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Extracts

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A Life on Our Planet

Pripyat in the Ukraine is a place unlike anywhere else I have been. It is a place of utter despair.

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A Deadly Education

I decided that Orion needed to die after the second time he saved my life.

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Pure Narco

Adjectives such as ‘singular’ and ‘extraordinary’ tend to be overused by biographers to describe the lives of the people they’re writing about, not to mention the publicists who are paid to promote their books.

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Moonlite

Come now. On this mild summer’s night let us gaze upon two men who have known what it is to love and be loved, to hold and be held, and who now have only death for companionship.

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The Godmothers

By the time Eliza Maxine Olivia Miller was eleven, she had lived in eight different country towns.

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The Fire Star

Of all the things I’d imagined might stop us from reaching Rennart Castle by nightfall, goats had not even made the top fifty.

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The Gift

In the spring of 1944, I was sixteen, living with my parents and two older sisters in Kassa, Hungary.

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Vida

Melbourne, 1912: on the busy corner of Collins and Swanston streets stood an attractive woman of middle age.

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More Than a Woman

I am in the spare room, which doubles as my office, and I have just finished my day’s work.

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Daddy

LINDA WAS INSIDE, ON HER PHONE—TO WHO, THIS EARLY?

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Tomorrow Will Be A Good Day

I heard them long before I saw them, the throaty rumble of their Second World War engines reverberating in my hearing aids as I sat outside on the morning of my 100th birthday.

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Atomic Love

The hot touch of the city still on her, Rosalind unfastens her stockings and drops them in the bathroom sink with a handful of washing soda.

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V2

On a Saturday morning in late November 1944, in a railway shed in the Dutch seaside resort of Scheveningen, three ballistic missiles, each nearly fifteen metres long...

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Lionhearts

Robin Hood is dead, long live Robin Hood.

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Deacon King Kong

DEACON CUFFY LAMBKIN OF FIVE ENDS BAPTIST CHURCH became a walking dead man on a cloudy September afternoon in 1969.

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Breath

The place looked like something out of Amityville: all paint-chipped walls, dusty windows, and menacing shadows cast by moonlight.

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Agent Sonya

If you had visited the quaint English village of Great Rollright in 1945, you might have spotted a thin, dark-haired and unusually elegant woman emerging from a stone farmhouse called The Firs and climbing onto her bicycle.

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Stop Surviving Start Fighting

It wasn’t until I did that test that I really thought about how aspects of my personality and my strengths could affect my mental health, through my reactions and approaches to things.

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The Thursday Murder Club

Killing someone is easy. Hiding the body, now that’s usually the hard part. That’s how you get caught.

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Islands of Mercy

In that crowded city, she had worked for a haberdasher and presided over the slow death of her mother, after which she’d discovered in herself an unexpected yearning to leave Ireland and see the world.

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The Liar's Dictionary

Let us imagine you possess a perfect personal dictionary.

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Anxious People

A bank robbery. A hostage drama. A stairwell full of police o¬fficers on their way to storm an apartment.

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Intimations

There will be many books written about the year 2020: historical, analytical, political as well as comprehensive accounts.

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Death in Her Hands

Her name was Magda. Nobody will ever know who killed her. It wasn’t me. Here is her dead body.

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