Canterbury Tales Guesthouse

[Daveo]

Jim Thompson: The Unsolved Mystery by William Warren.

@ Canterbury Tales Bookshop / Book exchange / Cafe, Pattaya.....

On Easter Day, 1967, American businessmen and founder of the modern Thai silk industry James H. W. Thompson disappeared while supposedly on a stroll in the jungle-clad Cameron Highlands in Central Malaysia. 
Neither Jim Thompson nor his remains has ever been found, some twenty years earlier Jim Thompson had abandoned his former life to embark on an exotic business career in Southeast Asia. 
After establishing the Thai Silk Company, Thompson built a house and an art collection which are among Bangkok's top tourist attractions today. 
After vanishing, he became the subject of a massive search and investigation, and a mystery that has never been solved. 
This definitive account of the life of Jim Thompson, written by a man who knew him well, gives the reader a first-hand glance into his private affairs and his alleged role as an agent for the CIA.

This true life mystery will keep you turning the pages to the final chapter.

 

[Daveo]

Back to Blood by Tom Wolfe.

 

In Now @ Canterbury Tales Bookshop / Book exchange / Cafe, Pattaya.....

 

As a police launch speeds across Miami’s Biscayne Bay with officer Nestor Camacho on board, Tom Wolfe is off and running.

Into the feverous landscape of the city, he introduces the Cuban mayor, the black police chief, a wanna go muckraking young journalist and his Yale marinated editor.

An Anglo sex addiction psychiatrist and his Latina nurse by day, loin lock by night until lately, the love of Nestor’s life; a refined, and oh so light skinned young woman from Haiti and her Creole spouting, black gang banger stylin’ little brother; a billionaire porn addict, crack dealers in the ‘hoods, “de skilled” conceptual artists at the Miami Art Basel Fair, “spectators” at the annual Biscayne Bay regatta looking only for that night’s orgy, yenta heavy ex New Yorkers at an “Active Adult” condo, and a nest of shady Russians. Based on the same sort of detailed, on scene, high energy reporting that powered Tom Wolfe’s previous bestselling novels, BACK TO BLOOD is another brilliant, spot on, scrupulous, and often hilarious reckoning with our times.

 

[Daveo]

Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts.

 

In Now @ Canterbury Tales Bookshop / Book exchange / Cafe, Pattaya.

 

A novel of high adventure, great storytelling and moral purpose, based on an extraordinary true story of eight years in the Bombay underworld.

 

In the early 80's Gregory David Roberts, an armed robber and heroin addict, escaped from an Australian prison to India, where he lived in a Bombay slum.

There, he established a free health clinic and also joined the mafia, working as a money launderer, forger and street soldier.

He found time to learn Hindi and Marathi, fall in love, and spend time being worked over in an Indian jail.

Then, in case anyone thought he was slacking, he acted in Bollywood and fought with the Mujahedeen in Afghanistan . . . Amazingly, Roberts wrote Shantaram three times after prison guards trashed the first two versions.

It's a profound tribute to his willpower . . . At once a high kicking, eye gouging adventure, a love saga and a savage yet tenderly lyrical fugitive vision.'

 

[Daveo]

The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga.

 

In Now @ Canterbury Tales Bookshop / Book exchange / Cafe, Pattaya..

WINNER OF THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE 2008

 

Balram Halwai is the White Tiger the smartest boy in his village.

His family is too poor for him to afford for him to finish school and he has to work in a teashop, breaking coals and wiping tables.

But Balram gets his break when a rich man hires him as a chauffeur, and takes him to live in Delhi.

The city is a revelation.

As he drives his master to shopping malls and call centres, Balram becomes increasingly aware of immense wealth and opportunity all around him, while knowing that he will never be able to gain access to that world.

As Balram broods over his situation, he realizes that there is only one way he can become part of this glamorous new India, by murdering his master.

 

The White Tiger presents a raw and un-romanticised India, both thrilling and shocking, from the desperate, almost lawless villages along the Ganges, to the booming Wild South of Bangalore and its technology and outsourcing centres.

