Canterbury Tales Guesthouse

[Daveo]

The Well of Lost Plots & Early Riser by Jasper Fforde. . . .

@ Canterbury Tales Bookshop / Book exchange / Cafe / Guesthouse. .

Jasper Fforde has done it again in this genre-bending blend of crime fiction, fantasy, and top-drawer literary entertainment.

After two rollicking adventures through Western literature, resourceful literary detective Thursday Next definitely needs some downtime.

And what better place for a respite than in the hidden depths of the Well of Lost Plots, where all unpublished books reside?

But peace and quiet remain elusive for Thursday, who soon discovers that the Well is a veritable linguistic free-for-all, where grammasites run rampant, plot devices are hawked on the black market, and lousy books like the one she has taken up residence in are scrapped for salvage.

To make matters worse, a murderer is stalking the personnel of Jurisfiction and it’s up to Thursday to save the day.

A brilliant feat of literary showmanship filled with wit, fantasy, and effervescent originality, this Ffordian tour de force is the most exciting Thursday Next adventure yet.

[Daveo]

Crooked Little Vein by Warren Ellis .

Traded in recently @ Canterbury Tales Bookshop / Book exchange / Cafe / Guesthouse. .

Burned-out private detective and self-styled shit magnet Michael McGill needed a wake-up call to jump-start his dead career.

What he got was a virtual cattle prod to the crotch, in the form of an impossible assignment delivered directly from the president's heroin-addict chief of staff.

It seems the Constitution of the United States has some skeletons in its closet: the Founding Fathers doubted that the document would be able to stave off human nature indefinitely, so they devised a backup Constitution to deploy at the first sign of crisis.

In the government's eyes, that time is now, as America is overgrown with perverts who spend more time surfing the Web for fetish porn than they do reading a newspaper. They want to use this "Secret Constitution" to drive the country back to a time when civility, God, and mom's homemade apple pie were all that mattered. The only problem is, no one can seem to find it . . . So who better to track it down than a private dick who's so down-and-out that he's coming up the other side, a shamus whose only skill is stumbling into every depraved situation imaginable? With no lead to speak of, and no knowledge of the underground world in which the Constitution has traveled, McGill embarks on a cross-country odyssey of America's darkest, dankest underbelly.

Along the way, his white-bread sensibilities are treated to a smorgasbord of depravity that runs the gamut of human imagination.

The filth mounts; it is clear that this isn't the kind of life, liberty, or happiness that Thomas Jefferson thought Americans would enjoy in the twenty-first century. But what McGill learns as he closes in on the real Constitution is that freedom takes many forms, the most important of which may be the fight against the "good old days." Like Vonnegut, Orwell, and Huxley before him, Warren Ellis deftly exposes the hypocrisy of the "moral majority" by giving us a glimpse at the monstrous outcome that their overzealous policies would achieve.

[Daveo]

Mafia Dynasty: The Rise and Fall of the Gambino Crime Family by John H. Davis..

@ Canterbury Tales Bookshop / Book exchange / Cafe / Guesthouse.

The Gambinos, they arrived in America from Sicily when the 1920s roared with bootleg liquor.

For thirty years they fought a bloody battle for control of New York's underworld to emerge as the nation's richest and most powerful crime family.

Now Mafia expert John H. Davis tells their compelling inside story. Here are the chilling details and deceptions that created a vast criminal empire. Here are six decades of the uncontrolled greed and lust for power of such men as Lucky Luciano, Frank Costello, Meyer Lansky, Vito Genovese, Albert Anastasia, Carlo Gambino, Paul Castellano, and John Gotti - men for whom murder and betrayal were business as usual. From the Gambinos' powerful stranglehold on New York's construction, garment, and waterfront industries to the government's onslaught against them in the `80's and `90's, Mafia Dynasty takes you into the mysterious world of blood oaths, shifting alliances, and deadly feuds that will hold you riveted from the first page to the last.

