Argylle by Elly Conway: There is a movie of this book opening in cinemas on 1st February which is unusual – the movie usually comes some time after the original book publication. It’s been made by Apple who have reportedly invested $200 million. 

It’s a spy/thriller/highly entertaining story of Aubrey Argylle, a young man who has been making a living showing tourists around parts of the Golden Triangle (there’s a good back story to this) when one day a plane comes down in the jungle and turns out the passengers are all CIA drug squad. He rescues them and the CIA subsequently take him on for a daring mission – to stop a sociopathic Russian billionaire who’s  running for President and who has set in motion a chain of events which will take the world to the brink of chaos. It’s fun, a bit silly, but very enjoyable and is possibly the start of a series. 

I Seek a Kind Person by Julian Borger. The author is a journalist who discovered a few years ago that his father, who was born in Vienna, was sent to the UK during the war after his parents took out an advertisement in the Manchester Guardian, saying:  I seek a kind person who will educate my intelligent boy, aged 11. There were several such adverts placed in the newspaper from parents desperate to get their kids out of Austria and in uncovering his father’s story, Julian Borger also traces the lives of several other children who were sent at very young ages to live with complete strangers in a foreign country. 

In the case of his own father, the trauma of those years never left him and blighted his adult life, but as he never talked about it his family simply didn’t understand the cause of it. 

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