The first person confession of a murderer, The White Tiger is as compelling for its subject matter as for the voice of its narrator amoral, cynical, unrepentant, yet deeply endearing.

 

[Daveo]

The Sea; by John Banville.

 

In Now @ Canterbury Tales Bookshop / Book exchange / Cafe, Pattaya..

 

In this luminous new novel about love, loss, and the unpredictable power of memory, John Banville introduces us to Max Morden, a middle aged Irishman who has gone back to the seaside town where he spent his summer holidays as a child to cope with the recent loss of his wife.

It is also a return to the place where he met the Graces, the well heeled family with whom he experienced the strange suddenness of both love and death for the first time.

What Max comes to understand about the past, and about its indelible effects on him, is at the center of this elegiac, gorgeously written novel among the finest we have had from this masterful writer."

 

[Daveo]

Around India in 80 Trains by Monisha Rajesh.

 

In Now @ Canterbury Tales Bookshop / Book exchange / Cafe, Pattaya..

 

In 1991, Monisha Rajesh's family uprooted from Sheffield to Madras in the hope of making India their home.

Two years later, fed up with soap eating rats, severed human heads and the creepy colonel across the road, they returned to England with a bitter taste in their mouths.

 

Two decades on, she turns to a map of the Indian Railways and takes a page out of Jules Verne's classic tale, embarking on an adventure around India in 80 trains, covering 40,000km the circumference of the Earth.

She hopes that 80 train journeys up, down and across India will lift the veil on a country that has become a stranger to her.

 

Along the way, Monisha discovers that the Indian Railways - featuring luxury trains, toy trains, Mumbai's infamous commuter trains, and even a hospital on wheels, have more than a few stories to tell, not to mention a colourful cast of characters.

And with a self confessed 'militant devout atheist' in tow, her personal journey around a country built on religion isn't quite what she bargained for...

 

[Daveo]

Darkness Descending, The Murder of Meredith Kercher

by Paul Russell.

 

In Now @ Canterbury Tales Bookshop / Book exchange / Cafe, Pattaya..

 

It was a brutal murder, and the trial of the decade.

On 1 November 2007, 21-year-old British student Meredith Kercher was slaughtered in cold blood in the apartment in Perugia, Italy, that she shared with three other girls.

Two bright young people, Amanda Knox and her Italian ex-boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito, stood accused of the killing in a trial that lasted through 2009.

They were found guilty and sentenced to twenty six and twenty five years respectively on 4 December.

A second man, Ivory Coast-born Rudy Guede, 22, had already been found guilty of the sexual assault and murder of Meredith in a separate trial in 2008 and sentenced to thirty years, but the prosecution always stated that he didn't act alone.

 

Kercher was a model student whilst American Knox acquired a reputation that fuelled speculation about her character.

Her bizarre behaviour just after Meredith's body was found, her false accusation of an innocent man, her weak alibi and her DNA on the murder weapon, a kitchen knife found to be scrubbed with bleach, went against her.

 

TV producer Paul Russell and critically acclaimed crime writer Graham Johnson have teamed up with leading Italian forensics expert General Luciano Garofano to reveal the full truth behind this sensational murder and its trial.

They unravel all the details and study all the personalities in this case that has stunned the world.

Complex, and some say controversial, DNA evidence is explained in simple language and, bit by bit, a story emerges of brutality and jealousy in a university town where all was not what it seemed. Their findings make for gripping, sensational reading.

 

[Daveo]

1984 Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell.

 

In Now @ Canterbury Tales Bookshop / Book exchange / Cafe, Pattaya..

 

'Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past'

 

Hidden away in the Record Department of the sprawling Ministry of Truth, Winston Smith skilfully rewrites the past to suit the needs of the Party.

Yet he inwardly rebels against the totalitarian world he lives in, which demands absolute obedience and controls him through the all seeing telescreens and the watchful eye of Big Brother, symbolic head of the Party.

In his longing for truth and liberty, Smith begins a secret love affair with a fellow worker Julia, but soon discovers the true price of freedom is betrayal.

 

George Orwell's dystopian masterpiece, Nineteen Eighty Four is perhaps the most pervasively influential book of the twentieth century.

