Fifteen years ago, Susan Morrow left her first husband Edward Sheffield. One day, comfortable in her home, & her second marriage, she receives, entirely out of the blue, a parcel containing the manuscript of her ex-husband`s first novel. He writes asking her to read the book; she was always his best critic, he says. As Susan reads, she is drawn into the fictional life of his character Tony Hastings, a maths professor driving his family to their summer house in Maine. & as we read with her, so are we. As the Hastings` ordinary, civilized lives are disastrously, violently sent off course, Susan is plunged back into the past, forced to confront the darkness that inhabits her, & driven to name the fear that gnaws at her future & will change her life. Tony & Susan is a dazzling achievement: simultaneously a riveting portrayal of the experience of reading & a page-turning thriller, written in startlingly arresting prose. It is also a novel about fear & regret, revenge & aging, marriage & creativity. It is simply unique. ...

Shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award, the Saltire Scottish First Book of the Year & the Green Carnation Prize ` More than just one of the best debuts of the year; one of the best books of the year. It should do for Aberdeen what Trainspotting did for Edinburgh` Louise Welsh, Herald When Janie Ryan is born, she is destined to be the latest in a long line of Aberdeen fishwives. Ahead of her lies a life filled with feckless men, filthy council flats & bread & marge sandwiches. But Janie isn`t like the rest of them. She wants a different life. & Janie, born & bred for combat, is ready to fight for it. ...

Tony Robinson takes you on a headlong gallop through time, pointing out all the most important, funny, strange, amazing, entertaining, smelly & disgusting bits about World War II! It`s history, but not as we know it! Find out everything you need to know in this brilliant, action-packed, fact-filled book, including:
- just how useful mashed potato is
- how the Battle of Britain was won
- what it takes to be a spy
- how D-Day was kept a surprise



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Tony Wheeler, founder of Lonely Planet, travelled through some of the world’s most repressive & dangerous regimes. Wheeler says, “ When Mr Bush produced his ‘ Axis of Evil’ list, my first thought was ‘I’ve got to go there.’ I’d visited Iran several times & found it to be a beautiful & welcoming country but I’d never managed to make it to North Korea or Iraq. North Korea’s utterly reclusive nature has always fascinated me & I’d had a long interest in the tourist potential of Iraq. So the Evil Axis trio formed the core of my Bad Lands & it was no trouble to come up with a half dozen other contenders.” As he travels to Afghanistan, Albania, Burma (Myanmar), Cuba, Libya, Iran, Iraq, North Korea & Saudi Arabia, Wheeler considers each country’s attitude to human rights & terrorism, to ask ‘what makes a country truly evil?’ & ‘how bad is bad?’. It’s a timely comment, written in his usual no-nonsense style, making for an absorbing & frank look at life in these countries. ...

Following up on his travels detailed in Bad Lands, this time Tony Wheeler, the Lonely Planet founder, sets off to visit Dark Lands: Colombia, Haiti, Congo, Zimbabwe, Israel, Palestine, Pakistan, Papua New Guinea & Nauru. These places aren’t bad but in some ways conceal a shady story & could be thought of as ‘ Troubled States’, somewhat ‘ Failed States’, & sometimes ‘ Weird Lands’. In his interesting & educational journeys to understand how they got such reputations he sums up their stories with fairytales & legends. He finds examples of the birthday-suited king in Colombia as the war on drugs wages on, Rumpelstiltskin & King Midas in Papua New Guinea where gold brought unhappiness, Cinderella in Haiti though the prince has yet to turn up & Hydra whose severed heads either grow back or doubles, in the hills of Pakistan … He concludes that fairytales, though colourful stories, usually conceal a rather dark meaning to warn children of life’s dangers, the same way that history should teach adults about past’s mistakes. Yet, it seems, we let history repeat itself, as if we had forgotten both, the night time fairy tales & the history lessons! This is a very interesting & engaging account of travels in the Dark Lands, from an unusual perspective. Buy it now! ...

Shortlisted for the BBC Samuel Johnson Prize 2010 Andrew Ross Sorkin delivers the first true behind-the-scenes, moment-by-moment, account of how the greatest financial crisis since the Great Depression developed into a global tsunami. From inside the corner office at Lehman Brothers to secret meetings in South Korea, Russia & the corridors of Washington, Too Big to Fail is the definitive story of the most powerful men & women in finance & politics grappling with success & failure, ego, greed, &, ultimately, the fate of the world's economy. ' We've got to get some foam down on the runway' a sleepless Timothy Geithner, the president of the Federal Reserve of New York would tell Henry M. Paulson, the Treasury Secretary about the catastrophic crash of the world's financial system would experience. Through unprecendented access to the players involved, Too Big to Fail recreates all the drama & turmoil, revealing never-disclosed details & elucidating how decisions made on Wall Street over the past decade sowed the seeds of the debacle. This true story is not just a look at banks that were 'too big to fail', it is a real-life thriller about a cast of bold-faced names who themselves thought they were 'too big to fail'. ...

Ever since Jurassic Park we thought we knew how dinosaurs lived their lives. In this remarkable new book, Brian J. Ford reveals that dinosaurs were, in fact, profoundly different from what we believe, & their environment was unlike anything we have previously thought. In this meticulous & absorbing account, Ford reviews the latest scientific evidence to show that the popular accounts of dinosaurs` lives contain ideas that are no more than convenient inventions: how dinosaurs mated, how they hunted & communicated, how they nursed their young, even how they moved. He uncovers many surprising details which challenge our most deeply-held beliefs
- such as the revelation that an asteroid impact did not end the dinosaurs` existence. Professor Ford`s illuminating examination changes everything. As he unravels the history of the world, we discover that evolution was not Charles Darwin`s idea; there were many philosophers who published the theory before him. The concept of continental drift & plate tectonics did not begin with Alfred Wegener a century ago, but dates back to learned pioneers hundreds of years before his time. Ever since scientists first began to study dinosaurs, they have travelled with each other down the wrong path, & Ford now shows how this entire branch of science has to be rewritten. A new dinosaur species is announced every ten days, & more & more information is currently being discovered about how they may have lived: locomotion, hunting, nesting behaviour, distribution, extinction. Ford brings together these amazing discoveries in this controversial new book which undoubtedly will ruffle a few feathers, or scales if you are an old-school dinosaur lover.
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Conservationist, scholar, soldier, white hunter & fabled lover
- Denys Finch Hatton was an aristocrat of leonine nonchalance.
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It`s hard to imagine a world where anything you could possibly want to know about
- & everything you don`t even know you want to
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She was particularly taken with the small narrow ledges that ran along either side of the boat. For a cat, four inches is an airport runway
- she could dance a Moonwalk along them on her two hind legs, juggling at the same time. Steve has a new member of crew aboard his narrowboat, Justice
- but maybe not the kind he`d have wanted if he`d known the trouble she`d cause. Kit, an untidy bundle of fur with all the attitude you would expect from a `sarf Lunnun` cat, joins him on a mission to discover lost parts of Engl&. Steve gets a different perspective on the modern world as he cruises the canals through a landscape unchanged for centuries, visiting picturesque towns & waterway festivals along the way.

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