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Amande’s bed by John Aberdein
Purple Hibiscus by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
The five people you meet in heaven by Mitch Albom
Arthur & George by Julian Barnes
The family tree by Carole Cadwalladr
Three day road by Joseph Boyden
Conversations with my gardener by Henri Cueco
Night song of the last tram by Robert Douglas
Rock and roll mountains by Graham Forbes
Rough music by Patrick Gale
Notes on a scandal by Zoe Heller
Skinny Dip by Carl Hiaasen
Calum's Road by Roger Hutchinson
Puccini's Ghosts by Morag Joss
A short history of tractors in Ukrainian by Marina Lewycka
Blood sisters by Barbara and Stephanie Keating
Rowing without oars by Ulla-Carin Lindquist
Stuart – a life backwards by ALexander Masters
Midnight cab by James W Nichol
The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger
The Mammy by Brendan O'Carroll
How to breathe underwater by Julie Orringer
The tenderness of wolves by Stef Penney
My sister's keeper by Jodi Picoult
The testament of Gideon Mack by James Robertson
Blindsighted by Karin Slaughter
The crystal cave by Mary Stewart
The once and future King - the complete edition by T.H. White
Blazing paddles - a Scottish coastal oddysey by Brian Wilson
The shadow of the wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon
ABERDEIN, John
Amande’s bed
1956: the nation is reeling with daft Yankee ideas, resistant ‘pinkos’, sex, atoms – and fish. In a country yet to decide the nature if its history, what is the future of love?
Feisty Amande, washed up from Free France into a fiercely traditional community, finds she will learn its value all too painfully.
Royston & Cran, the time-and-motion men, sure can count plenty but can’t get the hang.
And young Peem, child of a stern communist father and a patient peace-seeking mother, must attend the death of several dreams before he learns what love and life may be.
Set in Scotland’s cities and wild places, Amande’s Bed is a vivid, hilarious roller coaster: a poignant tale in which individual odysseys startlingly merge.
Winner of the Saltire first book of the year 2005
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ADICHIE, Chimamanda Ngozi
Purple Hibiscus
Fifteen-year-old Kambili livers in fear of her father, a charismatic yet violent Catholic patriarch who, although generous and well respected in the community, is repressive and fanatically religious at home. Escape and the discovery of a new, liberated way of life come when Nigeria is shaken by a military coup forcing Kambili and her brother to live at their aunt’s home, a noisy place full of laughter. The visit will lift the silence from her world and, in time, unlock a terrible, bruising secret at the heart of her family life.
An extraordinary debut, Purple Hibiscus is a novel about the blurred lines between the old gods and the new, childhood and adulthood, love and hatred – the grey spaces in which truths are revealed and true living is begun.
Winner of the 2005 Commonwealth Writers’ best first book prize
Shortlisted for the Orange Prize for fiction 2004
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ALBOM, Mitch
The five people you meet in heaven
‘All endings are also beginnings. We just don’t know it at the time…’
On his eighty-third birthday, Eddie, a lonely war veteran, dies in a tragic accident trying to save a little girl from a falling cart. With his final breath, he feels two small hands in his – and then nothing. He awakens in the afterlife, where he learns that heaven in not a lush Garden of Eden but a place where your earthly life is explained to you by five people who were in it. These people may have been loved ones or distant strangers. Yet each of them changed your path forever.
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BARNES, Julian
Arthur & George
Arthur and George grow up worlds apart in late nineteenth-century Britain: Arthur in shabby-genteel Edinburgh, George in the vicarage of a small Staffordshire village. Arthur becomes a doctor, then a writer; George a solicitor in Birmingham. Arthur is to become one of the most famous men of his age, while George remains in hard-working obscurity. But as the new century begins, they are brought together by a sequence of events that made sensational headlines at the time as the The Great Wyrley Outrages.
With a mixture of intense research and vivid imagination, Julian Barnes brings to life not just this long-forgotten case, but the inner workings of these two very different men. This is a novel in which the events of a hundred years ago constantly set off contemporary echoes, a novel about low crime and high spirituality, guilt and innocence, identity, nationality and race. Most of all it is a profound and moving meditation on the fateful differences between what we believe, what we know and what we can prove.
Shortlisted for the Man Booker prize 2005
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CADWALLADR, Carole
The family tree
On the day of Charles and Diana’s wedding, Rebecca Monroe’s mother locked herself in the bathroom and never came out. Was it because her squidgy chocolate log collapsed? Or because Rebecca’s grandmother married her first cousin? Can we ever know why we do what we do?
