Deborah Devonshire is a natural writer with a knack for the telling phrase and for hitting the nail on the head. She tells the story of her upbringing, lovingly and wittily describing her parents (so memorably fictionalised by her sister Nancy); she talks candidly about her brother and sisters, and their politics (while not being at all political herself), finally setting the record straight. Throughout the book she writes brilliantly about the country and her deep attachment to it and those who live and work in it.
Samurai sleuth Sano Ichiro has a very personal motive in determining who killed the shogun's heir apparent with a hairpin: he's trying to save himself from being executed for the crime.
The group around Dan's brother had been held together by a mutual taste for liquor and endless arguments. Now, high in the mountains on a quest to see who could bag the biggest deer, old jealousies and hatreds were being dusted off and revived. Everyone knew an explosion was coming. No one knew who would survive. And none of them were willing to turn back.
This book is a higher level of a well known coursebook - 'Basic Comprehension Passages' by Donn Byrne. The texts, although written with the needs of students at this level in mind, are not graded, so that throughout, the learners are being exposed to natural language.
