Книги, похожие на «Deborah Gold, Counting Down»

In this incredible and moving memoir, a mother tells of her fight for justice to convict her daughter’s murderer for a crime that he thought could never be punished.When her 22-year-old daughter, Julie, went missing in the night, Ann Ming was certain she had been murdered. Liaising with the police, looking after Julie’s beloved three-year-old son, Ann waited desperately for news. Three months later she found her child's decomposing body behind a bath panel.A violent local man, Billy Dunlop, was tried for her murder but a series of blunders allowed him to walk free. Knowing he could not be tried again under the law of Double Jeopardy, he callously bragged about his 'perfect crime'.But Dunlop had not reckoned on Ann Ming…This is the extraordinary story of a fight for justice which she never gave up. A moving account of courage and determination, showing how much a mother's love can achieve.

An intense and emotive memoir of one girl’s difficult family upbringing in a Singaporean Chinese family during the Second World War.Lucy Lum was the third of seven children, born in Singapore in 1933 into a Chinese immigrant family ruled with an iron hand by Popo, her fearsome and superstitious grandmother. Popo is a firm believer in the old ways, in stomach-churning herbalist remedies, in the dubious fortune-telling of mystics, and in mischievous little girls like Lucy knowing their place, and is forever keen to dispense her own wicked brand of justice, much to the despair of her adopted family.Yet the suffering does not end at home. This is Singapore in the forties, a former British colony now living under the spectre of the invading Japanese – the hungry worms crawling down from the north as Lucy knows them – and fear floods the streets outside the family home. Lucy's father, a kind-hearted and talented linguist, finds himself being used by the occupiers as a translator, and brings back terrifying stories of his merciless employers, family friends blown apart inside their rickety shelters, dead bodies heaped on top of one another by the roadside, that he confides to his daughter under the heavy teak table in the dining room.‘The Thorn of Lion City’ is a fascinating and honest account of wartime occupation and of a little girl's upbringing in a repressive Chinese family. At times harrowing, at others touching, it breaks the long silence of the Singaporean Chinese and speaks of hardship, family and the softly-spoken, redemptive relationship between a father and daughter.

The second volume of Helen Forrester’s powerful, painful and ultimately uplifting four-volume autobiography of her poverty-stricken childhood in Liverpool during the 1930s.The Forrester family are slowly winning their fight for survival. But life remains extremely tough for fourteen-year-old Helen. Along with caring for her younger siblings and suffering terrible hardships she is also battling with her parents to persuade them to allow her to earn her own living. Helen is desperate to lead her own life after the years of neglect and inadequate schooling.Written with an unflinching eye, Helen’s account of her continuing struggles against severe malnutrition and dirt (she has her first bath in four years) and, above all, the selfish demands of her parents, is deeply shocking. But Helen’s fortitude and her ability to find humour in the most harrowing of situations make this make this a story of amazing courage and perseverance.