The Austro-Hungarian army that marched east & south to confront the Russians & Serbs in the opening campaigns of World War I had a glorious past but a pitiful present. Speaking a mystifying array of languages & lugging outdated weapons, the Austrian troops were hopelessly unprepared for the industrialized warfare that would shortly consume Europe. As prizewinning historian Geoffrey Wawro explains in A Mad Catastrophe, the doomed Austrian conscripts were an unfortunate microcosm of the Austro-Hungarian Empire itself--both equally ripe for destruction. After the assassination of the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand in June 1914, Germany goaded the Empire into a war with Russia & Serbia. With the Germans massing their forces in the west to engage the French & the British, everything--the course of the war & the fate of empires & alliances from Constantinople to London--hinged on the Habsburgs` ability to crush Serbia & keep the Russians at bay. However, Austria-Hungary had been rotting from within for years, hollowed out by repression, cynicism, & corruption at the highest levels. Commanded by a dying emperor, Franz Joseph I, & a querulous celebrity general, Conrad von Hotzendorf, the Austro-Hungarians managed to bungle everything: their ultimatum to the Serbs, their declarations of war, their mobilization, & the pivotal battles in Galicia & Serbia. By the end of 1914, the Habsburg army lay in ruins & the outcome of the war seemed all but decided. Drawing on deep archival research, Wawro charts the decline of the Empire before the war & reconstructs the great battles in the east & the Balkans in thrilling & tragic detail. A Mad Catastrophe is a riveting account of a neglected face of World War I, revealing how a once-mighty empire collapsed in the trenches of Serbia & the Eastern Front, changing the course of European history. ...

A Mad World My Masters is arguably John Simpson`s most popular volume of autobiographical writing. There are only a handful of places left on this earth where you can`t buy a Mc Donald`s hamburger or stay in a Holiday Inn
- & John Simpson has been to them all. This hugely successful volume of writing is a celebration of some of the world`s wilder places. His extraordinary experiences include stories about a television camera that killed people, about how Colonel Gadhaffi farted his way through an interview & how he
- Simpson
- mooned the Queen. From small heroes to big villains, John Simpson is a master of storytelling, carrying within him a sense of wonder & adventure. Having been at the epicentre of many of the world`s flashpoints for over 30 years, Simpson has a journalistic eye for detail & nuance & never holds back from telling you the things you want to know. He is a pro at bringing people & places to life, poking fun where appropriate & never taking the moral high ground for the sake of political correctness.


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Three seasonal stories set in Paris at Christmas, from the celebrated creator of Inspector Maigret. It is Christmas in Paris, but beneath the sparkling lights & glittering decorations lie sinister deeds & dark secrets... This collection brings together three of Simenon`s most enjoyable Christmas tales, newly translated, featuring Inspector Maigret & other characters from the Maigret novels. In `A Maigret Christmas`, the Inspector receives two unexpected visitors on Christmas Day, who lead him on the trail of a mysterious intruder dressed in red & white. In ` Seven Small Crosses in a Notebook`, the sound of alarms over Paris send the police on a cat & mouse chase across the city. & ` The Little Restaurant in Les Ternes (A Christmas Story for Grown-Ups)` tells of a cynical woman who is moved to an unexpected act of festive charity in a nightclub
- one that surprises even her...
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At first sight, Ove is almost certainly the grumpiest man you will ever meet. He thinks himself surrounded by idiots
- neighbours
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A New York Times bestseller In a remarkable career, Edward O. Thorp rose up from nothing to become a professor at MIT, invented card counting & the world`s first wearable computer, beat the casinos of Las Vegas at blackjack & roulette, then became a bestselling author & a hedge fund heavyweight, ushering in a revolution on Wall Street. Now he shares his incredible life story for the first time, revealing how he made his fortune & giving advice to the next generation of investors. An intellectual thrill ride, replete with practical wisdom, A Man for All Markets is a scarcely imaginable tale of ludicrous success. ...

