It`s 1946 & author Juliet Ashton can`t think what to write next. Out of the blue, she receives a letter from Dawsey Adams of Guernsey
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A couple in their thirties live in a small rented cottage in a quiet part of Tokyo. They work at home as freelance writers. They no longer have very much to say to one another. One day a cat invites itself into their small kitchen. She is a beautiful creature. She leaves, but the next day comes again, & then again & again. New, small joys accompany the cat; the days have more light & colour. Life suddenly seems to have more promise for the husband & wife; they go walking together, talk & share stories of the cat & its little ways, play in the nearby Garden. But then something happens that will change everything again. The Guest Cat is an exceptionally moving & beautiful novel about the nature of life & the way it feels to live it. The book won Japan`s Kiyama Shohei Literary Award, & was a bestseller in France & America. ...

The Guest Log contains plenty of room for recording your visitors aboard, as well as information about your cruises. Reference pages are also included, covering such topics as: Equipment checklist, rules of the road, & more. Pages are also provided for recording important information about your vessel. ...

This summer, I went on holiday to New York, to visit Aunt Gloria & Salim. While I was there, a painting was stolen from the Guggenheim Museum, where Aunt Gloria works. Everyone was very worried & upset. I did not see what the problem was. I do not see the point of paintings, even if they are worth £9.8 million. Perhaps that`s because of my very unusual brain, which works on a different operating system to everyone else`s. But then Aunt Gloria was blamed for the theft
- & Aunt Gloria is family. & I realised just how important it was to find the painting, & discover who really had taken it.
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My name is Ted Spark. Three months ago, I solved the mystery of how my cousin Salim disappeared from a pod on the London Eye. This is the story of my second mystery. This summer, I went on holiday to New York, to visit Aunt Gloria & Salim. While I was there, a painting was stolen from the Guggenheim Museum, where Aunt Gloria works. Then Aunt Gloria was blamed for the theft, & I realised just how important it was to find the painting, & discover who really had taken it. ...

For most people, being a single mother to three boys (two of them teenagers), sorting out your feelings for an ex-boyfriend who`s now an international film star, pacifying an elderly father who keeps asking why you`re not married, tolerating your bigoted brother, while keeping out of the way of a dismissive film producer who seems to have made a mission out of annoying you, would be quite enough of a challenge. Annie Lester however, is not only trying to tackle all this
- she`s also doing it in the small Gulf emirate of Hawar where, in the summer of 2002, the impact of America`s decision to invade Iraq is just beginning to be felt. As her well-organised life begins to unravel in the most unexpected ways, Annie has to make some difficult decisions, & question where her loyalties lie. Are her sons defined by who they are, or by what they do? Can a British woman ever really be at home in the Middle East? & can James Hartley, the blue-eyed heartthrob adored by millions, really be serious about someone as ordinary as Annie Lester believes herself to be?
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The memory of war will stay with a man longer than anything else. Dawn, mist clearing over the rice fields, a burning Vietnamese village, & a young war photographer gets the shot that might make his career. The image, of a staring soldier in the midst of mayhem, will become one of the great photographs of the war. But what he has seen in that village is more than he can bear, & he flees. Jonathan drifts on to Japan, to lose himself in the vastness of Tokyo, where there are different kinds of pictures to be taken: peacetime pictures of crowds & subways & cherry blossom. & pictures of a girl with whom he is no longer lost: innumerable pictures of Kumiko, on the streets & in the rain & in the heat of the summer. Yet even here in this alien city, his history will catch up with him: that photograph & his responsibility in taking it; his responsibility as a witness to war, & as a witness to other events buried far deeper in his past. The Gun Room is a powerful exploration of image & memory, & of the moral complexity & emotional consequences of the experience of war. ...

The memory of war will stay with a man longer than anything else. Dawn, mist clearing over the rice fields, a burning Vietnamese village, & a young war photographer gets the shot that might make his career. The image, of a staring soldier in the midst of mayhem, will become one of the great photographs of the war. But what he has seen in that village is more than he can bear, & he flees. Jonathan drifts on to Japan, to lose himself in the vastness of Tokyo, where there are different kinds of pictures to be taken: peacetime pictures of crowds & subways & cherry blossom. & pictures of a girl with whom he is no longer lost: innumerable pictures of Kumiko, on the streets & in the rain & in the heat of the summer. Yet even here in this alien city, his history will catch up with him: that photograph & his responsibility in taking it; his responsibility as a witness to war, & as a witness to other events buried far deeper in his past. The Gun Room is a powerful exploration of image & memory, & of the moral complexity & emotional consequences of the experience of war. ...

Americans have always loved guns. This special bond was forged during the American Revolution & sanctified by the Second Amendment. It is because of this exceptional relationship that American civilians are more heavily armed than the citizens of any other nation. Or so we`re told. In The Gunning of America, historian Pamela Haag overturns this conventional wisdom. American gun culture, she argues, developed not because the gun was exceptional, but precisely because it was not: guns proliferated in America because throughout most of the nation`s history, they were perceived as an unexceptional commodity, no different than buttons or typewriters. Focusing on the history of the Winchester Repeating Arms Company, one of the most iconic arms manufacturers in America, Haag challenges many basic assumptions of how & when America became a gun culture. Under the leadership of Oliver Winchester & his heirs, the company used aggressive, sometimes ingenious sales & marketing techniques to create new markets for their product. Guns have never ”sold themselves”; rather, through advertising & innovative distribution campaigns, the gun industry did. Through the meticulous examination of gun industry archives, Haag challenges the myth of a primal bond between Americans & their firearms. Over the course of its 150 year history, the Winchester Repeating Arms Company sold over 8 million guns. But Oliver Winchester--a shirtmaker in his previous career--had no apparent qualms about a life spent arming America. His daughter-in-law Sarah Winchester was a different story. Legend holds that Sarah was haunted by what she considered a vast blood fortune, & became convinced that the ghosts of rifle victims were haunting her. She channeled much of her inheritance, & her conflicted conscience, into a monstrous estate now known as the Winchester Mystery House, where she sought refuge from this ever-expanding army of phantoms. In this provocative & deeply-researched work of narrative history, Haag fundamentally revises the history of arms in America, & in so doing explodes the cliches that have created & sustained our lethal gun culture. ...

The classic World War II thriller from the acclaimed master of action & suspense. Now reissued in a new cover style. Twelve hundred British soldiers isolated on the small island of Kheros off the Turkish coast, waiting to die. Twelve hundred lives in jeopardy, lives that could be saved if only the guns could be silenced. The guns of Navarone, vigilant, savage & catastrophically accurate. Navarone itself, grim bastion of narrow straits manned by a mixed garrison of Germans & Italians, an apparently impregnable iron fortress. To Captain Keith Mallory, skllled saboteur, trained mountaineer, fell the task of leading the small party detailed to scale the vast, impossible precipice of Navarone & to blow up the guns. The Guns of Navarone is the story of that mission, the tale of a calculated risk taken in the time of war... ...