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Love and Promise
0600 FtMaddy Kiernan knows her situation is desperate. With her parents dead, her brother Thomas is left as guardian to her and her sister Carmel, and Thomas, Maddy is all too aware, only cares about himself. When his plans to marry the daughter of the Protestant canal agent backfire Thomas takes off to Liverpool, leaving the girls to fend for themselves. Taking the momentous decision to follow their brother, Maddy leaves for Liverpool. Within days the girls are destitute, reduced to living in a cellar, their money gone. Eventually, Maddy finds work as a maid to an old lady, becoming her unpaid companion and sole beneficiary of her will. But Maddy has to promise not to marry until the woman who has rescued her and her sister dies. When Maddy meets a young seaman she realises she may have to choose between love and that promise…
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The Bone Clocks
02 000 FtFollowing a scalding row with her mother, fifteen-year-old Holly Sykes slams the door on her old life. But Holly is no typical teenage runaway: a sensitive child once contacted by voices she knew only as “the radio people,” Holly is a lightning rod for psychic phenomena. Now, as she wanders deeper into the English countryside, visions and coincidences reorder her reality until they assume the aura of a nightmare brought to life. For Holly has caught the attention of a cabal of dangerous mystics—and their enemies. But her lost weekend is merely the prelude to a shocking disappearance that leaves her family irrevocably scarred. This unsolved mystery will echo through every decade of Holly’s life, affecting all the people Holly loves—even the ones who are not yet born. A Cambridge scholarship boy grooming himself for wealth and influence, a conflicted father who feels alive only while reporting from occupied Iraq, a middle-aged writer mourning his exile from the bestseller list—all have a part to play in this surreal, invisible war on the margins of our world. From the medieval Swiss Alps to the nineteenth-century Australian bush, from a hotel in Shanghai to a Manhattan townhouse in the near future, their stories come together in moments of everyday grace and extraordinary wonder.