'That absolutely glorious way of looking at things differently. 'The Godfather of Alternative Comedy' Eddie Izzard 'Milligan is the Great God to all of us' John Cleese 'Desperately funny, vivid, vulgar' Sunday Times 'The most irreverent, hilarious book about the war that I have ever read' Sunday Express I fell down a hatchway').įilled with bathos, pathos and gales of ribald laughter, this is a barely sane helping of military goonery and superlative Milliganese. No ammunition') to the landing at Algiers in 1943 ('I closed my eyes and faced the sun. In this, the first of Spike Milligan's uproarious recollections of life in the army, our hero takes us from the outbreak of war in 1939 ('it must have been something we said'), through his attempts to avoid enlistment ('time for my appendicitus, I thought') and his gunner training in Bexhill ('There was one drawback. I searched every compartment, but he wasn't on the train. gave me a travel warrant, a white feather and a picture of Hitler marked "This is your enemy". Adolf Hitler: My Part on His Downfall is volume One of Spike Milligan's outrageous, hilarious, legendary War Memoirs.
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Like Youssef, he too has secrets, including the cause of his failing health, the reason for his nighttime excursions from the house, and the truth about what happened to the boys’ parents. But he is uncharismatic at home, a distant father who spends evenings in his study with whiskey-laced coffee, writing letters to his former compatriots back in Saudi Arabia. The boys’ adoptive father, Imam Salim, is popular in the community, known for his radical sermons extolling the virtues of opting out of Western ideologies. Brother is both a balm for the young boy and a curse-he provides solace to Youssef but demands information in exchange. Nevertheless, Youssef is keeping a secret from his brothers: he has an imaginary double, a familiar who seems absolutely real, a shapeshifting creature he calls Brother. The three boys are a conspicuous trio: Dayo is of Nigerian origin, Iseul is Korean, and Youssef indeterminately Middle Eastern, but they are so close as to be almost inseparable. They are adopted as infants and live in a shared bedroom perched atop a mosque in one of Staten Island’s most diverse and precarious neighborhoods, Coolidge. In 1990, three boys are born, unrelated but intertwined by circumstance: Dayo, Iseul, and Youssef. A New York Times Writer to Watch Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize But it’s not about being the boss of other people, it’s just about being the boss of your own life. SOPHIA AMORUSO: It’s really just about being the boss of your life, it’s not, I mean yeah being a girl, something that I relate to. Amoruso had her own idea of what a girlboss should be: The book was a New York Times bestseller and was eventually adapted into a television series for Netflix. The origins of the word girlboss can be traced back to 2014, when Sophia Amoruso, CEO of the online fashion retailer Nasty Gal, released her autobiography titled #Girlboss. But what exactly is a girlboss? And how did the word go from an inspirational moniker to an ironic meme? “Gaslight, Gatekeep, Girlboss.” The phrase that seems to be on the lips of every Gen Z college student, parodying the modern “girlboss” and the brand of white millennial feminism that was once so popular. It's a job for the Goondas that finally brings Tina back to the Greyhill estate, giving her the chance for vengeance she's been waiting for. With revenge always on her mind, Tina spends the next four years surviving on the streets alone, working as a master thief for the Goondas, Sangui City's local gang. Greyhill's personal study, she knows exactly who's behind it. So when her mother is found shot to death in Mr. But Tina soon learns that the Greyhill fortune was made from a life of corruption and crime. Her mother quickly found work as a maid for a prominent family, headed by Roland Greyhill, one of the city's most respected business leaders. After fleeing the Congo as refugees, Tina and her mother arrived in Kenya looking for the chance to build a new life and home. In the shadows of Sangui City, there lives a girl who doesn't exist. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo meets Gone Girl in this enthralling murder mystery set in Kenya. I would have finished it sooner, but life got in the way. It’s finished now (the book, not life), but I don't think any of the original story survived the process! In 2010, I decided to make time to finish the book I'd started many years earlier (writing not reading). In the middle of it all, I served in the Naval Reserve for five years. I worked for many years in the computer industry in a wide variety of roles including programming, systems analysis and sales. Dark Tidings, The Black Conspiracy and A Darker Shade of Black make up the trilogy. My books live under the tagline ‘ancient magic meets the Internet’. My name is Ken Magee and I tell people I write contemporary fantasies which blend adventure and humour with technology and magic. I hide behind the pretence that I write fiction to ensure I don't attract unwelcome attention deadly attention. My one mission in life is to open people’s eyes to that fact. Dark