“A clever and moving debut examining three generations of the Monroe family.”
Daily Mail Book Club selection
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BOYDEN, Joseph
Three day road
It is 1919 and Niska, the last Canadian medicine woman to live off the land, has received word that one of the two boys she saw off to the Great War has returned. Xavier Bird, her sole living relative, is gravely wounded and addicted to the army’s morphine. As Niska slowly paddles her canoe on the three-day journey to take Xavier back to his home, travelling through the stark but stunning landscape of Northern Canada, their respective stories emerge – stories of Niska’s life amongst her kin and Xavier’s horrifying experiences in the killing fields of Ypres and the Somme.
Niska realises that in the aftermath of war, Xavier’s soul is hovering somewhere between the worlds of the living and the dead – but will the three-day journey home be enough to save him?
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CUECO, Henri
Conversations with my gardener
“Come and see the courgettes … Look … If you stand still, you’d swear you can see them growing…”
The situation could not be simpler: two men, both in advancing years, conversing in a garden deep in the French countryside. One is an artist, the other his gardener.
The memoir of a friendship beautifully portrayed through their dialogue and conversations
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DOUGLAS, Robert
Night song of the last tram
“If my father had been killed in North Africa or Italy during the Second World War, I know that for the rest of my life I would have looked at the few photographs of him and mourned our lost relationship. Unfortunately, he survived and came home.”
Robert Douglas paints a hugely moving picture of a childhood spent below the poverty line in post-war Glasgow which, for all its deprivation, was full of memorable characters and blessed with an unshakeable community spirit.
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FORBES, Graham
Rock and roll mountains
Graham Forbes loved to play guitar, whether it was with local rock groups, pillaging village halls or on the big stages of the world with the Incredible String Band. But, like so many others, he enjoyed the gigs, groupies and booze too much. At 27, he found himself back in Glasgow, ears ringing, scratching his head, completely unemployable, with an empty bottle of tequila in one hand and a huge tax demand in the other. It had been great while it lasted but the party was over.
Realising his mind was like an out-of-control firework display and that his next stop was the Happy Duck Rest Home for the Bewildered, Graham noticed there were hills nearby and decided to go for a quiet walk. Just as it seemed he might at last settle down to some sort of normal life he met a crazy climber with a taste for the bizarre …
It was the beginning of a journey that would transform Graham completely, taking him from poverty to bluffing his way onto the board of directors of a national company, hoping that their next meeting wouldn’t be in a hotel he’d wrecked in his previous life.
Roaring along with bawdy tales of marauding bands, mad mountaineers and unforgettable Glasgow street-characters, Rock and Roll mountains weaves through wild rock tours and terrifying ice climbing to glowing sunsets on some of the most beautiful summits in the world. It is a book about extreme sport, fear and survival – but without the gung-ho heroics of mountaineering writers.
At times deeply moving, insightful yet hilarious and with an extraordinary climax, this book is for anyone who has looked in a mirror and wondered where it all went wrong …
Above all, it is very, very funny.
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GALE, Patrick
Rough music
Rough music is a family story, covering three generations, starting with an idyllic – though definitely strange – childhood, and ending in tragedy.
Julian as a small boy is taken on the perfect Cornish holiday. With the arrival of glamorous American relations emotions run high and events spiral out of control. Thought he has been brought up in the forbidding shadow of the prison his father runs, though his parents are neither as normal nor as happy as he supposes, Julian’s world view is the sunnily selfish, accepting one of boyhood. It is only when he becomes a man – seemingly at ease with love, with his sexuality, with his ghosts – that the traumatic effects of that distant summer rise up to challenge his defiant assertion that he is happy and always has been.
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HELLER, ZOE
Notes on a scandal
From the first day that the beguiling Sheba Hart joins the staff of St George’s, history teacher Barbara Covett is convinced that she has found a kindred spirit. Barbara’s loyalty to her new friend is passionate and unstinting and when Sheba is discovered to be having an illicit affair with one of her young pupils, Barbara quickly elects herself as Sheba’s chief defender. But all is not as it first seems in this dark story and, as Sheba will soon discover, a friend can be just as treacherous as any lover.
Shortlisted for the Man Booker prize 2003
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HIAASEN, CARL
Skinny dip
Joey Perrone is a woman with a mission. She’s just been pushed overboard from a cruise liner by Chaz, her scumbag husband, and survived to tell the tale. But rather than reporting him to the police, she decides to stay dead and – with a little help from her friends and a few of Chaz’s enemies – instead of getting mad, she’s going to get even.
