Category Archives: Travel Guides
What a Carve Up!
This is a brilliant noir farce, a dystopian vision and the story of an obsession. Michael is a lonely, rather pathetic writer, obsessed by the film, `What A Carve Up!` in which a mad knifeman cuts his way through the inhabitants of a decrepit stately pile as the thunder rages. Inexplicably, Michael is commissioned to
Not On the Label: What Really Goes into the Food on Your Plate
In 2004 Felicity Lawrence published her ground-breaking book, `Not on the Label`, where, in a series of undercover investigations she provided a shocking account of what really goes into the food we eat. She discovered why beef waste ends up in chicken, why a single lettuce might be sprayed six times with chemicals before it
Our Kind of Traitor
In John le Carre`s electrifying novel Our Kind of Traitor, innocents abroad are drawn into the darkest recesses of the financial world. Britain is in the depths of recession. A left-leaning young Oxford academic and his barrister girlfriend take an off-peak holiday on the Caribbean island of Antigua. By seeming chance they bump into a
Landmarks
`Landmarks` is Robert Macfarlane`s joyous meditation on words, landscape and the relationship between the two. Words are grained into our landscapes, and landscapes are grained into our words. `Landmarks` is about the power of language to shape our sense of place. It is a field guide to the literature of nature, and a glossary containing
Tide: The Science and Lore of the Greatest Force on Earth
From Cnut to D-Day, the history and science of the unceasing tide is explored for the first time.Half of the world`s population lives in coastal regions lapped by tidal waters. Yet how little most of us know about the tide – a key force on our planet that has altered the course of history and
Hot Milk
Two women arrive in a village on the Spanish coast. Rose is suffering from a strange illness andher doctors are mystified. Her daughter Sofia has brought her here to find a cure with the infamous and controversial Dr Gomez – a man of questionable methods and motives. Intoxicated by thick heat and the seductive people
A Castle in Spain
“Stands apart…This Englishman`s castle might have started as a dream, but it has ended up being an extraordinary reality”. (“Sunday Times”). Walking in the Pyrenees one spring morning Matthew Parris stumbled upon a magnificent ruined mansion standing on the edge of a line of huge cliffs. Later he was to discover that parts of the
De Niro`s Game
“De Niro`s Game” is the stunning winner of the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and the very first novel by up-and-coming Lebanese literary star Rawi Hage, also author of “Cockroach”. Bassam and George are childhood best friends who have grown up on the Christian side of war-torn Beirut. Now on the verge of adulthood, they must
A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian
“A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian” is bestselling author Marina Lewycka`s hilarious and award winning debut novel. `Two years after my mother died, my father fell in love with a glamorous blonde Ukrainian divorcee. He was eighty-four and she was thirty-six. She exploded into our lives like a fluffy pink grenade, churning up the
Love, Nina: Despatches from Family Life
Love, Nina: Despatches from Family Life by Nina Stibbe is the laugh-out-loud story of the trials and tribulations of a very particular family. In 1982 Nina Stibbe, a 20-year-old from Leicester, moved to London to work as a nanny for a very particular family. It was a perfect match: Nina had no idea how to
City of Women
In the very darkest hour, who do you trust, who do you love, and who can be saved? It is 1943 – the height of the Second World War. With the men taken by the army, Berlin has become a city of women. And while her husband fights on the Eastern Front, Sigrid Schroder is,
Making Sense of the Troubles: A History of the Northern Ireland Conflict
COMPLETELY REVISED AND UPDATED EDITION Making Sense of the Troubles is David McKittrick and David McVea`s classic history of the Troubles, now completely revised and updated. First published ten years ago, Making Sense of the Troubles is widely regarded as the most `comprehensive, considered and compassionate` (Irish Times) history of the Troubles in Northern Ireland.
Jonathan Swift: The Reluctant Rebel
Jonathan Swift was a man of contradictions: a man who satirized the powerful but aspired to political greatness, who mocked men`s vanity but held himself in high esteem, a religious moralizer famed for his malice – a man sharply aware of humanity`s flaws, but no less susceptible to them.As with his acclaimed biography of John
When the Emperor was Divine
Longlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction, “When the Emperor Was Divine” is the critically acclaimed debut novel by bestselling writer Julie Otsuka – author of “The Buddha in the Attic” – in which she explores the lives of Japanese immigrants living in America during the Second World War. It is four months after Pearl
15 Million Degrees: A Journey to the Centre of the Sun
110 times wider than Earth; 15 million degrees at its core; an atmosphere so huge that Earth is actually within it: come and meet the star of our solar system Light takes eight minutes to reach Earth from the surface of the Sun. But its journey within the Sun takes hundreds of thousands of years.
The Edge of the World: How the North Sea Made Us Who We Are
Michael Pye`s The Edge of the World is an epic adventure: from the Vikings to the Enlightenment, from barbaric outpost to global centre, it tells the amazing story of northern Europe`s transformation by sea. This is a story of saints and spies, of fishermen and pirates, traders and marauders – and of how their wild
The Girls of Slender Means
This is beautifully packaged reissue of one of Muriel Spark`s best loved novels, “The Girls of Slender Means”. `Long ago in 1945 all the nice people in England were poor, allowing for exceptions`. In the May of Teck Club – a London hostel `three times window shattered since 1940 but never directly hit` – the
The Sea Change
A Richard and Judy Summer 2013 Book Club pick. The Sea Change by Joanna Rossiter is a haunting and moving novel about a mother and a daughter, caught between a tsunami and a war. Yesterday was Alice`s wedding day. She is thousands of miles away from the home she is so desperate to leave, on
Inferno
In the last days of July 1943, British and American planes dropped 9,000 tons of bombs with the intention of erasing the German city from the map. The resultant firestorm burned for a month and left 40,000 civilians dead. “Inferno” is a searing account of terrifying destruction: of how and why the Allies dropped a
Argo
Argo by Antonio Mendez and Matt Baglio – the declassified CIA story behind the Oscar-winning film. It is the winner of `best picture` at the academy awards, The Baftas and The Golden Globes Tehran, November 1979. Militant students stormed the American embassy and held sixty Americans captive for a gruelling 444 days. But until now
