Advice, strong opinions, & personal revelations by the world`s greatest writers
- exclusively researched for this new book Featuring
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A young man decides to visit Nigeria after years of absence. Ahead lies the difficult journey back to the family house & all its memories; meetings with childhood friends & above all, facing up to the paradox of Nigeria, whose present is as burdened by the past as it is facing a new future. Along the way, our narrator encounters life in Lagos. He is captivated by a woman reading on a danfo; attempts to check his email are frustrated by Yahoo boys; he is charmingly duped buying fuel. He admires the grace of an aunty, bereaved by armed robbers & is inspired by the new malls & cultural venues. The question is: Should he stay or should he leave? But before the story can even begin, he has to queue for his visa. Every Day is for the Thiefis a striking portrait of Nigeria in change. Through a series of cinematic portraits of everyday life in Lagos, Teju Cole provides a fresh approach to the returnee experience. ...

A young man returns to Nigeria after fifteen years in New York. Like him, his childhood country has grown up quickly: found fast-food restaurants, email cafes, contempt for authority; the all-consuming draw of money for nothing. From the consulate in Manhattan to the dusty streets of Lagos, life in modern Nigeria runs like clockwork
- as long as you pay the fee. A bribe for the visa clerk, a ` Christmas gift` at immigration, cash
- no receipt
- at the unofficial tollbooth. Petrol pumps are rigged to overcharge & internet cafes overflow with career scammers, but the police are too busy doling out bogus fines to care. In a country routinely plundered of its oil & ancient treasures, who is to say who can thieve & who can`t? As our narrator makes the difficult journey back to his family house & its memories, he is confronted by the paradox of a country he wants to love, as burdened by its impoverished past as it is blinded by the spoils of the future.


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From the author of the Man Booker prize-winners ` Wolf Hall` & ` Bring Up the Bodies` comes a story of suburban mayhem & merciless, hilarious revenge. Barricaded inside their house filled with festering rubbish, unhealthy smells & their secrets, the Axon family baffle Isabel Field, the latest in a long line of social workers. Isabel has other problems too: a randy, untrustworthy father & a slackly romantic lover, Colin Sidney, history teacher to unresponsive yobs & father of a parcel of horrible children. With all this to worry about, how can Isabel begin to understand what is going on in the Axon household? ...

Every Falling Star, the first book to portray contemporary North Korea to a young audience, is the intense memoir of a North Korean boy named Sungju who was forced at age twelve to live on the streets & fend for himself. To survive, Sungju creates a gang & lives by thieving, fighting, begging, & stealing rides on cargo trains. Sungju richly recreates his scabrous story, depicting what it was like for a boy alone to create a new family with his gang, ”his brothers, ” to daily be hungry & to fear arrest, imprisonment, & even execution. This riveting memoir allows young readers to learn about other cultures where freedoms they take for granted do not exist. ...

A few weeks after the planes crashed into the World Trade Centre on 9/11, LA Times journalist Megan Stack was thrust into Afghanistan & Pakistan, dodging gunmen & prodding warlords for information. She then travelled to other war ravaged countries of the Middle East including Israel & Libya, witnessing & telling the stories of the changing Muslim world. Stack relates her initial wild excitement & her slow disillusionment as the cost of violence outweighs the elusive promise of freedom & democracy. She reports from under bombardment in Lebanon; records the raw pain of suicide bombings in Israel; & one by one, marks the deaths & disappearance of those she interviews. Every Man in This Village is a Liar is a deeply human memoir about the wars of the twenty first century. Beautiful, savage & unsettling, it is an indispensible book of our times. ...

In 1999, Lance Armstrong made world headlines with the most stunning comeback in the history of sport after battling against ...

As read on BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week` Moving, intellectual & unsentimental. I think it will become a classic` Melvyn Bragg` Thoughtful, subtle, elegantly clever & oddly joyous, Every Third Thought is beautiful` Kate Mosse In 1995, at the age of forty-two, Robert Mc Crum suffered a dramatic & near-fatal stroke. Since that life-changing event, Mc Crum has lived in the shadow of death, unavoidably aware of his own mortality. & now, in his sixties, he is noticing a change: his friends are joining him there. Death has become his contemporaries` every third thought. And so, with the words of Mc Crum`s favourite authors as travel companions, Every Third Thought takes us on a journey towards death itself. This is a deeply personal book of reflection & conversation
- with brain surgeons, psychologists, hospice workers & patients, writers & poets, & it confronts an existential question: in a world where we have learnt to live well at all costs, can we make peace with dying?
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” Every time I find the meaning of life, they change it.” The words of Reinhold Niebuhr provide the title & set the tone for what is a wryly humorous look at some of the great philosophical pronouncements on how life ought to be lived. Fifty years ago Daniel Klein embarked on the study of philosophy at Harvard, where he began gathering wise words from the world`s greatest thinkers. Now in his seventies, he revisits these pronouncements with characteristic warmth, charm & wonderfully dry sense of humour. Distilling the wonders of our greatest thinkers, from Epicurus & Nietzsche, all the way to Samuel Beckett, Klein is enlightening & never dull. This is a pithy & eminently readable meditation on one of the most profound subjects there is. ...

THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLERAN ECONOMIST BOOK OF THE YEARA NEW STATESMAN BOOK OF THE YEAR` This book is about a whole new way of studying the mind.. . Endlessly fascinating` Steven Pinker`A whirlwind tour of the modern human psyche` Economist Everybody lies, to friends, lovers, doctors, pollsters
- & to themselves. In Internet searches, however, people confess the truth. Insightful, funny & always surprising, Everybody Lies explores how this huge collection of data, unprecedented in human history, could just be the most important ever collected. It offers astonishing insights into the human psyche, revealing the biases deeply embedded within us, the questions we`re afraid to ask that might be essential to our well-being, & the information we can use to change our culture for the better.
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