Aesop`s Fables are given a contemporary twist in this series of retellings with bright & graphic artwork. Featuring ingenious die-cuts, you can lift the page to release the mouse from the lion`s claws, then, later, turn the page to make the mouse release the lion in return. The upmarket format & stylish illustrations make this series of books perfect gift material. ...

George Orwell`s moving reflections on the English character & his passionate belief in the need for political change. The Lion & the Unicorn was written in London during the worst period of the blitz. It is vintage Orwell, a dynamic outline of his belief in socialism, patriotism & an English revolution. His fullest political statement, it has been described as `one of the most moving & incisive portraits of the English character` & is as relevant now as it ever has been. ...

Emily (16), Travers (10), Angus (9), Maisie (7) & Oakley (1) lived in an idyllic 300-year-old cottage in the Cotswolds. They attended the local school, watched TV & did all the things English middle-class children do. Then, in 1995, their biologist mother seized the opportunity to study lions in Botswana &, in the space of 3 months, changed the family's lives forever. Within 24 hours of landing in Gaborone they were travelling to their new home at Maun in the Okavango Delta, one of the most beautiful wildernesses on earth. Weeks after arriving, the children had made home in an old mission house full of stray dogs & were learning to fetch fresh water, dig a toilet & which creepy crawlies could kill you & which couldn't. Their classroom was an open hut & free days were spent in a Land Rover tracking prides of lions across hundreds of miles of bush. The Lion Children is an extraordinary life-enhancing story about the joy of childhood & living in an environment as different as it can be. But above all it is about the lions, who we get to know through the eyes of the children themselves. This story will capture the public's heart & imagination. It is illustrated with the children's own drawings & photographs taken over the 5 years. ...

From the creator of the known & loved Bright Side lifestyle br&, Rachel Bright, & the winner of the Roald Dahl Funny Prize, Jim Field, comes a feelgood rhyming story about one little mouse trying to make himself heard & discovering along the way that even the smallest of us has the heart of a lion. Perfect for fans of Giraffes Can`t Dance this stylish book from two contemporary stars really is something to shout about
- it will make you laugh, cry & read it every bedtime.
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For Rian Malan, the blessing of living in South Africa is that every day presents him with material whose richness astounds those who live in saner places. Twenty years after the publication of his bestseller My Traitor`s Heart, he is still strongly committed to the struggle against suffocating political rectitude. Malan eviscerates politicians, provokes rabid fury in Aids activists, pursues justice in the music industry, & exults in the company of an extraordinary cast of characters from truckers to tycoons. ...

In his “ Liquid Continent” trilogy, Nicholas Woodsworth combines travel narrative, history & reflection of the essence of life in the Mediterranean. Beginning in Alexandria, the author travels overland around the eastern rim of the sea. Behind the spread of modern apartment blocks, he encounters an older, sophisticated existence
- the city of Cleopatra; the city where renowned mathematicians corresponded with the Greek Archimedes & where great scholars such as Eratosthenes, a lover of all knowledge who was appointed by the Ptolemies as Chief Librarian, turned geography into the rational study it is today. This fluid & lively account unravels a mythic city whose grand historical reputation has sustained it through the ages, even if physically it has changed beyond recognition.
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This wonderful book is part of Nicholas Woodsworth’s “ Liquid Continent” trilogy, combining travel narrative, history & a reflection on the essence of life in the Mediterranean. Here, in Volume II, he comes to Venice; of all the great powers of the Mediterranean past, Venice was the most commercially ambitious. Her great wealth & sophisticated culture were products of a commercial empire that stretched from the Adriatic to the ports of the Levant, & her long history is studded with sea dramas of war, crusade & intrigue. Seeing maritime dominance as the foundation of Venice’s existence, the author abandons museums & tourist hordes to engage in the city’s ongoing love-affair with the sea. He investigates the heart of Venice’s marine activity, the Arsenale; prowls the corridors of the city’s mysterious State Archives; takes part in a celebrated rowing race; meets the city’s top gondola-builder. Signing on as a canal-boat delivery man, he discovers in the backwaters of Venice a magnificent but intimate city rarely seen by outsiders. ...

This wonderful book is part of Nicholas Woodsworth’s “ Liquid Continent” trilogy, combining travel narrative, history & a reflection on the essence of life in the Mediterranean. Volume III, the final chapter in the trilogy, sees Woodsworth go to Istanbul. As ever, he takes the road less travelled, through Albania towards the Aegean archipelago, visiting Lesbos & Dardanelles on the way to Istanbul. Under the Ottomans, who ruled the eastern Mediterranean for 500 years, cosmopolitan life in Istanbul, or Constantinople as it was then, took a particularly vigourous & productive form, creating a web of connection & identity that is conspicuously absent in our own era. Installing himself in a former Benedictine monastery overlooking the Golden Horn, Nicholas Woodsworth looks into the social life of a city that was once the capital of a vast & ethnically complex empire. He meets a diverse range of citizens, from fishermen of the Bosphorus to the remnants of the port-city’s Greek & Armenian communities. On the stage of a vital drama now being played out between modern secularism & traditional Islam, Nicholas Woodsworth finds in today’s Istanbul a city that offers solutions to the future of globalisation. Despite the seriousness of the book’s theme, he keeps his narrative lively & down-to-earth by letting Mediterraneans do their own talking, something they excel at in any case. ...

Combining history & travel narrative, Nicholas Woodsworth journeys around the eastern edge of the Mediterranean, the sea which gave birth to Western civilisation. This sea, he says, should not be seen as an empty space surrounded by Europe, Asia & Africa, but as a continent in its own right, a place from whose coastlines people look, not outwards to distant countries or that capitals but inwards across the water to each other. The Mediterranean has its own culture, its own life, its own way of being. Setting out from Alexandria, in a journey marked by lively & unpredictable encounters, Woodsworth discovershidden corners of Venice, before arriving at Istanbul, where he installs himself in a former Benedictine monastery. In all these places he finds traces of a vibrant & cosmopolitan heritage, & asks what these cities & their inhabitants owe to the sea. ...

What would it take to change your life? Jocelyne is 47. She lives in a small provincial French town, runs her own dressmaking shop, has been married to the same man for what seems like an eternity, has had two children & lives a very ordinary existence. In fact so ordinary that she is beginning to wonder what happened to her, to all those dreams she had when she was seventeen. Then comes the chance to change her life completely
- but should she? For when Jocelyne begins to look at her life & its small pleasures
- her friendship with the twins who run the hairdresser next door, her weekends away, her sewing blog
- she realises that maybe ordinary isn't so bad. Until the decision is taken out of her hands... The List of my Desires is a wonderfully heart-warming novel about what we value in life & the search for happiness.


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