' You have to be on your guard when you go back to special places. You may be able to locate them easily enough on the map, but maps tell only one story. Times change & places & people with them. The memory plays curious tricks, & things aren't always as you remember or expect'. Twenty years ago, Tom Fort drove his little red car onto the ferry at Felixstowe, bound for all points east. Eastern Europe was still a faraway place, just emerging from its half-century of waking nightmare, blinking, injured, full of fears but importantly full of hope too. Things were different then. Czechoslovakia was still Czechoslovakia, Russia was the USSR & the Warsaw Pact had not formally dissolved. But what did exist then, as they do now, were the rivers: the nations' lifeblood. It was along & by these rivers that Fort travelled around Eastern Europe meeting its people & immersing himself in its culture. Since that trip though, much has changed & in more recent years around one million Poles have settled in Britain. Fort's local paper has a Polish edition, his supermarket has a full range of Polish bread, sausage & beer & an influx of Polish businesses opened in his town centre. And it's not just the Poles, his gym has a Lithuanian trainer & the woman who cuts his hair is from Hungary. As a tide of people began to leave Eastern Europe & settle in the UK, Tom Fort started to wonder about what they were leaving behind & whether the friends he had made all those years ago remained. & so he decided to make the journey again, travelling against the flow of the steady human stream to explore the once familiar places. As he did so, many began to return as the recession took hold of Western Europe. Tom was keen to find out what had changed & how the places, people & way of life had moved on & of course fit in a spot of fishing along the way. ...

Written by the author of Thirty Miles: A Local Journey in Food, this book presents an intriguing adventure that strikes at the heart of the cuisine along the Mekong River. It tells how the beating heart of a cobra snake contrasts with the remarkable everyday cuisine of Cambodia. ...

Translated from the Arabic, intifada means the shivering caused by fever. In political terms it means an explosion. The Palestinian uprising erupted in the Gaza strip in December 1987 after 20 years of Israeli military occupation. It quickly spread to the West Bank & Jerusalem. What the world saw of the intifada were the photographs of Israeli soldiers breaking Palstinians' bones, Palestinians hurling Molotov cocktails at Jewish housewives or rocks at soldiers. The author writes about the real life behind those photographs. She travelled throughout the West Bank & the Gaza Strip interviewing both Jews & Palestinians in an attempt to document their lives. She watched the intifada flourish & then wane, Middle East peace talks come & go, & more frightening, the lengths to which people of both sides are driven when they become desperate. Weaving together accounts of weeks spent with armed militant factions of the PLO, the memories of a Holocaust survivor who defended the Palestinians in military courts for 25 years, the faded dreams of the Israeli Left & the emotional impact of occupation on the children, the author builds a complex picture of the new Sparta of the Middle East. Part reportage, part travel book, this is a personal account of the stories of people trapped by history & geography. ...

Simon Yates is the man who cut the rope in Joe Simpson`s award-winning account of their struggle for survival in ” Touching the Void”. In this book, Yates recounts how he & three companions climbed the world`s largest vertical rock-face, in the Chilean Andes. ...

Sacrificed to further a father`s blood-soaked career; sacrificed for the common good; sacrificed, then forgotten. In his compelling prequel to The Successor, Kadare draws us into a land deprived of choice, a country under a reign of terror. Published here in English for the first time, the spellbinding Agamemnon`s Daughter, written in Albania in the 1980s & smuggled into France a few pages at a time, reveals a world where fear is an instrument of power, but the individual survives despite the odds. From the winner of the first Man Booker International Prize comes a searing story of love denied, then shattered under the chilling wheels of the state. Through the impeccably crafted, incisive tale of a thwarted lover`s odyssey through a single day, we are given a true sense of how hard it can be to remain human in a world ruled by fear & suspicion. ...