 

[Daveo]

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson.

 

In Now @ Canterbury Tales Bookshop / Book exchange / Cafe, Pattaya.

 

‘We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold.

I remember saying something like, “I feel a bit lightheaded; maybe you should drive .”’

 

Hunter S. Thompson is roaring down the desert highway to Las Vegas with his attorney, the Samoan, to find the dark side of the American Dream.

Armed with a drug arsenal of stupendous proportions, the duo engage in a surreal succession of chemically enhanced confrontations with casino operators, police officers and assorted Middle Americans.

 

This stylish reissue of Hunter S. Thompson’s iconic masterpiece, a controversial bestseller when it appeared in 1971, features the brilliant Ralph Steadman illustrations of the original.

It brings to a new generation the hallucinatory humour and nightmare terror of Hunter S. Thompson’s musings on the collapse of the American Dream.

 

[Daveo]

If This Is a Man / The Truce by Primo Levi.

 

In Now @ Canterbury Tales Bookshop / Book exchange / Cafe, Pattaya..

 

With the moral stamina and intellectual pose of a twentieth century Titan, this slightly built, dutiful, unassuming chemist set out systematically to remember the German hell on earth, steadfastly to think it through, and then to render it comprehensible in lucid, unpretentious prose.

was profoundly in touch with the minutest workings of the most endearing human events and with the most contemptible.

What has survived in Levi's writing isn't just his memory of the unbearable, but also, in THE PERIODIC TABLE and THE WRENCH, his delight in what made the world exquisite to him.

He was himself a "magically endearing man, the most delicately forceful enchanter I've ever known" - PHILIP ROTH

 

[Daveo]

Happy Days by Graham Hurley.

 

In Now @ Canterbury Tales Bookshop / Book exchange / Cafe, Pattaya..

 

D/I Faraday is gone and the police are left reeling.

As his boss attempts to limit any possible PR damage his one time shadow on the force, ex D/C Winter is ever more concerned that he may have made the biggest mistake of his life throwing in his lot with the city's drug baron, Bazza McKenzie.

 

Especially as Bazza is becoming increasingly desperate and violent as his empire begins to crumble under the weight of austere times. And; in the person of D/S Jimmy Suttle there's a new will at the heart of Portsmouth's embattled police force to nail Bazza once and for all, the one man Faraday was always desperate to bring to justice.

 

Graham Hurley's novel is about loss. It is about the decisions we make in life, about the impact our lives have on others.

Hurley's trademark authenticity has been allied to an ever increasing sense of drama as he charts the lives of his vivid characters and paints a stunning portrait of a city and a country at war with itself.

A war which throws the police into the front line. Happy days?

Edited January 3, 2017 by Daveo

[Daveo]

Orphan X; 1 Sep 2016. by Gregg Hurwitz.

 

In Now @ Canterbury Tales Bookshop / Book exchange / Cafe, Pattaya.

 

'Do you need my help?'

It was the first question he asked.

They called him when they had nowhere else to turn.

 

As a boy Evan Smoak was taken from an orphanage.

Raised and trained in a top secret programme, he was sent to bad places to do things the government denied ever happened.

 

Then he broke with the programme, using what he'd learned to vanish.

Now he helps the desperate and deserving.

 

But someone's on his trail.

 

Someone who knows his past and believes that the boy once known as Orphan X must die.

 

[Daveo]

The Book of Night Women by Marlon James.

 

In Now @ Canterbury Tales Bookshop / Book exchange / Cafe, Pattaya..

 

By the Man Booker winning author Marlon James, this is the powerful story of Lilith, born into slavery on a Jamaican sugar plantation at the end of the eighteenth century.

Even at her birth, the Night Women, a clandestine council of fierce slaves plotting an island wide revolt, recognize a dark force in her that they treat with both reverence and fear.

But as Lilith comes of age and begins to understand her own feelings and identity, she dares to push at the edges of what is imaginable for the life of a slave woman.

And as rebellions simmer and unspoken jealousies intensify, Lilith’s powers and sense of purpose threaten not just her own destiny, but the destinies of all the slave women in Jamaica.

