A suitcase of stolen cash has brought three criminals together. One has a bullet in his side. One has blood on his hands. One has vengeance on his mind. Each has run from their past. Each will now fight for their future. A modern noir thriller, The Low Road highlights our desire to outrun our demons, & the dark consequences we face when we are forced to confront them. ...

Doe maar gewoon dan doe je gek genoeg Act normal, & that will be crazy enough Nine out of ten people in the Netherlands will"e this well-worn saying if asked to come up with a basic trait of the Dutch character. Expatriates who have been here for a while see it differently. For them, Dutch society is a weird & wonderful maze full of unpredictable people. At times Dutch people will ignore you politely; other times they will go out of their way to help you. You will get into trouble with the authorities for putting up a fence without permission but, in the late evenings, many family television channels broadcast pornography & advertisements for telephone sex into the privacy of your home. Even your best friends reach for their diaries to make a dinner date, because you don t just drop by without being invited. & when you buy them a present they will open it in front of you without batting an eyelid. A country & a people full of paradoxes. Or is there some kind of system behind it all? Han van der Horst paints a picture of Dutch society & the Dutch psyche that will help expatriates understand the country they are living in & will help them function properly at work & in their free time. The Low Sky Understanding the Dutch is the best guide to the Netherlands & its people. This latest edition has been completely reviewed & updated to do justice to the major social changes that have affected Dutch society in recent years.” ...

Manuel is growing up in Franco`s Spain. He adores his elder sister, María, & they are watched over by their mother, who enjoys reciting poetry, & their father, a construction worker with vertigo. Beyond the walls of the house, he encounters chatty hairdressers & priests, wolf hunters & monstrous carnival effigies. The community is still haunted by the civil war, yet Manuel`s world is changing. Coca-Cola opens a factory nearby & news arrives of men landing on the moon. This is a story about family, memory & the experiences that make us who we are. ...

Award-winning writer Paul Theroux draws upon personal experience of living in Malawi in his eye-opening novel, about one man`s return to an Africa he no longer recognises, ” The Lower River”. Decades ago Massachusetts salesman Ellis Hock spent four years in Africa
- & the continent has never left him. So when his wife walks out & his business goes belly up, Ellis turns back to the one place in which he briefly found happiness. Yet returning to the village of Malabo shocks him. The school he built is a ruin. The people he remembers are poor, apathetic, hostile. The country labours as if under a great, invisible burden. However, Ellis is determined. This is his escape, a paradise regained. But escape can be a snare, a trap for the unwary...” The Lower River” is a hypnotic, compelling & brilliant return to a terrain no one has ever written better about than Paul Theroux: the tragic stage of modern Africa, AIDS-ravaged & despairing in the face of creeping consumerism, greed & dependence. ” Remarkable, admirable, riveting, heartbreaking. A masterly, moving portrait of how Africa ensnares & enchants”. (” Guardian”). ” Terrific writing. Theroux`s senses are always on full alert”. (” Evening Standard”). ” Powerful, vivid, shocking”. (” The Times”). ” Theroux invests this very 21st-century journey into the heart of ennui with a caustic bite, like the snakes that pop up throughout”. (” Metro”). ” The sense of menace is masterful. Theroux has never written a better novel”. (” Sunday Telegraph”). American travel writer Paul Theroux is known for the rich descriptions of people & places that is often streaked with his distinctive sense of irony; his novels & collected short stories, ” My Other Life”, ” The Collected Stories”, ” My Secret History”, ” The Stranger at the Palazzo d` Oro”, ”A Dead Hand”, ” Millroy the Magician”, ” The Elephanta Suite”, ” Saint Jack”, ” The Consul`s File”, ” The Family Arsenal”, ” The Mosquito Coast”, & his works of non-fiction, including the iconic ” The Great Railway Bazaar” are available from Penguin.
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The lower Seine from Le Harve to Paris in a series of guides from Editions Grafocarte/ Editions de l` Ecluse to France’s canals & navigable waterways with mapping showing facilities & navigational hazards along each route, general information on signals & regulations, & descriptions of places of interest. Each guide provides mapping of the route showing locks, stop gates, mooring quays, tunnels, weirs, dangerous shoals, sand or mud banks, etc., as well as a wide range of facilities from drinking water & rubbish disposal to various types of shops, restaurants, pharmacies, shipyards & engine repair workshops, etc. The mapping is usually presented as vertical 28 x 8.5cm panels which, together with the annotations, occupy one whole page of the guide & so each cover 14km or more of the route. Also included as necessary are more detailed enlargements of main basins or photographs of bridges, shown usually as viewed from both directions. The text providing navigational information & tips as well as descriptions of places of interest & a general background are kept separate from the maps but, where possible, placed on the adjoining page to the relevant section of the route. The guides also provide general information on rules & regulations, plus illustrations of navigational signals. Each guide also has an index of locations along the route annotated with symbols indicating various facilities, accompanied where possible with contact details.* All of the text, explanations & the map legend are in French, English & German.** Please note:** The publishers’ name has changed from Editions Grafocarte to Editions de l’ Ecluse & the series name shown on each title is Fluviacarte or Navicarte depending on whether mapping of coastal waters is included. Various combinations of these names can be found"ed in other publications on French waterways. ...

