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JANE SHILLING

NO PLAN B

by Lee Child and Andrew Child (Penguin £9.99, 464 pp) WHEREVER Jack Reacher goes, trouble is sure to follow. The freelance lawenforcer arrives in the small Colorado town of Gerrardsville, planning to see an American Civil War exhibition.

On his way, he notices a woman waiting at a crossing as a bus approaches. She dives under the wheels and the driver cannot avoid running her over. It looks like suicide, but Reacher has noticed something others have missed: she was pushed by a man who then stole her handbag.

That lone act of violence sends Reacher on a road trip to Mississippi, to investigate a conspiracy at a private prison.

The latest thriller by Lee and Andrew Child finds Reacher joining forces with a vulnerable teenager and the tough ex-wife of a former prison employee in his relentless pursuit of wrongdoers.

SINS OF MY FATHER

by Lily Dunn (W&N £9.99, 256 pp) LILY DUNN’s parents were fabulously glamorous. When they married, her father was 21 and her mother was just 18. With their two children — Lily and her brother — they seemed like the perfect happy family.

But the image quickly became tarnished: Lily’s father was unfaithful and, when she was six, he left them to join the ashram of the guru Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh in India.

Chronicling her fractured relationship with her father as his charisma inexorably soured into debt and fatal alcoholism, Dunn describes the ‘culture of neglect and abuse’ around the Bhagwan’s philosophy that led her, aged 13, to be groomed by one of her father’s much older friends.

Exploring the childhood that may have been the source of her father’s instability, Dunn’s memoir is a lucid record of family damage as well as painstaking recovery.

LONGLISTED for the Booker, Maddie Mortimer’s debut is the story of Lia, her relationship with her body, and her body’s relationship with her.

It begins with the voice of something lodged deep inside Lia’s flesh: a ‘disaster tourist’ planning its next move. ‘Here is the thing about bodies,’ it reflects. ‘They are impossibly easy to prowl, without anyone suspecting a thing. Until they do.’

Lia is an illustrator in her 40s, married to an academic with whom she has a daughter, Iris. On Iris’s first day at secondary school, Lia learns that her cancer, which has been in remission, is back.

As her body becomes the scene of a battle between the cancer and the treatment, this inventive novel explores the landscapes of illness from the perspectives of Lia, her family and the malignant cells themselves.

Friday Books

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2023-03-24T07:00:00.0000000Z

2023-03-24T07:00:00.0000000Z

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