[Daveo]

The Dark Beneath by Alan Gibbons

Traded In recently @ Canterbury Tales Bookshop / Book exchange / Cafe / Guesthouse, Pattaya..

GCSEs are over and 16-year-old Imogen is looking forward to a perfect, lazy English summer.

But her world is turned upside down by three refugees, all hiding from life.

Anthony is fourteen, already an outcast, bullied and shunned by his peers.

Farid is an asylum seeker from Afghanistan, who has traveled across continents seeking peace.

And Gordon Craig is a bitter, lonely old man.

She knows all of them, but she doesn't know how dangerous they are.

Being part of their lives could cost Imogen her own. Supercharged with tension and drama, this novel explores what happens when the fabric of normality is ripped apart, exposing the terrifying dark beneath.

[Daveo]

Borderliners by Peter Høeg,

@ Canterbury Tales Bookshop / Book exchange / Cafe / Guesthouse. .

Strange things are happening at Biehl's Academy when this elite school opens its doors to a group of orphans and reform-school rejects, kids at the end of the system's tether.

The school is run by a peculiar set of rules by which every minute is regimented and controlled.

Soon, they suspect they are guinea pigs in a bizarre social experiment and that their only hope of escape is to break through a dangerous threshold of time and space.

Peter Høeg's "brilliant" and dystopian Borderliners is a "uniquely philosophical thriller" and a haunting story of childhood travail and hope.

[Daveo]

Ian McEwan - Nutshell. . .

Also in - The Children act as well as more @ Canterbury Tales Bookshop / Book exchange / Cafe / Guesthouse.

 

Trudy has betrayed her husband, John.

She's still in the marital home – a dilapidated, priceless London townhouse – but not with John.

Instead, she's with his brother, the profoundly banal Claude, and the two of them have a plan.

But there is a witness to their plot: the inquisitive, nine-month-old resident of Trudy's womb.

 

Told from a perspective unlike any other, Nutshell is a classic tale of murder and deceit from one of the world’s master storytellers.

[Daveo]

Who Killed Hanratty? by Paul Foot..

@ Canterbury Tales Bookshop / Book exchange / Cafe / Guesthouse. .

The late Paul Foot should be honoured for his dedication to justice for James Hanratty.

His book demonstrated Hanratty's innocence of the horrible A6 murder beyond any reasonable doubt, if the Home Office continues to deny justice to Hanratty's memory & family, that is doubly shameful.

Valerie Storie's mistaken identification of Hanratty as the murderer should remind judges & lawyers of the fallibility of identity evidence. Hanratty died on the gallows in 1962; the real murderer Peter Alphon died naturally in 2009; must we wait for Valerie Storie's death before this appalling miscarriage of justice is corrected ? It should not be left to Paul Foot & others of the political Left to correct injustice in Britain. His book should remind modern Conservatives of their duty to balance upholding law & order with justice for all, and repairing the Home Office's integrity.

[Daveo]

The Football Factory by John King

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'Fever Pitch with testosterone and eight pints of lager.

Like Fever Pitch, it is not exclusively a novel about football. This is a chronicle of a lost tribe - the white, Anglo-Saxon, heterosexual who is fed up with being told he is crap.

It is the story of a flight from fear by a group of Londoners who have seen the present and know it does not work-King writes powerfully with a raw realism and clear grasp of a culture which has been denied but cannot be ignored'

[Daveo]

The Geographer's Library by Jon Fasman

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The literary history suspense novel has long been a genre appreciated by a small subset of general readers.

It is currently enjoying a new vogue and a wider readership with the publication of such novels as The Da Vinci Code, The Rule of Four, and Codex.

What these books have in common, and what The Geographer's Library can also claim, is a set of characters in the here and now grappling with questions about things that went on a very long time ago.

Another characteristic is the unearthing or explanation of objects of great value.

The trick is to weave these two realities together in a compelling way, one that will keep the reader involved in both stories.

