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A Thousand Splendid Suns After 103 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and with four million copies of The Kite Runner shipped, Khaled Hosseini returns with a beautiful, riveting, and haunting novel that confirms his place as one of the most important literary writers today. Propelled by the same superb instinct for storytelling that made The Kite Runner a beloved classic, A Thousand Splendid Suns is at once an incredible chronicle of thirty years of Afghan history and a deeply moving story of family, friendship, faith, and the salvation to be found in love. Born a generation apart and with very different ideas about love and family, Mariam and Laila are two women brought jarringly together by war, by loss and by fate. As they endure the ever escalating dangers around them-in their home as well as in the streets of Kabul-they come to form a bond that makes them both sisters and mother-daughter to each other, and that will ultimately alter the course not just of their own lives but of the next generation. With heart-wrenching power and suspense, Hosseini shows how a woman's love for her family can move her to shocking and heroic acts of self-sacrifice, and that in the end it is love, or even the memory of love, that is often the key to survival. A stunning accomplishment, A Thousand Splendid Suns is a haunting, heartbreaking, compelling story of an unforgiving time, an unlikely friendship, and an indestructible love.

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Image from Amazon.co.uk	The Gathering Anne Enright is a dazzling writer of international stature and one of Ireland’s most singular voices. Now she delivers The Gathering, a moving, evocative portrait of a large Irish family and a shot of fresh blood into the Irish literary tradition, combining the lyricism of the old with the shock of the new. The nine surviving children of the Hegarty clan are gathering in Dublin for the wake of their wayward brother, Liam, drowned in the sea. His sister, Veronica, collects the body and keeps the dead man company, guarding the secret she shares with him—something that happened in their grandmother’s house in the winter of 1968. As Enright traces the line of betrayal and redemption through three generations her distinctive intelligence twists the world a fraction and gives it back to us in a new and unforgettable light. The Gathering is a daring, witty, and insightful family epic, clarified through Anne Enright’s unblinking eye. It is a novel about love and disappointment, about how memories warp and secrets fester, and how fate is written in the body, not in the stars.
Image from Amazon.co.uk	I Can Make You Thin The easy way to lose weight and stay slim — with a free weight-loss CD included. Do you want to lose weight easily? Would you like to feel really happy with your body? Are you unable to lose those last 10 pounds? Are you a late night snacker? Do you find it hard to say no to second helpings? Do you get disheartened about your eating habits and your weight? Yes? Well, Paul McKenna has written the book for you. I Can Make You Thin will change your attitude to food forever.
Image from Amazon.co.uk	On Chesil Beach A novel of remarkable depth and poignancy from one of the most acclaimed writers of our time. It is July 1962. Florence is a talented musician who dreams of a career on the concert stage and of the perfect life she will create with Edward, an earnest young history student at University College of London, who unexpectedly wooed and won her heart. Newly married that morning, both virgins, Edward and Florence arrive at a hotel on the Dorset coast. At dinner in their rooms they struggle to suppress their worries about the wedding night to come. Edward, eager for rapture, frets over Florence’s response to his advances and nurses a private fear of failure, while Florence’s anxieties run deeper: she is overcome by sheer disgust at the idea of physical contact, but dreads disappointing her husband when they finally lie down together in the honeymoon suite. Ian McEwan has caught with understanding and compassion the innocence of Edward and Florence at a time when marriage was presumed to be the outward sign of maturity and independence. On Chesil Beach is another masterwork from McEwan—a story of lives transformed by a gesture not made or a word not spoken.

Top 10 Books

1. Cook Yourself Thin: The Delicious Way to Drop a Dress Size
2. A Thousand Splendid Suns
3. A Quiet Belief in Angels
4. S.U.M.O. Your Relationships: How to Handle Not Strangle the
5. Jamie at Home: Cook Your Way to the Good Life
6. The Gathering
7. Random Acts of Heroic Love
8. I Can Make You Thin
9. The Lollipop Shoes
10. Moab Is My Washpot

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The Blackbird of Belfast Lough keeps singing

Int én bec
    ro léic feit
    do rind guip
    glanbuidi
    fo-ceird faíd
    os Loch Laíg
    lon do craíb
    charnbuidi

This weird little scrap of Irish syllabic verse, probably from the 9th century, consists of just 24 syllables, broken up into eight short lines, which have somehow continued to echo in modern Irish verse: the little lyric seems to have stuck; it has proved itself, in Seamus Heaney's words, to have "staying power".

First used in a metrical tract of the 11th century to illustrate a metre called snám súad, the lyric might be translated, literally, as: "The little bird which has whistled from the end of a bright-yellow bill: it utters a note above Belfast Lough – a blackbird from a yellow-heaped branch" (in a translation by Gerard Murphy). Or perhaps: "The little bird has whistled from the tip of his bright yellow beak; the blackbird from a bough laden with yellow blossom has tossed a cry over Belfast Lough" (translation by David Greene & Frank O'Connor).

Perhaps the poem's recent appeal has something to do with the character of the plucky little bird singing out over Belfast – the site of so much tragedy during the past three decades. Blackbird = poet? That, at least, is one way of looking at it.

Poetic versions, and rewrites, and reinterpretations of the poem abound, by John Montague, and John Hewitt, and Seamus Heaney, and Thomas Kinsella (in The New Oxford Book of Irish Verse), and Tomás Ó Floinn (in modern Irish), and by the current director of the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry, Ciaran Carson.

Carson tells the story of how, when appointed as the first director of the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry, he saw a blackbird pecking around in the little garden outside the School of English and thought it might make an interesting symbol for the newly established centre for creative writing. And so "The Blackbird of Belfast Lough", in word and image, became the Centre's motto and emblem.

Some years later, as writer in residence at the Heaney Centre, I found myself in conversation with two artists, the brothers Oliver and Rory Jeffers. We'd occasionally meet, the three of us, on Saturday mornings to drink coffee and to talk about art and literature, and Oliver would sometimes bring along work-in-progress and Rory would try to explain to me the structure and meaning of the language of images (which I never understood). On a whim, and high on caffeine and big ideas, I thought I would invite a number of local and international artists to read "The Blackbird of Belfast Lough" in its original Irish and its English translations, and to make of it what they would. Which is how I found myself putting together an exhibition now on show at the Heaney Centre.

In his preface to the exhibition catalogue Seamus Heaney suggests that the images might be a way of keeping "the perpetual motion machine of art on the go". I couldn't – obviously – have put it better myself.

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