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[[image:Grimwood_Berlin.jpg|link=http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/0718181581/ref=nosim?tag=thebookbag-21]]
 
 
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Nightfall Berlin by Jack Grimwood
[[image:4.5star.jpg|link=Category:{{{rating}}} Star Reviews]] [[:Category:Thrillers|Thrillers]]
 
I have heard it said that the best way to begin to tell a story is to create a multi-dimensional character, imbued with compelling layers of detail - be it backstory, character quirks or behaviours. The point seems to be that in creating a character in such a way you begin to reflect the truth of life wherein people are by definition multi-dimensional and thus, you bring your story to life. In Major Tom Fox, Grimwood has successfully created just such a character. In one man he gifts us an exciting and honourable figure who somehow simultaneously manages to present as damaged and flawed. Grimwood provides some character history for Fox which clearly informs the actions of the character but I would suggest that rather than any written history provided for Major Fox, it is in the way he interacts with the other characters and drives the action of the story that we come to know him. [[Nightfall Berlin by Jack Grimwood|Full Review]]
 
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Jane Ashland is dying. That's a description of a very early scene here – but also, of course, a platitude that can apply to all of us. Jane's life, if anything, is going up and down in levels of pleasure, energy – sobriety – in these pages, but we soon learn that it recently found a very deeply dark down place. Here then, scattered through a timeline-bending narrative, we have her days finding a Lincolnesque lover as a student in New York, glimpses of therapy, a drive to find her ancestors that takes her from rural America to Norway – and a trip there with a new-found friend to watch the musk oxen, of all things. And nowhere in sight is anything like a platitude… [[The Gradual Disappearance of Jane Ashland by Nicolai Houm and Anna Paterson (translator)|Full Review]]
 
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===[[The Company of Eight by Harriet Whitehorn]]===
 
[[image:5star.jpg|link=Category:{{{rating}}} Star Reviews]] [[:Category:Confident Readers|Confident Readers]]
 
Fourteen-year-old orphan Cass lives in the Magical District, but as she hasn't the slightest ability in that direction she doesn't exactly fit in. She takes after her dad, and she hopes desperately that she'll pass the upcoming auditions for acrobats and join the Circus Boat as it tours to give performances on all the islands of the Longest World. Her guardian Mrs Potts, however, does ''not'' approve: her hope that Cass will demonstrate magical abilities like her mother's (and make Mrs Potts very rich) has been disappointed so she is determined her ward will take on a sedate, genteel job instead: governess, maybe, or draper's model. So poor Cass is reduced to practising her routines in secret, using an old book her father left her. [[The Company of Eight by Harriet Whitehorn|Full Review]]
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