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Share THE CUT OUT GIRL by Bart Van Es (Penguin £9.99, 288 pp)

THE CUT OUT GIRL 

by Bart Van Es (Penguin £9.99, tour bắc kinh thượng hải giá rẻ 288 pp)

‘Without families you don't get stories', says Lien, an elderly Dutch woman, to Bart van Es.

He is an Oxford Professor of English, born in the Netherlands, who decided to explore his family's wartime history. As a child, Lien de Jong-Spiero lived with her parents in the Hague, historically a tolerant place of refuge for Jews.

But in 1942, under ever-worsening Nazi oppression, Lien's parents made the agonising decision to send their only child to live with a Protestant family — Bart's grandparents.

Soon afterwards, Lien's parents died in Auschwitz. She became one of some 4,000 Jewish children in Holland who survived the war in hiding.

Now in her 80s, she shares her memories of life during and after the war in Bart's Costa award-winning account of family bonds fractured and healed.




 

INCURABLE ROMANTIC by Frank Tallis (Abacus £9.99, tour bắc kinh thượng hải giá rẻ 304 pp)

INCURABLE ROMANTIC 

by Frank Tallis (Abacus £9.99, 304 pp)

Love is a sickness, bắc kinh thượng hải as poets often remind us.

As a psychologist, vtr.org.vn Frank Tallis has seen enough cases of love turned toxic to understand that poetic accounts of the agonies of Romantic love are seldom exaggerated.

‘It is my belief that the problems arising from love — infatuation, jealousy, heartbreak, trauma, inappropriate attachment and addiction . . . merit serious consideration and that the line which separates normal from abnormal love is frequently blurred . . .

‘The merest spark of sexual attraction can cause a fire with the potential to consume us.'

Tallis recounts the case histories of his lovesick patients with a novelist's eye for a story. We learn of a ‘dowdy' barrister's clerk fixated on her dentist; a man obsessed with his ex-girlfriend; and an elderly widow mourning the loss of her energetic sex life with her late husband.