Jan Bourne’s Desert Island Books
Name: Jan Bourne
Job role: Clinical Coding Admin Clerk
About: I work part time supporting the Clinical Coding team, mainly processing the coding information on Meditech for Out-Patients.
Book 1: The Nightingale by Kristin Hannah
This story is about what it was like to be a woman during World War II, when women’s stories were all too often forgotten or overlooked . . . Vianne and Isabelle Mauriac are two sisters, separated by years and experience, by ideals and passion and circumstance, each embarking on her own dangerous path towards survival, love and freedom in war-torn France.
Book 2: The Women by Kristin Hannah
A sweeping story of epic love, heartbreaking loss, extraordinary bravery and the unbreakable bond of female friendship about the women who answered the call of the Vietnam War and paid the price.
Book 3: Winter Solstice by Rosamunde Pilcher
Elfrida Phipps loves her new life in her pretty Hampshire village. She has a tiny cottage, her faithful dog Horace and the friendship of the neighbouring Blundells – particularly Oscar – to ensure that her days are filled with companionship as well as independence. But an unforeseen tragedy upsets Elfrida’s tranquillity.
Book 4: Still Life by Sarah Winman
1944, Italy. As bombs fall around them, two strangers meet in the ruined wine cellar of a Tuscan villa and share an extraordinary evening. Ulysses Temper is a young British soldier, Evelyn Skinner a 64-year-old art historian living life on her own terms. She has come to salvage paintings from the wreckage of war and relive memories of her youth when her heart was stolen by an Italian maid in a particular room with a view. Ulysses’ chance encounter with Evelyn will transform his life – and all those who love him back home in London – forever.
Book 5: A Terrible Kindness by Jo Browning Wroe
It is October 1966 and William Lavery is having the night of his life at his first black-tie do. But, as the evening unfolds, news hits of a landslide at a coal mine. It has buried a school: Aberfan. William decides he must act, so he stands and volunteers to attend. It will be his first job as an embalmer, and it will be one he never forgets.
Book 6: The Help by Kathryn Stockett
Enter a vanished and unjust world: Jackson, Mississippi, 1962. Where black maids raise white children, but aren’t trusted not to steal the silver . . .
There’s Aibileen, raising her seventeenth white child and nursing the hurt caused by her own son’s tragic death; Minny, whose cooking is nearly as sassy as her tongue; and white Miss Skeeter, home from College, who wants to know why her beloved maid has disappeared.
Luxury item
My duvet.