Fantastic new fiction from the team behind the wildly successful ` The Princess & the..` picture book series. A single story in two colour printing this is a lovely beginner-reader series for 5/6 year olds which is hilarious &, just about, true to life. In this first story, troublesome twosome Nell & Freddie go on a school trip to a farm, where they pet the animals & learn about how they live, & Freddie smuggles a piglet out in his backpack. He thinks he`s saving it from becoming sausages. So Nell keeps it in her bedroom, gives it a bath & gets it involved in bringing a local crime wave to an end... ...

Paris, 1937. Andras Lévi, an architecture student, has arrived from Budapest with a scholarship, a single suitcase, & a mysterious letter he has promised to deliver to Clara Morgenstern a young widow living in the city. When Andras meets Clara he is drawn deeply into her extraordinary & secret life, just as Europe’s unfolding tragedy sends them both into a state of terrifying uncertainty. From a remote Hungarian village to the grand opera houses of Budapest & Paris, from the despair of Carpathian winter to an unimaginable life in forced labour camps & beyond, The Invisible Bridge tells the story of a marriage tested by disaster & of a family, threatened with annihilation, bound by love & history. ...

In Jennifer Egan`s highly acclaimed first novel, set in 1978, the political drama & familial tensions of the 1960s form a backdrop for the world of Phoebe O` Connor, age eighteen. Phoebe is obsessed with the memory & death of her sister Faith, a beautiful idealistic hippie who died in Italy in 1970. In order to find out the truth about Faith`s life & death, Phoebe retraces her steps from San Francisco across Europe, a quest which yields both complex & disturbing revelations about family, love, & Faith`s lost generation. This spellbinding novel introduced Egan`s remarkable ability to tie suspense with deeply insightful characters & the nuances of emotion. ...

` This is the story of about the strangest thing that I`ve ever encountered, old art dealer that I am.` It is perhaps the finest art collection of its kind, acquired through a lifetime of sacrifice
- but when a dealer comes to see it, he finds something quite unexpected, & is drawn into a peculiar deception of the collector himself... Stefan Zweig was a wildly popular writer of compelling short fiction: in this collection there are peaks of extraordinary emotion, stories of all that is human crushed by the movements of history, of letters that fill a young heart or drive a person towards death, of obsession & desire. They will stay with the reader for ever.
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The unseen letters of the only British officer to spend three years in the trenches throughout the First World War Colonel Graham Chaplin, commander of the Cameron Highlanders, wrote letters from the trenches almost daily to the wife he had married just before the war began. Even if he had no time to write, he would at least send a postcard to reassure her he was ` Quite well`. These personal & loving letters give a rare insight into the mind of a serving officer, his worries about his men & his family back home, his concern for the progress of the war (however cautiously phrased) & his comments on the growing list of friends dead or wounded. Having once refused what he considered unacceptably dangerous orders to send his troops over the top during the Battle of Loos, Chaplin wasn`t promoted out of the trenches until 1917. Respected & trusted by his men, he was, even so, the only officer to whom this happened. Andrew Davidson, author of the highly praised Fred`s War, analyses Chaplin`s unique status & weaves around his letters a fascinating portrait of a soldier`s life & of the war on the Western Front. ...

A killer at large in a remote Basque Country valley, a detective to rival Sarah Lund, myth versus reality, masterful storytelling
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A killer at large in a remote Basque Country valley, a detective to rival Clarice Starling, myth versus reality, masterful storytelling
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Euridice is young, bright & ambitious. A talented musician, she dreams only of fame & fortune. But this is Rio de Janeiro in the 1940s, & the one thing society expects of its women: to be loving wives & mothers. So when her rebellious sister Guida elopes, breaking her parents` hearts, Euridice sacrifices her own aspirations to marry conventional Antenor, spending her days ironing his shirts & removing the lumps of onion from his food. As his professional success grows, so does her feeling of restlessness. Throwing convention to the wind, the irrepressible Euridice dreams up an array of creative ventures to escape her humdrum family life, to the distress of her tradition-loving husb&. & then one day the free-spirited Guida suddenly reappears, & together the two sisters set about forging their own paths in life. With a cast of unforgettable characters, The Invisible Life of Euridice Gusmao is a darkly comic novel from one of the most exciting new voices in world literature. ...

`A real gem of a book` Stylist A wickedly funny tale of two rebellious sisters in 1940s Rio de Janeiro‘ Why Euridice & Antenor married, no one knows for certain.’ Euridice is bright & ambitious. But this is Brazil in the 1940s, & society expects her to be a loving wife & mother. While Antenor is busy congratulating himself on his excellent catch, Euridice spends her spends her humdrum days ironing his shirts & removing the lumps of onion from his food, dreaming of the success she could have made from herself – as a writer, dressmaker or culinary whizz – in another life. Her free-spirited sister Guida, on the other h&, is the kind of person who was ‘born knowing everything’. When she returns from her failed elopement with stories of heartbreak & loss, the lives of Euridice & her husband are thrown into confusion, with disastrous consequences. The Invisible Life of Euridice Gusmao is a darkly comic debut, bursting with vibrant Brazilian spirit & unforgettable characters – a jubilant novel about the emancipation of women, perfect for fans of Maria Semple’s Today Will Be Different & Elizabeth Strout’s My Name Is Lucy Barton. ...

Based on a true story The Invisible Mile tells the poignant story of five Australian & New Zealand cyclists who in 1928 formed the first English-speaking team to ride in the Tour de France. They were gallant, under-resourced & badly outnumbered but taken deep to the heart by the French nation. The novel describes in a wonderful poetic & visceral voice what it was like to ride in this race (the chaos, danger & rivalries), the extraordinary lengths to which the riders pushed themselves, suffering horrific injuries, riding through the night in pitch dark, & the ways they staved off the pain, through camaraderie, through sexual conquest, through drink, & through drugs (cocaine for energy, opium for pain). Added to the team is the fictional narrator who is cycling towards his demons in a northern France still scarred by the First World War. His brother was a fighter pilot damaged by his experiences in France, his sister has died, & this self-imposed test of endurance is slowly & painfully bringing him to his final, invisible mile where memory eventually comes to collide with the past ...