Murdo, a teenager obsessed with music, dreams of a life beyond his Scottish island home. His dad Tom has recently lost his wife & stumbles towards the future, terrified of losing control of what remains of his family life Both are in search of something as they set out on an expedition into the American South. As they travel they encounter a new world & we discover whether the hopes of youth can conquer the fears of age. Dirt Road is a major novel exploring the brevity of life, the agonising demands of love & the lure of the open road. It is also a beautiful book about the power of music & all that it can offer. ...

Dirty Beasts is a collection of hilarious animal rhymes from the World`s NUMBER ONE Storyteller! Reissued in the exciting new Roald Dahl branding. A collection of (mainly) grisly beasts out for human blood, ranging from Gocky-Wock the crocodile to Sting-A-Ling the scorpion. Described in verse with all Dahl`s usual gusto & illustrated in suitably lurid style by Quentin Blake. ”A true genius.. . Roald Dahl is my hero”. (David Walliams). Exciting, bold & instantly recognisable with Quentin Blake`s inimitable artwork. Listen to DIRTY BEASTS (with REVOLTING RHYMES) & other Roald Dahl audiobooks read by some very famous voices, including Kate Winslet, David Walliams & Steven Fry
- plus there are added squelchy soundeffects from Pinewood Studios! Look out for new Roald Dahl apps in the App store & Google Play- including the disgusting TWIT OR MISS! inspired by the revolting Twits. Look out for the whole collection of wondercrump Roald Dahl books!
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This is the entertaining biography of Edward VII & his playboy lifestyle, by Stephen Clarke, author of 1000 Years of Annoying the French & A Year in the Merde. Despite fierce opposition from his mother, Queen Victoria, Edward VII was always passionately in love with France. He had affairs with the most famous Parisian actresses, courtesans & can-can dancers. He spoke French more elegantly than English. He was the first ever guest to climb the Eiffel Tower with Gustave Eiffel, in defiance of an official English ban on his visit. He turned his French seduction skills into the diplomatic prowess that sealed the Entente Cordiale. A quintessentially English king? Pas du tout! Stephen Clarke argues that as ` Dirty Bertie`, Edward learned all the essentials in life from the French. ...

Pedro Juan Gutiérrez`s Dirty Havana Trilogy tells the story of Pedro Juan, an ex-radio journalist who wanders from one odd job to the next, half-disgusted & half-fascinated by his predicament. Working as a garbage-man, dealing on the black market, selling marijuana, & hustling lady tourists off the streets, Pedro Juan throws himself wholeheartedly into the pleasures of the flesh in his squalid surroundings: drink, sex & more sex. These novels are many things: visceral & unforgettably picaresque, a damning portrait of vice & poverty in a third-world country, & an insane journey into the condemned soul of a sexual deviant- the title itself is probably responsible for Pedro Juan Gutiérrez’s reputation as the master of ‘dirty realism’. You can easily sense from reading the text that this is written by someone very close to the core of the material- Havana itself. Living in Havana, Gutiérrez began to work selling ice cream & newspapers when he was eleven years old; he was a soldier, swimming & kayak instructor, agricultural worker, technician in construction, technical designer, radio speaker & journalist for 26 years. Not only this, but nowadays he is a painter, sculptor & author of several poetry books. Gutiérrez depicts life in the shady alleys of Havana with his unadorned style- without taking any political stance, his books describe contemporary Cuba in an unembellished way, & his life most certainly informs this style. ...

In Victorian London, filth was everywhere: horse traffic filled the streets with dung, household rubbish went uncollected, cesspools brimmed with ”night soil, ” graveyards teemed with rotting corpses, the air itself was choked with smoke. In this intimately visceral book, Lee Jackson guides us through the underbelly of the Victorian metropolis, introducing us to the men & women who struggled to stem a rising tide of pollution & dirt, & the forces that opposed them. Through thematic chapters, Jackson describes how Victorian reformers met with both triumph & disaster. Full of individual stories & overlooked details--from the dustmen who grew rich from recycling, to the peculiar history of the public toilet--this riveting book gives us a fresh insight into the minutiae of daily life & the wider challenges posed by the unprecedented growth of the Victorian capital. ...

In 1789, Alexander Mackenzie traveled 1200 miles on the immense river in Canada that now bears his name, in search of the fabled Northwest Passage that had eluded mariners for hundreds of years. In 2016, the acclaimed memoirist Brian Castner retraced Mackenzie`s route by canoe in a grueling journey -- & discovered the Passage he could not find. Disappointment River is a dual historical narrative & travel memoir that at once transports readers back to the heroic age of North American exploration & places them in a still rugged but increasingly fragile Arctic wilderness in the process of profound alteration by the dual forces of globalization & climate change. Fourteen years before Lewis & Clark, Mackenzie set off to cross the continent of North America with a team of voyageurs & Chipewyan guides, to find a trade route to the riches of the East. What he found was a river that he named ” Disappointment.” Mackenzie died thinking he had failed. He was wrong. In this book, Brian Castner not only retells the story of Mackenzie`s epic voyages in vivid prose, he personally retraces his travels, battling exhaustion, exposure, mosquitoes, white water rapids & the threat of bears. He transports readers to a world rarely glimpsed in the media, of tar sands, thawing permafrost, remote indigenous villages &, at the end, a wide open Arctic Ocean that could become a far-northern Mississippi of barges & pipelines & oil money. ...

Perils of the Atlantic is a chronicle of the most frightening episodes in the maritime history of the North Atlantic. Acclaimed maritime scholar William Flayhart has spent much of the last forty years in search of material from which to create colourful narratives. Many of us know the stories of the Titanic & the Lusitania-both tragedies causing loss of life whilst making the ships themselves immortal but there are also many little-known accounts of extraordinary survivals at sea. Here Flayhart offers classic ocean liner disaster stories while bringing to light compelling lesser-known episodes which illustrate man's ongoing battle with the sea. ...

The River Thames has been a vital lifeline for London since Roman warships sailed along it to the newly founded town of Londinium. Even then the peaceful-looking river had a lethal aspect which deceived many Thames sailors. Throughout the centuries the River Thames has claimed the lives of crews of small boats & large naval warships, the scale of the tragedies growing with the sizes of the vessels involved. The danger to shipping was accepted as a necessary risk in order to keep trade flowing into London & many of the earlier tragedies, in the years before widespread news reporting, were quickly forgotten
- at least until the wreck resurfaced in the Thames mud. From the little-known to the worst disaster in Thames history, the Princess Alice collision in 1878 with the loss of around 650 people, this illustrated book chronicles the surprising number of disasters & tragedies to have occurred on the River Thames up to the present day.
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Tsunamis, earthquakes, floods, bird flu, international terrorism
- the world seems to get more dangerous by the day. Or does
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Dr Siri Paiboun may be in his seventy-third year, but he`s still as sturdy as a jungle boar
- & as crafty as one. Reluctant coroner
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