A follow-up to Andrea Wulf`s award-winning & critically acclaimed history of British gardening, this is the story of how George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams & James Madison`s passion for nature, plants, agriculture & gardens shaped the birth of America. Through a series of vignettes spanning the Declaration of Independence to the death of Adams & Jefferson exactly fifty years to the day afterwards, these stories that weave the political, the personal & the botanical & are in turns funny, fascinating & moving. The Founding Gardeners shows that it is impossible to understand these visionary men & the American nation without considering their love of gardening. ...

It is 1919. On a summer`s night in Normandy, a new-born baby is left in a basket outside the home of Albert & Jeanne Arnaud. The childless couple take the foundling in, name him Jean, & decide to raise him as their own, though his parentage remains a mystery. Though Jean`s life is never dull, he grows up knowing little of what lies beyond his local area. Until the day he sets off on his bicycle to discover the world, & encounters a Europe on the threshold of interesting times... ...

This is the page-turning true story of Paul Fronczak, a man who recently discovered that he had been kidnapped as a baby-and how his quest to find out who he really is upturned the genealogy industry, his own family & set in motion the second longest cold-case in US history. In 1964, a woman pretending to be a nurse kidnapped an infant boy named Paul Fronczak from a Chicago hospital. Two years later, police found a boy abandoned outside a variety store in New Jersey. The FBI tracked down Dora Fronczak, the kidnapped infant`s mother, & she identified the abandoned boy as her son. The family spent the next fifty years believing they were whole again-but Paul was always unsure about his true identity. Then, four years ago-spurred on by the birth of his first child, Emma Faith-Paul took a DNA test. The test revealed that he was definitely not Paul Fronczak. From that moment on, Paul has been on a tireless mission to find the man whose life he`s been living-and to discover who abandoned him, & why. Poignant & inspiring, The Foundling is a story about a child lost & a faith found, about the permanence of families & the bloodlines that define you, & about the emotional toll of both losing your identity & rediscovering who you truly are. ...

This is Ayn Rand`s story of Howard Roark, a brilliant architect who dares to stand alone against the hostility of second-hand souls. First published in 1943, this best-selling novel is a passionate defense of individualism & presents an exalted view of man`s creative potential; it is a book about ambition, power, gold & love. ...

The western United States is a region of astonishing open space which has profoundly shaped the American character. Here Reg Saner explores places that can still transform the human spirit with almost sacred power. His essays describe journeys--both physical & spiritual--to areas as remote as they are beautiful. ...

It is short-listed for the Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction. It is the winner of the Jerwood Prize. It is a constellation of everyday digital phenomena is rewiring our inner lives. We are increasingly coaxed from the three-dimensional containment of our pre-digital selves into a wonderful & eerie fourth dimension, a world of ceaseless communication, instant information & global connection. Our portals to this new world have been wedged open, & the silhouette of a figure is slowly taking shape. But what does it feel like to be four-dimensional? How do digital technologies influence the rhythms of our thoughts, the style & tilt of our consciousness? What new sensitivities & sensibilities are emerging with our exposure to the delights, sorrows & anxieties of a networked world? & how do we live in public, with these recoded private lives? Tackling ideas of time, space, friendship, commerce, pursuit & escape, & moving from Hamlet to the ghosts of social media, from Seinfeld to the fall of Gaddafi, from Facebook politics to Oedipus, The Four-Dimensional Human is a highly original & pioneering portrait of life in a digital landscape. ...

A mysterious keepsake, a murdered bride, a legacy of secrets... One balmy June evening in 1881, Phoebe Stanbury stands before the guests at her engagement party: this is her moment, when she will join the renowned Raycraft family & ascend to polite society. As she takes her fiance`s h&, a stranger brandishing a knife steps forward & ends the poor girl`s life. Amid the tumult, he turns to her aristocratic groom & mouths: `I promised I would save you.` The following morning, just a few miles away, timid young legal clerk William Lamb meets a reclusive client, whom he was never meant to meet. He finds the old man terrified & in desperate need of aid: William must keep safe a small casket of yellowing papers, & deliver an enigmatic message: The Finder knows. With its labyrinth of unfolding secrets, Claire Evans` riveting debut will be adored by fans of Kate Mosse, Carlos Ruiz Zafon & Jessie Burton. ...

The Waldseemuller Map of 1507 introduced an astonishing collection of cartological firsts. It was the first map to show the New World as a separate continent, alongside Europe, Africa & Asia
- & the first on which the word ' America' appears. It was the first map to suggest the existence of the Pacific. It was, in short, the first map to depict the whole world as we know it today. Beautiful, fascinating & revealing, it arrived on the scene as Europeans were moving out of the Middle Ages & into the Renaissance, thanks to a tiny group of European mapmakers who pieced together ideas going back to the ancients & through Marco Polo to Vespucci. In The Fourth Part of the World, Toby Lester charts the amazing & colourful history of this map, whose profound influence has been neglected for centuries & which changed the world-view of all humankind.
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THE SECOND NOVEL IN THE CRITICALLY ACCLAIMED CHINA SERIES, FROM THE MILLION-SELLING AUTHOR OF THE RICHARD & JUDY BESTSELLER THE BLACKHOUSE. THE SECOND OPINION The Chinese police have once more been forced to enlist the services of American forensic pathologist Margaret Campbell: this time to investigate a series of four horrific ritual executions that have taken place in Beijing. THE THIRD DEGREE Detective Li Yan is determined to discover just how one of the victims in particular, an American diplomat, became caught up in the slaying. & he is arguably even more determined to have nothing to do with Campbell. THE FOURTH SACRIFICE The polarity that once attracted Yan & Campbell eventually pulls them back into partnership. Yet the closer they are drawn to the truth, the nearer they come to a killer prepared to use extreme force to conceal it. ...

At the end of the nineteenth century European pimps & 'white slavers' established a hugely successful global market for commercial sex & for three turbulent decades before the First World War, Joseph Silver was central to this hidden world of betrayal, intrigue, lust & sexual slavery. Burglar, gun-runner & trafficker in women on four continents, Silver was a disturbed adolescent, youthful predator & adult misogynist whose notoriety was captured in the most confidential correspondence of a dozen countries in the western world. But what those in charge of law-enforcement agencies kept to themselves was how their officers had attempted to use Silver as an informer to infiltrate syndicates, only to have him outwit them as he moved in the dangerous space between police & prostitutes. In this brilliant study, Charles van Onselen situates the private life of one man amidst the demi-monde of the Atlantic world & casts a brilliant light on the most infamous serial killer of all time
- Jack the Ripper.
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