Search results for ""MACMILLAN""

They thought they were alone . . . 'This is Iceland's Twin Peaks' CorrenThe Ice Lands by Steinar Bragi is set against the backdrop of Iceland’s volcanic hinterlands, four thirty-somethings from Reykjavík embark on an ambitious camping trip, their jeep packed with supplies.The purpose of the trip is to heal both professional and personal wounds but the desolate landscape forces the group to reflect on the shattered lives they’ve left behind in the city. As their jeep hurtles through the wilderness, an impenetrable fog descends, causing them to suddenly crash into a rural farmhouse.Seeking refuge from the storm, the friends discover that the isolated dwelling is inhabited by a mysterious elderly couple who barricade themselves inside every night. As the merciless weather blocks every attempt at escape, they are forced to confront difficult questions: who has been butchering animals near the house? What happened to the abandoned village nearby where bones lie strewn across the ground? And most importantly,will they ever return home?

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A comforting story set against the nation's favourite holiday camp, from bestselling author of The Woolworths Girls'Molly Missons gazed around in awe. So this was Butlin's. Whitewashed buildings, bordered by rhododendrons, gave a cheerful feeling to a world still recovering from six years of war. The Skegness holiday camp covered a vast area, much larger than Molly expected to see.'Molly Missons hasn't had the best of times recently. Having lost her parents, now some dubious long-lost family have darkened her door - attempting to steal her home and livelihood... After a horrendous ordeal, Molly applies for a job as a Butlin's Aunty. When she receives news that she has got the job, she immediately leaves her small home town - in search of a new life in Skegness.Molly finds true friendship in Freda, Bunty and Plum. But the biggest shock is discovering that star of the silver screen, Johnny Johnson, is working at Butlin's as head of the entertainment team. Johnny takes an instant liking to Molly and she begins to shed the shackles of her recent traumas. Will Johnny be just the distraction Molly needs - or is he too good be to be true?

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'48 by international bestseller and Master of Horror, James Herbert, explores a horrifying alternative end to the Second World War.In 1945, Hitler unleashed the Blood Death on Britain as his final act of vengeance.Those who died at once were the lucky ones. The really unfortunate took years. The survivors – people like me, who had the blood group that kept us safe from the disease – were now targets for those who believed our blood could save them.I survived for three years. I lived alone, spending my days avoiding the fascist Blackshirts who wanted my blood for their dying leader. Then I met the others – and life got complicated all over again . . .

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With a sprightly dose of insightful inspiration, a sprinkling of practical advice, and a bounty of exuberant stories by great writers, O's Little Book of Happiness features some of the best work ever to have appeared in O, The Oprah Magazine. Inside you'll find Elizabeth Gilbert's ode to the triumph of asking for what you want... Jane Smiley's tribute to the animal who taught her about lasting fulfillment... Shonda Rhimes's secret to trading stress for serenity... Brene Brown's celebration of the power of play... Neil de Grasse Tyson's take on our joyful participation in the universe... and much more. In revisiting fifteen years of the magazine's rich archives, O's editors have assembled a collection as stunning as it is spirit-lifting.

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With an introduction by Helen DunmoreCome for a walk down the river road,For though you're all a long time deadThe waters part to let us passThe way we'd go on summer nightsIn the times we were childrenAnd thought we were lovers.The Drowned Book is a work of memory, commemoration and loss, dominated by elegies for those the author has loved and admired. Sean O'Brien's exquisite collection is powerfully affecting, sad and often deeply funny; but it is also a dramatically compelling book - disquieting, even - and full of warnings. As the book unfolds, O'Brien's verse occupies an increasingly dark, subterranean territory - where the waters are rising, threatening to overwhelm and ruin the world above. Winner of both the T. S. Eliot and Forward prizes, The Drowned Book is an extraordinary collection, a classic from one of the leading poets of our time.

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There is no one quite like Brian Blessed. He's an actor, film star, trained undertaker, unlikely diplomat, secret romantic, martial artist and mountaineer. He's also a brilliant storyteller who will – and you must brace yourself – simply leap out of the pages at you. Ready? Then start Absolute Pandemonium and you'll be taken on a riotous journey from his childhood, growing up the son of a miner in Goldthorpe, to finding fame in Z-Cars. You'll see Brian falling for Katharine Hepburn on the set of The Trojan Women, suffering wires strapped round his wotsits as he was hoisted into the heavens on Flash Gordon, almost causing an international incident when meeting the Emperor and Empress of Japan, and winning round George Lucas to get the role of Boss Nass on Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace.Along the way he takes secret revenge on headmistress Mrs Jarman and her very big bottom, punches Harold Pinter, loves and hates Peter O'Toole, woos his beautiful wife Hildegard Neil and braves the shocking death toll on cosy TV drama My Family and Other Animals. Crammed with anecdotes from his illustrious career, this is a funny, warm-hearted, life-affirming, LOUD and unique memoir from a much-loved figure.

