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Being a combination of conventional diary entries and transcripts of videos shot by the author on the camera she was given for her 13th birthday, and beginning at the end of summer.Bluebell Gadsby is 13 but that's the least of her problems. Both her parents seem more interested in their careers than the family, leaving Blue and her three siblings in the care of Zoran the au pair, as well as their three pet rats (who may or may not be pregnant). The enigmatic Joss moves in next door and Blue thinks she might be falling in love, until he takes out her older sister Flora instead (who, incidentally, is trying to make a statement by dying her hair bright pink but no one takes the blindest bit of notice). Blue thinks and feels very deeply about life but can't really talk to anyone about it, because no one in the Gadsby family wants to address the real problem - that Blue's twin sister, Iris, died a year ago, and they are all just trying to hide their grief in busyness...So Blue turns to her diary and her unique way of seeing the world through her camcorder to express herself. A tender, funny, smart and ultimately heartwarming story.
An old man sits in a room, with a single door and window, a bed, a desk and a chair. Each day he awakes with no memory, unsure of whether or not he is locked into the room. Attached to the few objects around him are one-word, hand-written labels, and on the desk is a series of vaguely familiar black-and-white photographs and four piles of paper. Then a middle-aged woman called Anna enters and talks of pills and treatment, but also of love and promises.Who is this Mr Blank, and what is his fate? What does Anna represent from his past - and will he have enough time to ever make sense of the clues that arise?After the huge success of The Brooklyn Follies, his new novel sees Auster return to the metaphysical territory familiar from his enormously influential The New York Trilogy. A dark puzzle, and a game that implicates both reader and writer alike, Travels in the Scriptorium is a mind-altering exploration of language, responsibility and the passage of time. 'Travels in the Scriptorium returns to . . . the nihilistic gaiety of Beckett (in particular Krapp) or the sub-dermal violence of Pinter.' New Statesman
'A writer of great gifts.' - Robert MacfarlaneI now live a richly connected year, marked by seasonal events: the first snowdrop in my garden, cut and brought inside;
The unparalleled breadth of his impact is reflected in his disciples, who included George Harrison, John Coltrane, Philip Glass and Yehudi Menuhin. For this first biography of Ravi Shankar, Oliver Craske has carried out more than 130 new interviews and enjoyed unprecedented access to the Shankar family archives.
Covid-19 seems to be a sort of dirty bomb, thrown into the body to cause havoc. On the same day that the UK government finally made the first of two decisive interventions that led to a conspicuously late lockdown, David Hare contracted Covid-19.
'...Out glides a limo, as sleek as a plane,With big gleaming hubcaps as bright as champagne' The first in a comic 'What's in the?' picture book series, children will delight in this silly tale of a dog prince in his truck with a very special delivery .
'These Women is full of resilient and undaunted characters that society often doesn't give a second look to. But Ivy Pochoda does and in these pages she gives us the small story that grows so large in meaning and emotion as to transcend genre. It tells us how to look at ourselves and at what is important.' Michael ConnellyThe dancer. The mother. The cop. The artist. The wife.These women live by countless unspoken rules. How to dress; who to trust; which streets are safe and which are not. The rules grow out of a kaleidoscope of fear, anguish, power, loss and hope. Maybe it is only these rules which keep them alive.When their neighbourhood is rocked by two murders, the careful existence these women have built for themselves begins to crumble.'Pochoda turns grief, suffering and loss into art, crafting a literary thriller that is no less compelling for its deep emotional resonance.' VogueNamed a Most Anticipated Novel for 2020 by* The Washington Post * Entertainment Weekly * Vulture * LitHub * Crime Reads * Book Riot *What readers are saying:'Gritty and addicting.''The kind of storytelling you hope to find in your movie theaters one day.''Pochoda weaves a mystery that not only had me turning the page, but dwelling on lines of prose.''This book was far from what I was expecting it to be . . . I couldn't tear myself away.''I devoured it in one sitting . . . I LOVED IT.''This is one of those books that tears into you and doesn't let you go - even after you read the last page.'
Omar and his brother Hassan, two Somali boys, have spent a long time in the Dadaab refugee camp. The hunger is constant . but there's football to look forward to, and now there's a chance Omar will get to go to school . This book perfectly depicts life in a refugee camp for 8-12 year olds.
complete with blaring, psychedelic illustrations.' Metro (Kitchen Disco)'Fantastic - totally captured my son's imagination.' Parent/Carer, Time to Read Campaign (Kitchen Disco)'Absolutely brilliant.' Librarian, Time to Read Campaign (Kitchen Disco)
'In a change to our scheduledprogramme tonight,I proudly present,for your joy and delight .
My only regret is that I shan't be alive to savour my retrospective triumph. I savour it every day of my life. Follow the 'Queen of Crime' as she takes us into the mind of a man who has waited decades to enact his patient, ingenious revenge on a school bully.