 

[Daveo]

Thermal Image by Pat O'keeffe.

 

In Now @ Canterbury Tales Bookshop / Book exchange / Cafe, Pattaya..

 

Steve Jay is a fireman on the edge.

Crippling debts and the recent return of his unfaithful partner Jenny have bent him out of shape, getting between him and the job he loves.

 

But Jay's problems are only just beginning.

A horrific fire in an East London fashion store and workshop tests him and his watch to the limit.

And when an old friend offers him serious money to investigate the Sheldon family'' history of fires, it sounds like the answer to a prayer.

 

[Daveo]

Brunelleschi's Dome: How a Renaissance Genius Reinvented Architecture by Ross King.

 

In Now @ Canterbury Tales Bookshop / Book exchange / Cafe, Pattaya..

Filippo Brunelleschi, goldsmith and clockmaker, was an unkempt, cantankerous and suspicious man, even by the generous standards according to which artists were judged in fifteenth century Florence. He also designed and erected a dome over the cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore, a feat of architectural daring that we continue to marvel at today, thus securing himself a place among the most formidable geniuses of the Renaissance.

At first denounced as a madman, Brunelleschi literally reinvented the field of architecture amid plagues, wars, and political feuds to raise seventy million pounds of metal, wood, and marble hundreds of feet in the air.

Ross King's captivating narrative brings to life the personalities and intrigue surrounding the twenty eight year long construction of the dome, opening a window onto Florentine life during one of history's most fascinating eras.

 

Edited January 4, 2017 by Daveo

[Daveo]

Code of Conduct by Brad Thor.

 

In Now @ Canterbury Tales Bookshop / Book exchange / Cafe, Pattaya..

 

Hidden deep within one of the world's most powerful organizations is a secret committee with a devastating agenda.

Its members are afforded incredible protections-considered elites, untouchables.

 

But when four seconds of video is captured halfway around the world and anonymously transmitted to D.C., covert wheels are set in motion and counterterrorism operative Scot Harvath is tapped to undertake the deadliest assignment of his career.

 

What begins as a favour will evolve into a globe-spanning drama of highly personal stakes played out against a backdrop of stunning international intrigue, duplicitous political gamesmanship and the darkest, most clandestine fears of the espionage world.

 

With razor sharp plotting, richly rendered characters and heart stopping surprises on every page, Thor is on top of his game.

 

Edited January 4, 2017 by Daveo

[Daveo]

Edge of Eternity: Book Three of the Century Trilogy by Ken Follett.

In Now @ Canterbury Tales Bookshop / Book exchange / Cafe, Pattaya..

Ken Follett's extraordinary, #1 bestselling historical epic, the Century Trilogy, reaches its sweeping, passionate conclusion.

In Fall of Giants and Winter of the World, Ken Follett followed the fortunes of five international families, American, German, Russian, English, and Welsh, as they made their way through the twentieth century. 
Now they come to one of the most tumultuous eras of all: the 1960's through the 1980's, from civil rights, assassinations, mass political movements and Vietnam to the Berlin Wall, the Cuban Missile Crisis, presidential impeachment, revolution and rock and roll.

East German teacher Rebecca Hoffmann discovers she has been spied on by the Stasi for years and commits an impulsive act that will affect her family for the rest of their lives.
George Jakes, the child of a mixed race couple, bypasses a corporate law career to join Robert F. Kennedy’s Justice Department and finds himself in the middle of not only the seminal events of the civil rights battle but a much more personal battle of his own. Cameron Dewar, the grandson of a senator, jumps at the chance to do some official and unofficial espionage for a cause he believes in, only to discover that the world is a much more dangerous place than he’d imagined.
Dimka Dvorkin, a young aide to Nikita Khrushchev, becomes an agent both for good and for ill as the United States and the Soviet Union race to the brink of nuclear war, while his twin sister, Tanya, carves out a role that will take her from Moscow to Cuba to Prague to Warsaw and into history.

 

[Daveo]

The Five People You Meet in Heaven by Mitch Albom.

 

In Now @ Canterbury Tales Bookshop / Book exchange / Cafe, Pattaya..