Jon Fasman has taken a big chance with The Geographer's Library, his debut novel, setting out a complicated scenario in which a collection of priceless objects is stolen from the titular library and, eventually, scattered and re-collected a thousand years later - with very bad results for the final collector.

The geographer is a real person, Al-Idrisi, a Spanish-Muslim philosopher, cartographer, linguist, and scholar who served in the court of King Roger of Sicily in Palermo in the year 1154.

For the most part, Fasman's risk pays off, although there is a lot of meandering before we finally get to the final revelation.

[Daveo]

The Sorrow Of War: A Novel of North Vietnam by Bảo Ninh,

Traded In recently @ Canterbury Tales Bookshop / Book exchange / Cafe / Guesthouse, Pattaya..

Bao Ninh, a former North Vietnamese soldier, provides a strikingly honest look at how the Vietnam War forever changed his life, his country, and the people who live there. Originally published against government wishes in Vietnam because of its non-heroic, non-ideological tone.

[Daveo]

Caught in the Crossfire by Russell Findlay.

@ Canterbury Tales Bookshop / Book exchange / Cafe / Guesthouse. .

The deadliest Glasgow gang war of a generation between the Daniel and Lyons families was sparked by an opportunistic cocaine theft that unleashed a decade of murderous violence.

Homes were firebombed while children slept, families were ripped apart, and witnesses forced into protection.

The explosive story of what happened as the Daniel-Lyons feud spiraled out of control and engulfed an entire community, this book chronicles the death of 21-year-old Michael Lyons at a north Glasgow garage, the shooting in broad daylight outside a suburban supermarket, and the desecration of eight-year-old cancer victim Garry Lyons’s grave, a sickening low.

Chronicling the efforts of a band of parents who made a brave stand against allowing their community center to be used as the Lyons’s gang hut, this book demonstrates how their coalition won the battle against violence and intimidation and exposed a shocking and murky nexus between police officers, politicians, and the underworld.

[Daveo]

A Loyal Spy by Simon Conway.....

This book UK was 7.99 - our price 140 baht plus the 50% trade in for credit when finished with it @ Canterbury Tales Bookshop / Book exchange / Cafe / Guesthouse. .

The last time Jonah saw Nor ed-Din, he was lying face down in a pool of black water in the Khyber Pass.

For many years, Jonah had been under the impression that he'd killed him there.

How far can loyalty be stretched before it reaches a limit? Millions of lives depend on the answer, as a twisting road of betrayal and revenge leads from the mountains of Afghanistan to the heart of London ...and a ticking bomb.

[Daveo]

Morgan's Run by Colleen McCullough

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In a story of breathtaking scope, Colleen McCullough returns to the magnificent setting of her international bestseller The Thorn Birds. Following the disappearance of his only son and the death of his beloved wife, Richard Morgan is falsely imprisoned and exiled to the penal colonies of eighteenth-century Australia.

His life is shattered but Morgan refuses to surrender, overcoming all obstacles to find unexpected contentment and happiness in the harsh early days of Australia's settlement. From England's shores to Botany Bay and the rugged frontier of a hostile new world, Morgan's Run is the epic tale of love lost and found, and the man whose strength and character helped settle a country and define its future.

[Daveo]

Magic Seeds by V.S. Naipaul. . .

@ Canterbury Tales Bookshop / Book exchange / Cafe / Guesthouse. .

Willie Chandran is a man who has allowed one identity after another to be thrust upon him. In his early forties, after a peripatetic life, he succumbs to the encouragement of his sister and his own listlessness and joins an underground movement in India.

But years of revolutionary campaigns and then prison convince him that the revolution ‘had nothing to do with what we were fighting for’, and he feels himself further than ever ‘from his own history’. When he returns to Britain where, thirty years before, his wanderings began, Willie encounters a country that has turned its back on its past and, like him, has become detached from its own history.