After the death of her cop father, PI Roxane Weary did everything she could to lose herself in her work - but she's getting tired of the hangovers, of fighting with her ex-girlfriend, and of avoiding her mother.
. . The most powerful trucks . . . Firefighting helicopters . . . A thrilling book packed with full-colour technical illustrations and information about emergency vehicles from around the world. Featuring various emergency scenarios, and fully researched to be up to the minute, this book is already a hit in-house .
'Compelling from first to last page.' DENISE MINAMeet Juniper Song, an under employed, twenty-something, Raymond-Chandler-loving, Korean American woman from downtown LA.When a friend asks Song to carry out surveillance on his father, she figures she doesn't have anything better to do - plus she gets to indulge her Philip Marlowe fantasies. But barely half a day into playing private eye someone has knocked her unconscious and left a dead body in the trunk of her car.
'A gritty, politically charged mystery.' LA TimesJuniper Song - private detective - has a talent for surveillance, and for knowing when a client isn't telling her the whole story.Rubina Gasparian, Song's latest client, is worried about her cousin, who just happens to be carrying her baby as a surrogate. Something tells her she's been hired to do more than just follow a heavily pregnant twenty-six-year-old around LA, and soon enough, Song finds herself caught in the dangerous underbelly of one of LA's biggest immigrant communities.
'Nathanael West and Raymond Chandler would be proud.' LA TimesJuniper Song has a new gig: apprenticed to a private investigation firm in downtown LA, she's racking up hours following cheating spouses.When a NY artist hires her to keep an eye on her long-distance boyfriend in LA, Song has no problem tailing the guy - until a panicked late-night phone call has her racing to the iconic Roosevelt Hotel. There, in the aftermath of a wild party in its top floor suite, she finds only two people left: the boyfriend and a Hollywood legend. Only one of them is still alive.
Graham's New Collected Poems (2004) marked a crucial point in the growth of his reputation, bringing together for the first time all the poems of his seven collections as well as some of the unpublished material that had come to light since his death in 1986.
So topsy-turvy had attitudes become in certain circles that the accusation of being 'unquestionably the biggest war-monger in the world today' was levelled at Churchill not Hitler! This book intends to study the various forms of motivation which led to this phenomenon (pro-Nazi sympathies in Britain).
Five-time Oscar nominee and BAFTA winner, the only British director to have won the top prize at both Cannes (for Secrets & Lies) and Venice (for Vera Drake), Mike Leigh is unquestionably one of world cinema's pre-eminent figures.
This critical magnum opus, unprecedented in Shakespeare studies for its scope and daring, is nothing less than an attempt to show the Complete Works - dramatic and poetic - as a single, tightly integrated, evolving organism.
It's risky work, handlin' men, my lass. For when a woman builds her life on men, either husbands or sons, she builds on summat as sooner or later brings the house down crash on her head - yi, she does.In Husbands and Sons, Ben Power has interwoven three of D. H. Lawrence's greatest dramas, The Daughter-in-Law, A Collier's Friday Night and The Widowing of Mrs Holroyd. Together, they describe the community Lawrence came from with fierce tenderness, evoking a now-vanished world of manual labour and working-class pride.On the cracked border of Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire stands the village of Eastwood. The women of the village, wives and mothers, struggle to hold their families and their own souls together in the shadow of the great Brinsley pit.Husband and Sons by D. H. Lawrence, adapted by Ben Power, premiered at the National Theatre, London, in October 2015 in a co-production with Royal Exchange Theatre.
The truth is that jail is a place where you can still hold on to hope - hope you'll be bailed out, hope you'll be found innocent, hope you'll get a second chance.Four teenagers, never destined to be friends - one rebel, one bully, one geek and one pariah, find themselves on the run from corrupt police officers in a stolen police car. How can you prove your innocence when the people who are supposed to protect you are the ones out to get you? A beautiful, thrilling story of rebellion, and of friendship triumphing against all odds.
Patriotism Perverted is an exploration of British anti-Semitism in the last six months of peace and the first year of the Second World War. It shows how, against the backdrop of an endemic British 'social anti-Semitism', a virulent form of this tendency was able to emerge in the late Thirties in a variety of extremist movements. These movements gained their strength from the popular obsessions, in 1939, with Jewish responsibility for the approaching war (seen as 'The War of the Jews' Revenge'), and with the myth of the Judaeo-Bolshevik Plot. In many cases, these views were closely related with pro-Nazism and were often held by the most patriotic of people. For most, the outbreak of war was a signal to perform their patriotic duty. But there were others who found themselves in a considerable dilemma, torn between patriotism and their desire to subvert a war they believed Britain to have been tricked into undertaking. Researching many prominent figures of the day, including Captain Ramsay and Sir Oswald Mosley, Patriotism Perverted offers a fascinating insight into the views and activities of those in the various anti-Semitic and/or pro-Nazi circles in 1939.