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Before we go any further, I want you to understand this: I am not a good person.We all want to be seen. We all want to be heard. But what happens when we’re seen and heard saying or doing the wrong things?When Winter Halperin – former spelling bee champion, aspiring writer, and daughter of a parenting expert –gets caught saying the wrong thing online, her life explodes. All across the world, people know what she’s done, and none of them will forgive her.With her friends gone, her future plans cut short, and her identity in shambles, Winter is just trying to pick up the pieces without hurting anyone else. She knows she messed up, but does that mean it’s okay for people to send her hate mail and death threats? Did she deserve to lose all that she’s lost? And is “I’m sorry” ever good enough?If You Don't Have Anything Nice To Say is the thought provoking novel from multi award winning author, Leila Sales

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Track a stalker. Catch a killer. When a mysterious DVD is delivered to Northumbria Police Headquarters, DS Matthew Ryan and Detective Superintendent Eloise O’Neil are among the few to view its disturbing content. With little to go on the only lead comes from the anonymous and chilling woman’s voice narrating the blood-soaked lock-up depicted on screen. But with no victim visible, nor any indication of where the unidentifiable crime scene is located, Ryan and O’Neil get the distinct feeling someone is playing with them. What is certain is that the newly formed special unit has just taken on its first challenging case.As further shocking videos start arriving at police stations around the country, the body count rises. But what connects all the victims? And why are they being targeted? As the investigation deepens, the team is brought to breaking point as secrets from the past threaten to derail their pursuit of a merciless killer . . .The Death Messenger is a tense police procedural and follows The Silent Room in the thrilling Matthew Ryan series by Mari Hannah.

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Irma and Siiri go out with a bang in The End of Sunset Grove, the conclusion to Minna Lindgren's Lavender Ladies Detective Agency trilogy. A hilarious cosy crime mystery, perfect for fans of Richard Osman’s The Thursday Murder Club and M.C. Beaton.Best friends Irma and Siiri are relieved when they can finally return home, but things have changed in the retirement home . . . Sunset Grove is under new management, a sinister organization that promises spiritual enlightenment in return for donations from its residents. And the staff seem to have disappeared, replaced by technology that remotely takes care of all of their needs, if only they could work out how to use it . . . The Lavender Ladies are increasingly suspicious of the new order and plan an elaborate act of sabotage. But their last hurrah has some drastic consequences – will the Lavender Ladies get more than they bargained for?

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A bereaved husband is faced with a devastating choice in Brutal, an engrossing gritty thriller from the top ten bestselling author Mandasue Heller.When Frank Peter’s wife Maureen dies, he feels that his once-idyllic life on the Yorkshire Moors is over. And with a daughter emigrating to Australia and a son who has his own marital problems, Frank feels resigned to a life of loneliness. Then one night he finds a frightened young woman hiding at the back of his farmhouse. She explains that her name is Irena and was brought to this country by a man who promised her the world and then forced her into prostitution.Frank offers her a bed for the night but it’s the middle of winter, and when heavy snowfall prevents her from leaving the next day, he’s forced to extend the invitation. But the longer Irena stays, the easier it gets for the men she’s trying to escape from to find her.People-trafficking could just be the tip of the iceberg, and Frank has no idea what these people are really capable of.

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Each poem in Sean O'Brien's superb new collection opens on a wholly different room, vista or landscape, each drawn with the poet's increasingly refined sense of tone, history and rhetorical assurance. The Beautiful Librarians is a stock-taking of sorts, and a celebration of those unsung but central figures in our culture, often overlooked by both capital and official account. Here we find infantrymen, wrestlers, old lushes in the hotel bar - but none more heroic than the librarians of the title, those silent and silencing guardians of literature and knowledge who, the poet reminds us, also had lives of their own to be celebrated. Elsewhere we find a 12-bar blues sung by Ovid, a hymn to a grey rose, a writing course from hell, and a very French exercise in waiting. A book of terrific variety of theme and form, The Beautiful Librarians is another bravura performance from the most garlanded English poet of his generation.

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Diane Allen was born in Leeds, but raised at her family's farm, deep in the Yorkshire Dales. After working as a glass engraver, raising a family and looking after an ill father, she found her true niche in life, joining a large-print publishing firm in 1990. She now concentrates on her writing full-time and has recently been made Honorary Vice President of the Romantic Novelists' Association. Diane and her husband Ronnie live in Long Preston, in the Yorkshire Dales, and have two children and four beautiful grandchildren.

