One wild night midwife Patty Peel is called to attend a birth on the opposite side of Liverpool. She pedals off into the storm & delivers a baby girl in a filthy slum dwelling, just as the mother dies. The drunk & violent father tells Patty to get rid of it, so she takes the child away, meaning to deliver it to the nearest orphanage.

But Patty had spent her entire childhood in an institution & cannot bear to hand the baby over. However, there are rough waters ahead. Patty has few friends, & fears & despises men, including her next door neighbour, Darky Knight, so how can she hope to bring up the child alone?

She has no idea how the baby will affect the attitude of those around her, nor how her life will change as a result...



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MY TRUE IDENTITY... SPELLS DANGER!

Everyone thinks Tasha is a big joke because she is OBSESSED with spies. But when

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There has been no other epoch in American history where corruption, debauchery, sleaze & horrific murder has intersected with a society as speciously glittering & innocent as the Los Angeles of the 1940s & 50s.

The Tinseltown of that age had movie star glamour on the surface but a dark, violent & unrepentant heart. None knew this dichotomy better than the Los Angeles Police Department, whose story became the most successful police drama in television history, Dragnet. Jack Webb was the star & creator of the show, but much of what he unearthed was too sensational to be broadcast on prime time. Those stories he saved for his classic, The Badge.

Crimes like the sex slaying of Betty Short, the Black Dahlia: tortured for days, drained of blood, cut in two & dumped in Leimert Park, the subject of James Ellroy



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Living & working in Rumania, Guy & Harriet Pringle are forced to evacuate to Greece before the steady advance of the German army. The Balkan Trilogy is the remarkable portrait of their marriage, a haunting evocation of a vanished way of life & a delightfully ironic comedy of manners in a breaking world. ...

This is a fictional re-creation of the marriage & separation of poets Sylvia Plath & Ted Hughes. From the start, poetry was the couple's tryst-placing & battleground. Sylvia read Ted's verse before she met him, confronting the handsome poet with his own words at their first encounter one cold Cambridge night. In intensely vivid prose, Emma Tennant takes us beyond the familiar outlines of the pair's legend, imbuing their story with the heightened symbolism of an epic drama. From the scarlet lipstick & headband Sylvia wore on the night they first met, to the yards of red corduroy curtains left unfinished at her death, Tennant constructs a ballad from the unforgettable images that tap into our very nerve endings. As Sylvia & Ted struggle to create both life & art, their duet becomes a duel
- creating a powerful vortex of sensation & passion that draws everyone into its path, including Sylvia's darkly beautiful rival, Assia Wevill. Through imaginative fiction, The Ballad of Sylvia & Ted evokes the social & literary circles in which Plath & Hughes travelled, even as it animates the three talented yet tortured people whose tragic tale surely deserves its place as one of the twentieth century's most famous literary love stories.
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When Annabel Smith is driven to jumping overboard from her father's Elisabethan sailing vessel, she expects to die but is instead washed up on the shores of feudal Japan & into the hands of brutal warlord Nakano. Enchanted by her naked blonde beauty, Nakano takes her to Shimoyama, his fortress home where the Mamma San is to teach Annabel the art of giving pleaser. Shimoyama is a world of political intrigue & Nakano's brother warns Annabel of the dangers that surround her. Will she ever be accepted as a barbarian Geisha, given that her sexual appetites are revenous & go against the rules? ...

When Annabel Smith is driven to jumping overboard from her father's Elisabethan sailing vessel, she expects to die but is instead washed up on the shores of feudal Japan & into the hands of brutal warlord Nakano. Enchanted by her naked blonde beauty, Nakano takes her to Shimoyama, his fortress home where the Mamma San is to teach Annabel the art of giving pleaser. Shimoyama is a world of political intrigue & Nakano's brother warns Annabel of the dangers that surround her. Will she ever be accepted as a barbarian Geisha, given that her sexual appetites are revenous & go against the rules? ...

The Barbarian Football Club is a rugby institution that transcends the national barriers of the 15-a-side game around the world. For a century & more the Barbarians, a touring club without a permanent base, have travelled the length & breadth of Britain & Europe & as far afield as South Africa, Japan, Russia & North & South America to play matches against the mighty & the minnows. Club sides everywhere welcome them with open arms because to play against them is an honour in itself & a guarantee of a match of flowing rugby & massive crowd appeal. & the most famous players in the history of the game, from Gareth Edwards to Gavin Hastings, Michael Lynagh to Jonah Lomu, or Serge Blanco to Jeremy Guscott, have worn the famous black-&-white shirt of the Barbarians. Since 1948 the Barbarians have regularly played the All Blacks, Springboks & Wallabies in front of sell-out crowds at Twickenham, Cardiff Arms Park, the Millennium Stadium & Lansdowne Road in Dublin
- & at one time or another beaten them all. In more recent times summer tours have featured high-profile fixtures against Engl&, Scotl&, Ireland & Wales. The United Nations of Rugby is the updated official history of the legendary touring club &

Includes:: personal reflections & anecdotes from several celebrated players from around the world. Famous matches such as the incomparable defeat of the 1973 All Blacks & ground-breaking tours to Canada & South Africa are recalled through the eyes of the stars who took part. Full coverage is also given to the Barbarians continuing contact with the grass roots of the game in Britain & the fostering of the sport in developing rugby nations such as Portugal. The book also addresses the question of what makes the Barbarians so special & how they have survived & flourished in the age of professional rugby.


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No writer is more charismatic than Robert Burns & no biographer has captured his energy, brilliance & radicalism as well as Robert Crawford does in The Bard. To his international admirers Burns was a genius, a hero, a warm-hearted friend; yet to the mother of one of his lovers he was a wastrel, to a fellow poet he was ...