A Messiah of the Last Days (1974) was C. J. Driver's fourth novel. A profound meditation on politics and a complex portrait of English society, it is also fast-paced and suspenseful. Its narrator is Tom Grace, a pragmatic, efficient London barrister with a comfortable life. But his ordered world is unsettled by his involvement with a young man he defends in court - John Buckleson, the charismatic leader of an anarchic movement calling themselves The Free People. Though deeply divided in many ways, the two men are drawn to each other by a common dream of creating a new social and moral order. Buckleson, though, is a figure of interest to more people than those who subscribe to his vision.'C. J. Driver's exceptional alertness to our times is matched by the power and zest of his evocative writing, lit up by wry wit.' Nadine Gordimer.
Emperor of Austria, Apostolic King of Hungary, King of Jerusalem, King of Bohemia, King of Dalmatia, King of Transylvania, King of Croatia and Slovenia, King of Galicia and Illyria, Grand Duke of Tuscany and Cracow, Margrave of Moravia, Duke of Salzburg, Duke of Bukovina, Duke of Modena, Parma, and Piacenza and so on, another thirty or so titles could be added. Was ever a monarch so festooned as Emperor Francis Joseph? He ruled from the Year of the Revolutions, 1848 until his death in 1916. His empire was the most multi-national state ever. An ethnic map of 1910 shows there to be Germans, Magyars, Czechs, Slovaks, Poles, Ruthenes, Serbs, Croats, Slovenes, Italians, Jews, Muslims, Ladins (in the Tyrol) and Roumanians. What is more, even together the Germans and the Magyars constituted a minority. And yet, as Alan Palmer observes no other European monarch 'exercised full sovereignty for so long.' Unlike Queen Victoria he ruled rather than merely reigned. That alone suggests he was something more than the humourless bureaucrat he is commonly thought to have been, and Alan Palmer is successful in providing a more rounded and sympathetic portrait of him both as head of an empire and head of a family.His personal life was punctuated with tragedy: his brother, Maximilian was executed y Mexican republicans; his only son, Rudolf shot himself and his mistress at Mayerling; his wife, Empress Elizabeth, was stabbed to death in Geneva, and his nephew and heir, Francis-Ferdinand was assassinated at Sarajevo. This was the first biography of Francis Joseph by an English writer and was acclaimed when originally published in 1994.'With great skill Mr Palmer blends in the Emperor's private life with the story of the Empire. . . This is an important book; also an entrancing one.' Allan Massie, Daily Telegraph'A compelling read' Lawrence James, Evening Standard
A glib assessment of Metternich might not be a favourable one, he was not without his ridiculous qualities, and yet he survived, more than survived, in fact, with the 'Age of Metternich' lasting for more than a generation, and giving Europe a measure of peace, albeit repressive, that was much needed after the Napoleonic convulsions.Alan Palmer describes well Metternich's extraordinary longevity. 'Clement von Metternich held continuous office at the head of Europe's affairs for a longer period of time than any other statesman in modern history: he became foreign minister of the Austrian Empire in the autumn of 1809 and he did not resign until the spring of 1848. For thirty-three of these thirty-nine years his statecraft and philosophy of government determined the political pattern of the continent. The 'Age of Metternich' , though often impatiently dismissed by historians as a mere interlude, lasted for twice as long as the 'Age of Napoleon' which preceded it and for half as long again as the 'Age of Bismarck' which followed in the closing decades of the century.'Metternich was a statesman to his fingertips, practising 'the skills of diplomacy with greater fluency than any contemporary Talleyrand, from whom he had learnt many of the refinement of the game.'How would he fare today? Probably quite well as he was, again in Alan Palmer's words, 'an early champion of federalism and a good European ...''As a work of history (it) cannot be faulted.' A. J. P. Taylor, Observer'Well-written, well-researched, lucid and witty.' Philip Ziegler, The Times
'Even the lives of scoundrels play some part in portraying an age...'Our interest in all things Victorian - in the seamy side of the era especially - is ageless and undimmed. Giles St. Aubyn's Infamous Victorians, first published in 1971, stands as a brilliant illumination of two dark stories of the time, replete with sinister elements of iniquity and hypocrisy.In the first fifty years of Victoria's reign two doctors were hanged after being found guilty of murder at the Central Criminal Court. Both men were 32 years old, both poisoners, both murdered for money. Dr William Palmer was a notorious figure, tried for a single murder though he almost certainly killed others. Dr George Lamson was a morphia addict convicted of killing his crippled young brother-in-law at Blenheim House school. Giles St. Aubyn restores them to life on the page, examines their careers and assesses their guilt.
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