Becoming Strangers

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Nicholas Shakespeare

"A young Englishman visits Cold War Leipzig with a group of students and, during his brief excursion behind the Iron Curtain, falls for an East German girl who is only just beginning to wake up to the way her society is governed. Her situation touches him, but he is too frightened to help. He spends the next 19 years pretending to himself that he is not in love until one day, with Germany now reunited, he decides to go back and look for her. But who was she, how will his actions have affected her, and how will he find her? All he knows of her identity is the nickname he gave her - Snowleg." "Nicholas Shakespeare's novel is a powerful love story that explores the close, fraught relationship between England and Germany, between a man who grows up believing himself to be a chivalrous English public schoolboy and a woman who tries to live loyally under a repressive regime. In her world not only is every move recorded, but a person's scent may be secretly bottled, labelled and stored away until such time as she needs to be traced."--Jacket.

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Emma Henderson

On her first day at the Briar Mental Institute, eleven-year-old Grace meets Daniel, an epileptic who can type with his feet. He sees a different Grace: someone to share secrets and canoodle with, someone to fight for. Daniel fills Grace's head with tales from Paris and the world beyond. This is Grace's story: her life, its betrayals and triumphs, disappointment and loss, the taste of freedom; roses, music and tiny scraps of paper. Most of all, it is about the love of a lifetime.

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Emma Donoghue

Set in the Irish Midlands in the 1850s, Emma Donoghue's *The Wonder* - inspired by numerous European and North American cases of 'fasting girls' between the sixteenth century and the twentieth - is a psychological thriller about a child's murder threatening to happen in slow motion before our eyes. Pitting all the seductions of fundamentalism against sense and love, it is a searing examination of what nourishes us, body and soul. ------- In this masterpiece by Emma Donoghue, an English nurse brought to a small Irish village to observe what appears to be a miracle -- a girl said to have survived without food for months -- soon finds herself fighting to save the child's life. Tourists flock to the cabin of eleven-year-old Anna O'Donnell, who believes herself to be living off manna from heaven, and a journalist is sent to cover the sensation. Lib Wright, a veteran of Florence Nightingale's Crimean campaign, is hired to keep watch over the girl. As Anna deteriorates, Lib finds herself responsible not just for the care of a child, but for getting to the root of why the child may actually be the victim of murder in slow motion. Written with all the propulsive tension that made *Room* a huge bestseller, *The Wonder* works beautifully on many levels--a tale of two strangers who transform each other's lives, a powerful psychological thriller, and a story of love pitted against evil.

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Avner Mandelman

"In 1977, having renounced his Israeli citizenship and withdrawn from his family, David Starkman is living a new life in Canada, haunted by persistent nightmares following his military service as a chandestine assassin. When news reaches him of his father's gruesome murder, he reluctantly returns to his homeland for what he hopes will be the final time"--Page 2 of cover.