He endures the indignities of a culture dissipated by reform and compromise until, in a moment of grotesque revelation a tour de force of parodic savagery from our most visionary of writers, Willie comes to an understanding that might finally allow him to release his true self. This book is the second volume of Half A Life, but can be read alone.

[Daveo]

Pretty Straight Guys by Nick Cohen. . .

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In Pretty Straight Guys Nick Cohen, one of the most exciting journalists of his generation, explores the feeling of angry impotence which has swept modern Britain during the Labour administration.

Shifting focus away from Westminster and into other territories of New Labour influence, from America to India and based on original research and interviews - this book combines contemporary history with satire and polemic. With the hope that a well-written argument and a love of storytelling can make the reader see the world afresh.

[Daveo]

About a Boy by Nick Hornby....

Traded in recently @ Canterbury Tales Bookshop / Book exchange / Cafe / Guesthouse. .

'How cool was Will Freeman?' Too cool! At thirty-six, he's as hip as a teenager.

He's single, child-free, goes to the right clubs and knows which trainers to wear.

He's also found a great way to score with women: attend single parents' groups full of available (and grateful) mothers, all hoping to meet a Nice Guy. Which is how Will meets Marcus, the oldest twelve-year-old on the planet.

Marcus is a bit strange: he listens to Joni Mitchell and Mozart, looks after his mum and has never owned a pair of trainers.

But Marcus latches on to Will - and won't let go.

Can Will teach Marcus how to grow up cool? And can Marcus help Will just to grow up?

[Daveo]

Chasing Che: A Motorcycle Journey in Search of the Guevara Legend by Patrick Symmes...

@ Canterbury Tales Bookshop / Book exchange / Cafe / Guesthouse.

Intrepid journalist Patrick Symmes sets off on his BMW R80 G/S in search of the people and places in Ernesto "Che" Guevara's classic Motorcycle Diaries, seeking out his own adventure as well as the legacy of the icon Che would become, Symmes retraces the future revolutionary's path.  

And on the way he runs out of gas in an Argentine desert, talks a Peruvian guerrilla out of taking him hostage, wipes out in the Andes, and, in Cuba, drinks himself blind with Che's travel partner, Alberto Granado. Here is the unforgettable story of a wanderer's quest for food, shelter, and wisdom.

Here, too, is the portrait of a continent whose dreams of Utopia give birth not only to freedom fighters, but also to tyrants whose methods include torture and mass killing. Masterfully detailed, insightful, unforgettable, Chasing Che transfixes us with the glory of the open road, where man and machine traverse the unknown in search of the spirit's keenest desires.

[Daveo]

Yes Man by Danny Wallace. . .

@ Canterbury Tales Bookshop / Book exchange / Cafe / Guesthouse. .

Recently single, Danny Wallace was falling into loneliness and isolation. When a stranger on a bus advises, "Say yes more," Wallace vows to say yes to every offer, invitation, challenge, and chance. In Yes Man, Wallace recounts his months-long commitment to complete openness with profound insight and humbling honesty.

Saying yes takes Wallace into a new plane of existence: a place where money comes as easily as it goes, nodding a lot can lead to a long weekend overseas with new friends, and romance isn't as complicated as it seems.

Yes eventually leads to the biggest question of all: "Do you, Danny Wallace, take this woman . . ." Yes Man is inspiring proof that a little willingness can take anyone to the most wonderful of places.

[Daveo]

Detective Stories by Philip Pullman...

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Young mystery fans will be enthralled by this compelling volume of classic detective fiction.

Not even Sherlock Holmes or Hercule Poirot can solve the dilemma of which one of these fifteen exciting and intriguing short stories to read first.

The list of suspects - including such classic and contemporary writers as Italo Calvino, Agatha Christie, Ellery Queen, Damon Runyon, and Andrew Vacchs - may offer clues but no solution.

Both the burden of proof and the delectation of detection must fall upon the reader as ultimate sleuth.

