Category Archives: Travel Guides
The Italians
Sublime and maddening, fascinating yet baffling, Italy is a country of endless paradox and seemingly unanswerable riddles. John Hooper`s marvellously entertaining and perceptive book is the ideal companion for anyone seeking to understand contemporary Italy and the unique character of the Italians. Looking at the facts that lie behind – and often belie – the
Fear and Loathing at Rolling Stone
This is a compilation of the subversive, important and entertaining writer of Hunter S. Thompson – renowned American writer of “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas”. `It would not do to be found in the desert under these circumstances: firing wildly into the cactus from a car full of drugs`. “Fear and Loathing at Rolling
The Savage Altar
Before Stieg Larsson, there was Asa Larsson…”The Savage Altar” is a truly absorbing, atmospheric and fast-paced thriller featuring lawyer Rebecka Martinsson, a fantastic character in the mould of “The Silence of the Lambs”` Clarice Starling. A church in the glittering frozen wastes of northern Sweden. Inside, a sacrifice: the body of a man – slashed
Mastering The Art Of French Cooking – Volume One
This book is Volume One of Julia Child`s classic Mastering the Art of French Cooking. With over 1,000 clear, authentic and delicious recipes for everything from Boeuf Bourguignon to the perfect French omelette.Bon appetit!
The Art Of Camping – The History And Practice Of Sleeping Under The Stars
Could there be another way of life? Can I survive with less stuff? Should I run for the hills? These are all good questions that people have asked before, throughout history, and which have inspired people to set up camp. But now camping is part of the drive for self-sufficiency, a reaction against mass tourism,
The Buddha in the Attic
Julie Otsuka`s “The Buddha in the Attic”, the follow-up to “When the Emperor Was Divine” was shortlisted for the 2011 National Book Award for Fiction and the 2011 Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and winner of the Pen Faulkner Award for Fiction 2012. Between the first and second world wars a group of young, non-English-speaking
Moth Smoke
In Lahore, Daru Shezad is a junior banker with a hashish habit. When his old friend Ozi moves back to Pakistan, Daru wants to be happy for him. Ozi has everything: a beautiful wife and child, an expensive foreign education – and a corrupt father who bankrolls his lavish lifestyle. As jealousy sets in, Daru`s
The Great Explosion: Gunpowder, the Great War, and a Disaster on the Kent Marshes
This is the Great Explosion by Brian Dillon: a masterful account of a terrible disaster in a remarkable place. In April 1916, shortly before the commencement of the Battle of the Somme, a fire started in a vast munitions works located in the Kentish marshes. The resulting series of explosions killed 108 people and injured
The Little Sister
`So you need help. What`s your name and trouble?`Private Investigator Philip Marlowe`s latest client is Orfamay Quest. She`s come all the way from Manhattan, Kansas, to find her missing brother Orrin. Or at least that`s what she tells Marlowe, offering him just twenty dollars for his trouble. Feeling charitable, Marlowe accepts – though it`s not
What Money Can`t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets
“What Money Can`t Buy” is the Top Ten “Sunday Times” Bestseller from `the superstar philosopher`, Michael Sandel. Should we financially reward children for good marks? Is it ethical to pay people to donate organs? What about hiring mercenaries to fight our wars, outsourcing inmates to for-profit prisons or selling citizenship? In recent decades, market values
A Home at the End of the World
`It was the start of my second new life, in a city that had a spin of its own – a wilder orbit inside the earth`s calm blue-green whirl. New York wasn`t open to the hopelessness and lost purpose that drifted around lesser places …` Meet Bobby, Jonathan and Clare. Three friends, three lovers, three
The Pleasures Of Men
Kate Williams` first novel, “The Pleasures of Men”, is a gothic thriller with a splash of brutal murder. Spitalfields, 1840. A murderer nicknamed The Man of Crows. A heroine with a mysterious past and a vivid imagination. Catherine Sorgeiul lives with her Uncle in a rambling house in London`s East End. When a murderer strikes,
Our Mathematical Universe: My Quest for the Ultimate Nature of Reality
In Our Mathematical Universe, Max Tegmark, one of the most original physicists at work today, leads us on an astonishing journey to explore the mysteries uncovered by cosmology and to discover the nature of reality. Part-history of the cosmos, part-intellectual adventure, Our Mathematical Universe travels from the Big Bang to the distant future via parallel
A Guide to the Birds of East Africa
For lovers of Alexander McCall Smith, Nicholas Drayson introduces the charming Mr Malik and the East African Ornithological Society in “A Guide to the Birds of East Africa”. Reserved, honourable Mr Malik. You wouldn`t notice him in a Nairobi street – except, perhaps, to comment on his carefully sculpted comb-over – but beneath his unprepossessing
The Help
Recently made into a major US motion picture and proving a bestseller the world over, here is your chance to read the original book that started it all. Enter a vanished and unjust world: Jackson, Mississippi, 1962. Where black maids raise white children, but aren`t trusted not to steal the silver…There`s Aibileen, raising her seventeenth
The Penguin Book of Irish Short Stories
`Do the Irish have, in relation to anybody else, any special capacity for the short story?`. In this collection of thirty-eight short stories covering many generations and moods of Irish writing, this question is emphatically answered in the affirmative. These mercurial, intoxicating, witty and sometimes sad stories range from Lady Gregory`s moving retelling of an
American Smoke: Journeys to the End of the Light
In American Smoke, Iain Sinclair hits the road to America in the tracks of the Beats. On the trail of the American Beats, Iain Sinclair makes a delirious and perhaps ill-fated expedition in the footsteps of Malcolm Lowry, Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs, Charles Olson and Gary Snyder. It is a journey in search of literary
The Whispering Land
`When you have a large collection of animals to transport from one end of the world to the other you cannot, as a lot of people seem to think, just hoist them aboard the nearest ship and set off with a gay wave of your hand`. Gerald Durrell and his wife are the proud owners
Home: A Time Traveller`s Tales from Britain`s Prehistory
In Home Francis Pryor, author of The Making of the British Landscape, archaeologist and broadcaster, takes us on his lifetime`s quest: to discover the origins of family life in prehistoric Britain. Francis Pryor`s search for the origins of our island story has been the quest of a lifetime. In Home, the Time Team expert explores
Just Send Me Word
From Orlando Figes, international bestselling author of “A People`s Tragedy”, “Just Send Me Word” is the moving true story of two young Russians whose love survived Stalin`s Gulag. Lev and Svetlana, kept apart for fourteen years by the Second World War and the Gulag, stayed true to each other and exchanged thousands of secret letters
