Who wants to live in a town where everyone has to wear glasses to stop them going blind? & who wants to be neat & tidy & perfectly behaved all the time?violet quickly discovers there`s something weird going on in the town
- she keeps hearing voices, her mam is acting strange & her dad has disappeared. When she meets Boy she realizes that her dad is not the only person to have vanished... & that the mysterious Watchers are guarding a perfectly creepy secret!
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To find yourself, sometimes you must lose everything. Discover it all in A PLACE CALLED WINTER
- picked for the BBC Radio 2 Simon
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An immensely humorous & original tale of Englishmen abroad, inspired from the hit Channel 4 series. Charting the adventures of affable yet bumbling Nigel, looking for a place to renovate in the deepest Ardeche, this compelling, original & slightly bonkers tale sees him first foray to France with the common-sensical Nippy, & later take up partnership with the truly eccentric Reza, as the pair decide to open up an Indian restaurant. Perfectly capturing the cultural & emotional wrangles of moving abroad, the book is bursting with character; featuring mad estate agents, a love triangle between Nigel, a pretty French girl
- & her boyfriend
- the trials of persuading people that Indian cuisine is what is needed in the French countryside, a chef that pulls out of the project a week before the grand opening, & of course Reza's recipes, this is a great stand alone read that also enjoys television support with the transmission of the new peak-time series.

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Chasing memories of the losses of his brother & father, the author, a young newspaper director, & his Australian wife visit the Cotswolds. On a whim they buy a cottage & Ian resigns. They slowly get to know Norman, their inscrutable & apparently terrifying neighbour; Geoff, the ebullient landlord of their eclectic local
- last bastion against the encroaching gastropub
- & Tom, an ex-gamekeeper, who lets Ian see something of a hidden rural culture. The delightful aspects of village life & an ever-changing landscape is evocatively captured; but it is from working with Norman on his small chaotic farm that they learn about the loss of the countryside to industrial farming & of no-longer affordable housing to the dreaded 'white settlers'. & it is shadows of the past & a seemingly segregated social world around them that begin to cast doubts on whether this is the place for them. This is a gentle lesson in taking time to confront our losses, memories & prejudices to discover a revitalised life in our own country.

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From the author of the critically-acclaimed Austerlitz & Across the Land & Water comes. A Place in the Country, the much anticipated translation of one of W.G. Sebald's most brilliant works. When W. G. Sebald, the prize-winning author of Austerlitz, travelled to Manchester in 1966, he packed in his bags certain literary favourites which would remain central to him throughout the rest of his life & during the years when he was settled in Engl&. In A Place in the Country, he reflects on six of the figures who shaped him as a person & as a writer, from Jean-Jacques Rousseau to Jan Peter Tripp. Fusing biography & essay, & finding, as ever, inspiration in place
- as when he journeys to the Ile St. Pierre, the tiny, lonely Swiss island where Jean-Jacques Rousseau found solace & inspiration
- Sebald lovingly brings his subjects to life in his distinctive, inimitable voice. A Place in the Country is a window into the mind of this much loved & much missed writer. Praise for W.G. Sebald: A new kind of writing, combining fiction, memoir, travelogue, philosophy & much else besides...greatness in literature is still possible. (John Banville, Irish Times). When you read Sebald you are transported to another realm. Reading him is a truly sublime experience. (Literary Review). Is literary greatness still possible? One of the few answers available to English-Language readers is the work of W.G. Sebald. (Susan Sontag). W.G. Sebald was born in Wertach im Allgau, Germany in 1944. He studied German language & literature in Freiburg, Switzerland & Manchester. In 1966 he took up a position as an assistant lecturer at the University of Manchester, & settled permanently in England in 1970. He was Professor of European Literature at the University of East Anglia, & the author of Austerlitz; The Emmigrants, which won a series of major awards, including the Berlin Literature Prize, the Heinrich Boll Prize, the Heinrich Heine Prize & the Joseph Breitbach Prize.

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From the double Man Booker prize-winner comes an extraordinary work of historical imagination
- this is Hilary Mantel`s epic novel
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Why is it that the more advanced our society becomes, the unhappier we areseeking an answer from the only honest perspective, Tobias Jones & his wife opened up their family home & ten acre woodland to those going through crises in their lives, or suffering from depression, addiction & loneliness. They will encounter extraordinary people: from ` Roadkill Kev` to ` Mary Poppins`; build a chapel, raise pigs & encounter both violent antagonism & astounding generosity. At the same time, they will open themselves, their children & their ideals up to the most demanding of judgements & transformations. Five years on, they think they are on to something. To sit down to eat together, to work on the l&, to have no tolerance for drugs but a lot of tolerance for change a it takes time & many mistakes, but they have found a way to help people. This is the story of how.” ...

On September 11, 2011 the world will be watching as the 9/11 National Memorial Plaza opens on the site of the World Trade Centre. With photographs & architectural plans never before published, paired with comments in the very voices of those who witnessed the event, those who struggled in its shadow for days & months after, & those who have dedicated the years since to rebuilding a place of hope & meditation at Ground Zero, this book will stand apart from all the rest as the 10th anniversary of that world-changing events approaches. Heavily illustrated & elegantly designed, this book recalls the excitement & symbolism of the Twin Towers, the horror & chaos of the attack of 9/11, the fierce devotion & exhaustion as rescue of living victims became a recovery of remains. But it also carries on from that date in history to tell the inside story of the long, complex, & sometimes contentious efforts to turn 8 acres of Downtown Manhattan into a lasting memorial to those lost in New York, Washington, & Pennsylvania.A solemn reminder, a historic keepsake, & a fascinating read, this is the official book published by & about the 9/11 National Memorial Museum, created by those who have been working for years to honour those who died that day. A special fold-out list all names of the nearly 3, 000 victims, making the book itself & enduring memorial to those who died on September 11. ...

A boy exiles himself from his family through a shocking act of violence. Years later, having built a new life he returns to try to understand his past. He attempts to reconcile with his family but the closer he gets to them, the more he sets the course for disaster. Starting at the point of the final tragedy, we discover through four narrators the fabric of lies on which all their live were built, & how deep wounds can go. ...

The first book to detail the speculative history & hidden humour behind the definition of British place names. There are over 150 homographs in common use. Consider: `bow` meaning bow or bow, `object` meaning object or object, `moped` meaning moped or moped; the list goes on (in many documents, a great deal more informatively!) What is commonly overlooked is that this conundrum can be true for words that are place-names, every bit as much as for those that are not. For instance, even the most erudite students of the English language have not been taught that Felixstowe can be `a Suffolk dialect word meaning a cat`s claw`, nor, indeed, that Sixpenny Handley was `an erotic diversion offered to soldiers onleave during WW1 in the less genteel parts of our great cities.` There are many works detailing & comparing the meanings of non-titular homographs; far fewer do so for names. A Place of Sense takes examples which are all genuine places that may be found on an OS map & seeks to redress that balance, at least to a small degree, with a large dose of humour. The author hopes it has the desired effect (not to be confused with effect!) ...