A round-up of book signings, author interviews, news and events.
Hazel Goss has been married to her husband John for 54 years, and for the last 33 of those he has been paraplegic and wheelchair-bound following a gliding accident. That has not stopped them seeing the world, with holidays all over North America as well as in France, Spain, Italy, Iceland and Norway, and having plenty of adventures back home in the UK. This is Hazel’s story of the joys and frustrations of life when you can’t get around on your own two feet.
The idea of writing a book telling the story of Methodism in the ancient Lincolnshire village of Saxilby was born in 2020, when the sad decision had to be taken to sell the village’s Methodist chapel, for many years the focus of Methodist worship in the community. This book adds not only to local history but to the social history of the county in general and the story of the growth and development of Methodist movement, from John Wesley, its founding father, to modern times. Saxilby and District History Group, formed in 2000, has already published two books about the history of the village, which has links going back to Roman times. Jenny Scott has lived in the village all her life, and her depth of local knowledge has well qualified her to write this new book, richly illustrated with archival photographs
Fran Adams, born in Leicestershire and at home at different stages of her life in Cheltenham, Melton Mowbray and Stroud, has previously written two entertaining and well-received books
about her low-budget holiday adventures on two wheels with her sons. This frank and entertaining account reveals chapters from her earliest days, up to the time in later life when she finally
overcame her acute self-consciousness.
Richard Coolen began his maritime career soon after World War II as a teenage apprentice on tramp ships (general purpose freight carriers). He rose through the ranks to become Master of his first ship in 1962, while still in his thirties. After years of ploughing through the world’s oceans from Hudson Bay to the South Pacific, he was persuaded ashore to take a series of very senior management positions in the shipping industry. He became Honorary Consul for the Netherlands, then for Germany, and devoted much of his later years to the RNLI and its lifeboat service before finally retiring. In this memoir, completed in his 90th year, he has distilled some of the more colourful stories from his varied life afloat and ashore.
Paolo Vignone, after surviving an impoverished and loveless childhood, has carved out a new life for himself by building a thriving, if morally dubious, business empire. His ruthless, controlling attitude to those closest to him has created distance, distrust and hostility. Then chance brings together two of Paolo’s own kin, and the chain of events that follows leads to horrifying and murderous consequences.
Chris’ world as a newspaper journalist is all about asking questions; unsolved mysteries and dark secrets are like a red rag to a bull. Matt, on the other hand, is doing his best to stay out of the news and keep people from prying into his previous life – even when he finds romance. Unfortunately the object of his attention is Chris’s sister…
A story of intrigue, deception, love and adventure, in which things are rarely as they seem.
On December 5, 2021, Moshe Sonnheim from Philadelphia and his Dutch-born wife Jolene deWilde-Sonnheim celebrated their Golden Wedding Anniversary in Jerusalem. It was an occasion for celebration, and also for looking back at two colorful lives which have been lovingly entwined for more than half a century. Age has not dimmed their memories of youth or of their many happy times together. This little book tells their stories, in childhood and in love, of their lives in two different cultures, in two different continents, and united in the “Promised Land”.
Ashton Byers experienced sexist insults and bullying in her career in the US Air Force, and went on to endure repeated domestic abuse as a single mom at the hands of her partner, culminating in gang rape. But Ashton is a survivor. She has since shaken off the torment of abuse in the toxic male culture which trapped her for so long and found fulfilment and independence as a mother and a sought-after cosmetologist. This is her inspirational story.
‘Many children have terrible childhoods. But in mine there is a hole…’ The gaping rent that four-year-old Philip Dodd found one morning in the wire mesh of the hutch which had housed Harvey, his pet rabbit, became a metaphorical one which, along with Harvey’s disappearance, has haunted his thoughts throughout his life. In this sensitive, beautifully told memoir, Dodd (‘a small boy with more air in my brain than knowledge’) finds himself, if not Harvey, and learns to become at peace with the unknowable and the forces of darkness. ‘The horns of Elfland are still blowing, as Alfred Lord Tennyson once heard them, and preserved them in his lines, and somewhere beyond the border stones, through the mist on the moors, strange folk ride, as they ever did, in the shadow of the dark tower.’
This book tells about the life experiences of Henry Thomas Hamblin, often known as HTH, and the philosophy he developed which was principally of the omnipresence of God with a clear focus on the teachings of Jesus Christ. Although he had a broad appreciation of the power of other beliefs to help a searcher find God, he wrote that God was latent within every human being. In today’s language he might have said that every human is ‘hard-wired’ to need God but that this feature must be activated. He would certainly say that God is with us now and always. He believed that health, happiness and a sense of achievement are the normal state for mankind but that to achieve this state the individual needed to align with what he referred to as ‘Cosmic Law’ which he also referred to as The Truth.
Over his 45 years as a prolific author, the emphasis of Hamblin’s work developed from suggesting to his readers how to change their lives through ‘right thought’ and faith to teaching them how to find a living consciousness of God within themselves. It was this process which led him to publishing a monthly magazine called The Science of Thought Review which endured for some 85 years before being re-orientated as a larger sized printed magazine entitled New Vision (later to be called Hamblin Vision) which endured for a further 20 years and is now on-line only.
Hamblin’s work continues to this day through the Hamblin Trust, which propagates the work he began in 1921, when he was in his mid-40s, and, in keeping with the times of 100 years later, now operates in a new “on-line” environment publishing some of his books as well as Hamblin Vision, the magazine that follows the path established by the original The Science of Thought Review.
This new book has been compiled by his grandson, John Delafield, based on HTH’s own works and is written just over 100 years after HTH launched into his life’s work as a disciple of God. His work and advice became widely read and was followed by many.