Category Archives: Travel Guides
Dirty Bertie: an English King Made in France
This is the entertaining biography of Edward VII and his playboy lifestyle, by Stephen Clarke, author of 1000 Years of Annoying the French and A Year in the Merde. Despite fierce opposition from his mother, Queen Victoria, Edward VII was always passionately in love with France. He had affairs with the most famous Parisian actresses,
Firefly
On a secluded hillside in Jamaica lies Firefly, Noel Coward`s peaceful retreat. Here, between sundowners and sunsets, brandies and cigarettes, the seventy-one-year-old Coward whiles away his days – a comforting, frustrating pattern of unwanted breakfasts, reluctant walks, graceless dips in the pool – in the company of his manservant Patrice. Both of them dream of
A Sting in the Tale
This is a Sunday Times bestseller. It is shortlisted for the 2013 Samuel Johnson Prize. Dave Goulson has always been obsessed with wildlife, from his childhood menagerie of exotic pets and dabbling in experimental taxidermy to his groundbreaking research into the mysterious ways of the bumblebee and his mission to protect our rarest bees. Once
London: The Concise Biography
An abridged edition of Peter Ackroyd`s magisterial biography of the city of London. Prize-winning historian, novelist and broadcaster, Peter Ackroyd takes us on a journey – historical, geographical and imaginative – through the city of London. Moving back and forth through time, Ackroyd is an effortless, exuberant guide to times of plague and pestilence, fire
Waterloo: The Aftermath
After midnight, 19 June 1815…On the battlefield more than 50,000 men and 7,000 horses lie dead and wounded; the wreckage of a once proud French Grande Armee struggles in abject disorder to the Belgian frontier pursued by murderous Prussian lancers; and Napoleon Bonaparte, exhausted and stunned at the scale of his defeat, rode through the
The Dogs of Riga (Wallander)
Sweden, winter, 1991. Inspector Kurt Wallander and his team receive an anonymous tip-off. A few days later a life raft is washed up on a beach. In it are two men, dressed in expensive suits, shot dead. The dead men were criminals, victims of what seems to have been a gangland hit. But what appears
Beastly Things
When a body is found floating in a canal, strangely disfigured and with multiple stab wounds, Commissario Brunetti is called to investigate and is convinced he recognises the man from somewhere. However, with no identification except for the distinctive shoes the man was wearing, and no reports of people missing from the Venice area, the
The Man Who Smiled
Spiralling into an alcohol-fuelled depression after killing a man in the line of duty, Inspector Kurt Wallander has made up his mind to quit the police force for good. When an old acquaintance seeks Wallander`s help to investigate the suspicious circumstances in which his father has died, Kurt doesn`t want to know. But when his
The Greatcoat
In the winter of 1952, Isabel Carey moves to the East Riding of Yorkshire with her husband Philip, a GP. With Philip spending long hours on call, Isabel finds herself isolated and lonely as she strives to adjust to the realities of married life. Woken by intense cold one night, she discovers an old RAF
Fifth Woman
Four nuns and a fifth woman are killed in a savage night-time attack in Africa. A year later, Inspector Kurt Wallander invesigates the disappearance of an elderly birdwatcher and discovers a gruesome and meticulously planned murder – a body impaled in a trap of sharpened bamboo poles. Then, another man is reported missing. Once again
The Sense of an Ending
Winner of the 2011 Man Booker PrizeTony Webster and his clique first met Adrian Finn at school. Sex-hungry and book-hungry, they would navigate the girl-less sixth form together, trading in affectations, in-jokes, rumour and wit. Maybe Adrian was a little more serious than the others, certainly more intelligent, but they all swore to stay friends
London Bridge in America: The Tall Story of a Transatlantic Crossing
In 1968 the world`s largest antique went to America. But how do you transport a 130-year-old bridge 3,000 miles? And why did Robert P. McCulloch, a multimillionaire oil baron and chainsaw-manufacturing king, buy it? Why did he ship it to a waterless patch of the Arizonan desert? Did he even get the right bridge? To
Stop What You`re Doing and Read This!
In any 24 hours there might be sleeping, eating, kids, parents, friends, lovers, work, school, travel, deadlines, emails, phone calls, Facebook, Twitter, the news, the TV, Playstation, music, movies, sport, responsibilities, passions, desires, dreams. Why should you stop what you`re doing and read a book? People have always needed stories. We need literature – novels,
Empire Antarctica: Ice, Silence & Emperor Penguins
This is shortlisted for the RSL Ondaatje prize. Gavin Francis fulfilled a lifetime`s ambition when he spent fourteen months as the base-camp doctor at Halley, a profoundly isolated British research station on the Caird Coast of Antarctica. So remote, it is said to be easier to evacuate a casualty from the International Space Station than
Blood Med
Spain is corrupt and on the brink of collapse. The king is ill, banks are closing, hospitals are in chaos, homes are lost, demonstrators riot and rightwing thugs patrol the street. The tunnels beneath the streets are at once a refuge and a source of anger. And as the blood flows Camara roars in on
Hemingway`s Boat
This is the “New York Times” bestseller. `She`d been intimately his, and he hers, for twenty-seven years – which were his final twenty-seven years. She`d lasted through three wives, the Nobel Prize, and all his ruin. He`d owned her, fished her, worked her and rode her, from the waters of Key West to the Bahamas
Three Brothers
Three Brothers follows the fortunes of Harry, Daniel and Sam Hanway, born on a post-war council estate in Camden Town. Marked out from the start by curious coincidence, each boy is forced to make his own way in the world – a world of dodgy deals and big business, of criminal gangs and crooked landlords,
The War is Dead, Long Live the War
Wars come and go across the headlines and television screens, but for those who survive them, scarred and scattered, they never end. This is a book about post-conflict irresolution, about the lives of those who survived the gulag of concentration camps in north-western Bosnia and about seeking justice for Bosnia today. But justice is not
The Flowers of War
Set in December 1937, the Japanese have taken over the city of Nanking. Sixteen school girls take shelter in a church run by an American priest, Father Engelmann. As the soldiers pass through the city, a group of courtesans from a local brothel arrive at the church seeking refuge further endangering the children. Based on
The Quick
You are about to discover the secrets of The Quick – But first, reader, you must travel to Victorian England, and there, in the wilds of Yorkshire, meet a brother and sister alone in the world, a pair bound by tragedy. You will, in time, enter the rooms of London`s mysterious Aegolius Club – a