A very funny crime novel by one of America’s finest satirical novelists.
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HUTCHINSON, ROGER
Calum’s road
For almost all his life, Calum MacLeod lived in the north of the Hebridean island of Raasay, where he worked as a crofter, postman and tender of the Rona lighthouse. Yet, due to clearance and neglect, the population of northern Raasay dwindled during his lifetime to just two people – Calum and his wife. Calum had an idiosyncratic response to this decline. One spring morning, he took his homemade wheelbarrow, a pick, an axe and a shovel, trundled south from his crofthouse down a narrow, rutted bridle path, across rough hillsides, along the edge of hazardous cliff-faces, through patches of stunted hazel and birch and over quaking peat bogs. Then, alone in an empty landscape, he began to build a road. ‘With a road,’ his former neighbour Donald MacLeod said, ‘he hoped new generations of people would return to the north end of Raasay.’ It would become a romantic quixotic venture; an obsessive work of art so perfect in every gradient, culver and supporting wall that its creation occupied almost twenty years.
The extraordinary story of one man’s devotion to a visionary project, Calum’s Road is a tale not simply of stubbornly heroic resistance and supreme personal achievement; it is also the story of a cry form the depths of one man’s heart against the erosion of his native culture.
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JAMIE, KATHLEEN
Findings
It’s surprising what you can find by simply stepping out to look. Award-winning poet Kathleen Jamie has an eye and ease with the nature and landscapes of Scotland as well as an incisive sense of our domestic realities. In Findings she draws together these themes to describe travels like no other contemporary writer. Whether she is following the call of a peregrine in the hills above her home in Fife, sailing into a dark winter solstice on the Orkney islands, or pacing around the carcass of a whale on a rain-swept Hebridean beach, she creates a subtle and modern narrative, peculiarly alive to her connections and surroundings.
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JOSS, Morag
Puccini’s Ghosts
The fading Lila Du Cann returns to Burnhead to bury her father and remembers the summer of 1960. Aged fifteen, she was drawn away from the patchy sunshine of the town’s summer season and deep into Uncle George’s preposterous production of Puccini’s Turandot – the opera of the moon, of passion, sacrifice and death – when she first sang and first fell in love. Self-absorbed, caught between illusion and truth, innocence and knowledge, she barely noticed the production for the lunacy it was.
As she revisits the melancholy and delusion of that summer, Lila’s grasp of the present loosens. Once more adrift in twilight between opera and life, she wonders why the lover turns destroyer.
‘Joss writes with a vividness that captures exactly particular moods and atmospheres … The darkness of her main themes, the sense of impending catastrophe that hangs over the story, is relieved by a lightness of touch – and the combined result is a very fine novel indeed.’ Sunday Herald
‘Powerfully told, bristling with tension and horribly funny’ The Times
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LEWYCKA, MARINA
A short history of tractors in Ukrainian
‘Two years after my mother died, my father fell in love with a glamorous blonde Ukrainian divorcee. He was eighty-four and she was thirty-six. She exploded into our lives like a fluffy pink grenade, churning up the murky water, bringing to the surface a sludge of sloughed-off memories, giving the family ghosts a kick up the backside.’
Sisters Vera and Nadezhda must put aside a lifetime of feuding to save their émigré engineer father from voluptuous gold-digger Valentina. With her proclivity for green satin underwear and boil-in-the-bag cuisine, she will stop at nothing in her pursuit of Western wealth. But the sisters’ campaign to oust Valentina unearths family secrets, uncovers fifty years of Europe’s darkest history and sends them back to roots they’d much rather forget…
Winner of the Bollinger Everyman prize for comic fiction
Shortlisted for the Orange Prize
The choice of the Penguin Orange Readers Group winners
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KEATING, BARBARA & STEPHANIE
Blood sisters
During their childhood years in the Kenya Highlands of the 1950’s, three girls from vastly different backgrounds become blood sisters, promising that nothing will ever destroy the bond between them. But as they grow up love rivalries, broken promises and the tensions and violence of a newly independent Kenya threaten to tear their childhood dreams apart.
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LINDQUIST, ULLA-CARIN
Rowing without oars
Until 2003, Ulla-Carin Lindquist had balanced a successful career with the competing demands of her four children. Then suddenly, on her birthday, she was diagnosed with a terminal illness, and her world was turned upside down. She had a year to live. During this last year of her life she started writing. Here is her unforgettable story – a story about love, motherhood, and finding the strength to finally let go. Inspiring and uplifting, it might just change the way you live.
