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|summary=We meet Sam Grant on his 27th birthday, but he's not out celebrating. He's got flu and just to add to his problems he's got a boil in his groin - or on his thigh - depending on which side of the doctor's desk you're sitting. Sam's not been looking after himself since his girlfriend dumped him just over three months ago and when you work in adland the opportunities for not looking after yourself are many and varied. The millenium hasn't quite arrived, 'austerity' hasn't even been thought about and living an out-of-control life has never been easier. What we get is Sam's diary, but it's not in chronological order, with some of it going back to before he met Sarah - the girl he didn't really want, but struggles to get over.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1909273007</amazonuk>
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|author=Grace McCleen
|title=The Professor of Poetry
|rating=4
|genre=General Fiction
|summary=Grace McCleen's ''The Professor of Poetry'' is Elizabeth Stone, a 52 year old aged professor at a London University. When the book opens she has just discovered that a cancer scare is now in remission, but forced by her illness to take a sabbatical, she sets about researching her latest book based on some papers of TS Eliot. This takes her back to Oxford, to her alma mater and raises the prospect of seeing her former professor there, a man convinced of the young Miss Stone's potential at an early age, but whose last meeting was somewhat awkward. McCleen looks at the issues raised by generations of poets, namely time, death and love. For Professor Stone, the first has passed, the second come uncomfortably close and the third remains unknown to her. What's more, her academic focus is on the music of love poetry which is somewhat ironic in that she avoids human relationships perhaps due to the death of her mother at an early age and an unhappy foster experience, while also having a peculiar aversion to music. Perhaps though this is what allows her a detached ability to write academic studies.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1444769952</amazonuk>
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|summary=Germany, the 1920s. Whatever that old proverb is about an ending of something merely being a beginning of something else in disguise, this novel is an evocation of it. In the rural habitation of the title a father and son pair of policemen is called to a remote house by news that a newborn baby is missing. In the house is an awkward combination of families – elderly matriarch, her son and daughter and both their spouses – two couples living on top of each other, with a disabled boy and maid in the mix too. We soon are given an explanation for the child being dead – a terrible instance of clumsiness, but like I say, this is only the beginning – of several things, including the older policeman's infatuation with the grieving mother's sister-in-law…
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0091944384</amazonuk>
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