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Author & theatre producer Julius Green has been given unprecedented access to archives in the UK & USA & has uncovered unpublished & unperformed plays, as well as previously unknown facts & correspondence.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Includes:: illustrations, deleted extracts, unused ideas, two unpublished Poirot stories & a lost Miss Marple.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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Incomer Gloria French is at first welcomed in the Cotswold village of Piddlebury. She seems like a do-gooder par excellence, raising funds for the church & caring for the elderly. But she has a bad habit of borrowing things & not giving them back, so when she is discovered dead, poisoned by a bottle of elderberry wine, folk in the village don`t mourn her passing too intently. Parish councillor Jerry Tarrant hires Agatha Raisin to track down the murderer. But the village is creepy & secretive & the residents don`t seem to want Agatha to find who the murderer is, & Agatha`s investigations are hampered by the emotional upset of finding her ex, James Lacey, has fallen in love with young detective Toni Gilmour. & now the murderer is targeting Agatha! Praise for the Agatha Raisin series: `M.C. Beaton`s imperfect heroine is an absolute gem` Publishers Weekly ` Clever red herrings & some wicked unfinished business guarantees that the listener will pant for a sequel` The Times (audio review) ...

Topographic coverage of mainland Spain at 1:50, 000 in the MTN50 (Mapa Topográfico Nacional) series from the Centro Nacional de Información Geografica, the country’s civilian survey organization. The maps have contours at 20m intervals, enhanced by relief shading, plus colouring and/or graphics to show different types of terrain, vegetation or land use. Boundaries of national parks & other protected areas are marked. In addition to all the usual information featured on topographic mapping at this scale, detailed presentation of the road & rail networks, rural tracks & paths, etc, the maps also show campsites & mountain refuges. On more recent editions some GRs, the official long-distance hiking routes, are also marked (although not as clearly as on hiking maps from other publishers). Each map covers 29.5x 18.5 km (with adjustments in the border or coastal areas). The maps have a 1-km UTM grid, plus margin ticks for latitude & longitude at 1` intervals. Map legend is in Spanish only.HOW TO CHOOSE THE RIGHT 50K MAP: all the titles in CNIG’s 200K Provincial Road Maps series at 1:200, 000 are overprinted with the grid for the 1:50, 000 maps & can be used to see the area covered by each 50K title. TO SEE THE LIST OF TITLES IN THIS SERIES PLEASE CLICK ON THE SERIES LINK.PLEASE NOTE
- MAP TITLES: the grids shown on our website serve both the civilian & the military 1:50, 000 topographic series. Although the areas covered by maps in both series are identical (apart from some border or coastal sheets), occasionally map titles differ – only one title is shown on the grid, usually the military one. In Galicia, the Basque country & in the Catalan speaking areas the tendency now is to use local place names rather than the often better known Castilian ones. Where possible, both versions are included in our titles. Map titles listed on our website are based on information received by us at the time of publication, but sometimes maps arrive showing a completely different title! As long as the map number is as ordered, the correct map has been supplied.
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` The kind of vision the world needs right now... Pankaj Mishra shouldn`t stop thinking` Christopher de Bellaigue, Financial Times` This is the most astonishing, convincing, & disturbing book I`ve read in years` Joe Sacco` Urgent, profound & extraordinarily timely` John Banville How can we explain the origins of the great wave of paranoid hatreds that seem inescapable in our close-knit world
- from American `shooters` & ISIS to Trump, from a rise in vengeful nationalism across the world to racism & misogyny on social media? In Age of Anger, Pankaj Mishra answers our bewilderment by casting his gaze back to the eighteenth century, before leading us to the present. He shows that as the world became modern those who were unable to fulfil its promises
- freedom, stability & prosperity
- were increasingly susceptible to demagogues. The many who came late to this new world or were left, or pushed, behind, reacted in horrifyingly similar ways: intense hatred of invented enemies, attempts to re-create an imaginary golden age, & self-empowerment through spectacular violence. It was from among the ranks of the disaffected that the militants of the 19th century arose
- angry young men who became cultural nationalists in Germany, messianic revolutionaries in Russia, bellicose chauvinists in Italy, & anarchist terrorists internationally. Today, just as then, the wider embrace of mass politics, technology, & the pursuit of wealth & individualism has cast many more millions adrift in a literally demoralized world, uprooted from tradition but still far from modernity
- with the same terrible results Making startling connections & comparisons, Age of Anger is a book of immense urgency & profound argument. It is a history of our present predicament unlike any other.