` Lively... a joy to read`
- The Times Shortlisted for the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse prize From the bestselling author of A
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` Lively.. .a joy to read`
- The Times From the bestselling author of A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian North London in
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London abounds with all manner of ludicrous laws, & not all of these curious statutes have been relegated to the past. Despite the efforts of the Law Commission there are medieval laws that are still in force, & the City of London & its livery companies have their own legal oddities. Laws are made in the capital because parliament is here; so are the Old Bailey, the Law Courts, the House of Lords &, now, the Supreme Court. The privy council, which sometimes has to decide cases, also sits in London, & there were other courts that used to sit in London, from prize courts concerning war booty to ecclesiastical courts. Having maintained its `ancient rights & freedoms` under Magna Carta, the City felt free to enact its own laws, many of which seem to have had to do with what people could wear. Until quite recently, for example, a man could be arrested for walking down the street wearing a wig, a robe & silk stockings
- unless he was a judge. & all human folly has been paraded through the law courts of London, to the extent that it is difficult to know where the serious business of administering justice ends & where farce begins. As law is made in the courtroom as well as in parliament & elsewhere, judges like to keep a firm h&, but sometimes so-called jibbing juries will simply not do what they are told. All sorts of oddities get swept up into the law. Legislators particularly love to pass Acts about sex. If sexual services are being offered in a London massage parlour, for example, a police officer must then search the premises for school children. According to The Children & Young Persons Act of 1933 it is against the law for children & `yowling persons` between the age of four & sixteen to frequent a brothel. A writ was introduced under both Edward III & Henry IV to ban lawyers from parliament as there were too many of them, the reason being that it was easier for a lawyer to spend his time in London attending parliament that it was for a knight of the shires. But because parliament was already packed with lawyers it was difficult to make any such rule stick. Then an effective way of excluding them was found. They were denied the wages paid to members in those days. Sadly, these days, parliament & the government are packed with lawyers once again. & they are being paid.A law passed in 1540
- & still in force today
- makes it illegal for barbers in the City of London to practise surgery; with impeccable impartiality, the Act also forbids surgeons to cut hair. Finally, never forget that under the Vagrancy Act of 1824, you can be convicted of being `an idle & disorderly person, or a rogue, vagabond, or incorrigible rogue`. The same act also outlaws people `professing to tell fortunes`, including `palmistry`. Under the Act, it is an offence merely to be suspected.


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Anna lives in Brooklyn. But she didn`t always. She grew up in Kielce, Pol&, where the summers were long & the politics communist. When her parents were indicted for their alliance with anti-government forces, Anna had to flee her homel&, leaving her closest friends behind. Now an adult, she lives in the US & has lost touch with the girls she once knew, the ones she missed so much as a teenager that she`d sneak back into Kielce hidden in the back of a car just to share another summer. When she learns that one of them has suffered a terrible tragedy, she hurries home to Kielce. But when she arrives, she`ll find more than she`d ever imagined. It`s finally time to face everything that happened during those childhood summers long ago. ...

Man Booker Prize Winner 2013. It is 1866, & Walter Moody has come to make his fortune upon the New Zealand goldfields. On arrival, he stumbles across a tense gathering of twelve local men, who have met in secret to discuss a series of unsolved crimes. A wealthy man has vanished, a whore has tried to end her life, & an enormous fortune has been discovered in the home of a luckless drunk. Moody is soon drawn into the mystery: a network of fates & fortunes that is as complex & exquisitely patterned as the night sky. The Luminaries is an extraordinary piece of fiction. It is full of narrative, linguistic & psychological pleasures, & has a fiendishly clever & original structuring device. Written in pitch-perfect historical register, richly evoking a mid-19th century world of shipping & banking & goldrush boom & bust, it is also a ghost story, & a gripping mystery. It is a thrilling achievement & will confirm for critics & readers that Catton is one of the brightest stars in the international writing firmament. ...