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My Daughter's Boyfriend by Daniel Hurst (Bookouture) 3 stars

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  Publication date UK 3/6/23 audio time 6 hrs 41 m, book 249 pages I would like to thank the author, publishers and Netgalley for allowing me to pick this to read and review. all my reviews are honest. Synopsis   My daughter thought she had found the man of her dreams. But now her life is in danger… When Ellie tells me she has a new boyfriend, I am absolutely thrilled and can’t wait to meet him. She finally seems so happy and in love. But there’s a catch. Ellie has never met him in person. In fact, he doesn’t even live in the same country. Our home is in England, but Daryl is in Los Angeles. When handsome Daryl invites Ellie to stay with him at his luxury Los Angeles mansion for a few weeks, I insist on joining her. I need to find out more about the man who has my daughter so enamoured. Daryl welcomes us into his whitewashed house, complete with a stunning swimming pool and sun-drenched patio. Then one morning, I discover a terrible secret in his basement that changes everythi...

Secrets Of The Moon by Andrew Osiow (Books forward)(Independent Author) 4 stars

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  Publication date UK 27/1/23 book 264 pages I would like to thank the author, publishers and Netgalley for allowing me to pick this to read and review. all my reviews are honest. Synopsis  Secrets of the Moon reveals a Moon that is often different from the one we think we know. We typically underestimate its importance in our lives. Very few things are linked to such a wide and diverse net of concepts and beliefs. No matter what those beliefs are, the Moon plays a role in shoring up our reality. Learning about the Moon is a chance to learn about ourselves and our world from an unbiased point of view, and that is Moon's biggest secret of all. The book is divided into sixty short sections, which are grouped into thirteen chapters and five parts. Each section tells a different story about the Moon and usually address one of two key questions: How did the Moon become so subtly influential in our lives and more importantly why is the Moon so essential to all life of Earth. Togethe...

Things To Do Before The End Of The World by Emily Barr (Penguin) 4 stars

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  Publication date UK 6/5/21 book 368 pages I would like to thank the author, publishers and Netgalley for allowing me to pick this to read and review. all my reviews are honest. Synopsis Timely and powerful; the new coming-of-age thriller from the bestselling author of The One Memory of Flora Banks. One minute you're walking in the park, hiding from a party. Then you discover that the next nine months will probably be your last. Everyone's last. You realise that you happen to be alive at the time when your species becomes extinct. You have to decide whether to go with it meekly like you usually do, or to do something brave, to live your last months with all the energy and bravery you can muster, to rage against the dying of the light. Olivia struggles to live her real life as fully as she wants to. She plans out conversations and events in her head but actually doing them and interacting with other people is hard. When the news breaks that humans have done such damage t...

Ancient Egypt by Peter Mavrikis (Amber Books) 4 stars

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  Publication date UK 14/9/21 book 224 pages I would like to thank the author, publishers and Netgalley for allowing me to pick this to read and review. all my reviews are honest. Synopsis  Featuring monuments and obelisks, hieroglyphics and jewelry, funerary masks, tombs and mausoleums, mummies of cats and statues of falcon-headed gods, Ancient Egypt includes outstanding photographs and captions. From the Neolithic cave paintings in Wadi Sura—created long before it was a desert when the region was savannah grassland—to the Valley of the Kings, to the rock-cut temples at Abu Simbel, and from the vast temple complexes at Karnak and Luxor to the funerary mask of Tutankhamun and, of course, to the pyramids and the Sphinx, Ancient Egypt is a hugely colorful guide to the surviving wonders of Egyptian antiquity. Today the exceptional beauty and scale of the antiquities is legendary, drawing millions of visitors to Egypt's monuments each year. Arranged by historical era, the book tak...

Life Lived Wild by Rick Ridgeway (Patagonia) 4 stars

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  Publication date UK 26/10/21 book 454 pages I would like to thank the author, publishers and Netgalley for allowing me to pick this to read and review. all my reviews are honest. Synopsis  A life worth living is lived at the edges where it is wild At the beginning of his memoir Life Lived Wild, Adventures at the Edge of the Map, Rick Ridgeway tells us that if you add up all his many expeditions, he’s spent over five years of his life sleeping in tents: “And most of that in small tents pitched in the world’s most remote regions.” It’s not a boast so much as an explanation. Whether at elevation or raising a family back at sea level, those years taught him, he writes, “to distinguish matters of consequence from matters of inconsequence.” He leaves it to his readers, though, to do the final sort of which is which. Some of his travels made, and remain, news: the first American ascent of K2; the first direct coast-to-coast traverse of Borneo; the first crossing on foot of a 300-mi...