” It`s unbelievable. I just read 200 pages of it & I need the next volume like crack. It`s completely blown my mind”. (Zadie Smith via Twitter on My Struggle Book 1). It is shortlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize 2014. This is a book about leaving your wife & everything you know. It is about fresh starts, about love, about friendship. It is also about the earth-shattering experience of becoming a father, the mundane struggles of family life, ridiculously unsuccessful holidays, humiliating antenatal music classes, fights with quarrelsome neighbours, the emotional strains of children`s` birthday parties & pushing a pram around Stockholm when all you really want to do is write. This is a book about one man`s life but, somehow, about everyone else`s too. A Man in Love, the second book of six in the My Struggle cycle, sees Knausgaard write of tempestuous relationships, the trials of parenthood & an urge to create great art. His singular insight & exhilarating honesty must be read to be believed. Another international sensation from the publishers of HHh H, 1Q84 & Coetzee`s Summertime. Fans include Zadie Smith, Jonathan Lethem, Hari Kunzru, Jeffrey Eugenides, James Wood & Rachel Cusk. ...

He fought & beheaded three Turkish adversaries in duels. He was sold into slavery, then murdered his master to escape. He sailed under a pirate flag, was shipwrecked & marched to the gallows to be hanged, only to be reprieved at the eleventh hour. & all this happened before he was thirty years old. This is Captain John Smith`s life. Everyone knows the story of Pocahontas, & how in 1607 she saved John Smith. & were it not for Smith`s leadership, the Jamestown colony would surely have failed. Yet Smith was a far more ambitious explorer & soldier of fortune than these tales suggest
- & a far more ambitious self-promoter, too. With A Man Most Driven, Firstbrook delivers a riveting, enlightening dissection of this myth-making man, England`s arrival on the world stage, & the creation of America.
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When Asad was eight years old, his mother was shot in front of him. With his father in hiding, he was swept alone into the great wartime migration that has scattered the Somali people throughout the world. This extraordinary book tells Asad`s story. Serially betrayed by the people who promised to care for him, Asad lived his childhood at a sceptical remove from the adult world, living in a bewildering number of places, from the cosmopolitan streets of inner-city Nairobi to towns deep in the Ethiopian desert. By the time he reached the cusp of adulthood, Asad had made good as a street hustler, brokering relationships between hardnosed Ethiopian businessmen & bewildered Somali refugees. He also courted the famously beautiful Foosiya, & married her, to the astonishment of his peers. Buoyed by success in work & in love, Asad put $1, 200 in his pocket & made his way down the length of the African continent to Johannesburg, whose streets he believed to be lined with gold. So began an adventure in a country richer & more violent than he could possibly have imagined.A Man of Good Hope is the story of a person shorn of the things we have come to believe make us human
- personal possessions, parents, siblings. & yet Asad`s is an intensely human life, one suffused with dreams & desires & a need to leave something of permanence on this earth.
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Through the windows of the slowly turning spacecraft they looked out at the place where the sun had once been, & there was the moon: a huge, magnificent sphere bathed in the eerie blue light of earthshine, each crater rendered in ghostly detail. The race to the moon was won spectacularly by Apollo 11 on 20 July 1969. When astronauts Neil Armstrong & Buzz Aldrin took their `giant leap for mankind` across a ghostly lunar landscape, they were watched by some 600 million people on Earth 240, 000 miles away. A Man on the Moon is the definitive account of the heroic Apollo programme: from the tragedy of the fire in Apollo 1 during a simulated launch, Apollo 8`s bold pioneering flight around the moon, through the euphoria of the first moonwalk, to the discoveries made by the first scientist on the moon aboard Apollo 17. Drawing on hundreds of hours of in-depth interviews with the astronauts & mission personnel, this is the story of the twentieth century`s greatest human achievement, minute-by-minute, through the eyes of those who were there.` Impressive & illuminating` -Tom Hanks` The authoriative masterpiece`
- Los Angeles Times
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Set in the in the atmospheric & squalid streets of Paris, Maigret sets out to prove the innocence of a man condemned to death for a brutal murder. In another one of Maigret's unconventional & audacious plans, he arranges the escape of the condemned man in an attempt to prove his theory. The presumed murderer goes on the run across Paris & its suburbs, dropping misleading clues along the way & leading Maigret into the labyrinthine twists of the mystery. Maigret is in for more than he bargained for, as he encounters rich American expatriates, dangerous foreigners & their hidden motives. ...