Between 1970 & 1975 Jon Swain, the English journalist portrayed in David Puttnam's film, ' The Killing Fields', lived in the lands of the Mekong river. This is his account of those years, & the way in which the tumultuous events affected his perceptions of life & death as Europe never could. He also describes the beauty of the Mekong landscape
- the villages along its banks, surrounded by mangoes, bananas & coconuts, & the exquisite women, the odours of opium, & the region's other face
- that of violence & corruption.

...

After a terrible argument with her father over their family property, Rebecca throws her kit into the back of her ute & heads north with her sheepdogs. A job as a trainee farmhand takes her into the rowdy world of country dances, Bundy rum & boys. When she at last settles down to a bit of study at agricultural college, her life is turned upside down by the very handsome, but very drunken party animal, Charlie Lewis.

Will she choose a life of wheat farming on vast open plains with Charlie? Or will she return to the mountains to fight for the land & the river that runs through her soul?

It's only when tragedy shatters her world that Rebecca finds a strength & courage she never knew she had, in this action-packed novel of adventure, dreams, heartbreak & love.



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A sequence of delicate, tragic stories by the bestselling author of Raj evokes the profound presence of tradition & desire. ...

Driving 15, 000 miles from Tierra del Fuego, Argentina, to Prudhoe Bay, Alaska, in a record-breaking twenty-three & a half days, Tim Cahill's Road Fever is a hilarious account of a preposterous journey, a breathtaking tour of North & South America, as well as a veritable how-to for pulling off cheeky scams to get ahead. All in the spirit of getting his name written into the record books.

Told with the humour, knowledge, & propriety-be-damned attitude that have made his other adventure books such critical & popular successes, Cahill embarks on his fastest, funniest trip yet. He reveals everything there is to know about surviving South America on a diet of beef jerky & Farmer's milk shakes & getting General Motors & the Guinness Book of World Records to subsidize his wanderlust.

...

A by-pass is planned in Kingsmarkham
- that will destroy its peace & the natural habitat forever. Dora Wexford joins the protest
...

A by-pass is planned in Kingsmarkham, that will destroy its peace & the natural habitat forever. Dora Wexford joins the protest movement, but Wexford must be more circumspect. Trouble is expected. However, before the protestors make their presence felt, the badly decomposed body of a young woman is discovered. Burden believes he knows the identity of the murderer, but Wexford is not convinced. Before the murder inquiry can proceed much further a number of people disappear
- including Dora Wexford
- leaving the Chief Inspector is both puzzled & bereft. Having also just become a grandfather, he cannot come to terms with the most powerful, familiar passions until the case is resolved.

...

Verdun was the largest, the longest & the bloodiest battle between the French & Germans in the First World War, lasting from February 1916 until the end of the year & claiming more then 700, 000 casualties. For the French in particular, it was always more than just a battle, being rather (in Paul Valery's words) 'a complete war in itself, inserted in the Great War'. Ian Ousby's masterly book gives a dramatic & brilliantly illuminating account of the generals' planning & the troops' suffering. At the same time it challenges the narrow horizons of military history by locating the experience of Verdun in how the French had thought about themselves since the debacle of the Franco-Prussian War. Verdun emerges as the mid-point in the cycle of Franco-German hostility, carrying both the burden of history &
- if only by the presence on the battlefield of men like Petain & de Gaulle, France's two leaders in the next war
- the seeds of the future. The Road to Verdun will radically challenge every reader's view of France
- & the very nature of warfare.


...

Verdun was the largest, the longest & the bloodiest battle between the French & Germans in the First World War, lasting from February 1916 until the end of the year & claiming more then 700, 000 casualties. For the French in particular, it was always more than just a battle, being rather (in Paul Valery's words) 'a complete war in itself, inserted in the Great War'. Ian Ousby's masterly book gives a dramatic & brilliantly illuminating account of the generals' planning & the troops' suffering. At the same time it challenges the narrow horizons of military history by locating the experience of Verdun in how the French had thought about themselves since the debacle of the Franco-Prussian War. Verdun emerges as the mid-point in the cycle of Franco-German hostility, carrying both the burden of history &
- if only by the presence on the battlefield of men like Petain & de Gaulle, France's two leaders in the next war
- the seeds of the future. The Road to Verdun will radically challenge every reader's view of France
- & the very nature of warfare.


...

Victor Gollancz personally commissioned Orwell to write about the distressed north of England in January 1936. After Orwell handed in his typescript a little before Christmas Day 1936, he immediately left to fight in Spain. Shortly afterwards the book was selected for publication by the Left Book Club. This meant a print run of 47, 340 copies instead of 2, 150, so bringing Orwell to a much wider audience. The first part of Orwell's account, Gollancz wrote in LEFT NEWS in April 1937, 'has done, perhaps in a greater degree than any previous book, what the [ Left Book] Club is meant to do
- it has provoked thought & discussion of the keenest kind'. All copies of the original Left Book Club & first public editions of THE ROAD TO WIGAN PIER were sold. This edition reproduces the illustrations selected for that first edition, corrects the text & prints Victor Gollancz's Foreword as an Appendix.
...