Edward Payson Weston`s 3, 100-mile walk from California to New York, completed on 3 May 1910, was one of his great achievements, but only one. It took him just 77 days. He was 71 years old. For half a century Weston was one of the most famous people in the English-speaking world, as the first age of international celebrity unfolded. The godfather of the pedestrianism movement, he criss-crossed Britain & America on foot earning fame, fortune & notoriety in an athletic career that saw him complete some of the most amazing endurance feats ever witnessed. In this entertaining & wide-ranging book, co-authors Nick Harris, Helen Harris & Paul Marshall, skillfully recreate a vanished world to tell one of the most amazing stories in sporting history. Part social history, part biography, part exposition of the seedy underbelly of Victorian society, this is a work that draws in elements of sporting genius, high stakes gambling, drug abuse, & marital scandal. A Man in a Hurry is one man`s flamboyant athletic journey from the Gold Rush to the Jazz Age, the story of a dreamer, schemer & ladies man who met with Presidents & royalty, crooks & knaves. With its colourful detail, historical context & readable style, this groundbreaking work is an important addition to the sports literature canon. ...

” 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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Paris Small Shops is Herb Lester’s guide to a more specialised shopping experience. The pocket-sized map lists & gives a bit of background information on 40 shops where you can buy anything from everyday essentials, art supplies, to scented candles & even taxidermy. Including the odd café, this map shows shops dating back hundreds of years as well as ones that are new in town. With a wide range of places to visit in France’s capital this map will introduce to a whole new world of shops tucked away in back streets as well on grand boulevards. Maps in this series are an eclectic selection of quirky titles designed to illuminate particular aspects of a city or a district. Each title lists publishers’ recommendations, ranging from the already famous attractions to little gems known only to the well informed locals, all with brief descriptions &, where appropriate, contact details. Accompanying maps are designed to highlight the locations of the recommended places rather than to provide an accurate presentation of the street network. To see other titles in this series please click on the series link. ...

The New York Times bestseller The stories in A Manual for Cleaning Women make for one of the most remarkable unsung collections in twentieth-century American fiction. With extraordinary honesty & magnetism, Lucia Berlin invites us into her rich, itinerant life: the drink & the mess & the pain & the beauty & the moments of surprise & of grace. Her voice is uniquely witty, anarchic & compassionate. Celebrated for many years by those in the know, she is about to become
- a decade after her death
- the writer everyone is talking about. The collection will be introduced by Lydia Davis. ` With Lucia Berlin we are very far away from the parlours of Boston & New York & quite far away, too, from the fiction of manners, unless we are speaking of very bad manners.. . The writer Lucia Berlin most puts me in mind of is the late Richard Yates.` LRB, 1999

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The New York Times bestseller ` This selection of 43 stories should by all rights see Lucia Berlin as lauded as Jean Rhys or Raymond Carver` Independent The stories in A Manual for Cleaning Women make for one of the most remarkable unsung collections in twentieth-century American fiction. With extraordinary honesty & magnetism, Lucia Berlin invites us into her rich, itinerant life: the drink & the mess & the pain & the beauty & the moments of surprise & of grace. Her voice is uniquely witty, anarchic & compassionate. Celebrated for many years by those in the know, she is about to become
- a decade after her death
- the writer everyone is talking about. The collection will be introduced by Lydia Davis. ` With Lucia Berlin we are very far away from the parlours of Boston & New York & quite far away, too, from the fiction of manners, unless we are speaking of very bad manners.. . The writer Lucia Berlin most puts me in mind of is the late Richard Yates.` LRB, 1999

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`I devoured A Manual for Heartache in one sitting... a kind, honest & wise book about how to make a friend of sadness.` Rachel Joyce When Cathy Rentzenbrink was still a teenager, her happy family was torn apart by an unthinkable tragedy. In A Manual for Heartache she describes how she learnt to live with grief & loss & find joy in the world again. She explores how to cope with life at its most difficult & overwhelming & how we can emerge from suffering forever changed, but filled with hope. This is a moving, warm & uplifting book that offers solidarity & comfort to anyone going through a painful time, whatever it might be. It`s a book that will help to soothe an aching heart & assure its readers that they`re not alone. ...

This is a new translation of Georges Simenon`s atmospheric novel set in the bustling streets of Paris, book nine in the new Penguin Maigret series. Slowly the Czech was becoming animated, but in a muted way, so typical of the man. Maigret now noticed his hands, which were long, surprisingly white & dotted with freckles. They seemed to reach out & take part in the conversation. ` Let`s be clear that it`s not your professionalism which I question. If you understand nothing, & I mean absolutely nothing, it`s because from the very start you`ve been working with facts which had been falsified.` Maigret sets out to prove the innocence of a man condemned to death for a brutal murder. As his audacious plan to uncover the truth unfolds, he encounters rich American expatriates, some truly dangerous characters & their hidden motives. Penguin is publishing the entire series of Maigret novels. ” Compelling, remorseless, brilliant”. (John Gray). ” One of the greatest writers of the twentieth century... Simenon was unequalled at making us look inside, though the ability was masked by his brilliance at absorbing us obsessively in his stories”. (Guardian). ”A supreme writer.. .unforgettable vividness”. (Independent). Georges Simenon was born in Liege, Belgium, in 1903. Best known in Britain as the author of the Maigret books, his prolific output of over 400 novels & short stories have made him a household name in continental Europe. He died in 1989 in Lausanne, Switzerl&, where he had lived for the latter part of his life. ...