On August 15, 1953, the day of a tumultuous street carnival in Elephant Park, Ohio, the baker Rocco La Grassa receives a devastating piece of news: his son has died in a POW camp in Korea. Rocco's dogged life is transformed.

This unforgettable debut novel follows Rocco, an elderly abortionist, an enigmatic drapery seamstress, a teenage boy & a jeweller deep into the heart of a crime that will twist all of their lives.

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Professor Alan Rugman is one of the world's leading academics in the field of international business & strategy. In The End of Globalization he argues that we are currently witnessing the end of globalization & draws on new research & analysis to argue that globalization never really happened anyway. Like Bartlett & Ghoshal's Managing Across Borders, this book is aimed at the market of practitioners & policy-makers, (not academics & theoreticians) showing them what the current state of the global economy means for them. Global business is dominated by the 500 largest multinational enterprises (MNEs) out of a total of 30, 000 MNEs altogether. The 500 MNEs that are the engines of international business 'think regional & act local'. Using analysis drawn from world-leading companies, Professor Rugman looks in detail at the managerial implications of the end of globalization, including in-depth discussion of corporate strategies, organizational structures, & analytical methods. ...

The love affair between Maurice Bendix & Sarah, flourishing in the turbulent times of the London Blitz, ends when she suddenly & without explanation breaks it off. After a chance meeting rekindles his love & jealousy two years later, Bendix hires a private detective to follow Sarah, & slowly his love for her turns into an obsession. ...

We have reached a pivotal moment for fishing, with seventy-five percent of the world's fish stocks either fully exploited or overfished. If nothing is done to stop the squandering of fish stocks the life of the oceans will face collapse & millions of people could starve.

Fish is the aspirational food for Western society, the healthy, weight-conscious choice, but those who eat & celebrate fish often ignore the fact that the fishing industry, although as technologically advanced as space travel, has an attitude to conservation 10, 000 years out of date. Trawling on an industrial scale in the North Sea takes 16 lbs of dead marine animals to produce just 1lb of sole. Regulation isn't working, fishermen must cheat or lose money, dolphins & other wildlife (seabirds, turtles, sharks) are killed unnecessarily & fish stocks are collapsing despite the warnings.

The End of the Line looks at the problem & proves that we, as consumers, have to change if the situation is to improve.



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Damian Thompson highly evocative, brilliant & comprehensive account of apocalyptic belief was a phenomenal critical success upon hardback publication. It brings together the massacre at Waco, the Solar Temple suicides, the Japanese subway gas attack, UFOs, angelic visitors & other apparently unrelated phenomena & places them in the context of the dawning of a new world at the time of the millennium. This is the revised, updated edition in which Damian Thompson tackles subjects such as the millennium dome & the millennium bug; rejacketed by Vintage for the lead-up to the year 2, 000. ...

According to the ancient Maya, the world as we know it will end on 21 December 2012. On that date, their calendar will click round to zero for the first time in over 5, 000 years. They prophesised that this destruction will be preceded by a series of natural disasters, including earthquakes & floods. Does this sound familiar?

What will this mean for us? Should we take seriously their claims that this will be a time of apocalyptic cataclysm? & just how did the Maya, a clever but nonetheless Stone Age people, calculate the date of an astronomical event that would take place many millennia in the future?

These are just some of the questions posed by Adrian Gilbert, co-author of the international bestseller The Mayan Prophecies. In The End of Time, he revisits the ancient archaeological sites of the Maya & makes astonishing new discoveries about their cosmology. He also makes use of modern computer technology to



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According to the ancient Maya, the world as we know it will end on 21 December 2012. On that date, their calendar will click round to zero for the first time in over 5, 000 years. They prophesied that this event will be preceded by a series of natural disasters, including earthquakes & floods ...