This miscellany explores the fascinating & enigmatic world created by the undisputed ` Queen of Crime`, Agatha Christie. Examining her place in literary history, her books & her iconic characters, including Hercule Poirot & Miss Marple, this unique collection

Includes:: facts, trivia "es that feature in Christie`s legendary stories & the subsequent film & television adaptations. The Agatha Christie Miscellany will also delve into the secrets, mysteries & tricks that made Christie the most sensational & successful mystery writer of her time. For example, how is it that she managed to keep us guessing the murderer until the very end? Looking at her life & the influences on her writing, this entertaining & informative miscellany will, above all, unravel the secrets of Agatha Christie`s phenomenal success.

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Janet Morgan`s definitive & authorised biography of Agatha Christie, with a new retrospective foreword by the author. Agatha Christie (1890-1976), the world`s bestselling author, is a public institution. Her creations, Hercule Poirot & Miss Marple, have become fiction`s most legendary sleuths & her ingenuity has captured the imagination of generations of readers. But although she lived to a great age & was prolific, she remained elusively shy & determinedly private. Given sole access to family papers & other protected material, Janet Morgan`s definitive biography unravels Agatha Christie`s life, work & relationships, creating a revealing & faithfully honest portrait. The book has delighted readers of Christie`s detective stories for more than 30 years with its clear view of her career & personality, & this edition

Includes:: a new foreword by the author reflecting on the longevity of Agatha Christie`s extraordinary success & popularity.

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A revealing & witty new examination of how Agatha Christie became the world`s most successful & popular female playwright, including details of never-before-published scripts & stories. Published in celebration of Agatha Christie`s 125th birthday, Curtain Up! is an essential purchase for Agatha Christie fans worldwide. Everyone knows that The Mousetrap is the world`s longest-running play, but this first ever book dedicated to Agatha Christie as a playwright tells how Christie prevailed against the male-dominated establishment to be the only woman to have three plays in the West End at the same time & became the most popular & successful female playwright in the world. Author & theatre producer Julius Green has been given unprecedented access to archives in the UK & USA & has uncovered unpublished & unperformed plays, as well as previously unknown facts & correspondence. Agatha Christie was a skilful & accomplished stage writer, & this long-awaited book is a fascinating, funny & revealing tale that theatregoers & Agatha Christie fans won`t want to miss. ...

Agatha Christie`s Complete Secret Notebooks brings together for the first time Secret Notebooks & Murder in the Making, two volumes that explore the fascinating contents of her 73 notebooks. This

Includes:: illustrations, deleted extracts, unused ideas, two unpublished Poirot stories & a lost Miss Marple. When Agatha Christie died in 1976, aged 85, she had become the world`s most popular author. With sales of more than two billion copies worldwide in more than 100 countries, she had achieved the impossible
- more than one book every year since the 1920s, every one a bestseller. So prolific was Agatha Christie`s output
- 66 crime novels, 20 plays, 6 romance books under a pseudonym & over 150 short stories
- it was often claimed that she had a photographic memory. Was this true? Or did she resort over those 55 years to more mundane methods of working out her ingenious crimes? Following the death of Agatha`s daughter, Rosalind, at the end of 2004, a remarkable secret was revealed. Unearthed among her affairs at the family home of Greenway were Agatha Christie`s private notebooks, 73 handwritten volumes of notes, lists & drafts outlining all her plans for her many books, plays & stories. Buried in this treasure trove, all in her unmistakable handwriting, are revelations & details that will fascinate anyone who has ever read or watched an Agatha Christie story. Christie archivist & expert John Curran leads the reader through the six decades of Agatha Christie`s writing career, unearthing some remarkable clues to her success & a number of never-before-published excerpts & stories from her archives. This book features Agatha`s original ending of her very first book, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, painstakingly transcribed from her notebooks. It also

Includes:: a number of short stories from the archives reproduced in full, including the unpublished The Man Who Knew, How I Created Hercule Poirot, & an early draft for a Miss Marple story, The Case of the Caretaker`s Wife.






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Agatha has fallen in love
- again. This time it`s the local gardener, George Marston, she has her eye on. But competition for
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