Echoes of the Dance

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Mark Neilson

Sophie Hargreaves hopes to repair her shattered family by buying a rundown vineyard in Piedmont and bringing everyone together again. Sadly, her attempt fails and she's left struggling to bring in the grape harvest on her own before she faces ruin. Then, just as she begins to lose hope, Sophie finds help from an unlikely source: three strangers fleeing a storm and its flooding. They find themselves wrestling with the problems of saving the grapes and making the ancient winery viable. Unexpectedly, Sophie finds a new life in the remote wine valleys of Northern Italy.

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Frances Itani

The new novel from the award-winning author of Deafening is a poignant exploration of one eighty-year-old life, as its heroine lies at the bottom of a ravine where she has crashed en route to visit the queen. Born the same day as Her Majesty, Queen Elizabeth II, Canadian Georgina Danforth Witley is one of ninety-nine privileged Commonwealth subjects invited to an eightieth birthday lunch at Buckingham Palace. All she has to do is drive to the airport and board the plane for London. Except that Georgie drives off the road, her car plunging into a thickly wooded ravine. Thrown from the car and unable to move, she must rely on her no-nonsense wit, her full store of family memories, and a recitation of the bones in her body -- a childhood exercise that reminds her she is still alive. As Georgina lies helpless, she reflects on her role as a daughter, mother, sister, wife, and widow -- on lost loves and painful secrets -- offering a whimsical and profound insight into the life of one ordinary woman who, while drawing on her instincts to survive, asks herself: what has it all amounted to?

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Gavin Corbett

Anthony Sonaghan, an Irish Traveller, is descended from two families whose ancient enmity has endured into the present. He comes to Dublin to lie low, and is disturbed only by Judith, a librarian who encourages him to record his stories, until his uncle Arthur arrives, apparently on the run.

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Tim Pears

Ezra and Sheena Pepin live in Blenheim Orchard in North Oxford with their three children: fourteen-year-old Blaise, entering the storm-world of adolescence. Hector, eleven and precociously clever, and sweet Louie, three years old and the family tyrant. Ezra, a disaffected employee at Isis Water, has abandoned his calling as an anthropologist; Sheena has inadvertently found hers running a travel company. They are like everyone else: over-worked, worried about the children, trying to steer their marriage on an even keel. But change comes knocking at the Pepins' door - and the family will never be quite the same again.