A troubled insomniac in 1890s England falls suddenly into a sleep-like trance from which he does not awake for over two hundred years During his centuries of slumber however investments are made that make him the richest & most powerful man on Earth But when he comes out of his trance he is horrified to discover that the money accumulated in his name is being used to maintain a hierarchal society in which most are poor & more than a third of all people are enslaved Oppressed & uneducated the masses cling desperately to one dream
- that the sleeper will awake & lead them all to freedom
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The Sleeping & the Dead is a tense psychological crime thriller from CWA Gold Dagger award-winning writer Ann Cleeves Detective Peter Porteous is called to Cranwell Lake where the body of a teenager has been discovered After trawling through the missing persons files he deduces that the corpse is Michael Grey an enigmatic & secretive young man who was reported missing by his foster parents in 1972 For country prison officer Hannah Morton it is the shock of her life Michael had been her boyfriend & she had been with him the night he disappeared The news report that a body has been found brings back dreaded & long buried memories from her past ' Cleeves again excels in her sense of place in this cleverly plotted psychological thriller' The Times 'A suspenseful crime story that puts Ms Cleeves in the Rendell class' Peterborough Evening Telegraph ...

Freya is an ordinary girl living in modern Britain but with a twist people still worship the Viking gods One evening stuck with her dad on his night shift at the British Museum she is drawn to the Lewis Chessmen & Heimdall's Horn Unable to resist she blows the horn waking three chess pieces from their enchantment 240 pages 10-15 Simon Francesca ...

Falsely accused victim? Or cold-blooded killer? Casey Carter was convicted of murdering her fiance fifteen years ago But Casey claims
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Falsely accused victim? Or cold-blooded killer? Casey Carter was convicted of murdering her fiance fifteen years ago But Casey claims
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Return to the darkly beautiful world of The Sin Eater's Daughter with a sequel that will leave you awed terrified & desperate for more Ever since her brother Lief disappeared Errin's life has gone from bad to worse Not only must she care for her sick mother she has to scrape together rent money by selling illegal herbal cures But none of that compares to the threat of the vengeful Sleeping Prince whom the Queen just awoke from his enchanted sleep When her village is evacuated as part of the war against the Sleeping Prince Errin is left desperate & homeless The only person she can turn to is the mysterious Silas a young man who buys deadly poisons from Errin but won't reveal why he needs them Silas promises to help Errin but when he vanishes Errin must journey across a kingdom on the brink of war to seek another way to save her mother & herself But what she finds splits the world as she knows it apart & with the Sleeping Prince drawing nearer Errin must make a heartbreaking choice that could affect the whole kingdom ...

An enchanting take on the legend of King Arthur from War Horse author & former Children's Laureate Michael Morpurgo There stood before me an ancient man swathed in a dark & tattered fleece his long hair & beard matted with filth his face grey with grief & age Holding the sword out in front of me I backed away until I felt the sink behind me & I could go no further His eyes followed me all the way' When Bun Bendle is struck blind he feels like he is drowning in blackness But the discovery of an ancient tomb & a strangely familiar sword changes him forever The Sleeping Sword weaves a contemporary tale with Arthurian legend in a way that is utterly spellbinding A gripping children's adventure from the master storyteller of An Eagle in the Snow Listen to the Moon Shadow Arthur High King of Britain & An Elephant in the Garden ------Former Children's Laureate Michael Morpurgo needs no introduction He is one of the most successful children's authors in the country loved by children teachers & parents alike Michael has written more than forty books for children including the global hit War Horse which was made into a Hollywood film by Steven Spielberg in 2011 Several of his other stories have been adapted for screen & stage including My Friend Walter Why the Whales Came & Kensuke's Kingdom Michael has won the Whitbread Award the Smarties Award the Circle of Gold Award the Children's Book Award & has been short-listed for the Carnegie Medal four times He started the charity Farms for City Children in 1976 with his wife Clare aimed at relieving the poverty of experience many young children feel in inner city & urban areas Michael is also a patron of over a dozen other charities Living in Devon listening to Mozart & working with children have provided Michael with the ideas & incentive to write his stories He spends half his life mucking out sheds with the children feeding sheep or milking cows; the other half he spends dreaming up & writing stories for children For me the greater part of writing is daydreaming dreaming the dream of my story until it hatches out
- the writing down of it I always find hard But I love finishing it then holding the book in my hand & sharing my dream with my readers Michael received an OBE in December 2006 for his services to literature
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Dulce Chacon's book has had an immense success in Spain no doubt because the novelist speaks with a just & powerful voice & because she has allowed women
- the most anonymous the most suppressed the most silenced
- to speak out Le Monde It is 1939 In the Ventas prison in Madrid a group of women have been incarcerated Their crime is to have supported or fought on the Republican side in Spain's cruel & devastating Civil War Chief among them are Hortensia who fought with the militia & is pregnant by her husband Felipe
- a man still at large & fighting against Franco's dictatorship
- & who lives with the knowledge that she will be shot after she gives birth; sixteen-year-old Elvira who tried to leave Spain with her mother but was arrested by the Falangists while she was boarding their ship; Tomasa whose husband four sons & daughter-in-law were thrown off a bridge; & Pepita Hortensia's sister who from outside the prison acts as messenger between her & her husband Dulce Chacon's deeply moving novel is based on the actual testimonies of a number of women who survived the Spanish Civil War & suffered imprisonment under the France regime as well as on accounts of others who died fighting for freedom A bestseller in Spain where it was voted ' Book of the year' The Sleeping Voice is remarkable for its combination of dramatic intensity & historical authenticity



