Recommendations based on "Tell Me where it Hurts A Day of Humour, Healing, and Hope in My Life as a Vet"

How could you refuse the polite invitation of begoggled Danny Wallace in Join Me ? You don't know what you could be missing out on. It's all about living for the moment in this quirky, seemingly pointless yet addictive narrative. Finding himself with too much time on his hands after quitting his BBC job, Danny revels in "sitting around in his pants" and generally taking a break from the responsibilities of working life. Danny attends the funeral of his great uncle Gallus and finds out that he had set up a commune of like-minded people to escape Swiss small town small-mindedness in the 1940s. Intrigued by this idea, on his return to London Danny places a cryptic advert in the classified ads paper Loot and gets some surprising results. His Norwegian radio-producer girlfriend Hanne is bemused and infuriated that this has become more than a transient interest; it takes over his life--and hers. The number of "joinees"--people replying to his ad--escalates as word gets out about this new "happy cult", but without a clue about what he wants to achieve, or do with all his newfound friends, Danny has to think fast as dissent rises in the ranks. Now the reluctant leader of a troop of random hopefuls, he maintains their interest with obscure e-mails and watches as his joinees meet and bond. Whatever he had created, it was bigger than he had anticipated. From an initially puerile idea, it had grown into something of a social experiment--why were people willing to take the risk? What was lacking in their lives that they thought they might get out of contacting a stranger? Taking risks, no matter how big or small, is the essential crux of the matter here and of course, nothing ventured, nothing gained. -- Angela Boodoo

He had his final heart attack in the Silver Band Club in Corby, somewhere between the bar and the cigarette machine. A foundling; a fantasist; a morose, threatening drinker who was quick with his hands, he hadn't seen his son for years. And for all those years the two estranged men had been falling - each at their own pace - towards their own vanishing points.John Burnside's extraordinary story of this failed relationship is an exquisitely written evocation of a lost and damaged world of from the condemned prefabs, overgrown gardens and haunted woods of Cowdenbeath to the simmering gang violence and industrial squalor of Corby. And through all this, the constants of his father's men defined by the drink they could take and the pain they could stand, men shaped by their guilt and machismo. This was a life of secrets - drunken rampages, adolescent fumblings, domestic violence, illicit affairs, angels in deserted houses - which was to set a pattern of binge-drinking, drug abuse and emotional trying to eradicate the past, trying to disappear.A Lie About My Father is about forgiving but not forgetting, about examining the way men are made and how they fall apart, about understanding that in order to have a good son you must have a good father. John Burnside's unflinching honesty, profound thinking and heart-stopping images of beauty and fracture combine to create a moving, unforgettable memoir of two lost a father and his child.

Once by Morris Gleitzman is the story of a young Jewish boy who is determined to escape the orphanage he lives in to save his Jewish parents from the Nazis in the occupied Poland of the Second World War.Everybody deserves to have something good in their life. At least Once.Once I escaped from an orphanage to find Mum and Dad.Once I saved a girl called Zelda from a burning house.Once I made a Nazi with a toothache laugh.My name is Felix. This is my story.Once is the first in a series of children's novels about Felix, a Jewish orphan caught in the middle of the Holocaust, from Australian author Morris Gleitzman - author of Bumface and Boy Overboard. The next books in the series Then, Now and After are also available from Puffin.

An Instant New York Times Bestseller Beloved bestselling author Mitch Albom returns with his most important novel to date, an unforgettable story of truth and lies set during the Holocaust. Eleven-year-old Nico Krispis has never told a lie. When the Nazis invade his home in Salonika, Greece, the trustworthy boy is discovered by a German officer, who offers him a chance to save his family. All Nico has to do is persuade his fellow Jewish residents to board trains heading “north,” where new jobs and safety await. Unaware that this is all a cruel ruse, the innocent boy reassures passengers on the station platform every day. But when the final train is loaded, Nico sees his family being herded into a boxcar. Only then does he discover that he has helped send them—and everyone he knows and loves—to their doom at Auschwitz. Nico escapes—but he never tells the truth again. In The Little Liar, Mitch Albom examines the human repercussions of deception by interweaving the stories of Nico, who yearns for forgiveness; his older brother, Sebastian, who vows revenge against him; Fannie, the girl who must choose between them; and Udo Graf, the Nazi officer who forever changed their lives with his lies. Through the war years, the concentration camps, and the decades that follow, Albom reveals the consequences of each person’s honesty and dishonesty, bringing them back to where it all started in a staggering climax worthy of the best of Albom’s internationally embraced stories.  

Winner of the 1957 Pulitzer Prize in Drama“The definitive edition.”—Boston GlobeEugene O’Neill’s autobiographical play Long Day’s Journey into Night is regarded as his finest work. First published by Yale University Press in 1956, it won the Pulitzer Prize in 1957 and has since sold more than one million copies. This edition includes a Foreword by Harold Bloom, in which he writes: “By common consent, Long Day’s Journey into Night is Eugene O’Neill’s masterpiece. . . . The helplessness of family love to sustain, let alone heal, the wounds of marriage, of parenthood, and of sonship, have never been so remorselessly and so pathetically portrayed, and with a force of gesture too painful ever to be forgotten by any of us.”