Stories are vital.

There's more wisdom in a story than in volumes of philosophy, and there's a hunger for stories in all of us. - Philip Pullman

[Daveo]

The Solitary Man by Stephen Leather.

@ Canterbury Tales Bookshop / Book exchange / Cafe / Guesthouse.

Chris Hutchison is a man on the run. Imprisoned for a crime he didn't commit, Hutch escapes from a British maximum security prison and starts a new life in Hong Kong. Then a ghost from his past catches up with him, forcing him to help a former terrorist break out of a Bangkok prison. Or face life behind bars once more. Meanwhile the DEA wants to nail the vicious drug warlord responsible for flooding the States with cheap heroin. And decides to use Hutch as a pawn in a deadly game. Hutch's bid for freedom takes him into the lawless killing fields of the Golden Triangle, where the scene is set for one final act of betrayal . .

[Daveo]

You'll find a few Dicks and a lot of Koontz @ Canterbury Tales Bookshop / Book exchange / Cafe / Guesthouse.

[Daveo]

The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out of the Window and Disappeared by Jonas Jonasson. . .

@ Canterbury Tales Bookshop / Book exchange / Cafe / Guesthouse.

Sitting quietly in his room in an old people's home, Allan Karlsson is waiting for a party he doesn't want to begin.

His one-hundredth birthday party to be precise.

The Mayor will be there. The press will be there.

But, as it turns out, Allan will not . . .

Escaping (in his slippers) through his bedroom window, into the flowerbed, Allan makes his getaway.

And so begins his picaresque and unlikely journey involving criminals, several murders, a suitcase full of cash, and incompetent police.

As his escapades unfold, Allan's earlier life is revealed.

A life in which - remarkably - he played a key role behind the scenes in some of the momentous events of the twentieth century.

[Daveo]

Spoken From The Front: Real Voices From the Battlefields of Afghanistan by Andy McNab. . .

We have a good selection from McNab @ Canterbury Tales Bookshop / Book exchange / Cafe / Guesthouse.

Spoken from the Front is the story of the Afghan Campaign, told for the first time in the words of the servicemen and women who have been fighting there.

With unprecedented access to soldiers of all ranks, as well as pilots, reservists, engineers, medics, Royal Military police, mechanics, cooks and other military personnel, Andy McNab has assembled a portrait of modern conflict like never before.

 

This is the full experience of our troops on the ground and in the air.

The horrors, cruelties, drudgery, excitement and banter of these soldiers' lives combine to form a chronological narrative of all the major events in Helmand during the British Army's time there.

 

From their action-packed, dramatic, moving and often humorous testimonies in interviews, diaries, letters and emails written to family, friends and loved ones, emerges a 360-degree picture of guerrilla warfare up close and extremely personal. It is as close to the real thing as you can get.

[Daveo]

 

This room available the whole of the month of February, has discreet back door, no walk of shame, discretion respected.

9,000 per month plus electricity and water.

Other room available.

email; [email protected]

location; https://goo.gl/maps/XksqfGEyJxAQTh1b9

Edited October 20, 2019 by Daveo

[Daveo]

The Truth about the Harry Quebert Affair by Joël Dicker.

@ Canterbury Tales Bookshop / Book exchange / Cafe / Guesthouse.

August 30, 1975. The day of the disappearance. The day Somerset, New Hampshire, lost its innocence.

That summer, struggling author Harry Quebert fell in love with fifteen-year-old Nola Kellergan. Thirty-three years later, her body is dug up from his yard, along with a manuscript copy of the novel that made him a household name. Quebert is the only suspect.

Marcus Goldman - Quebert's most gifted protégé - throws off his writer's block to clear his mentor's name. Solving the case and penning a new bestseller soon merge into one. As his book begins to take on a life of its own, the nation is gripped by the mystery of 'The Girl Who Touched the Heart of America'.

But with Nola, in death as in life, nothing is ever as it seems.