Dr Abby Dolan was on the fast track at a major San Francisco hospital when she made a critical choice: to follow her fiance, Josh Wyler, to the picturesque California town of Patience, where he has a new job with the manufacturing giant Colstar. Working in a small-town emergency room, knowing her every move sparks gossip, Abby nonetheless begins to feel at home-until the first undiagnosable patients start to showing up. Abby calls them NIWWs: No Idea What, s Wrong. & despite her cosiderable skills, she can, tcrack these baffling, seemingly random cases. When Josh too begins to suffer disturbing symptoms, followed by manic, even violent behaviour, she wonders: could Colstar somehow be poisoning the town? Warned by a colleague that her predecessor in the ER died in a dubious accident after makink similar allegations, Abby refuses to back off. She begins to question everyone & everything around her in the now hosti le town of patience-while her most dangerous enemy is far closer than she thinks. ...

Is there a 'physics of society'? Ranging from Hobbes & Adam Smith to modern work on traffic flow & market trading, & across economics, sociology & psychology, Philip Ball shows how much we can understand of human behaviour when we cease to try to predict & analyse the behaviour of individuals & look to the impact of hundreds, thousands or millions of individual human decisions, whether in circumstances in which human beings co-operate or conflict, when their aggregate behaviour is constructive & when it is destructive. By perhaps Britain's leading young science writer, this is a deeply thought-provoking book, causing us to examine our own behaviour, whether in buying the new Harry Potter book, voting for a particular party or responding to the lures of advertisers. ...

Denis Stone, a naive young poet, is invited to stay at Crome, a country house renowned for its gatherings of 'bright young things'. Crome's hosts, the world-weary Henry Wimbush & his exotic wife Priscilla are joined by a party of colourful guests whose intrigues & opinions ensure Denis's stay is a memorable one. In the course of the weekend Henry tells his guests fantastical stories from the history of the house, Mr Barbecue-Smith invents inspirational aphorisms conceived in trances, Mary dispense with her virginity on the roof, the local vicar prophesies the Apocalypse, the annual Crome Fair takes place & Denis tries to capture it all in poetry & has his heart broken. First published in 1921, Crome Yellow was Aldous Huxley's much-acclaimed debut novel. With the evident relish of the true satirist, he mocked the fads, foibles & spirit of his time with an unsurpassed wit & brilliance. ...

Denis Stone, a naive young poet, is invited to stay at Crome, a country house renowned for its gatherings of 'bright young things'. Crome's hosts, the world-weary Henry Wimbush & his exotic wife Priscilla are joined by a party of colourful guests whose intrigues & opinions ensure Denis's stay is a memorable one. In the course of the weekend Henry tells his guests fantastical stories from the history of the house, Mr Barbecue-Smith invents inspirational aphorisms conceived in trances, Mary dispense with her virginity on the roof, the local vicar prophesies the Apocalypse, the annual Crome Fair takes place & Denis tries to capture it all in poetry & has his heart broken. First published in 1921, Crome Yellow was Aldous Huxley's much-acclaimed debut novel. With the evident relish of the true satirist, he mocked the fads, foibles & spirit of his time with an unsurpassed wit & brilliance. ...

cross /krôs/ n., v., & adj.

1 an ancient instrument of torture
2 in a very bad


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A boy has been crucified in Galway city.

People are shocked; the broadsheets debate how the brutal death reflects the state

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An orthodox Jew is found shot dead in Montreal, the mutilated body is barely recognisable.

Extreme heat has accelerated

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No one has a better perspective on life on both sides of the channel than Julian Barnes. In these exquisitely crafted stories spanning several centuries, he takes as his universal theme the British in France; from the last days of a reclusive English composer, the beef consuming 'navvies' labouring on the Paris-Rouen railway to a lonely woman mourning the death of her brother on the battlefields of the Somme.

Clever, wise, reflective & imaginative, these stories are permeated with understanding of what it has meant for generations from these islands to cross the Channel.

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