` To risk my life had to mean something. Otherwise what was it all for?` Gulwali Passarlay was sent away from Afghanistan at the age of twelve, after his father was killed in a gun battle with the US Army. Smuggled into Iran, Gulwali began a twelvemonth odyssey across Europe, spending time in prisons, suffering hunger, making a terrifying journey across the Mediterranean in a tiny boat, & enduring a desolate month in the camp at Calais. Somehow he survived, & made it to Britain, no longer an innocent child but still a young boy alone. In Britain he was fostered, sent to a good school, won a place at a top university, & was chosen to carry the Olympic torch in 2012. Gulwali wants to tell his story
- to bring to life the plight of the thousands of men, women & children who are making this perilous journey every day. One boy`s experience is the central story of our times. This memoir celebrates the triumph of courage & determination over adversity.
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Finalist for the Man Booker International Prize 2015 Alain Mabanckou left Congo in 1989, at the age of twenty-two, not to return until a quarter of a century later. When at last he returns home to Pointe-Noire, a bustling port town on Congo`s south-eastern coast, he finds a country that in some ways has changed beyond recognition: the cinema where, as a child, Mabanckou gorged on glamorous American culture has become a Pentecostal temple, & his secondary school has been re-named in honour of a previously despised colonial ruler. But many things remain unchanged, not least the swirling mythology of Congolese culture which still informs everyday life in Pointe-Noire. Mabanckou though, now a decorated French-Congolese writer & esteemed professor at UCLA, finds he can only look on as an outsider at the place where he grew up. As Mabanckou delves into his childhood, into the life of his departed mother & into the strange mix of belonging & absence that informs his return to Congo, he slowly builds a stirring exploration of the way home never leaves us, however long ago we left home. ...

Seeing double rows of elegant lime trees around the main square of his hometown of Colonel Pringles, our narrator
- who could
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NOW AN UNMISSABLE FILM STARRING BILL NIGHY, DOUGLAS BOOTH & OLIVIA COOKE. ` Mesmerising, macabre & totally brilliant` Daily Mail Before the Ripper, fear had another name. London, 1880. A series of gruesome murders attributed to the mysterious ` Limehouse Golem` strikes fear into the heart of the capital. Inspector John Kildare must track down this brutal serial killer in the damp, dark alleyways of riverside London. But how does Dan Leno, music hall star extraordinaire, find himself implicated in this crime spree, & what does Elizabeth Cree, on trial for the murder of her husb&, have to hide? Peter Ackroyd brings Victorian London to life in all its guts & glory, as we travel from the glamour of the music hall to the slums of the East End, meeting George Gissing & Karl Marx along the way. ...

Mma Ramotswe & Mma Makutsi have always relied on the advice of the classic guide to their trade, The Principles of Private Detection. But who is the eminent author, Mr Clovis Andersen, & what if he were to come to Botswana? That seems a very unlikely possibility, & yet.. . When Mr Andersen visits Botswana on holiday, he is delighted & intrigued to stumble across a roadside sign that reveals the existence of the No.1 Ladies` Detective Agency. Professional courtesy suggests that he call & announce himself. Meanwhile, Mma Makutsi & Phuti Radiphuti are embarking on married life & building a new house
- a tricky business under any circumstances but especially hazardous when the name of the contractor is the Joy & Light Building Company.
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` Stunningly good. Beautiful, smart, raw, sad, poetic & humane... It`s the best thing I`ve read for ages`, James Rebanks, author of THE SHEPHERD`S LIFE How does a line in the sand become a barrier that people will risk everything to cross? Francisco Cantu was a US Border Patrol agent from 2008 to 2012. He worked the desert along the Mexican border, at the remote crossroads of drug routes & smuggling corridors, tracking humans through blistering days & frigid nights across a vast terrain. He detains the exhausted & the parched. He hauls in the dead. He tries not to think where the stories go from there. He is descended from Mexican immigrants, so the border is in his blood. But the line he is sworn to defend is dissolving. Haunted by nightmares, he abandons the Patrol for civilian life. & when an immigrant friend is caught on the wrong side of the border, Cantu faces a final confrontation with a world he believed he had escaped. The Line Becomes a River is timely & electrifying. It brings to life this landscape of sprawling borderlands & the countless people who risk their lives to cross it. Yet it takes us beyond one person`s experience to reveal truths about life on either side of an arbitrary line, wherever it is. ...

It is the summer of 1983, & young Nick Guest, an innocent in the matters of politics & money, has moved into an attic room in the Notting Hill home of the Feddens: Gerald, an ambitious new Tory MP, his wealthy wife Rachel, & their children Toby & Catherine. Nick had idolized Toby at Oxford, but in his London life it will be the troubled Catherine who becomes his friend & his uneasy responsibility. At the boom years of the mid-80s unfold, Nick becomes caught up in the Feddens` world. In an era of endless possibility, Nick finds himself able to pursue his own private obsession, with beauty
- a prize as compelling to him as power & riches are to his friends.
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With an introduction by Sebastian Faulks Winner of the Man Booker Prize in 2004, a classic novel about class, politics & sexuality in Margaret Thatcher`s 1980s Britain. There was the soft glare of the flash -- twice -- three times -- a gleaming sense of occasion, the gleam floating in the eye as a blot of shadow, his heart running fast with no particular need of courage as he grinned & said, ` Prime Minister, would you like to dance? In the summer of 1983, twenty-year-old Nick Guest moves into an attic room in the Notting Hill home of the wealthy Feddens: Gerald, an ambitious Tory MP, his wife Rachel & their children Toby & Catherine. Innocent of politics & money, Nick is swept up into the Feddens` world & an era of endless possibility, all the while pursuing his own private obsession with beauty. The Line of Beauty is Alan Hollinghurst`s Man Booker Prize-winning masterpiece. It is a novel that defines a decade, exploring with peerless style a young man`s collision with his own desires, & with a world he can never truly belong to. ...

In February 1793 France declared war on Britain & Holland & by 1815, established dynasties & kingdoms were overthrown, the United States had been established as a world power & a new age was dawning. This was to be the longest, hardest & cruellest war ever fought at sea & while the war on land saw the rise of the greatest soldier ever known
- Napoleon Buonaparte
- the war at sea had the formidable genius of Horatio Nelson. In The Line Upon A Wind, Noel Mostert has achieved a work of unparalleled research & illuminating analysis. He has also brought us the story of the daily lives of the sailors on board the fighting ships. There are heroes & villains, captains so harsh that crews were goaded to mutiny & others whose concern for the welfare of their crews changed life at sea forever. It is a tale of ordinary men & extraordinary bravery, of the building & navigation of fearsome warships & of a period of tumultuous conflict, change & innovation
- maritime history at its very best.


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A deceptively simple adventure into the unknown using only paper, a pencil & a single line. Wreck This Journal had a simple premise: destroy the book in all the ways you can imagine. The Line is even simpler: find pencil, start a line. As you move through the pages of Keri Smith`s newest book, you`ll be asked to let your line meander, explore the book`s gutter, & jump around the edges of the pages. You`ll hide your line, cut your line & even let someone else take over your line for a bit. The farther you get into the book, however, the more you`ll discover that maybe things aren`t as simple as they first seemed. The line has a mind of its own, & it`s up to you to discover what`s at the end of the line (hint: it`s just the beginning). ...