The Silent Children

The Silent Children is a book by Amna K. Boheim.

It is a modern-day ghost story set in Vienna.

It has a multitude of themes covering secrets and horrors that beset Austria in the 1930s,

It is 1938. Annabel Albrecht notices that things are not quite right within her once happy and stable home.

First, there is the mysterious disappearance of Eva, her favourite maid.

Then her good friend Oskar also vanishes

But those events are a mere drop in the ocean, when compared to the dreadful event that occur next, when her beloved brother is murdered.

In a horrendous continuation of these evil events, her mother is taken away from her and Annabel is left to, somehow, fends for herself.

Nearly 70 years later Max, who is Annabel's son, decides to dig into his mother's mysterious past and is able, with persistence, to disinter the secrets of his mother's vanished friends.

Now that his estranged mother is dead, all he has is a photograph of his mother and of Oskar, taken in 1938.

But something appears to be amiss. Are the missing completely silent?

The ghosts of the past are haunting Max.

The house in the photograph. There seems to be something wrong with it. Something amiss.

Can Max learn what it is? Can he help the ghosts of the past?

This is a highly evocative first novel by Amna K. Boheim.

It is published by Matador at £8.99. It can be bought from the That's Books bookshop, just to the right of this book review.

A Time of My Life

A Time of My Life is a remarkable book penned by nurse Mo Ruddling.

Back in the 1960s a young and qualified nurse, Mo Rudling, decided to take up a two year posting (no holidays allowed!) as a nurse on the island of Taraway (now called Kiribati) with the British Colonial Service.

She had the opportunity to work with the peoples of the atolls of the central Pacific Ocean tending to their medical needs, during the last days of the British Empire, close to the Equator.

The natives of the islands are bedevilled by a range of problematic conditions. Infant mortality, poverty and general medical necessities, which Mo does her best to help alleviate.

Based on Tarawa, Mo had to be transported by boat to the other neighbouring islands, wading ashore through the shallow seas to tend to the requirements and needs of her far flung patients.

She had to tend to a variety of medical needs, including those who were in a a leprosarium, where some 20 people who were suffering from chronic leprosy were living out their lives.

Medical supplies, were, Mo realised, in scant supply.

As well as providing medical care Mo was responsible for organising and overseeing the training programme to ensure that there would be a constant supply of locally-born nurses who would, eventually, be able to tend to the needs of the people on the islands.

This is a charming book and will be of great interest to lovers of books on  travel and medicine.

It is published by Matador and costs £15.99. It is available via the That's Books book shop, which you will find to the right of this review.

Enchanted Realms

Enchanted Realms is a new fantasy novel. Or perhaps it is a true story?

The author of Enchanted Realms, Valan Peters, is a intriguing character.

Middlesex-born, a riding instructor who eventually re-trained as a therapist using the complimentary medicine paradigm, and, ultimately, a teacher.

Valan saw a horse who was at death's door, a victim of tetanus. But the expected did not happen.

As a recipient of distance healing, the horse made a miraculous recovery from the dreadful disease.

Which brings us to the book that Valan Peters has written.

Soon after the Battle of Hastings two men were allotted their rewards for their bravery.

They were gifted two large areas of lands that were quite close to the Kingdom of Wales.

On their journey toward Wales, they met a powerful wizard.

He was able to make a prophesy about the births of their two two children.

The two would, at birth, betrothed to each other. And, so it was, when the two children, named David and Gwendolyn, were born, they were, indeed, betrothed.

And the other prophecies he made. Would they, could they come to fruition, also?

This is an extremely well-written story which melds fact, fiction and fantasy into a seamless tale that is guaranteed to beguile the reader.

It is published by Matador at £9.99 and is available via the That's Books Book Shop, which is to be found to the right-hand side of this book review.

Bruce Dickinson Insights

Bruce Dickinson  Insights is a stunningly original book by Brigitte Schon.

It is subtitled An Interpretation of his Solo Albums.

Known for his great musicianship, his lyrics, hisability as a TV presenter, a pilot a fencer a record producer,  and his specialist real ales (Just try his Trooper real ale. It'll be a real revelation to you!)  Bruce Dickinson is a sort of modern day renaissance man. Or a polymath.

This book helps the reader explore Bruce Dickinson through the interpretation of his lyrics from his solo albums.

Unfortunately the powers that be behind Iron Maiden decided that it would be wise to refuse Brigitte permission to reprint the lyrics. Which, one might argue, would somewhat risk devaluing the whole thrust of the book.

The problem is with the powers that be of this type is that although they know the cost of everything, they know the value of nothing.

However, despite the attempt to hobble this book Brigitte is able to use her considerable skills as a researcher and a writer to throw some illumination onto the lyrics of Bruce Dickinson.

Brigitte manages to use snatches from the lyrics and interviews with Bruce and others to offer a sensitive and heartfelt  analysis of the lyrics that  Bruce has created and sent out to the world.

