Andrea, an impoverished eighteen-year-old girl travels to Barcelona to pursue her ambition of studying literature at the university. She arrives at night, by train, in a city that immediately imposes its bleak, post-Civil War atmosphere on her impressionable mind. She makes her way to the home of relatives, a house she has not visited since her childhood, & before long we realise that she has entered a very strange household indeed. Tension between her grandmother, her two eccentric uncles, an aunt, & the housekeeper is present from the moment of her arrival & it grows in claustrophobic intensity as this unforgettable story develops. Nada describes a young woman ...

Brought up on his father's cotton plantation in Alexandria, Charles Austen had always led a privileged life. But when Charles falls hopelessly in love with Karima Ismail, his world is turned upside down. For although beautiful, & blessed with a magnificent singing talent, Karima is merely a servant & her forbidden love affair with Charles is destined to end in tragedy.

All too soon Karima is forced to accept a hastily arranged marriage & learns to live contentedly with her husband & daughter, Nadia, the only tangible link that remains between her & Charles. In time, she also becomes one of the most admired & successful singers of her generation
- the adored ' Nightingale'.

Yet Karima's success counts for nothing when Nadia suddenly disappears. For years this traumatic event casts a shadow over Karima's life & the life of her beautiful daughter who, with a new identity & a new name, grows up thousands of miles away. It is only when an unexpected chain of events leads ' Gaby' back to Egypt, that she can begin to unravel the mystery of her past
- & discover the happiness she longs for.





...

Nothing less than a catalogue of the most courageous motoring disasters of all time, Tony Davis has stepped behind the wheel of some of the world's most notoriously bad cars. From the 1958 Ford Edsel, which made ' Edsel' a byword for failure, to the much-loved travesty that was the P76 (when people took in the P76 for warranty work they provided a list of things that didn't need fixing), these cars really are the pits. Bad design, appalling execution, ridiculous pretensions, ludicrous names -- this detailed & hilarious look at automotive atrocities from the 1950s to the present day is nothing les than a motoring Hall of Shame.

101 of the world's most downright awful cars are given the once-over, from the East German Trabant, with its cotton-reinforced body, to the dafter-than-you'd-believe-possible Lightburn Zeta Sports, via the Corvair, Cedric, Pinto & Imp. It's all here -- the harebrained, the unsightly, the excruciatingly dull & the magnificently unsuccessful.

From Alfa to Zeta, from the tiny to the gargantuan, & from the endearingly incompetent to the bombastically stupid, Naff Motors will leave you not only laughing, but also wondering how so many car manufacturers got away with so much for so long.



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A sequence of extraordinary events over the past 300 years. A chain of intrigue, deceit, greed & murder.

The loss of H.M.S.

...