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` This is the most astonishing, convincing, & disturbing book I`ve read in years` Joe Sacco ` Urgent, profound & extraordinarily timely...throws light on our contemporary predicament, when the neglected & dispossessed of the world have suddenly risen up to transform the world we thought we knew` John Banville How can we explain the origins of the great wave of paranoid hatreds that seem inescapable in our close-knit world
- from American `shooters` & ISIS to Trump, from a rise in vengeful nationalism across the world to racism & misogyny on social media? In Age of Anger, Pankaj Mishra answers our bewilderment by casting his gaze back to the eighteenth century, before leading us to the present. He shows that as the world became modern those who were unable to fulfil its promises
- freedom, stability & prosperity
- were increasingly susceptible to demagogues. The many who came late to this new world or were left, or pushed, behind, reacted in horrifyingly similar ways: intense hatred of invented enemies, attempts to re-create an imaginary golden age, & self-empowerment through spectacular violence. It was from among the ranks of the disaffected that the militants of the 19th century arose
- angry young men who became cultural nationalists in Germany, messianic revolutionaries in Russia, bellicose chauvinists in Italy, & anarchist terrorists internationally. Today, just as then, the wider embrace of mass politics, technology, & the pursuit of wealth & individualism has cast many more millions adrift in a literally demoralized world, uprooted from tradition but still far from modernity
- with the same terrible results Making startling connections & comparisons, Age of Anger is a book of immense urgency & profound argument. It is a history of our present predicament unlike any other.




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Widely regarded as one of Edith Wharton`s greatest achievements, The Age of Innocence is not only subtly satirical, but also a sometimes dark & disturbing comedy of manners in its exploration of the `eternal triangle` of love. Set against the backdrop of upper-class New York society during the 1870s, the author`s combination of powerful prose combined with a thoroughly researched & meticulous evocation of the manners & style of the period, has delighted readers since the novel`s first publication in 1920. In 1921 The Age of Innocence achieved a double distinction
- it won the Pulitzer Prize & it was the first time this prestigious award had been won by a woman author.
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J. M. Coetzee’s “ Age of Iron” is another example of why this author in particular has won both the Booker Prize & the Nobel Prize for Literature. Here, J. M. Coetzee brings his insight & deft use of language to bear on one of the darkest episodes of our times. In Cape Town, South Africa, an elderly classics professor writes a letter to her distant daughter, recounting the strange & disturbing events of her dying days. She has been opposed to the lies & brutality of apartheid all her life, but now she finds herself coming face-to-face with its true horrors: the hounding by the police of her servant`s son, the burning of a nearby black township, the murder by security forces of a teenage activist who seeks refuge in her house. Through it all, her only companion, the only person to whom she can confess her mounting anger & despair, is a homeless man who one day appears on her doorstep. ...

A nine-year-old Kurdish boy plays in his village in the Persian mountains, gazing over the land of his fathers & forefathers. But when messengers from the hills bring whispers of war & rumours that the Shah`s army is on the march, he must stand alongside his villagers & fight for their l&. Years later, he can only faintly recall the brutal murder of his father & cousins. Orphaned on the battlefield, conscripted & given a new name, Reza is married & has risen up the ranks to become Captain. But there are stirrings within his heart. He will soon be sent west to Kermanshah, to rule as the Shah`s servant in the land of his birth. ...