It’s nearly Christmas and the end of another year, one I think we’ll all be glad to say goodbye to. But on a brighter note, it’s also favourite books of the year time.

When the raiders chase her into a swamp, Rawena falls into the furry claws of Goddess Pandemia. Despite her murderous instincts, Pandemia lets Rawena live—and turns her into a pawn in a mad game.
Only Garux, a warrior who has rejected Rawena for her younger sister, knows how deadly the game is. With the cards stacked against him, he must defeat the jealous Rawena and the cunning Pandemia… while fighting foreign invaders and traitors within his tribe.
Will Garux and his allies prevent a disaster that could wipe out everyone in Bohemia and perhaps the whole world? Purchase Celts and the Mad Goddess now to find out.
Category: Based on Fact, Psychological, Historical, Book Review
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London 1962. A strict and loveless English children’s home, or the promise of Australian sunshine, sandy beaches and eating fruit straight from the tree. Which would you choose?
Ten-year-old Lucy Rivers and her five-year-old sister Charly are thrilled when a child migrant scheme offers them the chance to escape their miserable past.
But on arrival in Sydney, the girls discover their fantasy future is more nightmare than dream.
Into The Unbounded Night follows the lives of five troubled individuals as they struggle for survival and purpose in the first century Roman empire. The story is primarily seen through the eyes of Aislin, a refugee from Albion; other important characters include Yohanan ben Zakkai, Saul of Tarsus, the emperor Vespasian, and Azazel, a doomed angel.
Throughout Into The Unbounded Night, these characters’ lives intertwine in unexpected ways that shed light on colonization and its discontents, the relative values of dominant and tyrannized cultures, the sense of imminent apocalypse, and the holiness of life itself — even the weakest of lives.
Into The Unbounded Night is not only relevant to the world today, it is also a meditation on who we are, the stories we tell, and why we tell them.
Published: February 2020 by Hatchette Books Ireland
Category: Dual Timeline, Historical, Contemporary, Book Review
For almost fifty years, Katie Carroll has kept a box tucked away inside her wardrobe. It dates from her time working as a nurse in a west of Ireland mother and baby home in the 1960s. The box contains a notebook holding the details of the babies and young women she met there. It also holds many of the babies’ identity bracelets.
Published: April 2014 by William Morrow Paperbacks
Category: Dual Timeline, Historical Fiction, Based on Fact, Contemporary, Book Review
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Ireland, 1912
Fourteen members of a small village set sail on RMS Titanic, hoping to find a better life in America. For seventeen-year-old Maggie Murphy, the journey is bittersweet. Though her future lies in an unknown new place, her heart remains in Ireland with Séamus, the sweetheart she left behind. When disaster strikes, Maggie is one of the few passengers in steerage to survive. Waking up alone in a New York hospital, she vows never to speak of the terror and panic of that fateful night again.
Published: August 2019 by Canongate Books
Category: Historical, Medical, Mystery, Crime, Book Review
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Edinburgh, 1850. Despite being at the forefront of modern medicine, hordes of patients are dying all across the city, with doctors finding their remedies powerless. But it is not just the deaths that dismay the esteemed Dr James Simpson – a whispering campaign seeks to blame him for the death of a patient in suspicious circumstances.
Kindle Edition
Category: Historical Fiction, The Great Depression, Book Review
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It’s a boring, hardscrabble life for three sisters growing up on a Michigan farm in the throes of the Great Depression. But, when young Nellie, digging for pirate treasure, discovers the tiny blue-black hand of a dead baby, rumors begin to fly. Narrated by Nellie and her two older sisters, the story follows the girls as they encounter a patchwork of threatening circumstances and take it upon themselves to solve the mystery.
Published: February 2018 by The British Library Publishing Division
Category: Classic Crime, Police Procedural, Historical, Book Review
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The Second World War is drawing to a close. Nicholas Vaughan, released from the army after an accident, takes refuge in Devon renting a thatched cottage in the beautiful countryside at Mallory Fitzjohn. Vaughan sets to work farming the land, rearing geese and renovating the cottage. Hard work and rural peace seem to make this a happy bachelor life.