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'Lucy Inglis has done a wonderful job bringing together a wide range of sources to tell the history of the most exciting and dangerous plants in the world. Telling the story of opium tells us much about our faults and foibles as humans – our willingness to experiment; our ability to become addicts; our pursuit of money. This book tells us more than about opium; it tells us about ourselves.' - Peter Frankopan, author of The Silk Roads‘The only thing that is good is poppies. They are gold.’ Poppy tears, opium, heroin, fentanyl: humankind has been in thrall to the ‘Milk of Paradise’ for millennia. The latex of papaver somniferum is a bringer of sleep, of pleasurable lethargy, of relief from pain – and hugely addictive. A commodity without rival, it is renewable, easy to extract, transport and refine, and subject to an insatiable global demand. No other substance in the world is as simple to produce or as profitable. It is the basis of a gargantuan industry built upon a shady underworld, but ultimately it is a farm-gate material that lives many lives before it reaches the branded blister packet, the intravenous drip or the scorched and filthy spoon. Many of us will end our lives dependent on it. In Milk of Paradise, acclaimed cultural historian Lucy Inglis takes readers on an epic journey from ancient Mesopotamia to modern America and Afghanistan, from Sanskrit to pop, from poppy tears to smack, from morphine to today’s synthetic opiates. It is a tale of addiction, trade, crime, sex, war, literature, medicine and, above all, money. And, as this ambitious, wide-ranging and compelling account vividly shows, the history of opium is our history and it speaks to us of who we are.

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She made her way down the cliff, and on to the beach. At the edge of the waves, she stopped, shaking her wet paws. She knew that somewhere ahead was her person, but far, far away. She miaowed plaintively; stood staring at the moving blur of uncrossable sea. She led the way to safety, out of the blazing hell of blitzed Coventry. People touched her for luck; feared her as an omen of disaster. Wherever she went, she changed lives . . . From her beginning to her end she never wavered. She was the Blitzcat. Blitzcat by Robert Westall is the Smarties Prize-winning book about one brave cat's experiences during World War Two. Now with a brilliant new cover look and including an extended author biography.

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How can you pack for the journey of a lifetime?George Baxter has settled for a comfortable life, content as the years unfold predictably - until Win, his wife of twenty-six years, dies.With his loyal dog Monty by his side, George throws himself into his work as an antiques dealer. His business is at the heart of the village and all sorts pass through the doors, each person in search of their own little piece of history. When George meets local widow Sylvia Newsome, he imagines a different kind of future. But life has more revelations to offer him. Over the course of an English summer George uncovers some unexpected mysteries from his past, which could shape his tomorrows . . .

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You know that feeling. Your life's on track and all is going well. And then something monumental occurs that turns everything on its head. It happens to everyone but, for Kristin Ryder, it was much, much worse . . . When up-and-coming photographer Kristin begins to receive anonymous emails, her life in a trendy loft in London's Hoxton with Anton, her ultra-cool, street-artist boyfriend, suddenly begins to feel unsafe. The emails come with sinister attachments that suggest the sender has an intimate knowledge of Kristin's past, and soon her life spirals out of control. Who can she trust? And will she be able to discover the sender's identity before it's too late? Breathtaking and shocking, Exposure by Aga Lesiewicz will grip you until the last snap of the camera shutter.

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Return to Woodbury by Jay Bonansinga is the eighth novel in Robert Kirkman's The Walking Dead spin-off series, is based on the award-winning comic books and blockbuster television show.She has weathered over four years of the apocalypse. She has done things that she would not have dreamt of doing in her darkest nightmares. But she has survived. And now, she has staked a claim in the plague-ravaged city of Atlanta. It is a safe haven for her people, rising high above the walker-ridden streets. But for Lilly Caul, something is missing . . . She still dreams of her former home, the little village known as Woodbury – a place of heartache as well as hope. For Lilly, Woodbury has become a symbol of the future, of family, of a return to normal life amidst this hell on earth. The call is so powerful that Lilly decides to risk everything in order to go back . . . Against all odds, Lilly leads a ragtag group of survivors across the impossible landscape of walker swarms, flooded rivers, bands of murderers and untold dangers. Along the way, she discovers a disturbing truth about herself. She is determined to return to Woodbury. No matter what the cost.

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End Game is the fifth book in the thrilling Will Robie series by international number one bestselling author David Baldacci.Will Robie, highly trained assassin and the US government’s most indispensable asset, is called to London.An imminent terrorist attack threatens the Underground and with the US next in line, Robie is the perfect choice to stop it before it begins.He knows he has one chance to succeed. One chance to save London. One chance to make it safely home to find out what has happened to fellow agent Jessica Reel following their last deadly mission together.But Robie is about to learn that even if he succeeds, the worst is yet to come.The game has started. Now only he can end it . . .

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An international bestseller about the redemptive power of books, from French author Jean-Paul Didierlaurent. The Reader on the 6.27 is ready to take you on a journey . . .Guylain Vignolles lives on the edge of existence. Working at a book pulping factory in a job he hates, he has but one pleasure in life . . .Sitting on the 6.27 train each day, Guylain recites aloud from pages he has saved from the jaws of his monstrous pulping machine. But it is when he discovers the diary of a lonely young woman, Julie – a woman who feels as lost in the world as he does - that his journey will truly begin . . .The Reader on the 6.27 is a tale bursting with larger-than-life characters, each of whom touches Guylain's life for the better. For fans of Amelie and Mr Penumbra's 24-hour Bookstore, this captivating novel is a warm, funny fable about literature's power to uplift even the most downtrodden of lives.

