Catherine Cooksonl
Rosie Of The River

When Fred Carpenter suggests to his wife, Sally, that they should take a boating holiday on the Norfolk Broads, she is filled with trepidation. Nevertheless, she summons her courage and they and their bull terrier Bill set off, with Fred at the helm of Dogfish Three. Sally's misgivings are soon justified, as a series of disasters, human, nautical and canine, threaten to ruin their holiday. Then everything changes as they make friends with the boating fraternity and encounter the remarkable fifteen-year-old Rosie, whose family history stirs their curiosity and sympathy.

Sixteen years have passed since Grace was locked up, at the age od sixteen, for the cold-blooded murders of her employer Mr Thomas Kinnear and his housekeeper/lover Nancy Montgomery. Her alleged accomplice in the crimes, James McDermot, paid the extreme sentence of the law and was hanged on November 21, 1843. But some thought Grace was innocent, and her sentence has been commuted to life imprisonment. After a spell in the Lunatic Asylum she now claims to have no memory of the murders, and so Dr Simon Jordan tries to wake the part of Grace's mind which lies dormant. But what will he find?

Bill Bryson
Down Under

Bill Bryson had imagined Australia as a kind of alternative to southern California. Of course, what greeted him was something rather different. Australia is the world's sixth largest country and the only island that is also a continent. It is the driest, flattest, hottest, most desicated, infertile and climatically aggressive of all the inhabited continents and still teems with life - a large proportion of it quite deadly. Bill Bryson journeyed to Australia and promptly fell in love with the country.