Sample Saturday is when I wade through the eleventy billion samples I have downloaded on my Kindle. I’m slowly chipping away and deciding whether it’s buy or bye. This week, all three come via Susan’s new release picks (and here).

Half Swimmer by Katja Oskamp

Summary: Growing up in 1980s East Germany, as the daughter of an army officer and a teacher, Tanja seems set up to become a model citizen of the German Democratic Republic. Except she has other ideas. And so, it turns out, does the course of history.

I’m thinking: Yes.

Our London Lives by Christine Dwyer Hickey

Summary: 1979, London. Two Irish outsiders seek refuge – Milly, a teenage runaway, and Pip, a young boxer full of anger and potential who is beginning to drink it all away. Over the decades their lives follow different paths, interweaving from time to time, yet rarely together. The story then picks up forty years on.

I’m thinking: Yes.

The Plains by Federico Falco

Summary: After a loss, a year in the four seasons to transform a garden and a self. The narrator recounts his day-to-day life in the house with a garden where he has isolated himself in an attempt to cut off contact with everything and everyone. Even, possibly, himself.

I’m thinking: No.