In derelict Dresden a cultivated, middle-class family does all it can to cope amid the Communist downfall. This striking tapestry of the East German experience is told through the tangled lives of a soldier, surgeon, nurse & publisher. With evocative detail, Uwe Tellkamp masterfully reveals the myriad perspectives of the time as people battled for individuality, retreated to nostalgia, chose to conform, or toed the perilous line between East & West. Poetic, heartfelt & dramatic, The Tower vividly resurrects the sights, scents & sensations of life in the GDR as it hurtled towards 9 November 1989. Uwe Tellkamp was born in 1968 in Dresden. After completing his military service, he lost his place to study medicine on the grounds of `political sabotage`. He was arrested in 1989, but went on to study medicine in Liepzig, Dresden & New York, later becoming a surgeon. He has won numerous regional prizes for poetry, as well as the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize for The Sleep in the Clocks. In 2008, he won the German Book Prize for The Tower. ...

In derelict Dresden a cultivated, middle-class family does all it can to cope amid the Communist downfall. This striking tapestry of the East German experience is told through the tangled lives of a soldier, surgeon, nurse & publisher. With evocative detail, Uwe Tellkamp masterfully reveals the myriad perspectives of the time as people battled for individuality, retreated to nostalgia, chose to conform, or toed the perilous line between East & West. Poetic, heartfelt & dramatic, The Tower vividly resurrects the sights, scents & sensations of life in the GDR as it hurtled towards 9 November 1989. Uwe Tellkamp was born in 1968 in Dresden. After completing his military service, he lost his place to study medicine on the grounds of `political sabotage`. He was arrested in 1989, but went on to study medicine in Liepzig, Dresden & New York, later becoming a surgeon. He has won numerous regional prizes for poetry, as well as the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize for The Sleep in the Clocks. In 2008, he won the German Book Prize for The Tower. ...

Description: Do you remember when you believed in magic? It is 1917, & while war wages across Europe, in the heart of London, there is a place of hope & enchantment. The Emporium sells toys that capture the imagination of children & adults alike: patchwork dogs that seem alive, toy boxes that are bigger on the inside, soldiers that can fight battles of their own. Into this family business comes young Cathy Wray, running away from a shameful past. The Emporium takes her in, makes her one of its own. But Cathy is about to discover that the Emporium has secrets of its own... A dark enchanting, spectacularly imaginative novel perfect for fans of Jessie Burton`s The Miniaturist & Erin Morgenstern`s The Night Circus. ...

A group of 20-something adventurers tackle inhospitable geography, harsh climates & the limits of their own endurance all in aid of Cambodian street children as they venture on an overland journey from Germany to Cambodia in the worlds worst car the Soviet-era Trabant. Their escapades include being tailed by the Turkmen KGB, running out of petrol in the Uzbek desert & drinking moonshine with Laotian river folk. ...

Inspector Montalbano rises one morning to find the carcass of a horse on the beach in front of his seaside home. But no sooner do his men arrive, than the body has mysteriously vanished, leaving behind only a trail in the s&. Before long Rachele, a beguiling equestrian champion, turns up at police headquarters to report her horse missing. She had been keeping it at the stables of a certain Saverio Lo Duca, one of the richest men in Sicily. Montalbano investigates, & soon things take a more disturbing turn. But who has Montalbano upset within this strange, unfamiliar world of horse-racing? & what has the Mafia to do with it all? Maneuvering his way through the colorful demimonde of eccentric aristocrats & high-rolling bourgeois, Montalbano must decipher the cryptic messages being sent by those spying on him & once again call upon his special blend of intuition, analysis, play-acting & Proustian memory for good food, if he is to uncover this latest mystery. ...

The title of Rod Heikell`s latest writing only hints at this book`s content & coverage. Five years ago the author & his wife, Lu, set out on a circumnavigation & the opening part of The Tradewind Foodie is an account of the successive eastbound passages first to the Caribbean & then on through the Panama Canal to the Pacific, Australia & the Indian Ocean. There`s plenty of practical advice as well as entertaining asides in Rod`s inimitable style on the incidents that contributed to the adventure. Throughout, however, there is a slant towards provisioning, cooking on board & discovering food & restaurants at the numerous landfalls. Rod Heikell provides an extensive selection of tried & tested dishes in the second part of the book. Cooking at sea is an art & Rod`s selection provides a great range of recipes that are practical under most sea conditions. ” Whilst taking you from the Mediterranean on a whirlwind trip west-about the world, dealing with food & provisioning as they go, Rod & Lu also incorporate a surprising amount of interesting information into this book... Having successfully tried a few recipes at home, with their straightforward ingredients list & instructions, I would have no hesitation in trying the rest on board. This is a useful, practical book which also makes for fascinating reading...” Sandy Duker, Cruising Magazine. ...

There has been nothing like Atlantic slavery. Its scope & the ways in which it has shaped the modern world are so far-reaching as to make it ungraspable. By examining the lives of three individuals caught up in the enterprise of human enslavement. James Walvin offers a new & an original interpretation of the barbaric world of slavery & of the historic end to the slave trade in April 1807. John Newton (1725-1807), author of ` Amazing Grace`, was a slave captain who marshalled his human cargoes with a brutality that he looked back on with shame & contrition. Thomas Thistlewood`s (1721-86) unique diary provides some of the most revealing images of a slave owner`s life in the most valuable of all British slave colonies. Olaudah Equiano`s (1745-97) experience as a slave now speaks out for lives of millions who went unrecorded. All three men were contemporaries but what held them together, in its destructive gravitational pull, was the Atlantic slave system. ...

Replogle’s 40cm (16”) Trafalgar globe is a wholly impressive floor-standing globe that strikes the eye with its uncompromising artistic angles. The progressive design of this specially sculpted metal floor-stand houses an incredible blue ocean globe with marvellous raised-relief mapping & a pewter finished die-cast meridian giving the Trafalgar an air of imposing sophistication. ...

In this magical realist blend of the all-too-real, the imaginary & the just plain absurd, the world teeters on the brink of destruction as JFK & Fidel Castro prepare once again for battle. As protests mount on the streets & the wily Castro plans his ruthless final move, the possibility of salvation emerges: the Second Coming of Christ to broker the conflict, assisted by the housewife Fatima. The result is a comical & highly nuanced exploration of the relationships between Capitalism & Communism, oppressed & oppressor, fantasy, memory & reality, in which grey areas proliferate & the rug is repeatedly pulled from beneath the reader`s feet. ...

In 1949 Mao Zedong hoisted the red flag over Beijing`s Forbidden City. Instead of liberating the country, the communists destroyed the old order & replaced it with a repressive system that would dominate every aspect of Chinese life. In an epic of revolution & violence which draws on newly opened party archives, interviews & memoirs, Frank Dikotter interweaves the stories of millions of ordinary people with the brutal politics of Mao`s court. A gripping account of how people from all walks of life were caught up in a tragedy that sent at least five million civilians to their deaths. ...