Because sometimes I read books for grown ups too!!!
Survivor by Sam Pivnik
Sam Pivnik is the ultimate survivor from a world that no longer exists. On fourteen occasions he should have been killed, but luck, his physical strength and his determination not to die, all played a part in Sam Pivnik living to tell his extraordinary life story.
In 1939, on his thirteenth birthday, his life changed forever when the Nazis invaded Poland. He survived the two ghettoes set up in his home town of Bedzin and six months on Auschwitz's notorious Rampkommando where prisoners were either taken away for entry to the camp or gassing. After this harrowing experience he was sent to work at the brutal Furstengrube mining camp. He could have died on the 'Death March' that took him west as the Third Reich collapsed and he was one of only a handful of people who swam to safety when the Royal Air Force sank the prison ship Cap Arcona, in 1945, mistakenly believing it to be carrying fleeing members of the SS.
He eventually made his way to London where he found people too preoccupied with their own wartime experiences on the Home Front to be interested in what had happened to him.
Now in his eighties, Sam Pivnik tells for the first time the story of his life, a tale of survival against the most extraordinary odds.
Out now from Hodder and Stoughton
Vagina: A New Biography by Naomi Wolf
As Naomi Wolf embarks on a life-changing journey to tease out the link between sexuality and creativity, what she discovers is revelatory and exhilarating - a scientifically supported link between the vagina and female courage, assertiveness and consciousness itself.
Emboldened by these new discoveries, she looks back in history and shows us how the vagina was considered sacred for centuries until it began to be cast as a threat. Even now, in an increasingly sexualised world, it is thought of as slightly shameful. Why?
Vagina: A New Biography combines cutting-edge science with cultural history to explore the role of female desire and how it affects female identity, creativity and confidence. Provocative and engaging, positive and inspiring, this book brings to light female impulses, history and dreams - and, in exploring what women really need, it goes to the very core of what it means to be female.
Out now from Little, Brown
When It Happens to You by Molly Ringwald
From a mother as she grapples with age, infertility and an increasingly distant husband to a former children's television star who tries to rebuild his life after being hospitalised for 'exhaustion'. From an elderly woman mourning the loss of her husband to a single mother who finds the strength to protect her flamboyant six-year-old son, these stories follow the hazardous terrain of everyday life, revealing the deceptions, heartbreak, and vulnerability familiar to us all.
When It Happens to You is an unflinchingly yet poignant examination of the intricacies of the human heart and an auspicious literary debut.
Out now from Simon and Schuster
Tigers in Red Weather by Liza Klaussmann
The epitome of East Coast glamour, scene of vodka martinis and moonlit conspiracies, Tiger House is where the beautiful and the damned have always come to play.
World War II is just ending and Nick is expecting her husband home at last. Her cousin Helena has gone to find married bliss in Hollywood. Everything is about to change...
Magnificently told by five characters in turn, Tigers in Red Weather is a simmering novel of passion, betrayal and secret violence beneath a polished and fragile facade.
Out now from Picador
Moranthology by Cailtin Moran
Possibly the only drawback about the bestselling How To Be A Woman was that its author, Caitlin Moran, was limited to pretty much one subject: being a woman.
Moranthology is proof that Caitlin can actually be 'quite chatty' about many other things, including cultural, social and political issues which are usually the province of learned professors, or hot-shot wonks - and not a woman who once, as an experiment, put a wasp in a jar, and got it stoned.
Out now from Ebury Press
