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The novel Body Surfing by Anita Shreve is being offered this week for £2.99 when you buy it with the Times Newspaper.

Plot wise The action takes place in and around A beach house in New Hampshire which is the summer home of the Edwards family, Anna and Mark and daughter Julie. There are also two older brothers, Jeff and Ben, who suddenly arrive there too

Mrs. Edwards has great hopes for Julie, who has a learning disability, so she hires a woman named Sydney to tutor her. Sydney is 29, twice married, once divorced, and once a widow. She is floundering, not sure what she wants to do, accepting whatever job comes along and then moving on. She answers the ad for a tutor and finds herself in the Edwards household, where she discovers that Julie has undiscovered artistic talent.

However Mrs. Edwards takes an instant dislike to Sydney, is dismissive, and treats her like a servant. Mr. Edwards befriends her, shows her his roses and talks to her about the history of the house.

Then Late one night Sydney goes body surfing with Jeff and Ben, and is sure that Ben groped her underwater, So takes immediate umbrage at this and treats him coldly thereafter, Julie comes home drunk one evening and won’t talk about it and there is also an illicit liaison between Sydney and Jeff which is complicated further when Jeff’s girlfriend arrives on the scene…

This historical epic is being offered for £2.99 this week when you buy it with the Times Newspaper. It is Kate Funivall’s second novel & concerns a character named Sofia Morozova, who has been imprisoned at Davinsky Labour Camp, Siberia and wants to escape. Only two things have sustained her through the bitter cold, aching hunger and hard labour - the prospect of one day walking free, and the stories told by her friend Anna- beguiling tales of a charmed upbringing in Petrograd and of Anna’s fervent love for a passionate revolutionary named Vasily.

Unfortunately Anna falls gravely ill, So Sofia makes a promise to escape the camp and find Vasily. But Sofia knows that times have changed. Russia is gripped by the iron fist of Communism and is no longer the country it once was.

Her perilous search takes her from industrial factories to remote villages, where she discovers a web of secrecy and lies, but also bonds of courage and loyalty and an overwhelming love that threatens her promise to Anna….

Armistice Day is not far off, so I have started reading A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway, which was given away a while back as part of The Independent Newspaper’s Banned Books series.

This was Hemingway’s second novel and is based on his real life experiences during World War I. It tells the story of an American ambulance driver named Fredrick Henry who is helping the Italians during World War I, who falls in love with a beautiful British nurse named Catherine Barkley.His actions lead to him being alienated from the extremists on his own side so he flees to be with his beloved Catherine, sadly tragedy is not far away…

“Grace under Pressure” was Hemingway’s definition of human courage & This novel portrays courage in many guises - courage to love, to fight, to survive & the courage to give up everything for the woman you love.

This novel by Kate Morton - a story of tragedy, secrets, and discovery, has been described as a cross between The Secret Carden & Rebecca, and is being offered for £2.99 when you buy this weeks Times newspaper.

It starts on the eve of the First World War, when a little girl named Nell is found wondering alone on a ship bound for Australia. Fast forward to the night of her twenty-first birthday, and Nell learns a family secret that will change her life forever. Decades later, she embarks upon a search for the truth that leads her to the windswept Cornish coast and the strange and beautiful Blackhurst Manor, once owned by the aristocratic Mountrachet family.

On Nell’s death, her granddaughter, Cassandra, comes into an unexpected inheritance. Cliff Cottage and its forgotten garden, which are notorious amongst the Cornish locals for the secrets they hold - secrets about the doomed Mountrachet family and their ward Eliza Makepeace, a writer of dark Victorian fairytales. It is here that Cassandra must uncover the
truth about the family, and solve a century-old mystery…

This is the latest novel to be offered for £2.99 when you buy the Times Newspaper.

It is the story of a boy who has a near-death experience one day during a football game and finds himself cursed with the ability to foresee the deaths of the people closest to him.

These visions follow him into adulthood and after some disastrous attempts to thwart destiny, he is ultimately left with the dilemma of having to decide whether or not he should try to save a little girl that he has grown to love.

the novel “People of the Book”, written by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author Geraldine Brooks is available for £2.99 with tHe Times Newspaper this week.