 

Eddie is a grizzled war veteran who feels trapped in a meaningless life of fixing rides at a seaside amusement park.

His days are a dull routine of work, loneliness, and regret.

 

Then, on his 83rd birthday, Eddie dies in a tragic accident, trying to save a little girl from a falling cart.

He awakens in the afterlife, where he learns that heaven is not a lush Garden of Eden, but a place where your earthly life is explained to you by five people.

These people may have been loved ones or distant strangers, yet each of them changed your path forever.

 

One by one, Eddie's five people illuminate the unseen connections of his earthly life.

As the story builds to its stunning conclusion, Eddie desperately seeks redemption in the still unknown last act of his life.

Was it a heroic success or a devastating failure The answer, which comes from the most unlikely of sources, is as inspirational as a glimpse of heaven itself.

 

In The Five People You Meet in Heaven, Mitch Albom gives us an astoundingly original story that will change everything you've ever thought about the afterlife and the meaning of our lives here on earth.

With a timeless tale, appealing to all, this is a book that readers of fine fiction, and those who loved Tuesdays with Morrie, will treasure.

 

[Daveo]

Snowing in Bali: The Incredible Inside Account of Bali's Hidden Drug World by Kathryn Bonella.

In Now @ Canterbury Tales Bookshop / Book exchange / Cafe, Pattaya..

From the bestselling author of hotel KEROBOKAN or hotel K (UK title) about Bali's most notorious prison, comes an incredible account of Bali's hidden drug world. 
With unprecedented access to some of Bali's biggest international bosses and local dealers, Kathryn Bonella has written a book even more explosive and revelatory than hotel K.
In the true crime section at Canterbury Tales Bookshop, Pattaya.

[Daveo]

[Daveo]

Manhunt: From 9/11 to Abbottabad - the Ten-Year Search for Osama bin Laden by Peter Bergen.

 

In Now @ Canterbury Tales Bookshop / Book exchange / Cafe, Pattaya..

 

Al Qaeda expert and CNN national security analyst Peter Bergen paints a multi dimensional picture of the hunt for bin Laden over the past decade, as well as the recent campaign that gradually tightened the noose around him.

Other key elements of the book include:

 

A careful account of Obama's decision making process throughout the final weeks and days during which the raid was planned, as well as what NSC cabinet members were advising him.

The fascinating story of a group of (mostly female) analysts at the CIA in the HVT (High Value Target) section, who never gave up assembling the tiniest clues about OBL's whereabouts.

 

The untold and action packed history of the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) and the SEALs, which accounts for the confidence Obama had in tasking them with the mission.

 

An analysis of what the death of OBL means for al Qaeda, for the wider jihadist movement that looked to him for inspiration and strategic guidance, and for Obama's legacy.

 

[Daveo]

Pilgrimage, Contemporary Quest For Ancient Wisdom

by Paulo Coelho.

 

In Now @ Canterbury Tales Bookshop / Book exchange / Cafe, Pattaya.

 

Here Paulo Coelho details his journey across Spain along the legendary road of Santiago, which pilgrims have traveled since the Middle Ages.

On this contemporary quest, he encounters a Chaucerian variety of mysterious guides and devilish opponents and learns to understand the nature of truth through the simplicity of life.

The Pilgrimage holds an important place in Paulo Coelho's literary canon.

His first book, it not only paved the way for his phenomenal novel The Alchemist, but it also fully expresses his humanist philosophy and the depth of his unique search for meaning.

 

[Daveo]

The Sellout: published 2016, by Paul Beatty.

In Now @ Canterbury Tales Bookshop / Book exchange / Cafe, Pattaya...

A biting satire about a young man's isolated upbringing and the race trial that sends him to the Supreme Court, Paul Beatty's The Sellout showcases a comic genius at the top of his game. 
It challenges the sacred tenets of the United States Constitution, urban life, the civil rights movement, the father / son relationship, and the holy grail of racial equality, the black Chinese restaurant.

