As playwright, painter & novelist, Richard Fenchurch has been both successful & rich, but now, in his mid-sixties, he's beginning to fall apart: again. His daughter plucks him from the squalor of his London house & installs him in the old family home, the mansion where he courted his first wife. Here, in a familiar house & in a changed though recognisable landscape, Fenchurch struggles to keep his grip on freedom & sanity, & allows himself to relax into memory. Time is catching up with him, but it is memory that produces the more startling revelation. Fenchurch's love for his wife was real enough
- it was a successful marriage as these things go
- but the old surroundings, both the building & the land itself, bring back to him the irresistibly ardent drive of his passionate affair with Isabella, his fiancee's mother. Returning to fiction after fourteen years, David Storey has created both a sharply comic vision of the indignities of age & a delicately erotic evocation of a youthful & dangerous affair.

...

Selected personally by multi-award-winning author & 2001-3 Children's Laureate, Anne Fine, this is a super collection of poetry that shouldn't be missed by any teen. Kingsley Amis, John Betjeman, Robet Browning, Leonard Clark, Adele Geras, Seamus Heaney, A E Housman, Philip Larkin, Pablo Neruda, Brian Patten & Derek Walcott are amongst the poets featured & there are over 100 poems in total. ...

Beneath the sea cliffs of the south coast, suicides are a sad but common fact. Yet even the hardened coastguard knows something is wrong when a beautiful young film actress is found lying dead on the beach one morning. Inspector Grant has to take a more professional attitude: death by suicide, however common, has to have a motive
- just like murder.
...

In this treasure of a book, Anna Quindlen, the bestselling novelist & columnist, reflects on what it takes to 'get a life'
-
...

Bill Bryson describes himself as a reluctant traveller: but even when he stays safely in his own study at home, he can't contain his curiosity about the world around him. A Short History of Nearly Everything is his quest to understand everything that has happened from the Big Bang to the rise of civilization
- how we got from there, being nothing at all, to here, being us.

Bill Bryson's challenge is to take subjects that normally bore the pants off most of us, like geology, chemistry & particle physics, & see if there isn't some way to render them comprehensible to people who have never thought they could be interested in science. It's not so much about what we know, as about how we know what we know. How do we know what is in the centre of the Earth, or what a black hole is, or where the continents were 600 million years ago? How did anyone ever figure these things out?

On his travels through time & space, he encounters a splendid collection of astonishingly eccentric, competitive, obsessive & foolish scientists, like the painfully shy Henry Cavendish who worked out many conundrums like how much the Earth weighed, but never bothered to tell anybody about many of his findings. In the company of such extraordinary people, Bill Bryson takes us with him on the ultimate eye-opening journey, & reveals the world in a way most of us have nevr seen it before.




...