Originally published in weekly instalments, Nine Suitcases is the Hungarian writer Bela Zsolt`s harrowing memoir of his experiences in the ghetto of Nagyvarad & as a forced labourer in the Ukraine. Written with exceptional freshness & a devastating blend of angry despair & cool detachment, Zsolt
- one of the earliest writers on the Holocaust
- provides not only a rare insight into Hungarian fascism, but a shocking exposure of the cruelty, indifference, selfishness, cowardice & betrayal of which human beings
- the victims no less than the perpetrators
- are capable in extreme circumstances. Interspersed with moments of grotesque farce, grim irony & occasional memories of human kindness, Zsolt`s nightmarish but meticulously realistic chronicle of smaller & larger crimes against humanity is as riveting as it is horrifying.



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Winter, 1980. The Yorkshire Ripper has just claimed his thirteenth victim. Ripper thirteen, police nil. As public anger against the police mounts, Assistant Chief Constable Peter Hunter is sent to take over the investigation. The Strafford Shootings remain unsolved, & the murders of the Jubilee summer of 1977 are still attributed to the Ripper. But Hunter soon realises that all is not as it seems
- & that the police are more heavily implicated in the killings than anyone could have imagined. Jack Whitehead, alone & mad in a mental institution after trying to exorcise the demons from his head with hammer & nail, appears to hold the key. What is the connection between the Ripper & this fresh spate of violence? & what will happen when these men's separate hells collide?
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Hidden away in the Record Department of the sprawling Ministry of Truth, Winston Smith skilfully rewrites the past to suit the needs of the Party. Yet he inwardly rebels against the totalitarian world he lives in, which demands absolute obedience & controls him through the all-seeing telescreens & the watchful eye of Big Brother, symbolic head of the Party. In his longing for truth & liberty, Smith begins a secret love affair with a fellow-worker Julia, but soon discovers the true price of freedom is betrayal. ...

May 1983. John Pigott, an overweight lawyer as noble in his intentions as he is a slave to his desires, finds that the man convicted for Clare Kemplay's murder might be innocent
- & that all the people who could answer his questions are dead. June 1977. BJ the rent boy's life is in danger for what he knows, plagued by the horrors he has witnessed. Soon he must confront the possibility that the man purporting to be his saviour is the devil himself. December 1974. Maurice Jobson, the senior policeman known as The Owl, is sucked into a morass of corruption where murder & cruelty present themselves as the only tools for survival. Nineteen Eighty Three is a dark, disturbing & intense finale to The Red Riding Quartet, one of the finest series in contemporary British crime writing.
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It was the year of sex & drugs & rock & roll; it was also the year of the Martin Luther King & Bobby Kennedy assassinations, Prague Spring, the Chicago convention, the anti-war movement & the Tet Offensive, the student rebellion that paralyzed France, Civil Rights, the generation gap, the beginning of the end for the Soviet Union, & the birth of the women's movement. With 1968: The Year that Rocked the World, award-winning journalist Mark Kurlansky has written his magnum opus-a cultural & political history of that world-changing year of social upheaval, when television's impact on global events first became apparent, & where simultaneously, in Paris, Prague, London, Berkeley, Chicago, New York & all over the globe uprisings spontaneously occurred. 1968 encompasses the worlds of youth & music, politics, war, economics, assassinations, riots, & demonstrations-and the media, & shows us how we got to where we are today. 1968 is destined to be Mark Kurlansky's most important & most fascinating book yet. ...

The atlas of the mid 1800's was covered in blank spaces. In the mid 19th century, people decided to discover what lay at the top of the world. Ninety Degrees North chronicles this race for the North Pole & examines what it was that people expected to discover when they got there. Fleming expertly details the eclectic mix of characters that sailed, walked, skied, sledged & ballooned their way towards this polar grail. Legandary figures such as Kane, Hayes, Hall, the Duke of Abruzzi, Cook & Peary are brought to life animatedly. Accounts of their quests are playfully & incisively related as they battle storms, scurvy, the interminable arctic winter, accidents & the regular loss of fingers & toes, guaranteeing that the book is elevated above simply being a list of extraodinary expeditions. ...

In 1932 Evelyn Waugh left the salons of Mayfair for the savannah & rainforest of what was then British Guiana. The result: classic travel-writing. Even Waugh`s comic imagination could not have invented the characters he met in South America, but only he could have described them so perfectly. A cattle-rancher who claimed to be a close friend of the Virgin Mary, a Jesuit missionary with a pet toad that ate burning cigarette ends, a gold-prospector who believed he was guided through the jungle by speaking parrots & many others live on in Waugh`s mordant prose, as do his descriptions of Guyana`s extraordinary landscapes. The author`s journey — on foot, horseback & by boat — was extremely arduous, but he remained an unfailingly astute observer, offering a fascinating picture of the Amerindian peoples through whose lands he travelled. In the afterword to this edition, award-winning novelist Pauline Melville explores the connections between Waugh`s experiences in the region of Guyana from which her own family hails & A Handful of Dust, one of Waugh`s greatest novels, giving a fascinating insight into the creative process & the mind of the man himself. ...

At a hot-dog-eating contest or at a demolition derby, in line at the pharmacy counter waiting for a shingles vaccination, living in a cave with a colony of bats: the Almighty appears in ever-more mysterious ways in Ninety-Nine Stories of God, Joy Williams` surreal, sublime new collection of very short short stories. Each less than a page long, each packing a punch belied by its size, every one of these ninety-nine stories tells of everyday human interaction with an increasingly elusive & arbitrary deity. Haunted by an array of extraordinary historical figures, from Kafka & Tolstoy to O. J. Simpson & Philip K. Dick, but populated by anonymous ordinary people just like you & me, the stories pool seemingly random moments into something deep, dazzling & disconcerting. Bleak & funny, ironic & lyrical, enigmatic & aphoristic, Ninety-Nine Stories of God breaks down the barriers between the everyday & the divine & takes Williams` writing into territories strange & new. ...

Street plan of Niort, part of an extensive series covering French cities & towns from Blay-Foldex, the country’s largest, oldest & most experienced publisher of urban mapping. Blay plans include outer suburbs &, where appropriate, adjoining localities forming part of the urban agglomeration & provide brief descriptions of the town’s main sights, contact details for hotels & other places of interest, etc. The plans show one way streets, car parks & pedestrian zones. Important public buildings are clearly marked & identified. Blay street maps are usually double-sided & include an enlargement for the town centre & a street index with separate lists of “edifices publics”: main public buildings, places of worship, schools, sport facilities, stations, etc. Each of the outer suburbs or the adjoining localities, identified with its postcode, has a separate index. Many titles also provide a road map of the environs. All the text is in French only.PLEASE NOTE: to see the list of Blay-Foldex street plans of French towns & cities please click on the series link – the series description also

Includes:: a comparison between Blay & IGN street plans.

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