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Electricity is now a film starring Agyness Deyn.Lily's epilepsy means she's used to seeing the world in terms of angles - you look at every surface, you weigh up every corner, and you think of your head slamming into it - but what would she be like without her sharp edges? Prickly, spiky, up-front honest and down-to-earth practical, Lily is thirty, and life's not easy but she gets by. Needing no-one and asking for nothing, it's just her and her epilepsy: her constant companion. But then Lily's long-estranged mother dies, and Lily is drawn back into a world she thought she'd left behind. Forced to renegotiate the boundaries of her life, she realises she has a lot to learn - about relationships, about the past, and about herself - and some difficult decisions ahead of her.

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Ready or not . . . here comes Hare! Bear and Hare are back in their third adventure, Where's Bear? and this time they're playing hide-and-seek. Hare is very good at closing his eyes and counting to ten. The problem is, Bear is not very good at hiding. Not very good at all. When you're as big as Bear squeezing yourself behind a lamp stand is not easy, and trying to disappear behind a glass fish tank is simply not going to work. But all of a sudden Bear is . . . gone! Wherever could he be?Lovingly written and illustrated by award-winning Emily Gravett, children will love this engaging and funny story featuring everybody's favourite friends: Bear and Hare.Look out for more Bear and Hare books: Bear and Hare Go Fishing and Snow!

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The Narrowboat Girl by Annie Murray is the story of a young woman's search for freedom and happiness.Young Maryann Nelson is devastated at the loss of her beloved father. But worse is to come when her mother, Flo, sees an opportunity to better herself and her family in a marriage to the local undertaker, Norman Griffin. Though on the surface a caring family man, Norman is not at all what he seems, as Maryann and her sister Sal soon discover.Unable to turn to their unsympathetic mother for support, the girls are left alone with their harrowing secret. But for Sal it is too much to bear . . . The chance of a new life opens up for Maryann when she befriends Joel Bartholomew. Aboard his narrowboat, the Esther Jane, she finds herself falling in love with life on the canal as she is swept away from Birmingham and all her worries. Until Joel's feelings for Maryann begin to change, awakening all the old nightmares that she had thought were long buried, and in panic and confusion she takes flight . . . The Narrowboat Girl is followed by sequel, Water Gypsies.

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WINNER OF THE CWA GOLD DAGGER AWARD FOR BEST CRIME NOVEL OF THE YEAR.Amos, Mississippi, is a quiet town. Silas Jones is its sole law enforcement officer. The last excitement here was nearly twenty years ago, when a teenage girl disappeared on a date with Larry Ott, Silas's one-time boyhood friend. The law couldn't prove Larry guilty, but Amos' residents have shunned him ever since.Then the town's peace is shattered when someone tries to kill the reclusive Ott, another young woman goes missing, and the town's drug dealer is murdered. Woven through the tautly written mystery is the unspoken secret that hangs over the lives of two men - one black, one white.Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter, winner of the CWA Gold Dagger Award for Best Crime Novel of the Year, is a masterful novel, sizzling with deep Southern menace.

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Snowflakes in the Wind is a heartwarming story of triumph over adversity by Rita Bradshaw, author of the number one bestselling Dancing in the Moonlight.It's Christmas Eve 1920 when nine-year-old Abby Kirby's family is ripped apart by a terrible tragedy. Leaving everything she's ever known, Abby takes her younger brother and runs away to the tough existence of the Border farming community.Years pass. Abby becomes a beautiful young woman and falls in love, but her past haunts her, casting dark shadows. Furthermore, in the very place she's taken refuge is someone who wishes her harm.With her heart broken, Abby decides to make a new life as a nurse. When the Second World War breaks out, she volunteers as a QA nurse and is sent overseas. However, life takes another unexpected and dangerous turn when she becomes a prisoner of the Japanese. It is then that Abby realizes that whatever has gone before is nothing compared to what lies ahead . . .

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Annie Freud's new book The Remains was inspired by a visit to an exhibition of Sung Dynasty works on paper, and their unselfconscious blending of illustration and poetry. However the book has its imaginative origins in a huge collection of broken household china amassed by the author while digging her garden. Stranger items also came to light: a minute horseshoe, a fossilised scallop shell, a rusted metal silhouette of a hound. These worn shards and talismans soon began work on Freud's singular imagination, and this extraordinary collection of poetry and art is the result. The Remains is concerned with what is left when everything seems broken or lost - and the new and unexpected things that happen when they are found again. Beautifully illustrated in full colour by the poet herself, The Remains is a powerful book of consolation and surprise from one of our most original literary voices.