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MASTERS, ALEXANDER
Stuart – a life backwards
This is the story of Stuart Shorter; thief, hostage-taker, psycho and street raconteur. It is a story told backwards, as he wanted, from the man he was when Alexander Masters met him to a ‘happy-go-lucky little boy’ of twelve. Brilliant, humane and funny, it is as extraordinary and unexpected as the life it describes.
Winner of the Guardian first book award 2005
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NICHOL, JAMES W
Midnight cab
A three-year-old boy is abandoned at the side of a country road. His mother whispers to him to hold on to a wire fence. She never returns, but the boy is eventually found – holding on so tightly the wire is cutting into his hands.
Sixteen years later, Walker Devereux sets out to discover the truth about his early life. Who are his parents? Why was he abandoned? And what happened to his mother? In pursuit of answers Walker uncovers his family’s dark secrets and comes within the grasp of a murderous sociopath.
Winner of the CCWA award
Nominated for the CWA Gold and Silver dagger awards
Time to introduce you to two crime writers you may not have come across yet – here’s the first one
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NIFFENEGGER, AUDREY
The Time Traveler’s Wife
This is the extraordinary love story of Clare and Henry who met when Clare was six and Henry was thirty-six, and were married when Clare was twenty-two and Henry thirty. Impossible but true, because Henry suffers from a rare condition where his genetic clock periodically resets and he finds himself pulled suddenly into his past or future. In the face of this force they can neither prevent nor control, Henry and Clare’s struggle to lead normal lives is both intensely moving and entirely unforgettable.
‘no wonder this novel has spent weeks on the bestseller lists…’ Guardian
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O’CARROLL, BRENDAN
THE MAMMY
Agnes Browne is a formidable woman. By day she sells fruit and vegetables from a stall in Dublin’s bustling Moore Street. By night, she is wife to Redser Browne and mammy, nurse, teacher and psychiatrist to her unruly brood of seven children.
Then Redser dies.
How Agnes copes with widowhood, with the help of her best pal Marion, un unquenchable sense of humour and the attentions of the amorous Pierre, makes this a memorable and moving account of one woman’s life and of inner-city Dublin in the late ‘60s.
To complete the trilogy read The Chisellers and The Granny
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ORRINGER, JULIE
HOW TO BREATHE UNDERWATER
In her dazzling first book Julie Orringer dives into the private world of childhood and immerses us in its fears and longings: the jealous friendships and the bitter sibling battles; the parents that row and the boys that won’t dance with you. Then, in a voice that is equally tender and compassionate, she reminds us of those rare, exhilarating moments of victory.
If you think you don’t like short stories, think again and try this excellent book
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The tenderness of wolves by Stef Penney
As winter tightens its grip on the isolated settlement of Dove River, a man is brutally murdered and a seventeen-year-old boy disappears. Tracks leaving the dead man's cabin head north towards the forest and the Tundra beyond. In the wake of such violence, people arc drawn to the township - journalists, Hudson's Bay Company men, trappers, traders - but do they want to solve the crime, or exploit it? One by one, the assembled searchers set out from Dove River, pursuing the tracks across a desolate landscape home only to wild animals, madmen and fugitives, variously seeking a murderer, a son, two sisters missing for seventeen years and a forgotten Native American culture, before the snows settle and cover the tracks of the past for good.
In an astonishingly assured debut, Stef Penney deftly weaves adventure, suspense, revelation and humour into an exhilarating thriller, a panoramic historical romance, a keen murder mystery and ultimately, with the sheer scope and quality of her storytelling, one of the books of the year.
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PICOULT, JODI
MY SISTER’S KEEPER
In my first memory, I am three years old, and I am trying to kill my sister. Sometimes, the recollection is so clear I can remember the itch of the pillowcase under my hand, the sharp point of her nose pressing into my palm …
Anna is not sick, but she might as well be. By age thirteen, she has undergone countless surgeries, transfusions, and injections to help her sister, Kate, fight leukaemia. Anna was born for this purpose, her parents tell her, which is why they love her even more.
But now she can’t help but wonder what her life would be like if it weren’t tied to her sister’s … and so she makes a decision that for most, at any age, would be too difficult to bear, and sues her parents for the rights to her own body.
‘If you use one of your children to save the life of another, are you being a good mother or a very bad one?’
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The Testament of Gideon Mack by James Robertson
The name ‘Gideon Mack’ will already be familiar to readers of the Scottish Press. Mystery has surrounded the Church of Scotland minister since 2003 – after falling into the Keldo water at the notorious Black Jaws ravine to his presumed death, he re-surfaced three days later claiming to have been rescued underground by none other than the devil.
