This title shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize & the Commonwealth Book Prize. It is longlisted for the Desmond Elliot Prize. The Spider King`s Daughter is a modern-day Romeo & Juliet set against the backdrop of a changing Lagos, a city torn between tradition & modernity, corruption & truth, love & family loyalty. Seventeen-year-old Abike Johnson is the favourite child of her wealthy father. She lives in a She lives in a sprawling mansion in Lagos, protected by armed guards & ferried everywhere in a huge black jeep. But being her father`s favourite comes with uncomfortable duties, & she is often lonely behind the high walls of her house. A world away from Abike`s mansion, in the city`s slums, lives a seventeen-year-old hawker struggling to make sense of the world. His family lost everything after his father`s death & now he runs after cars on the roadside selling ice cream to support his mother & sister. When Abike buys ice cream from the hawker one day, they strike up an unlikely & tentative romance, defying the prejudices of Nigerian society. But as they grow closer, revelations from the past threaten their relationship & both Abike & the hawker must decide where their loyalties lie. ...

This title is the winner of a Betty Trask Award, Shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize & the Commonwealth Book Prize, Longlisted for the Desmond Elliot Prize. Seventeen-year-old Abike Johnson is the favourite child of her wealthy father. She lives in a sprawling mansion in Lagos, protected by armed guards & ferried everywhere in a huge black jeep. But being her father`s favourite comes with uncomfortable duties, & she is often lonely behind the high walls of her house. A world away from Abike`s mansion, in the city`s slums, lives a seventeen-year-old hawker struggling to make sense of the world. His family lost everything after his father`s death & now he runs after cars on the roadside selling ice cream to support his mother & sister. When Abike buys ice cream from the hawker one day, they strike up an unlikely & tentative romance, defying the prejudices of Nigerian society. But as they grow closer, revelations from the past threaten their relationship & both Abike & the hawker must decide where their loyalties lie. ...

” From the secret archives of the Comptrollerate-General for Scrutiny & Survey Summer 1914: Europe is on the brink. As Britain`s enemies grow stronger, the Comptroller-General must confront the man with whom he has struggled for a generation
- a man he knows only as the Spider. In a desperate gamble, he sends four agents out across the continent, on a mission they do not underst&... The future of British intelligence
- of the British Empire
- is in their hands. Not all of them will return. Unique & resourceful, hunted & deceived, they have embarked on a journey that will climax in the town of Sarajevo on the 28th of June 1914.”


...

The bloodshed perpetrated in the name of religion in the world today is nowhere more obvious than in the Middle East. Whether we are talking about hardcore Zionist settlers still fighting ancient Biblical battles in the hills of the West Bank or Shiite death squads roaming the lawless streets of Iraq in the aftermath of Saddam; whether it`s the misappropriation & martyrdom of Mickey Mouse by Gaza`s Islamists, or a US president acting on God`s orders, James Hider sees the hallucinatory effect of what he calls the `crack cocaine of fanatical fundamentalism` all around him. As James Hider travels around the Middle East, from Israel to Gaza, to Iraq
- & then back to Jerusalem, he takes his doubts about religious beliefs to the very heart of the world`s holy wars. He meets terrorists & their victims, soldiers & clerics, ordinary people & extraordinary people. The question in the back of his mind is: how can people not only believe in all this madness, but die & kill for it too? This timely book casts an unflinching yet compassionate eye on the very worst & most violent crimes committed in the name of religion & asks questions that the world needs to answer if we are to stand a chance of facing our own worst demons.
...

Fez, 1954, & American ex-pat Stenham reluctantly accepts a guide for his night-time walk home through the streets of the Medina. A nationalist uprising is transforming the country, much to the annoyance of Stenham, who enjoys the trappings of the old city. His path soon crosses with the young, illiterate son of a healer, another outsider to the newly politicised life of Morocco, in this brutally honest novel of life in the midst of terrorism, violence & the ugly opportunism that accompanies both. Bowles` most masterly novel combines his classic themes: the conflict of Eastern & Western cultures & the trials of otherness. ...