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Frances Leviston's first collection, Public Dream, was one of the most acclaimed debuts of recent years, and praised for combining 'technical mastery with a lucidity that verges on the hypnotic' (Independent).Leviston's keenly-anticipated second book sees both an intellectual and dramatic intensification of her project. We often credit poetry as a kind of truth-telling, but it can also be an agent and a vessel of disinformation: in the course of making its proofs and confessions, it also seeks to persuade and seduce by any means it can. Leviston uses both sides of poetry's tongue to address one of the key questions of the age: how have we come to know what we think we know? In the title poem, a woman preparing for a child's birthday party suddenly glimpses the invisible screen of false data behind which she lives - and her own complicity in its power. Many of these poems are concerned with ruined or abandoned structures, dismembered and disappearing bodies, constructed and deconstructed identities; behind them lie the false gods who manipulate the streams of information with which we must navigate the contemporary world. In Leviston's inimitably vivid and vital language,Disinformation challenges us to rescue our idea of identity from that mass of glib truth and persistent falsehood - and proposes how we might begin to think of poetry itself as a means to that end.

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The Runaway Daughter by Joanna Rees is the first novel in A Stitch in Time – a sweeping historical trilogy.It’s 1926 and Anna Darton is on the run from a terrible crime she was forced into committing. Alone and scared in London, salvation comes in the form of Nancy, a sassy American dancer at the notorious nightclub, the Zip. Re-inventing herself as Vita Casey, Anna becomes part of the line-up and is thrown into a hedonistic world of dancing, parties, flapper girls and fashion. When she meets the dashing Archie Fenwick, Vita buries her guilty conscience and she believes him when he says he will love her no matter what. But unbeknown to Vita, her secret past is fast catching up with her, and when the people closest to her start getting hurt, she is forced to confront her past or risk losing everything she holds dear.

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Which Witch? is a brilliantly witty tale of magic and marriage by Eva Ibbotson, shortlisted for the Carnegie Medal.'Find me a witch!' cried Arriman the Awful, feared Wizard of the North.Arriman has decided to marry. His wife must be a witch of the darkest powers – but which witch will she be? To find the most fiendish, he holds a spell-casting competition.Glamorous Madame Olympia performs the terrifying Symphony of Death and conjures up a thousand plague-bearing rats. The magic of gentle Belladonna, the white witch, goes hopelessly wrong. She produces perfumed flowers instead of snakes. And bats roost in her golden hair instead of becoming blood-sucking vampires.Poor Belladonna longs to be an evil enchantress – but how?'This kind of fun will never fail to delight' - Philip Pullman.

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With a beautiful cover illustration by Alex T. Smith, creator of the Claude series, The Haunting of Hiram is a wonderfully spooky young fiction title from the award-winning author of Journey to the River Sea, Eva Ibbotson.'I will buy your castle,' declared Hiram C. Hopgood. 'But only if there are no ghosts!' Alex MacBuff can't afford to keep his beloved Castle Carra, and an American millionaire has made him an offer he can't refuse. The castle is shipped all the way to Texas, but its ghostly inhabitants, including Krok the Viking warrior and a hell-hound called Cyril, follow their home across the Atlantic. How can Alex stop them haunting Hiram and also save the millionaire's daughter from an evil ransom plot?

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It is early summer in 1953, and the friends and neighbours of Magnolia Square are looking forward to celebrating the Coronation. The war has become a memory; the future seems rosy. Kate Emmerson looks on with pride at her growing family, including Matthew, whose father was killed during the war. But Matthew's wealthy relations have never really forgiven Kate for marrying Leon, a West Indian who works as a Thames lighterman, and when Matthew runs away from his smart boarding school in Somerset the tensions which exist between the two families come to a head. Meanwhile Zac, the wonderfully talented and handsome new signing at the local boxing club, is being eyed hopefully by all the young women of Magnolia Square. But he has eyes for only one woman - Carrie Collins, who has teenage children of her own and whose husband, Danny, seems more interested in the boxing club and his market stall than in her.In the weeks leading up to the Coronation festivities, drama and tragedy threaten to haunt Magnolia Square, but by the time the great day dawns, the bells ring out in celebration as the Londoners enjoy themselves as only they know how.

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Forthright, witty and deliciously opinionated, Jean Trumpington's Coming Up Trumps is a wonderfully readable account of a life very well lived. In this characteristically trenchant memoir, the indomitable Jean Trumpington looks back on her long and remarkable life. The daughter of an officer in the Bengal Lancers and an American heiress, Jean Campbell-Harris was born into a world of considerable privilege, but the Wall Street Crash entirely wiped out her mother's fortune. At fifteen the young Jean Campbell-Harris was sent to Paris to study but two years later, with the outbreak of the Second World War, she became a land girl. However, she quickly changed direction, joining naval intelligence at Bletchley Park, where she stayed for the rest of the war. After the war she worked first in Paris and then on Madison Avenue, New York, with advertising's 'mad men'. It was here that she met her husband, the historian Alan Barker, and their marriage, in 1954, ushered in the happiest period of her life before embarking on her distinguished political career, as a Cambridge City councillor, Mayor of Cambridge and, then, in 1980, a life peer.