conspiracies and ancient magic actually dominate this world. Most folk believe that technology rules their lives. By turns hilarious and poignant, an adventure with spins into magic realism and beautifully evoked truths of loss and longing, Lily and the Octopus reminds us how it feels to love fiercely, how difficult it can be to let go, and how the fight for those we love is the greatest fight of all. When Lily's health is compromised, Ted vows to save her by any means necessary. Ted-a gay, single, struggling writer is stuck: unable to open himself up to intimacy except through the steadfast companionship of Lily, his elderly dachshund. A national bestseller combining the emotional depth of The Art of Racing in the Rain with the magical spirit of The Life of Pi, " Lily and the Octopus is the dog book you must read this summer" ( The Washington Post ). She sat down and sniffled, the cold seeping into her bones, the dreaded fatigue making her droop.Īlready at her lowest, Karma, with her sadistic sense of humor, answered her rant in the form of a big, probably hungry polar bear that emerged from the sea waters, water sluicing from its fur. “Just for once, could I have some good luck?” “Is it so much to ask that something goes right in my life?” she yelled to the sky. No matter what she did, the damned thing wouldn’t give her a single bar. Cursing again as she scrabbled after it on her hands and knees, one hand holding her glasses in place as she searched for it among the cracks and bumps it landed among. She walked to one end of the shelf then the other, holding it aloft, shaking it, cursing it, and at one point, throwing it at the cliff face. “Satellite, my butt,” she muttered, looking at the no-service box that popped up on the screen. Out here in the arctic? Yeah, it didn’t quite work as advertised. She’d tested it out a few times before the trip. State-of-the-art, guaranteed to work in even the toughest conditions-or so the salesman assured her. It took a few minutes of digging around in her pack, but Vicky located her satellite phone. “No one thought that there was going to be a permanent change,” Obejas said. Her family assumed they would go back to their home country because, she said, because Cuba went through coup d’états every so often, and everything would eventually return to normal. She was six years old when her family fled Cuba, following the Cuban Revolution. “If it hadn't been for forces outside of our family, my family would have remained in Cuba,” Obejas said. Obejas told KGOU’s World Views that Cuba is the subject of her work because she often focuses on rupture. She has also written collections of stories and poems. Obejas is a writer, translator and journalist whose novels include Memory Mambo, Days of Awe and Ruins. Even though Achy Obejas’s family left Cuba when she was very young, the island nation has an enormous influence on her work. Regeneration is the story of this success, featuring not only the people who are protecting the land and quietly working to undo the wrongs of the past, but also the myriad creatures which inspire them to do so. Regeneration : The Rescue of a Wild Land, Hardcover by Painting, Andrew, ISBN 1780277148, ISBN-13 9781780277141, Brand New, Free shipping in the US This is the inspiring story of a Highland estate, which was rescued from the catastrophic effects of decades of human interference, and is now one of the most successful examples of rewilding in the UK. Use features like bookmarks, note taking and highlighting while reading Regeneration: The Rescue of a Wild Land. Download it once and read it on your Kindle device, PC, phones or tablets. The only problem was that due to centuries of abuse by human hands, the ancient Caledonian pinewoods were dying, and it would take radical measures to save them.Īfter 25 years of extremely hard work, the pinewoods, bogs, moors and mountains are returning to their former glory. Regeneration: The Rescue of a Wild Land - Kindle edition by Painting, Andrew. Home to over 5,000 species, this vast expanse of Caledonian woodlands, subarctic mountains, bogs, moors, roaring burns and frozen lochs could be a place where environmental conservation and Highland field sports would exist in harmony. In 1995 the National Trust for Scotland acquired Mar Lodge Estate in the heart of the Cairngorms. Longlisted for the Highland Book Prize 2021 Home to Sir Henry and Lady Lucy Angkatell, they invite a select few people over for a relaxing weekend, but things take a sinister turn. Published in 1946, the book’s title refers to the grand house where the action (murder) takes place. Opening sentence: At six thirteen am on a Friday morning Lucy Angkatell’s big blue eyes opened upon another day and, as always, she was once wide awake and began immediately to deal with the problems conjured up by her incredibly active mind. The Hollow fits in with the January prompt ( a story set in a grand house) and isn’t a Poirot story I’d heard of before, so I was intrigued to get cracking. Are you doing a reading challenge this year? I wasn’t going to – a more fluid approach to my reading is how I need to approach things – BUT then I saw this intriguing one from the official Agatha Christie estate ( find out all about it here) and couldn’t resist. |