Joan's picks: The Last Orphan and Paris The Memoir

The Last Orphan by Gregg Hurwitz. We’ve done his other books in previous years. This is the 8th (and possibly last) in the series about Evan Smoak, who was taken from an orphanage as a young boy and trained in black ops by the US government but turned his back on all that and used the skills he acquired to help people in need. Now he finds that things have gone full circle and the government is asking for his help - and if he doesn’t give it, things will get ugly. 

Paris The Memoir by Paris Hilton. I’d only ever known her as the celebrity socialite and assumed she came from enormous wealth (she did) and a very entitled background (yes, that too). What I didn’t know was that her parents despaired of their difficult daughter who had undiagnosed ADHD, and whose brain worked in different ways from everyone she knew - and eventually they despatched her to what the Americans refer to as an “emotional growth” boarding school and having read about it, I can tell you that she’s a true survivor and her life hasn’t been as easy as we all thought. It was fascinating, as it so often is to get the real story behind the person that you thought you knew about.

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