Inspired by the true story of a mysterious codex known as the Sarajevo Haggadah. The story concerns an priceless illuminated manuscript which having made a series of incredibly, perilous journeys: through Inquisition-era Venice, fin-de-siecle Vienna, and the Nazi sacking of Sarajevo, survives due to the dedication of a bunch of people taking care of it.

The manuscript is eventually uncoverd Years later and an Australian rare-book expert named Hanna Heath is offered the job of a lifetime: analysis and conservation of the famed manuscript.

Hanna, a caustic loner with a passion for her work, discovers a series of tiny artifacts in its ancient binding—an insect wing fragment, wine stains, salt crystals, a white hair, and becomes determined to unlock the book’s mysteries and secrets and to find out the reason for the Haggadah’s extraordinary illuminations…

Oooh this book sounds really thrilling & interesting , I’d really like to read this once I’ve finished “The End of Mr Y”.

I did not fancy reading Almost Moon, so Seeing as I enjoyed it so much last time I have decided to re-read The End of Mr Y instead. I thought it was a rather entertaining novel by Scarlett Thomas

It concerns A young woman named Ariel Manto - a well read young journalist and polymath scholar, whose chief interest is in 19th-century thought experiments, who visits a second hand bookstore, and chances upon a rare antique novel entitled “The End of Mr Y”.

Ariel finds out that the novel is supposedly cursed and that her thesis adviser Mr Burlem happened to be reading it when he mysteriously vanished.So naturally she reads it too.

Ariel finds that The deeper she gets into the story, the more convinced she is that the author could enter a dimension called the Troposphere, a realm made of human consciousness. where you can meet gods or hitchhike on people’s thoughts in order to travel through space and time, and From there on, things get entertainingly, mind-bendingly weird…

Alice Sebold’s latest novel, “Almost Moon” is being offered for £2.99 when you buy The Times Newspaper.

It is a tragic tale concerning a character named Helen Knightly, a divorcee, whose elderly mother is suffering from dementia and is abusive and unpleasant to be around. Helen has reached breaking point and, despairing of her Mother’s behaviour, she finally snaps and takes a tragic course of action.

For the next 24 hours, Helen Knightly confronts the events that unfold from the act she has committed and reflects on the major events of her life such as Her relationships with her mother, father (who died before her mother), her two daughters, her ex-husband, her best friend and her best friend’s son, and what finally motivated her to take such drastic action….

This novel is the follow-up to Ken Follett’s masterful & immensely popular epic “The Pillars of the Earth” and is avaialable for £2.99 when you get the Times Newspaper this week.

It is the story of four children, who on the day after Halloween in the year 1327, slip away from the cathedral city of Kingsbridge. They are a thief, a bully, a boy genius and a girl who wants to be a doctor. However Their lves change forever when they see two men killed in the forest.

As adults, their lives will be braided together by ambition, love, greed and revenge. They will see prosperity and famine, plague and war. One boy will travel the world but come home in the end, the other will be a powerful, corrupt nobleman. One girl will defy the might of the medieval church; the other will pursue an impossible love, all this takes place against the backdop of The Black Death and The Hundred Years War.

Follett’s first novel “The Pillars of the Earth enchanted millions of readers with its compelling drama of war, passion and family conflict set around the building of a cathedral, and this novel set two-hundred years later sounds just as good so I would like to read it. I would also like to read The Pillars of the Earth too.

The Irresistible Inheritance of Wilberforce is Paul Torday’s second novel, after “Salmon Fishing in the Yemen”, and is being offered for £2.99 when you buy this weeks Times Newspaper.

It is a poignant tale about a character named Wilberforce, a 37-year-old former software engineer, who has sold his business to pursue a life of drinking. Or as he sees it, to safeguard the inheritance of his great friend Francis Black, whose house and underground wine cellar (”the undercroft”) he bought for a million pounds. Not bad for a hundred thousand bottles of priceless wine.

The book follows Wilberforce from the building up of his software business to the success it is today, and looks at how he spent his time working, often until late at night at the expense of his relationships, through to his gradual alcahol fuelled decline, to his present predicament and how he got there