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The pacy sensitive & formidably argued history of the causes of the First World War from acclaimed historian & author Christopher Clark FINANCIAL TIMES BOOKS OF THE YEAR 2014SUNDAY TIMES & INDEPENDENT BOOKS OF THE YEAR 2012 Winner of the Los Angeles Times History Book Prize 2014 The moments that it took Gavrilo Princip to step forward to the stalled car & shoot dead Franz Ferdinand & his wife were perhaps the most fateful of the modern era An act of terrorism of staggering efficiency it fulfilled its every aim it would liberate Bosnia from Habsburg rule & it created a powerful new Serbia but it also brought down four great empires killed millions of men & destroyed a civilization What made a seemingly prosperous & complacent Europe so vulnerable to the impact of this assassination? In The Sleepwalkers Christopher Clark retells the story of the outbreak of the First World War & its causes Above all it shows how the failure to understand the seriousness of the chaotic near genocidal fighting in the Balkans would drag Europe into catastrophe Reviews' Formidable one of the most impressive & stimulating studies of the period ever published' Max Hastings Sunday Times' Easily the best book ever written on the subject A work of rare beauty that combines meticulous research with sensitive analysis & elegant prose The enormous weight of its quality inspires amazement & awe Academics should take note Good history can still be a good story' Washington Post'A lovingly researched work of the highest scholarship It is hard to believe we will ever see a better narrative of what was perhaps the biggest collective blunder in the history of international relations' Niall Ferguson' Reading The Sleepwalkers it is as if a light had been turned on a half-darkened stage of shadowy characters cursing among themselves without reason Clark demolishes the standard view The brilliance of Clark's far-reaching history is that we are able to discern how the past was genuinely prologue In conception steely scholarship & piercing insights his book is a masterpiece' Harold Evans New York Times Book Review' Impeccably researched provocatively argued & elegantly written a model of scholarship' Sunday Times Books of the Year' Superb effectively consigns the old historical consensus to the bin It's not often that one has the privilege of reading a book that reforges our understanding of one of the seminal events of world history' Mail Online'A monumental new volume Revelatory even revolutionary Clark has done a masterful job explaining the inexplicable' Boston Globe' Superb One of the great mysteries of history is how Europe's great powers could have stumbled into World War I This is the single best book I have read on this important topic' Fareed Zakaria'A meticulously researched superbly organized & handsomely written account Military History Clark is a masterly historian His account vividly reconstructs key decision points while deftly sketching the context driving them A magisterial work' Wall Street Journal' This compelling examination of the causes of World War I deserves to become the new standard one-volume account of that contentious subject' Foreign Affairs'A brilliant contribution' Times Higher Education' Clark is fully alive to the challenges of the subject He provides vivid portraits of leading figures He also gives a rich sense of what contemporaries believed was at stake in the crises leading up to the war' Irish Times' In recent decades many analysts had tended to put most blame for the disaster of the First World War on Germany Clark strongly renews an older interpretation which sees the statesmen of many countries as blundering blindly together into war' Stephen Howe Independent Books of the Year About the author Christopher Clark is Professor of Modern History at the University of Cambridge & a Fellow of St Catharine's College He is the author of The Politics of Conversion Kaiser Wilhelm II & Iron Kingdom Widely praised around the world Iron Kingdom became a major bestseller He has been awarded the Officer's Cross of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany ...

Arthur Koestler's extraordinary history of humanity's changing vision of the universe In this masterly synthesis Arthur Koestler cuts through the sterile distinction between 'sciences' & 'humanities' to bring to life the whole history of cosmology from the Babylonians to Newton He shows how the tragic split between science & religion arose & how in particular the modern world-view replaced the medieval world-view in the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century He also provides vivid & judicious pen-portraits of a string of great scientists & makes clear the role that political bias & unconscious prejudice played in their creativity ...