Amanda Drake’s Heart
Cosy low stakes modern/historical fantasy
If you asked Amanda Drake what she would class herself as, she would probably say she did not have much class. She works in a department store and is married to an accountant but those in the know would see her as a Doer.
Some female Doers of her line had done well in the time of the Normans but others down the ages have not enjoyed luck through their abilities as seers and practitioners of herbal medicine.
If Amanda holds her cards close to her chest it is perhaps because her ancestor, Cicily Goymour, was famously chased out of Norfolk in the 1800s, after kindly assisting the poor of Yarmouth’s Rows with her knowledge.
For all the misfortune being a Doer could bring her, there are those who wish they had some of Amanda’s skills. However, her cousin Joy’s malicious dabbling makes her what Doers refer to as an Undoer.
When Joy becomes mixed up in a case of misused magic, Amanda receives an unusual request from the spirit world and makes her way to a small Norfolk town to save her ill-willed relative.
Jill’s Journey, Rachel Rahman
The unusual life and travels of my mother in South East Asia
Jill Rahman raised a family in Cambridge, England, but once her children discovered their independence so did she and her husband.
Abandoning the safety of suburban life they moved to Bangladesh, in 1986, where they spent the next 13 years using it as a place from which to follow roads less travelled.
Jill wrote about everything she saw, to her relatives and for a small publication, The Hardship Post, so that others might enjoy her experiences and have an idea of what to expect if they ever found themselves in the same places.
After Jill’s death in 2020, her daughter compiled some of her travel writing and letters home, in her memory.
Jill’s Journey is a blend of everyday life in Dhaka, Bangladesh and some of Jill’s more unusual journeys into India and Pakistan, of days spent on a steamboat on the rivers of Bangladesh and Christmas spent sleeping on the open deck of a fishing boat in the Sundarban mangroves.
Sentimental Journey is a particularly touching account of her husband’s return to is birth place, Assam, nearly 50 years after the violence of India’s Communal Riots forced his family to flee their ancestral home with just a handful of possessions
The Shard Puzzle, Ami Rahman
For years Ruby Jones has lived with the uncertainty of having a stalker. She changes her name and does everything she can to stay safe but finds herself living a very limited existence.
With few people believing what has happened to her she negotiates her way through all the dangers, hardly daring to speak of the man who is trying to control her life.
As the story progresses we learn about the misunderstanding that humiliated a man she hardly knew.
He has dark secrets of his own and seemingly inexhaustible ideas to make her suffer.
As Ruby shuts down her contact with the outside world her stalker is forced to move closer.
How They Shone, Ami Rahman
In a small town in Assam, India, a talented child’s life is changed by the violence of Communal Riots. The boy’s family move to Sylhet, where they re-establish themselves as the new state of East Pakistan is born.
The story follows Nurur to a new life in England, where he finds he cannot rid himself of his childhood trauma.
Nearly 50 years after leaving his birth place he returns with his British wife to see if he can lay the past to rest.
In his last years Nurur finds himself living in Bangladesh where his daughter comes to comfort him.
She has guilty memories of her last time in Dhaka but, as they sit in the endless traffic jams of the city, Nurur tries to make her see they have done something good.