Continuing the story begun in The Hobbit, all three parts of the epic masterpiece, The Lord of the Rings, in one paperback. Features the definitive edition of the text, fold-out flaps with the original two-colour maps, & a revised & expanded index. Sauron, the Dark Lord, has gathered to him all the Rings of Power
- the means by which he intends to rule Middle-earth. All he lacks in his plans for dominion is the One Ring
- the ring that rules them all
- which has fallen into the hands of the hobbit, Bilbo Baggins. In a sleepy village in the Shire, young Frodo Baggins finds himself faced with an immense task, as the Ring is entrusted to his care. He must leave his home & make a perilous journey across the realms of Middle-earth to the Crack of Doom, deep inside the territories of the Dark Lord. There he must destroy the Ring forever & foil the Dark Lord in his evil purpose. Since it was first published in 1954, The Lord of the Rings has been a book people have treasured. Steeped in unrivalled magic & otherworldliness, its sweeping fantasy has touched the hearts of young & old alike. This single-volume paperback edition is the definitive text, fully restored with almost 400 corrections
- with the full co-operation of Christopher Tolkien
- & features a striking new cover.




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Four-volume boxed-set edition of The Lord of the Rings in hardback, featuring Tolkien`s original unused dust-jacket designs, together with fourth hardback volume, The Lord of the Rings: A Reader`s Companion.

Includes:: special features & the definitive edition of the text. Since it was first published in 1954, The Lord of the Rings has been a book people have treasured. Steeped in unrivalled magic & otherworldliness, its sweeping fantasy has touched the hearts of young & old alike, with one hundred & fifty million copies of its many editions sold around the world. In 2005 Tolkien`s text was fully restored
- with the full co-operation of Christopher Tolkien
- with almost 400 corrections, the original red & black maps as fold-out sheets, a fully revised & enlarged index, & for the first time a special plate section containing the pages from the Book of Mazarbul, making this set as close as possible to the version that J.R.R. Tolkien intended. This Diamond Anniversary reissue of the prized boxed set marks 60 years since the first publication of The Fellowship of the Ring. These hardback editions feature Tolkien`s original unused dust-jacket designs from the 1950s, reworked for this edition, & some additional text corrections. The four-volume boxed set

Includes:: The Lord of the Rings: A Reader`s Companion, a unique annotated guide to the text, fully updated since its first publication in 2005, & is a book which will enhance the reader`s enjoyment & understanding of one of the most influential books of the 20th century.





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The third novel in Bernard Cornwell`s epic & bestselling series on the making of England & the fate of his great hero, Uhtred of Bebbanburg. BBC2`s major Autumn 2015 TV show THE LAST KINGDOM is based on the first two books in the series. Uhtred wants revenge. He wants the land & castle that is his. He wants his treacherous uncle to pay for taking them. Heading north with his lover, former nun Hild, he finds chaos as the Vikings battle among themselves to consolidate their hold on the region. At the heart of it are men from Uhtred`s past
- Sven the One-Eyed & Kjartan the Cruel, men of vicious reputation. Still, he has matched such men before. Then Uhtred suffers a betrayal to rival the treachery that deprived him of his birthright. It will leave him trapped with no hope of escape.. . Uhtred of Bebbanburg`s mind is as sharp as his sword. A thorn in the side of the priests & nobles who shape his fate, this Saxon raised by Vikings is torn between the life he loves & the cause he has sworn to serve.
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ENGLAND IS BORN. BBC2`s major TV series THE LAST KINGDOM is based on Bernard Cornwell`s bestselling novels on the making of England & the fate of his great hero, Uhtred of Bebbanburg. The Lords of the North is the third book in the series. Season 2 of the epic TV series premiers this March. The year is 878. Uhtred of Bebbanburg, fresh from fighting for Alfred the Great, must journey north with a band of men to avenge his father, who has been cut down by the Danish lord Kjartan, Uhtred`s oldest enemy. But the north is a realm of chaos, rebellion & bloody retribution. As he plans his revenge attack, Uhtred is betrayed & ends up on a slave voyage to Icel&. Friends & alliances must unite to free him, & fight once more in the battle for Engl&. ...

Scotland`s rich past & varied landscape have inspired an extraordinary array of legends & beliefs, & in ” The Lore of Scotland” Jennifer Westwood & Sophia Kingshill bring together many of the finest & most intriguing: stories of heroes & bloody feuds, tales of giants, fairies, & witches, & accounts of local customs & traditions. Their range extends right across the country, from the Borders with their haunting ballads, via Glasgow, site of St. Mungo`s miracles, to the fateful battlefield of Culloden, & finally to the Shetlands, home of the seal-people. More than simply retelling these stories, ” The Lore of Scotland” explores their origins, showing how & when they arose & investigating what basis
- if any
- they have in historical fact. In the process, it uncovers the events that inspired Shakespeare`s ” Macbeth, ” probes the claim that Mary King`s Close is the most haunted street in Edinburgh, & examines the surprising truth behind the fame of the Mac Crimmons, Skye`s unsurpassed bagpipers. Moreover, it reveals how generations of Picts, Vikings, Celtic saints & Presbyterian reformers shaped the myriad tales that still circulate, &, from across the country, it gathers together legends of such renowned figures as Sir William Wallace, St Columba, & the great warrior Fingal. The result is a thrilling journey through Scotland`s legendary past & an endlessly fascinating account of the traditions & beliefs that play such an important role in its heritage.

