned into a tangle of fraying lives, from the obsessive-compulsive crossword setter who lives above them to their aunt’s mysterious and elusive lover who lives below them, and even to their aunt herself, who never got over her estrangement from the twins’ mother – and who can’t even seem to quite leave her flat…

With Highgate Cemetery itself a character and echoes of Henry James and Charles Dickens, “Her Fearful Symmetry” is a delicious and deadly twenty-first-century ghost story about Niffenegger’s familiar themes of love, loss and identity. It is certain to cement her standing as one of the most singular and remarkable novelists of our time.

If you have read the book, let us know what you think by commenting below.

To buy ‘Her Fearful Symmetry’, click here.

American researchers carried out a series of studies on 3,000 people aged between 60 and 100 to find out what happens to the brain as it ages.

They discovered that elderly people could still learn new abilities but their brains were less dependent on “feel good” hormones making them appear less driven by emotion and impulsiveness.

This, in essence, is wisdom, the Royal College of Psychiatrists Congress in Edinburgh was told.

Porfessor Dilip Jests of the University of California, San Diego, said:

“The fact that older people are slower to respond than younger people is widely seen as a disadvantage. But that’s not always the case.

“The elderly brain is less dopamine-dependent, making people less impulsive and controllwed by emotion.”

The Daily Telegraph, Rebecca Smith, 25/06/2010

Photo courtesy of luis1988santos