The Winter Rose by Jennifer Donnelly

AZ: "Set in London and Africa in the early days of the twentieth century, "The Winter Rose" introduces some remarkable new characters. India Selwyn-Jones is one of the rare new breed: a lady doctor. Her family, her eligible, ambitious fiance, the male medical establishment all object but she insists on defying convention and finds a post in London's East End. There she meets a gangland boss called Sid Malone. Criminal he may be but he also has a hidden charm, and a devastatingly attractive personality, and when India is called to treat him after a dockside brawl, their friendship becomes more intense. But Sid Malone is not his real name: and he has a past and enemies by the score, including India's determined and ruthless fiance whose intention is to marry into the family money as well as becoming a leading political figure. The stormy, noisy, brawling docklands are a natural home to the political fight as the fledgling Labour Party gets underway, and the struggle for the women's vote becomes more strident. But the East End is also a place for those who have a past to hide, a new beginning to find. And so the complicated strands of betrayal and pretence, of ambition and family, are woven again into a new drama, in a new country"

Doorstep fo a book but a wonderful engaging read, kind of a sequel to The Tea Rose, which I've read but don't seem to have written in, focuses on a gangland leader and his changing life in Victorian London and later in colonial Kenya. Incredible detail as with her other book and, as Shakespeare wrote, 'a sad tale is best for winder'. I was driven on by wanting to know what happens to the characters.

Vanishing Acts by Jodie Picoult

AZ: "Delia Hopkins has led a charmed life. Raised in rural New Hampshire by her widowed father Andrew, she now has a young daughter, a handsome fiance, and her own Search and Rescue bloodhound - which she uses to find missing persons. But as she plans her wedding, she is plagued by flashbacks of a life she can't recall. Then a policeman shows up at her door, arresting her father for the kidnap of a little girl. And Delia's past and present fracture into little pieces. "Vanishing Acts" is a book about the very nature and power of memory. It explores what happens when the past we have been running from catches up to us, and questions who we trust to tell us the story of our lives before we are capable of remembering it ourselves."

Ouch, read in one day. About a grown woman who is making plans for her wedding to her fiance when her beloved father is arrested for abducting her as a child. Raises familiar ground of uncomfortable choices, the desperation of a father versus the rights of a mother to her child and about the fragility of memory. Also about learning that what you thought was right may not be so clear.

Plain Truth by Jodie Picoult AUDIO

AZ: "The discovery of a dead infant in an Amish barn shakes Lancaster County to its core. But the police investigation leads to a more shocking disclosure: circumstantial evidence suggests that eighteen-year-old Katie Fisher, an unmarried Amish woman believed to be the newborn's mother, took the child's life. When Ellie Hathaway, a disillusioned big city attorney, comes to Paradise, Pennsylvania, to defend Katie, two cultures collide and, for the first time in her high profile career, Ellie faces a system of justice very different from her own. Delving deep into the world of those who live 'plain', Ellie must find a way to reach Katie on her terms. As she unravels a tangled murder case, Ellie also looks deep within to confront her own fears and desires when a man from her past comes back into her life."

Long due to being an audio book but still held me the way her books tend to. Taught me a lot about the Amish, who call themselves Plain, and I identified with the Plain movement away from consumerist individualism. Plain is not being different but being the same, against the need to be an individual.