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A non-fiction thriller by international bestselling author Blaine Harden (Escape from Camp 14) that explores the world's most repressive state through the intertwined lives of two North Koreans, one infamous, one obscure: Kim Il Sung, the former North Korean leader and No Kum Sok, once the state's youngest jet fighter pilot.Shortly before the Korean War ended, No Kum Sok met Kim Il Sung, who congratulated him for his flying skill and his courage. A few months later, No Kum Sok stole a Soviet-made MiG-15 and flew it to a US airfield in South Korea. Beginning with the arbitrary division of Korea in 1945 and ending two months after the shaky armistice that halted combat in the Korean War, The Great Leader & the Fighter Pilot is an ambitious and gripping book which digs deeply into the character of the Kim family dictatorship.At once an irresistible adventure story and an authoritative guide to the notorious state, it explains why North Korea remains so isolated, why it created and maintains a vast gulag of concentration camps, and why it is still so angry at the western world.

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A beautifully illustrated, wittily observed picture book about kindness, empathy and friendship from the award-winning Rebecca Cobb. Hello Friend! tells the story of one big-hearted and enthusiastic little girl who is insistent on making friends with a certain little boy. And why wouldn't he want to be friends with her? She's very good at sharing – even if it's a sandwich that he doesn't like. And she's certain that playing outside is their favourite thing to do, even if he is not so sure. But while he doesn't seem keen on many of the things that she loves to do, there is one thing he's very keen on after all . . . being friends.Also available from Rebecca Cobb: Lunchtime, Aunt Amelia and The Something.

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Poems from the First World War is a moving and powerful collection of poems written by soldiers, nurses, mothers, sweethearts and family and friends who experienced WWI from different standpoints. It records the early excitement and patriotism, the bravery, friendship and loyalty of the soldiers, and the heartbreak, disillusionment and regret as the war went on to damage a generation. It includes poems from Wilfred Owen, Rupert Brooke, Vera Brittain, Eleanor Farjeon, Edward Thomas, Laurence Binyon, John McCrae, Siegfried Sassoon and many more. The Imperial War Museum was founded in 1917 to collect and display material relating to the ‘Great War’, which was still being fought. Today IWM is unique in its coverage of conflicts, especially those involving Britain and the Commonwealth, from the First World War to the present. They seek to provide for, and to encourage, the study and understanding of the history of modern war and wartime experience.

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Full of suspicion and half truths, The Burden of Proof is Scott Turow's second Kindle County legal thriller. One afternoon in late March, Sandy Stern, the brilliant, quixotic defence lawyer in Presumed Innocent, returns home to find his wife Clara dead in the garage. They have been married for thirty-one years. Her suicide note leaves him just four words – 'Can you forgive me?' But on the 6th March Clara had expected to live . . .

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Margaret Dickinson's Pauper's Gold is the heartfelt story of triumph over adversity, in the cotton mills of Derbyshire.Hannah Francis has been forced to leave her beloved mother and the life she knows in the silk mill town of Macclesfield and is set to become an apprentice at a cotton mill in the Derbyshire dales. It is a cruel blow for such a young girl, but her three travelling companions are even younger than she is, and Hannah is determined to keep their spirits up and remain in good cheer. Once she is settled in the mill, Hannah discovers that the hours of work are long, and the daily routine is dangerous, arduous and harsh, but her bright singing and capacity for joy lighten the load for everyone. Hannah soon becomes a favourite with the other mill workers. Friendships are forged and an innocent love starts to blossom. But can such a fragile love survive cruel reality? It is not long before she attracts the eye of Edmund Critchlow, the man who owns them all, body and soul – the man from whom no pretty mill girl is safe. Times are hard in the cotton industry as civil war rages across America affecting even the mill owner and the lives of all his workers . . .

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Rachael Boast’s first collection, Sidereal, was one of the most highly regarded debuts of recent years, winning the Forward Prize for Best First Collection and the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry Prize. Her second, Pilgrim's Flower, richly confirms and dramatically extends that talent – but where Sidereal’s gaze was often firmly fixed on the heavens, Boast’s focus here has shifted earthward. The book sings life’s intoxicants – love, nature, literature, friendship, and other forms and methods of transcendence – and sees Boast’s pitch-perfect lyrical metaphysic challenge itself at every turn. Pilgrim's Flower gives an almost Rilkean attention to the spaces between things – the slippage between what we think we know, and what is actually there – and in doing so brings the language of rite, observance and rune to the details of our daily lives.

