Twenty-year-old Luz, an Argentinian, is on holiday in Madrid with her husband and new born son. But secretly she has a mission - to find her real father. Carlos was a 'desaparecido' - one of the many political activists in Argentina who literally 'disappeared' during the country's brutal military dictatorship in the seventies - while her mother, a political prisoner, was killed trying to flee the country. The infant Luz was secretly adopted by a wealthy couple, unaware of her true origins. Only three people know Luz's real identity - Eduardo, her 'father', racked by guilt at this deception; the powerful and corrupt General Alfonso, her 'grandfather', determined to keep the secret buried; and Miriam, the prostitute who befriended Luz's real mother in her final days and who returns from exile determined to tell Luz the truth. MY NAME IS LIGHT is a gripping, emotionally charged book, a powerful story about a young girl's quest to find her identity and to uncover the deadly secrets of one of Argentina's darkest periods.
Jean Schalekamp Books






Two serial killers - one working the East Coast, and the other the West - may be in cahoots, thinks washed-up police det. Alex Cross after his niece is abducted.
Amber - 1-2: De negen prinsen / Het vuur van Avalon
- 378 pages
- 14 hours of reading
Amber is het volmaakte koninkrijk dat in feite een geestestoestand is die iedereen hoopt te bereiken. Amber betekent macht en geluk, terwijl Aarde en vele parallelle werelden slechts schaduwen zijn, stukjes doolhof op de weg naar Amber. Maar de weg terug naar Amber is bijzonder gevaarlijk, zoals Corwin, een van de negen prinsen, ondervindt. Pas ontsnapt uit de kerker van zijn broer Eric, is Corwin vastbeloten al zijn bovenmenselijke krachten aan te wenden om de troon van Amber terug te winnen.
Septimus Heap. Magyk
- 576 pages
- 21 hours of reading
After learning that she is the Princess, Jenna is whisked from her home and carried toward safety by the Extraordinary Wizard, those she always believed were her father and brother, and a young guard known only as Boy 412--pursued by agents of those who killed her mother ten years earlier. Suggested level: primary, intermediate, junior secondary
'I come from Des Moines. Somebody had to'. And, as soon as Bill Bryson was old enough, he left. Des Moines couldn't hold him, but it did lure him back. After ten years in England, he returned to the land of his youth, and drove almost 14,000 miles in search of a mythical small town called Amalgam, the kind of trim and sunny place where the films of his youth were set. Instead, his search led him to Anywhere, USA; a lookalike strip of gas stations, motels and hamburger outlets populated by lookalike people with a penchant for synthetic fibres. Travelling around thirty-eight of the lower states - united only in their mind-numbingly dreary uniformity - he discovered a continent that was doubly lost; lost to itself because blighted by greed, pollution, mobile homes and television; lost to him because he had become a stranger in his own land. The Lost Continent is a classic of travel literature - hilariously, stomach-achingly funny, yet tinged with heartache - and the book that first staked Bill Bryson's claim as the most beloved writer of his generation.
Tulip Fever
- 281 pages
- 10 hours of reading
With critical raves from Britain and film rights already sold to Steven Spielberg, this tour de force set in 1630s Amsterdam tells of the smoldering passion that develops between a married woman and the artist painting her portrait.