An Autumn evening in 1937. A German engineer arrives at the Warsaw railway station. Tonight, he will be with his Polish mistress; tomorrow, at a workers` bar in the city`s factory district, he will meet with the military attache from the French embassy. Information will be exchanged for money. So begins THE SPIES OF WARSAW, with war coming to Europe, & French & German operatives locked in a life-&-death struggle on the espionage battlefield. At the French embassy, the new military attache, Colonel Jean-Francois Mercier, a decorated hero of the 1914 war, is drawn in to a world of abduction, betrayal & intrigue in the diplomatic salons & back alleys of Warsaw. At the same time, the handsome aristocrat finds himself in a passionate love affair with a Parisian woman of Polish heritage, a lawyer for the League of Nations. Colonel Mercier must work in the shadows, amidst an extraordinary cast of venal & dangerous characters
- Colonel Anton Vyborg of Polish military intelligence, last seen in Furst`s THE POLISH OFFICER; the mysterious & sophisticated Doctor Lapp, senior German Abwehr officer in Warsaw; Malka & Viktor Rozen, at work for the Russian secret service; & Mercier`s brutal & vindictive opponent, Major August Voss of SS counterintelligence. & there are many more, some known to Mercier as spies, some never to be revealed.
...

This is the winner of the Guardian First Book Award 2013. It is longlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2013. It is the winner of Book of the Year at the Irish Book Awards 2012. ” My father still lives back the road past the weir in the cottage I was reared in. I go there every day to see is he dead & every day he lets me down. He hasn`t yet missed a day of letting me down.” In the aftermath of Ireland`s financial collapse, dangerous tensions surface in an Irish town. As violence flares, the characters face a battle between public persona & inner desires. Through a chorus of unique voices, each struggling to tell their own kind of truth, a single authentic tale unfolds. The Spinning Heart speaks for contemporary Ireland like no other novel. Wry, vulnerable, all-too human, it captures the language & spirit of rural Ireland & with uncanny perception articulates the words & thoughts of a generation. Technically daring & evocative of Patrick Mc Cabe & J.M. Synge, this novel of small-town life is witty, dark & sweetly poignant. Donal Ryan`s brilliantly realized debut announces a stunning new voice in literary fiction. ...

The Bangkok police have a confession from a nineteen-year-old drug addict admitting to the murder of the British computer geek (though judging from the bruises on the suspect`s face at the press conference, it appears they may have used more than a little gentle persuasion to get it). Case closed? Apparently so: only there are some loose ends that the police & just about everyone else is happy to overlook. Everyone except Vincent Calvino. Calvino`s investigations into Hoadly`s murder pitch him into Bangkok`s darkest heart. From the red-light district of Patpong to the slums of Klong Toey, Vincent must navigate a world of gangsters, godfathers & crooked police, & try to outwit
- & outrun
- the professional hit men who have orders to stop him. It seems that this former public schoolboy kept some very dubious company. Featuring drug addicts, dope dealers, fortune tellers, & high-class call girls, The Spirit House is a hard-boiled page-turner that brings the contradictions of Bangkok to disturbing, exhilarating, life.

...

A collection of essays charting five critical decades in the history of Czechoslovakia, including events such as: the Nazi occupation; the Stalinist regimes of the fifties; the celebrations of the Prague Spring; the 1968 Soviet invasion; Charter 77; & the Velvet Revolution of 1989. ...

The Spirit of the Mountains` presents the best photographs submitted to the International Mountain Summit (IMS) photography contest from 2011 to 2016. More than 130 stunning images display mountains around the world in their many manifestations from the violent spectacle of a volcanic eruption to a flower-painted valley. Above them all lies the eternal universe, now clouds, now stars, in darkness & light, embellished with northern lights, rainbows, slashes of lightning. But more than all of that, ` The Spirit of the Mountains` is a heart-stopping reminder that we humans are absurdly insignificant in nature`s design. The photographs are organized into the contest`s four categories: Mountain Nature, Mountain Action, Mountain Faces, & Mountain Aerial, which in 2016 allowed the use of drones for the first time. There are mountains in the book from every continent
- Half Dome, Yosemite; K2, second only to Everest; Kangchendzonga, Nepal-India; Kirkjufell, Iceland; Mitre Peak, New Zealand; Koryaksky, Russia; Sassolungo, Italy; the very active volcano, Mount Slamet, Indonesia; Tepuy Roraima, Venezuela
- & many more.` The Spirit of the Mountains` is the English edition of the German-language ` Der Atem der Berge`, which in 2016 won the ITB Book Award as `best illustrated travel book of the year` at the ITB Berlin Travel Trade Show, the world`s largest tourism convention. The International Mountain Summit (IMS) is an independent & international festival of mountaineers, alpinists, climbers & other mountain enthusiasts & photographers established in 2009 by Markus Gaiser & Alex Ploner. The annual IMS Photo Contest draws participation from more than 12, 000 photographers in nearly 100 countries.

...