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Smithfield, settled on the fringes of Roman London, was once a place of revelry. Jesters and crowds flocked for the medieval St Bartholomew's Day celebrations, tournaments were plentiful and it became the location of London's most famous meat market. Yet in Tudor England, Smithfield had another, more sinister use: the public execution of heretics.Spanning the reigns of British history's most remarkable dynasty, The Burning Time is a vivid insight into an era in which what was orthodoxy one year might be dangerous heresy the next. The first martyrs were Catholics, who cleaved to Rome in defiance of Henry VIII's break with the papacy. But with the accession of Henry's daughter Mary - soon to be nicknamed 'Bloody Mary' - the charge of heresy was levelled against devout Protestants, who chose to burn rather than recant. At the centre of Virginia Rounding's vivid account of this extraordinary period are two very different characters. The first is Richard Rich, Thomas Cromwell's protégé, who, almost uniquely, remained in a position of great power, influence and wealth under three Tudor monarchs, and who helped send many devout men and women to their deaths. The second is John Deane, Rector of St Bartholomew's, who was able, somehow, to navigate the treacherous waters of changing dogma and help others to survive. The Burning Time is their story, but it is also the story of the hundreds of men and women who were put to the fire for their faith. It is a gripping insight into a time when people were willing to die, and to kill, in the name of religion.

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All That Is explores a life unfolding in a world on the brink of change. The life is that of Philip Bowman and we see his formative experiences as a young naval officer in battles off Okinawa, his post-war career as a book editor in New York, his trips to the great European cities - for publishing parties in London, romantic holidays in Paris. But despite his success, what eludes him is love. His first marriage goes bad, another fails to happen, finally he meets a woman who enthrals him before setting him on a course he could never imagine for himself. James Salter's dazzling, seductive and haunting novel offers a fiercely intimate account of the great shocks and grand pleasures of being alive.

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Rachel Booker has a difficult start in life. When her father dies, deep in gambling debt, her mother must harden herself to make ends meet, but becomes so hard she has little room left for affection or warmth. Mother and daughter work at the open market in Birmingham, selling second-hand clothes or whatever they can find just to put a little food on the table.But the market has a silver lining: it's there that Rachel makes her first childhood friend, Danny. As they grow older, the friendship grows into something more and their innocent romance gives Rachel the care and comfort she's always craved. But at just sixteen, as World War II breaks out, Rachel falls pregnant. They marry in haste but it isn't long before Danny is called up. Left on the home front with a new baby and little else, Rachel must scrape by with the other residents of Sparkbrook. But if Danny ever makes it home, will he be the same boy she loved so fiercely? And if Rachel can sustain the family until then, will she end up as hard-hearted as her own mother? Annie Murray's War Babies is a moving and insightful novel about hardships on the home front and how the war changed everybody it touched . . .

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2011. Isabel Montgomery, investigative journalist, is the granddaughter of one of America's most radical lawyers, the daughter of one of America's most famous protesters. She's going to expose the Obama administration's unconstitutional surveillance of its citizens in the New York Times.Forced into hiding after her story breaks, she takes refuge in her grandparents' abandoned home. There, surrounded by the past she's run from for years, she makes a discovery that sees her question everything that led her to this moment.You're A Big Girl Now is a gripping, intelligent thriller about the moral and political responsibilities of the citizen in the modern world. For every choice, there is a consequence. The question is: should Isabel suffer for a choice she didn't make?

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The Snow Angel is a deliciously dark family saga from Lulu Taylor, the bestselling author of The Winter Folly.A forbidden passion. A lifetime of consequences. In 1960s London, Cressida Felbridge is living the high life as a debutante when she is courted by a friend of her brother's and set to marry. But as soon as she meets the painter Ralph Few, Cressie knows her life will never be the same again. Soon, she is deeply in love with Ralph, but there is one problem: Ralph is still married to Catherine. Soon, Cressie is drawn into a strange, triangular relationship. As Catherine's behaviour becomes increasingly erratic, Ralph and Cressie escape to Cressie's family home in Cumbria. But Catherine will not give up Ralph that easily . . .In the present day, Emily Conway has everything she could wish for: a huge house in West London, two beautiful children and a successful husband, Will. But as Emily and Will drive to a party, Will reveals that he has been betrayed by his business partner. Steering the car off the road at high speed, their perfect life is abruptly ended. When she wakes from her injuries, Emily is told of a mysterious legacy: a house in Cumbria on the edge of an estate, left to her by a woman she has never met. Could this house provide the chance to start anew, or must secrets be uncovered before it can be at peace?

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Glen Ashard – idyllic Scottish home of ex-rock star Nick Mackenzie and his exotic wife Alusha. A haven of peace and security after all the years on the road. Until the day a small plane with a deadly chemical cargo flies off course . . . In the tragic aftermath, Daisy Field, environmental campaigner, picks up the trail. Abrasive and idealistic, she's determined to fight the 'profits before safety' attitude of the agrochemical industry. But to win she needs Nick's millions, and Nick is facing difficulties of his own . . . From the wilds of Scotland to the corridors of power in London and Chicago, from Madison Square Garden to a seedy security firm in south London, Requiem pulls Daisy into a struggle against apathy, sabotage and dirty tricks . . . 'She writes with passion . . . undoubtedly her most ambitious novel to date' Sunday Express 'Moving . . . a great story' Mail on Sunday 'Pacy . . . intriguing' The Times

