Reader's Recommends - 30 January 2023
Reader's Recommends is our weekly live session, streamed live on Facebook, where we recommend the best, the popular and the latest Reads from all genres and WHY you should read them!
Each week, our Representative Thomas Bulpin, is joined by at least three Representatives from different Publishing Companies, and in this week's edition, Thomas was joined by five amazing reps, Inge van de Post from Jonathan Ball Publishers, Zenande Bidli from Pan Macmillan South Africa, Ammaarah Gamieldien from Penguin Random House, Samantha Jacobs from Jonathan Ball Publishers and Jaco Schreuder from Jonathan Ball Publishers
Ammaarah Gamieldien's Recommends:
Pre Order: The Good Life - By Robert Waldinger & Marc Schulz
It is a question that preoccupies us all and one that the longest and most successful study of happiness ever conducted strives to answer. In this groundbreaking book, directors of the Harvard Study of Adult Development, Robert Waldinger and Marc Schulz, bring together over 80 years of research to reveal the true components of a happy, fulfilled life.
2. Pre Order: The Cloisters - By Katy Hays
Ann Stilwell arrives in New York City, hoping to spend her summer working at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Instead, she is assigned to The Cloisters, a gothic museum and garden renowned for its collection of medieval and Renaissance art.
3. The Power Of Unwavering Focus - By Dandapani
Whether you're seeking to improve yourself as a team member or a leader, a partner or a parent, a student or a teacher, this book will help you learn how to focus and in doing so, dramatically improve your productivity, relationships, mental health, happiness and your ability to achieve your life goals.
Inge van der Post – Recommends:
Weaving together the stories of three women across five centuries, Weyward is an enthralling novel of female resilience and the transformative power of the natural world.
2. Pre Order: Heart To Heart - By Patrick McDonnell & His Holiness the Dalai Lama
At the Dalai Lama's residence in Dharamsala, India, an unusual visitor has arrived. His Holiness interrupts his morning meditation to greet a troubled Giant Panda who has travelled many miles to see him. Welcoming him as a friend, His Holiness invites the Panda on a walk through a cedar forest. There in the shadow of the Himalayas, surrounded by beauty, they discuss matters great and small . . .
3. 8 Rules Of Love - By Jay Shetty
Instead of presenting love as an ethereal concept or a collection of cliches, Jay Shetty lays out specific, actionable steps to help you develop the skills to practice and nurture love better than ever before. He shares insights on how to win or lose together, how to define love, and why you don't break in a break-up. Inspired by Vedic wisdom and modern science, he tackles the entire relationship cycle, from first dates to moving in together to breaking up and starting over. And he shows us how to avoid falling for false promises and unfulfilling partners.
Zenande Bidli's Recommends:
1. My Side Of The Ocean - By Ron Irwin
Accomplished American artist Stella Wright’s beachside home in Cape Town is perched on the edge of land and sea, safety and vulnerability, the domestic and the wild. When Stella takes an afternoon swim, she is unprepared for the drama that unfolds. She and a nearby surfer are tracked by a giant great white shark that swims close enough so she can look it in the eye, leaving the two of them deeply traumatised.
2. Pre-Order: Closer to Love - By Vex King
Modern relationships are more complex than ever, and our approach to love often comes from a place of lack, rather than an outpouring of a cup that is already filled. Our inherent need to give and receive love is as true today as it was at the dawn of time, but the purest love is built on self-love.
3. Pre Order: Exiles - By Jane Harper
Her baby lies alone in the pram, her mother's possessions surrounding her, waiting for a return which never comes.
A year later, Kim Gillespie's absence still casts a long shadow as her friends and loved ones gather to welcome a new addition to the family.
Samantha Jacobs's Recommends:
1. Loathe To Love You - By Ali Hazelwood
Mara, Sadie, and Hannah are friends first, scientists always. Though their fields of study might take them to different corners of the world, they can all agree on this universal truth: when it comes to love and science, opposites attract, and rivals make you burn....
2. Have I Told You This Already? : Stories I Don't Want to Forget to Remember - By Lauren Graham
Filled with surprising anecdotes, sage advice, and laugh-out-loud observations, these all-new, original essays showcase the winning charm and wry humour that have delighted Graham's millions of fans.
3. The Circus Train - By Amita Parikh
Two lives collide in a world of secrets.
But one secret greater than them all.
Is about to tear them apart . . .
4. The Prisoner - By B.A. Paris
Amelie has always been a survivor, from losing her parents as a child in Paris to making it on her own in London. As she builds a career for herself in the magazine industry, she meets, and agrees to marry, Ned Hawthorne.
Jaco Schreuder Recommends:
1. Pre Order: The Mysterious Case of the Alperton Angels - Janice Hallett
Everyone knows the sad story of the Alperton Angels: the cult who brainwashed a teenage girl and convinced her that her newborn baby was the anti-Christ. Believing they had a divine mission to kill the infant, they were only stopped when the girl came to her senses and called the police. The Angels committed suicide rather than stand trial, while mother and baby disappeared into the care system.
2. Pre Order: The Shards - By Bret Easton Ellis
Can he trust his friends ? or his own mind ? to make sense of the danger they appear to be in? Thwarted by the world and by his own innate desires, buffeted by unhealthy fixations, Bret spirals into paranoia and isolation as the relationship between The Trawler and Robert Mallory hurtles inexorably toward a collision.
3.Pre Order: Fresh Water For Flowers By Valerie Perrin
Violette Toussaint is the caretaker at a cemetery in a small town in Bourgogne. Her daily life is lived to the rhythms of the hilarious and touching confidences of random visitors and her colleagues-three gravediggers, three groundskeepers, and a priest.
Readers Warehouse Top 5:
1. Spare - By Prince Harry, The Duke of Sussex
It was one of the most searing images of the twentieth century: two young boys, two princes, walking behind their mother's coffin as the world watched in sorrow - and horror. As Diana, Princess of Wales, was laid to rest, billions wondered what the princes must be thinking and feeling - and how their lives would play out from that point on.
2. It Ends With Us - By Colleen Hoover
Lily hasn't always had it easy, but that's never stopped her from working hard for the life she wants. She's come a long way from the small town in Maine where she grew up - she graduated from college, moved to Boston, and started her own business. So when she feels a spark with a gorgeous neurosurgeon named Ryle Kincaid, everything in Lily's life suddenly seems almost too good to be true.
3. It Starts with Us (Includes Exclusive Magnetic Bookmark) - By Colleen Hoover
Lily and her ex-husband, Ryle, have just settled into a civil coparenting rhythm when she suddenly bumps into her first love, Atlas, again. After nearly two years separated, she is elated that for once, time is on their side, and she immediately says yes when Atlas asks her on a date.
4. Mad Honey - By Jodi Picoult
Olivia fled her abusive marriage to return to her hometown and take over the family beekeeping business when her son Asher was six. Now, impossibly, her baby is six feet tall and in his last year of high school, a kind, good-looking, popular ice hockey star with a tiny sprite of a new girlfriend.
5. All The Broken Places - By John Boyne
Ninety-one-year-old Gretel Fernsby has lived in the same mansion block in London for decades. She leads a comfortable, quiet life, despite her dark and disturbing past. She doesn't talk about her escape from Germany over seventy years before. She doesn't talk about the post-war years in France with her mother. Most of all, she doesn't talk about her father, the commandant of one of the most notorious Nazi concentration camps.
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