Jackson is aggressive, confrontational and often volatile. His mother, Kayla, is crippled with grief after tragically losing her husband and eldest son. Struggling to cope, she puts Jackson into foster care.Cathy, his carer, encourages Jackson to talk about what has happened to his family, but he just won’t engage. His actions continue to test and worry everyone.Then, in a dramatic turn of events, the true reason for Jackson’s behaviour comes to light …Cathy Glass's book 'Unwanted' was a No.1 Sunday Times bestseller w/c 2023-01-16.

“A remarkable novel. . . . A Prayer for Owen Meany is a rare creation. ... An amazingly brave piece of work ... so extraordinary, so original, and so enriching. . . . Readers will come to the end feeling sorry to leave [this] richly textured and carefully wrought world.” —STEPHEN KING, Washington PostI am doomed to remember a boy with a wrecked voice—not because of his voice, or because he was the smallest person I ever knew, or even because he was the instrument of my mother's death, but because he is the reason I believe in God; I am a Christian because of Owen Meany.In the summer of 1953, two eleven-year-old boys—best friends—are playing in a Little League baseball game in Gravesend, New Hampshire. One of the boys hits a foul ball that kills the other boy's mother. The boy who hits the ball doesn't believe in accidents; Owen Meany believes he is God's instrument. What happens to Owen after that 1953 foul ball is extraordinary.A PBS Great American Read Top 100 Pick

From daughter of musical visionary Frank Zappa, Moon Unit Zappa, comes a memoir of growing up in her unconventional household in 1970s Los Angeles, coming of age as part of the MTV generation in the 1980s as the “Valley Girl,” and finding herself after losing her father, then her mother, and the fracturing of her longest relationships.I got my first journal when I was five, for Christmas, then every year after I’d get a new one. They were hardbound in black leather with gold embellishments on the cover and along the paper edges. So fancy. These books felt important. I believed I had a responsibility to do excellent work in them, to match their external beauty and honor the dead trees I held in my hands, a concept my mother had recently illuminated along with explaining hamburgers were deceased cows. Plus, the diaries were from Gail and Frank, my mother and my father, with the inscription to me in his handwriting, so I put undue pressure on myself to turn these blank nothings into weighty somethings, as I saw my idol dad doing on his large, butter-colored music paper.When I wasn’t writing short stories about my camels T’mershi Duween and Sinini, or about aliens or ballerinas or nuns, or alien ballerina nuns, I’d report on the happenings in the house or the world at large. I was political and wrote a letter to President Ford to get him to stop men from clubbing baby harp seals. I was ambitious and practiced signing my autograph in various handwriting styles. I was complimentary and wrote a letter to Tina Turner to let her know she is almost as good a dancer as me. I was boy crazy for Shawn Cassidy and wrote his name everywhere, followed by pages of scrawling my new name “Moon Unit Cassidy” in loopy cursive. I used my journals like a secret best friend I could tell anything to: “I’m sad. I wish my dad would take me with him to Europe.” When I still lived at home and had no privacy, I’d write in code about really secret stuff so I had somewhere safe to be the real me, to vent about my feelings with impunity.As time went on, I loosened the reins on my dad-comparing and perfectionism in my journals. And in life. I had no choice. Rightly or wrongly, I believed I would never be as good as my dad, so I had to learn to live with plain old me.For Moon Unit Zappa, processing a life so unique, so punctuated by the whims of creative genius, the tastes of popular culture, the calculus of celebrity and the nature of fractured love has at times been eviscerating, at others, illuminating. Yes, this is a book about growing up in the shadows of Frank Zappa, in a sexually free, but also dysfunctional world in 1970s LA.And as we careen into the 1980s, the style and the music and the tone changes—but Moon remains the constant, trying to find herself in a very confusing, everchanging equation—that of her family and the relationship with fame.It is Moon’s deep sense of humor and humility that keeps her grounded, and keeps this memoir pinned to the ground. Earth to Moon is a creative, colorful, and wonderful lesson in growing into oneself.

** SOON TO BE A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE STARRING RENÉE ZELLWEGER, LOUIE ANDERSON AND OWEN TEAGUE ** Former academic Arthur Opp weighs 550 pounds and hasn't left his rambling Brooklyn home in a decade. Twenty miles away, in Yonkers, seventeen-year-old Kel Keller navigates life as the poor kid in a rich school and pins his hopes on what seems like a promising sporting career - if he can untangle himself from his family drama. The link between this unlikely pair is Kel's mother, Charlene, a former student of Arthur's. After nearly two decades of silence, it is Charlene's unexpected phone call to Arthur - a plea for help - that jostles them into action.

The American classic about a young girl's coming of age at the turn of the century. "A profoundly moving novel, and an honest and true one. It cuts right to the heart of life...If you miss A Tree Grows in Brooklyn you will deny yourself a rich experience...It is a poignant and deeply understanding story of childhood and family relationships. The Nolans lived in the Williamsburg slums of Brooklyn from 1902 until 1919...Their daughter Francie and their son Neely knew more than their fair share of the privations and sufferings that are the lot of a great city's poor. Primarily this is Francie's book. She is a superb feat of characterization, an imaginative, alert, resourceful child. And Francie's growing up and beginnings of wisdom are the substance of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn." --New York Times "One of the most dearly beloved and one of the finest books of our day." --Orville Prescott "One of the books of the century."--New York Public Library