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'Essential reading for anyone interested in the heady, vulgar, marvellous miasma of British music and culture in the nineties' – Irving Welsh'A true believer in the power of music and more importantly a believer in the people that make music. He gave me and many more like me a chance to change my life' – Noel GallagherAlan McGee's Creation Stories is a star-studded, outrageous, funny and anarchic account of the record label he set up and the bands that defined an era, including Primal Scream and Oasis.A charismatic Glaswegian who partied just as hard as any of the acts on his notoriously hedonistic label, Alan McGee became an infamous character in the world of music in the nineties. In Creation Stories he tells his story in depth for the first time, from leaving school at sixteen to setting up the Living Room club in London which showcased many emerging indie bands, from managing the Jesus and Mary Chain to co-founding Creation when he was only twenty-three. His label brought us acts like My Bloody Valentine, House of Love, Ride and, of course, Primal Scream. Embracing acid house, Alan decamped to Manchester and hung out at the Hacienda. His drug-induced breakdown, when it came, was dramatic. But as he climbed back to sobriety, he oversaw Oasis's rise to become one of the biggest bands in the world. Alan himself becoming one of the figureheads of Britpop. Having sold the label to Sony to stave off bankruptcy, he became disenchanted with the increasingly corporate ethos and left in 1999. Since then he's continued to be an influential figure in the music industry, managing the Libertines and setting up a new label, 359 Music, with Cherry Red.'Studded with diamond anecdotes . . . From mixing sound for My Bloody Valentine on mushrooms, via driving motorists off the road by commissioning billboard posters of Kevin Rowland flashing his pants, to escorting Carl Barat to A&E with one eyeball hanging out of its socket, the book bursts with tall-but-true tales.' – NME

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Q is for Quarry is the seventeenth in the Kinsey Millhone mystery series by Sue Grafton and is based on a true crime.She was a 'Jane Doe', an unidentified white female whose decomposed body was discovered near a quarry off California's Highway 1. The case fell to the Santa Teresa County Sheriff's Department, but the detectives had little to go on, and after months of investigation, the murder remained unsolved. That was eighteen years ago. Now the two men who found the body, both nearing the end of long careers in law enforcement, want one last shot at the case . . . and they turn to Kinsey Millhone to help them find closure. But revisiting the past can be a dangerous business, and what begins with the pursuit of Jane Doe's real identity ends in a high-risk hunt for her killer. Based on an unsolved homicide that occurred in 1969, Q is for Quarry and Grafton's interest in the case have renewed police efforts. The body has been exhumed, and a facial reconstruction made that appears in the last pages of the novel. It is hoped that the photograph will trigger memories that may lead to a positive identification.

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'Immersive, tense, seductive' – Sunday Times'Unputdownable' – Sunday ExpressScott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Pablo Picasso, Cole and Linda Porter, Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos - all are summer guests of Gerald and Sara Murphy. Visionary, misunderstood, and from vastly different backgrounds, the Murphys met and married young, and set forth to create a beautiful world. They alight on Villa America: their coastal oasis of artistic genius, debauched parties, impeccable style and flamboyant imagination. But before long, a stranger enters into their relationship, and their marriage must accommodate an intensity that neither had forseen. When tragedy strikes, their friends reach out to them, but the golden bowl is shattered, and neither Gerald nor Sara will ever be the same.Ravishing, heart-breaking, and written with enviable poise, Villa America delivers on all the promise of Liza Klaussmann's bestselling debut, Tigers in Red Weather. It is an overwhelming, unforgettable novel.

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This book explores the socio-political implications of human heredity from the second half of the nineteenth century to the present postgenomic moment. It addresses three main phases in the politicization of heredity: the peak of radical eugenics (1900-1945), characterized by an aggressive ethos of supporting the transformation of human society via biological knowledge; the repositioning, after 1945, of biological thinking into a liberal-democratic, human rights framework; and the present postgenomic crisis in which the genome can no longer be understood as insulated from environmental signals. In Political Biology, Maurizio Meloni argues that thanks to the ascendancy of epigenetics we may be witnessing a return to soft heredity - the idea that these signals can cause changes in biology that are themselves transferable to succeeding generations. This book will be of great interest to scholars across science and technology studies, the philosophy and history of science, and political and social theory.

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The Politics of Feminist Knowledge Transfer draws together analytical work on gender training and gender expertise. Its chapters critically reflect on the politics of feminist knowledge transfer, understood as an inherently political, dynamic and contested process, the overall aim of which is to transform gendered power relations in pursuit of more equal societies, workplaces, and policies. At its core, the work explores the relationship between gender expertise, gender training, and broader processes of feminist transformation arising from knowledge transfer activities. Examining these in a reflective way, the book brings a primarily practice-based debate into the academic arena. With contributions from authors of diverse backgrounds, including academics, practitioners and representatives of gender training institutions, the editors combine a focus on gender expertise and gender training, with more theory-focused chapters.

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