This is a truly amazing book and of you Bruce Dickinson  Insights a fan of Bruce's  music,  you really do need to buy this book.

It costs £9.99 and is worth every penny.

The Parrot Tree

The Parrot Tree is a romantic fictional novel by Barbara Kastelin.

It tells the story of Vivien. And of Karl.

Vivien is a talented young woman who lives in suburbia in the 1980s.

She feels stultified and suffocated in a marriage that she feels is loveless. It has damped her creativity so she, in effect, runs away from home and finds her way to Madison Avenue where she fully intends to discover professional and romantic fulfilment.

Karl is a genius (of the type often described as "tormented or tortured") who, as a young boy, had to flee from the Nazis by making a daring run for freedom in the sewerage system that was below the city of Bratislava.

He became a gardener (to an Austrian Barron, no less!). fathered a daughter (out of wedlock) and decided to emigrate to America in the 1950s.

Eventually, Karl found fame and fortune in the world of advertising and eventually was able to launch his own highly successful advertising agency on Madison Avenue.

Karl has become involved in a project to help save the Amazon rainforest.

His assistant hires Vivien to work with them on the location shooting, down their in the Amazon.

And so off they go, heading for the headwaters of the Amazon.

After all, what on earth could possibly go wrong? Or right, even?

This novel is published by Matador at £7.99 and is available via the That's Books book shop, on the right hand side of this review.

Far, Far the Mountain Peak

Far, Far the Mountain Peak is the début novel by Arthur Clifford, graduate of Rugby School and Newcastle University, school teacher, explorer and mountaineer of some renown.

It tells the story of John Denby, conceived in a church(!) to parents that might have cruelly been referred to in the Sun or the Daily Mail as "rent-a-protest tin-pot socialist revolutionaries" and, once born, he was rejected by these self-regarding and self-styled revolutionaries and parcelled off from the working class north (though his parents were anything but working class) to his wealthy grandparents in the south of England.

His grandparents doted on him and he was a well-loved child. He was pampered at home, sent to one of the best private schools that their money could buy and he lived a happy, contented life in the London suburb where he created his own idyllic little life filled with model railways (steam, of course!) and the teachings and promises of eternal salvation of the Scripture Union.

But a sudden tragedy destroys all that his grandparents and he had carefully constructed for John.

And he must return to the north of England, a north of England that he had never known.

His parents are just as cold and indifferent to him as they ever had been, and he is made to attend a bizarre and somewhat weird "experimental" state school, partially because this is a school that his father was instrumental in helping to create and launch.

John just does not fit in. Well, with the rejection of his parents and being reared by his wealthy grandparents in an entirely different society hundreds of miles away, how could he have ever had any hope of fitting in?

But John is far from being stupid and pretty quickly he realises that, in order to survive, let alone thrive, he will have to develop the ability to become two entirely different people. A posh and sensitive boy and also a devil may care hard boy. One of the lads.

As he grows up in this strange and somewhat alien environment, John Denby has to try to make sense of it all and to work out what he really wants in life and also how he is to attain it.

This is a very moving first novel and is well worth reading as it takes us from the confused, self-regarding protest generation to their children who still had to try to make sense of the real world.

It is published by The Book Guild at £12.99 and is available from the That's Books book shop, which you will find to the right hand side of this book review.

Zweck

Zweck, in which musician and well-published musical composer Stephen Deutsch (he of well over 40 scores for concert works, films/movies and the theatre plus a couple of scripts for television dramas) explores the world of modern musical composers.

Zweck is set in 1972. Bernard Robbins is a typical American in London. He is a mixture of innocence, arrogance and has a certain lack of knowledge about many of the things in life that matter.

He is in London to further his career as a concert pianist, a conductor and also as a composer of music.

By utter chance Bernard meets the only other member of his family who lives in London, his great uncle, Hermann Heinrich Zweck.

Now into his 90s, Zweck once had it all, he was an eminent composer. But now? Well, not so much eminence as there has been a somewhat dramatic slipping away of any public recognition of his once highly esteemed works.

Now Zweck is a one man force fighting a sort of guerilla war against what he sees as cowardice. laziness, ineptitude and stupidity of the entire world.

How can Bernard cope with the eccentricities and the rages -often capricious- of his older relative?

For some reason Zweck is excessively enraged by the hapless and less than offensive English musicologist Charles Forsythe. And he seems to have it in for Bernard, too!

But why? What motivates and drives Zweck and his rages?

Is it wine, women and song? Or perhaps just the latter two?

The book is subtitled "A novel and mostly reliable musical history."

The book is a delightful tale, which wanders off into all sorts of odd and somewhat arcane areas of musical history. For example, did you know of the link between Chief Sitting Bull and Rachmaninoff?

This is an interesting and marvellously mischievous novel and at £9.99 from Matador is available via the That's books Book Shop, available on the right hand side of this book review.