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At the centre of this extraordinary historical narrative are two linked themes: the grinding down of the aborigines during the long rivalries of the quest for El Dorado, the mythical kingdom of gold; &, two hundred years later, the man-made horror of the new slave colony. Naipaul shows how the alchemic delusion of El Dorado drew the small island of Trinidad into the vortex of world events, making it the object of Spanish & English colonial designs & a Mecca for treasure-seekers, slave-traders, & revolutionaries. & through an accumulation of casual, awful detail, he takes us as close as we can get to day-to-day life in the Caribbean slave plantations -- at the time thought to be more brutal than their American equivalents. In this brilliantly researched book, living characters large & small are rescued from the records & set in a larger, guiding narrative -- about the New World, empire, African slavery, revolution -- which is never less than gripping. ` History as literature, meticulously researched & masterfully written` New York Times Book Review `A formidable achievement... No historian has attempted to weave together in so subtle a manner the threads of the most complex & turbulent period of Caribbean history` Times Literary Supplement ` Brilliant... Startling` New Statesman `A remarkable book... Intelligent, humane, brilliantly written` Book World ...

The gripping first-hand narrative of the whaling ship disaster that inspired Melville`s ” Moby-Dick ”and informed Nathaniel Philbrick`s monumental history, ” In the Heart of the Sea.” In 1820, the Nantucket whaleship ” Essex” was rammed by an angry sperm whale thousands of miles from home in the South Pacific. The ” Essex ”sank, leaving twenty crew members drifting in three small open boats for ninety days. Through drastic measures, eight men survived to reveal this astonishing tale. ” The Narrative of the Wreck of the Whaleship Essex, ” by Owen Chase, has long been the essential account of the ” Essex”`s doomed voyage. But in 1980, a new account of the disaster was discovered, penned late in life by Thomas Nickerson, who had been the fifteen-year-old cabin boy of the ship. This discovery has vastly expanded & clarified the history of an event as grandiose in its time as the ” Titanic.” This edition presents Nickerson`s never-before-published chronicle alongside Chase`s version. Also included are the most important other contemporary accounts of the incident, Melville`s notes in his copy of the Chase narrative, & journal entries by Emerson & Thoreau. ...

In 1941 Richard Evans Schultes took a term's leave of absence from Harvard University & disappeared into the north west Amazon of Colombia. Twelve years later, he returned having gone places no outsider had ever been, mapping uncharted rivers & living among two dozen Indian tribes while collecting some thirty thousand botanical specimens, including two thousand novel medicinal plants & three hundred species new to science. The greatest Amazonian botanical explorer of the twentieth century, Schultes was not only a living link to the great naturalists of the Victorian age, but the world authority on toxic, medicinal & hallucinogenic plants. The Lost Amazon is the first major publication to examine Richard Evans Schultes's work through his photographs. Over the course of two decades, he took more than ten thousand images of plants, of landscapes, & of the indigenous peoples with whom he lived. Among his collection are images of teonanacatl, the sacred hallucinogenic mushrooms knows to the Aztecs as Flesh of the Gods, & whose identification sparked the psychdelic era. There are also photographs from the heart of the rain forest, a mantle of green that once stretched across the entire continent. Most importantly, there are portraits of many people never before photographed, lovingly & respectfully captured in moments of unguarded innocence that reflect his deep relationships with the native peoples. ...

When an explosion reverberates through the Swan Hotel in Shanghai, it is not just shards of glass & rubble that come crashing down. Li Jing & Zhou Meiling find their once-happy marriage rocked to its foundations. For Li Jing, his head pierced by a shard of falling glass, awakens from brain surgery only able to utter the faltering phrases of the English he learnt as a child
- a language that Meiling & their young song Pang Pang cannot speak. When an American neurologist arrives, tasked with teaching Li Jing to speak fluently again, she is as disorientated as her patient in this bewitching, bewildering city. As doctor & patient grow closer, feelings neither of them anticipated begin to take hold. Feelings that Meiling, who must fight to keep both her husband`s business & her family afloat, does not need a translator to underst&.
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Long before GPS, Google Earth, & global transit, humans traveled vast distances using only environmental clues & simple instruments. John Huth asks what is lost when modern technology substitutes for our innate capacity to find our way. Encyclopedic in breadth, weaving together astronomy, meteorology, oceanography, & ethnography, The Lost Art of Finding Our Way puts us in the shoes, ships, & sleds of early navigators for whom paying close attention to the environment around them was, quite literally, a matter of life & death. Haunted by the fate of two young kayakers lost in a fogbank off Nantucket, Huth shows us how to navigate using natural phenomena--the way the Vikings used the sunstone to detect polarization of sunlight, & Arab traders learned to sail into the wind, & Pacific Islanders used underwater lightning & ”read” waves to guide their explorations. Huth reminds us that we are all navigators capable of learning techniques ranging from the simplest to the most sophisticated skills of direction-finding. Even today, careful observation of the sun & moon, tides & ocean currents, weather & atmospheric effects can be all we need to find our way. Lavishly illustrated with nearly 200 specially prepared drawings, Huth`s compelling account of the cultures of navigation will engross readers in a narrative that is part scientific treatise, part personal travelogue, & part vivid re-creation of navigational history. Seeing through the eyes of past voyagers, we bring our own world into sharper view. ...