Born in the "agrarian ghetto" of Dickens, on the southern outskirts of Los Angeles, the narrator of The Sellout resigns himself to the fate of lower middle class Californians: "I'd die in the same bedroom I'd grown up in, looking up at the cracks in the stucco ceiling that have been there since '68 quake." 
Raised by a single father, a controversial sociologist, he spent his childhood as the subject in racially charged psychological studies. He is led to believe that his father's pioneering work will result in a memoir that will solve his family's financial woes. 
But when his father is killed in a police shoot out, he realizes there never was a memoir. 
All that's left is the bill for a drive thru funeral.

Fueled by this deceit and the general disrepair of his hometown, the narrator sets out to right another wrong: Dickens has literally been removed from the map to save California from further embarrassment. 
Enlisting the help of the town's most famous resident, the last surviving Little Rascal, Hominy Jenkins, he initiates the most outrageous action conceivable, reinstating slavery and segregating the local high school, which lands him in the Supreme Court.

 

[Daveo]

HIT, by Tara Moss.

 

In Now @ Canterbury Tales Bookshop / Book exchange / Cafe, Pattaya...

 

Makedde Vanderwall has her PhD and is ready to begin her new life in Australia with her detective boyfriend Andy Flynn.

Hoping to scrape together some extra cash to start her own forensic psychology practice, Mak begins working part time for an infamous Sydney private investigator.

With a knack of investigation and bending the law, she might just have stumbled across her true calling and the career choice that could break up her relationship once and for all.

Then Mak is hired by a mysterious client to investigate the murder of A list PA Meaghan Wallace.

The police believe it's an open and shut case but Mak discovers that it's a lot more complicated, uncovering a dangerous web of deceit, killers for hire and the sleazy underworld of the powerful and debauched rich.

 

[Daveo]

The Farm by Tom Rob Smith.

 

In Now @ Canterbury Tales Bookshop / Book exchange / Cafe, Pattaya..

 

Until the moment he received a frantic call from his father, Daniel believed his parents were headed into a peaceful, well deserved retirement.

They had sold their home and business in London, and said "farewell to England" with a cheerful party where all their friends had gathered to wish them well on their great adventure: setting off to begin life anew on a remote, bucolic farm in rural Sweden.

 

But with that phone call, everything changes. Your mother's not well, his father tells him.

She's been imagining things, terrible, terrible things.

She's had a psychotic breakdown, and has been committed to a mental hospital.

 

Daniel prepares to rush to Sweden, on the first available flight the next day.

Before he can board the plane, his father contacts him again with even more frightening news, his mother has been released from the hospital and he does not know where she is.

 

Then, he hears from his mother.

 

I'm sure your father has spoken to you, everything that man has told you is a lie, I'm not mad, I don't need a doctor, I need the police, I'm about to board a flight to London, meet me at Heathrow.

 

Caught between his parents, and unsure of who to believe or trust, Daniel becomes his mother's unwilling judge and jury as she tells him an urgent tale of Secrets, of lies, of a horrible crime and a conspiracy that implicates his own father.

 

Until the moment he received a frantic call from his father, Daniel believed his parents were headed into a peaceful, well deserved retirement.

They had sold their home and business in London, and said "farewell to England" with a cheerful party where all their friends had gathered to wish them well on their great adventure: setting off to begin life anew on a remote, bucolic farm in rural Sweden.

 

But with that phone call, everything changes. Your mother's not well, his father tells him.

She's been imagining things, terrible, terrible things.

She's had a psychotic breakdown, and has been committed to a mental hospital.

 

Daniel prepares to rush to Sweden, on the first available flight the next day.

Before he can board the plane, his father contacts him again with even more frightening news, his mother has been released from the hospital and he does not know where she is.

 

Then, he hears from his mother.

 

I'm sure your father has spoken to you, everything that man has told you is a lie, I'm not mad, I don't need a doctor, I need the police, I'm about to board a flight to London, meet me at Heathrow.

 

Caught between his parents, and unsure of who to believe or trust, Daniel becomes his mother's unwilling judge and jury as she tells him an urgent tale of Secrets, of lies, of a horrible crime and a conspiracy that implicates his own father.

Edited January 6, 2017 by Daveo