There was a flurry of media interest when Mack was suspended as a minister and subsequently disappeared. The discovery, many months later, of his body on the slopes of remote Ben Alder only fuelled speculation about the strange circumstances of his final days.
In fact, the stories surrounding Mack’s breakdown and death have thrown up more questions than they have answers. What really happened to Mack in the three days he was missing? What caused the erratic behaviour that led to his suspension and was there any truth in the assertion that he was and always had been an atheist? What of the mysterious stone he claimed to have seen in Keldo woods? And why did he choose to leave the world a detailed chronicle of his experience?
Answers – and not a few further questions – are to be found in the Testament of Gideon Mack. This manuscript, discovered in 2004 in the Scottish Highlands and printed here for the first time is Mack’s own version of events, a compelling blend of memoir, legend, fantasy, history and – perhaps – madness. It offers a mesmerising account of one man’s fall from grace. As to where he fell … well, you must read the book and decide for yourself.
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SLAUGHTER, KARIN
BLINDSIGHTED
The sleepy town of Heartsdale, Georgia, is jolted into panic when Sara Linton, paediatrician and medical examiner, finds Sibyl Adams dead in the local diner. As well as being viciously raped, Sibyl has been cut: two deep knife wounds form a lethal cross over her stomach.
When a second victim is found, crucified, only a few days later, it becomes clear that Sibyl’s brutal murder wasn’t a one-off attack. What Sara and police chief Jeffrey Tolliver are dealing with is a seasoned sexual predator. A violent serial killer …
…and here’s the other (crime writer)
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STEWART, MARY
THE CRYSTAL CAVE
The dramatic first novel in the classic Merlin trilogy – a thrilling adventure through the mystical age of King Arthur.
Fifth century Britain is a country of chaos and division after the Roman withdrawal. This is the world of young Merlin, the illegitimate child of a South Wales princess who will not reveal to her son his father’s true identity.
Yet Merlin is an extraordinary child, aware at the earliest age that he possesses a great natural gift – the Sight. Against a background of invasion and imprisonment, wars and conquest, Merlin emerges into manhood, and accepts his dramatic role in the New Beginning – the coming of Arthur.
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WHITE, T.H.
THE ONCE & FUTURE KING - the complete edition
T.H. White’s masterful retelling of the Arthurian legend is an abiding classic. Here for the first time all five volumes that make up the story are published in one volume, as White himself always wished.
A brilliantly imaginative telling of King Arthur’s early life.
You’ll be doing well to manage more than the first book – ‘The sword in the stone,’ but I’ll be very surprised if you don’t go on to read the rest at a later date. A great complement to the Mary Stewart.
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WILSON, BRIAN
BLAZING PADDLES – A SCOTTISH COASTAL ODYSSEY
Alone in his tiny kayak, Brian Wilson sets off on an 1,800 mile odyssey around Scotland’s grand cliffscapes, unspoiled shorelines, fearsome sea passages and Hebridean islands. He discovers a world of sea-level adventure and brings it home to us in this delightful book.
Blazing paddles is the beautifully written account of Wilson’s epic journey. Sometimes harrowing, frequently philosophical, often hilarious this book will appeal to all lovers of the coast and its endlessly varied character, wildlife and lore.
Adventure is there aplenty as he battles with whirlpools, heavy seas and hypothermia, streaks naked in front of Lady Diana, and survives a close encounter with a killer whale. The narrative is brimful of history and folklore, disasters at sea, haunted bothies and the exploits of Celtic Saints, Viking raiders and mermaids; and inhabited by larger than life characters like Tex Geddes the shark hunter, Dr. Stan the cave-dweller, and a whole base camp of homosexual gold panners.
Blimey! I haven’t read this but am assured by those who have that it’s a very entertaining read!
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ZAFON, CARLOS RUIZ
THE SHADOW OF THE WIND
Hidden in the heart of the old city of Barcelona is the ‘Cemetery of Forgotten Books’, a labyrinthine library of obscure and forgotten titles. To this library, a man brings his ten-year-old son, Daniel, one cold morning in 1945. Daniel is allowed to choose one book and from the dusty shelves pulls The Shadow of the Wind by Julian Carax. But as Daniel grows up several people seem inordinately interested in his find. What begins as a case of literary curiosity turns into a race to find out the truth behind the life and death of Julian Carax and to save those he left behind.
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