Books in the news... 12-13 September

Six Degrees: The power of attraction connects us all  by Honey Brown
Weaving an intricate web of interconnected characters and their six stories, Six Degrees explores the powerful role sexual attraction plays in everyday life.

Written by Honey Brown, best selling author of several critically acclaimed novels, Six Degrees is Honey’s first exploit into rural romance.

Strong female protagonists lead a cast of characters with lives we recognize and know, crossing paths in intimate, surprising and erotic ways. The ripple effect of one tragic event shapes each character’s experiences, but in the end it is their individual need for connection that truly binds them.

Six Degrees uses the allure, the action or the absence of physical connection to explore these everyday character’s flaws, quirks and strengths. For the first time, Honey has made sexual attraction the intriguing hero of each story.

Another Day by David Levithan
In this enthralling companion to his New York Times bestseller Every Day, David Levithan (co-author  of Will Grayson, Will Grayson with John Green) tells Rhiannon’s side of the story as she seeks to discover the truth about love and how it can change you.

Every day is the same for Rhiannon. She has accepted her life, convinced herself that she deserves her distant, temperamental boyfriend, Justin, even established guidelines by which to live: Don’t be too needy. Avoid upsetting him. Never get your hopes up.

Until the morning everything changes. Justin seems to see her, to want to be with her for the first time, and they share a perfect day—a perfect day Justin doesn’t remember the next morning. Confused, depressed, and desperate for another day as great as that one, Rhiannon starts questioning everything. Then, one day, a stranger tells her that the Justin she spent that day with, the one who made her feel like a real person . . . wasn’t Justin at all.

The first thing you see by Gregoire Delacourt
Imagine you are a young mechanic living in a small community in France. You own your own home, and lead a simple life. Then, one evening, you open your front door to find a distraught Hollywood starlet standing in front of you. This is what happens to Arthur Dreyfuss in the village of Long, population 687 inhabitants.

But although feigning an American accent, this woman is not all that she seems. For her name is Jeanine Foucamprez, and her story is very different from the glamorous life of a star. Arthur is not all he seems, either; a lover of poetry with a darker past than one might imagine, he has learnt to see beauty in the mundane.


The Anti Cool Girl by Rosie Waterland
Brutal, brave, hilarious - a full-frontal memoir about surviving the very worst that life can throw at yousurviving the very worst that life can throw at you Rosie Waterland has never been cool. Growing up in housing commission, Rosie was cursed with a near perfect, beautiful older sister who dressed like Mariah Carey on a Best & Less budget while Rosie was still struggling with various toilet mishaps. She soon realised that she was the Doug Pitt to her sister's Brad, and that cool was not going to be her currency in this life. But that was only one of the problems Rosie faced. With two addicts for parents, she grew up amidst rehab stays, AA meetings, overdoses, narrow escapes from drug dealers and a merry-go-round of dodgy boyfriends in her mother's life. Rosie watched as her dad passed out/was arrested/vomited, and had to talk her mum out of killing herself. As an adult, trying to come to grips with her less than conventional childhood, Rosie navigated her way through eating disorders, nude acting roles, mental health issues and awkward Tinder dates. Then she had an epiphany: to stop pretending to be who she wasn't and embrace her true self - a girl who loved drinking wine in her underpants on Sunday nights - and become an Anti-Cool Girl. An irrepressible, blackly comic memoir, Rosie Waterland's story is a clarion call for Anti-Cool Girls everywhere.

A Beautiful Question: In Pursuit of the Hidden Logic of the Universe by Wilczek, Frank
In a book that stretches from the ancient Greeks to the deep waters of twentieth-century physics to the present day and beyond, Wilczek explores just how intertwined our ideas about beauty and art are with our scientific understanding of the cosmos, from the infinitesimal to the infinite. In the process, he traces the bright lines of thought connecting Pythagoras's triangles to Plato's solids and Newton's classical equations to Einstein's spooky ones. As he shows us, the equations for atoms and light are almost literally the same equations that govern musical instruments and sound; the subatomic particles that are responsible for most of our mass are determined by simple geometric symmetries.

The Sea Devils : operation struggle and the last great raid of World War Two by Mark Felton
July 1945. Eighteen daring young British, Australian and New Zealand special forces from a top-secret underwater warfare unit prepare to undertake three simultaneous and incredibly risky missions against the Japanese. Using four brilliantly conceived XE-craft midget submarines, the raiders will creep deep behind Japanese lines to sink two huge warships and sever two vitally important undersea communications cables. Success will hasten ultimate victory over Japan; but if any of the men are captured they can expect a gruesome execution. Can the Sea Devils overcome Japanese defences, mechanical failures, oxygen poisoning and submarine disasters to fulfil their missions? Mark Felton tells the story of a band of young men living on raw courage, nerves and adrenalin as they attempt to pull off what could be the last great raid of the Second World War.