A hilarious new picture book by Roald Dahl Funny Prize winner Peter Bently & bestselling illustrator Tom Mc Laughlin. Sausage dog Hal loves his trusty old blanket & takes it everywhere, even though his friends all say that it makes him look like a sausage covered in mustard. From the beach to the zoo, wherever Hal goes his blanket goes with him. Little do Hal`s friends know just how useful it might turn out to be when a thunderstorm strikes & Hal manages to rescue his canine chums using that scruffy old blanket! ...

Hot Hands Hand Warmers (2 pack) are a safe, odourless & natural way of keeping your hands warm; they are air-activated & provide up to 10 hours of comfortable, concentrated warmth (126-144F / 52-62C)
- simply slip the activated pouch inside your gloves. Hot Hands Hand Warmers are not reusable. Please read usage instructions carefully.
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A richly mythic, colour-saturated tale of mothers & daughters from the Man Booker-short-listed author of Swimming Home. Two women arrive in a Spanish village
- a dreamlike place caught between the desert & the ocean
- seeking medical advice & salvation. One of the strangers suffers from a mysterious illness: spontaneous paralysis confines her to a wheelchair, her legs unusable. The other, her daughter Sofia, has spent years playing the reluctant detective in this mystery, struggling to understand her mother`s illness. Surrounded by the oppressive desert heat & the mesmerising figures who move through it, Sofia waits while her mother undergoes the strange programme of treatments invented by Dr Gomez. Searching for a cure to a defiant & quite possibly imagined disease, ever more entangled in the seductive, mercurial games of those around her, Sofia finally comes to confront & reconcile the disparate fragments of her identity. Hot Milk is a labyrinth of violent desires, primal impulses, & surreally persuasive internal logic. Examining female rage & sexuality, Deborah Levy`s dazzling new novel explores the strange & monstrous nature of motherhood, testing the bonds of parent & child to breaking point

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Two women arrive in a village on the Spanish coast. Rose is suffering from a strange illness andher doctors are mystified. Her daughter Sofia has brought her here to find a cure with the infamous & controversial Dr Gomez
- a man of questionable methods & motives. Intoxicated by thick heat & the seductive people who move through it, both women begin to see their lives clearly for the first time in years. Through the opposing figures of mother & daughter, Deborah Levy explores the strange & monstrous nature of womanhood. Dreamlike & utterly compulsive, Hot Milk is a delirious fairy tale of feminine potency, a story both modern & timeless.
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An unabashed celebration of the joys of food & cooking, Hot Sun, Cool Shadow follows the story of award-winning food-writer Angela Murrills & the artist Peter Matthews, who travel together to the southerly French region of Languedoc. The Languedoc is famed for its landscape, legendary gastronomical pleasures & rich culture, stretching from the Rhone to the Pyrennees, it is one of Europe`s oldest provinces & one of it`s most fertile regions. Hot Sun, Cool Shadow, is a vivid account of their quest for the finest wines, cuisine & characters. Along the way they discover ancient houses, take in the scenery that inspired great artists like Henry Matisse, retrace the steps of Toulouse-Lautrec, & recreate typical dishes of the region; finally settling themselves in this staunchly independent agricultural region, where life moves at a steady pace under the mellow sun. Hot Sun, Cool Shadow

Includes:: over eighty illustrations by renowned artist Peter Matthews.

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The elite hotels of Africa serve as an interface between the tribal, religious, social & cultural aspects of Africa & the global uniformity of international business culture. They are also the places where the unseen resources of many African countries
- oil, diamonds, minerals
- are bartered away behind closed doors. These are environments which have a strangely hybrid quality
- their design, their cuisine, musak & global TV echoing `international` standards. Yet they are ultimately sites of tension, where cultures collide & conflict. At the same time, however, these hotels are viewed by their local communities as symbols of achievement which contradict the more usual representations of Africa. Far from being despised as enclaves of the rich, these hotels have become `objects of desire`, the dream venue for weddings & where to be invited to a business conference is to have reached the pinnacle of success. & for most hotel employees there is the reassurance of wages that are higher than they could earn elsewhere & therefore their duties are carried out with pride & self-assurance.


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Sam is a war photographer famous for her hauntingly beautiful pictures of the dead. After a particularly gruelling assignment, she checks into an expensive hotel. Unfortunately she has chosen the exact moment terrorists attack the hotel. Abhi, the hotel manager, begs her to stay quiet & stay put. Abhi has never wanted to be a hero; a disappointment to his army father & brother. He thought he`d come to a safe haven at the hotel, a place where he could be himself. Now stuck inside the sealed-off manager`s office in the middle of a terrorist attack, he is desperately trying to keep those still alive safe. His lover Dieter is amongst the hostages in the bar & the photographer Sam, refusing to stay in her room, is roaming through the hotel taking pictures, potentially coming face to face with the terrorists at any moment. A small child, Billy, is found alive under the bodies of his dead parents & Abhi has to persuade the non-maternal Sam to bring him back to her room. He`s hurt & Sam has no clue how to look after a child. As the tension mounts & more people are killed, the bond between Sam & Abhi, between Sam & Billy, grows. If any of them get out alive, none of them will ever be the same... ...

` Something strange occurs to guests as soon as they check in. Even if in real life they are perfectly well-mannered, decent people with proper balanced relationships, as soon as they spin through the revolving hotel doors the normal rules of behaviour no longer seem to apply.` All of the following is true. Only the names have been changed to protect the guilty. All the anecdotes, the stories, the characters, the situations, the highs, the lows, the scams, the drugs, the misery, the love, the death & the insanity are exactly as was told by Anonymous
- someone who has spent his whole career working in hotels at the heart of London`s luxury hotel industry. However, for legal reasons, the stories now take place in a fictitious hotel known as Hotel Babylon. More than a decade is compressed into a day. Everything else is as it should be. The rich spend money, the hotel makes money & the chambermaids still fight the bellboys over a two-pound coin. It`s just another twenty-four hours in an expensive London hotel.
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Kati Hirschel, in her thirties, is the proud owner of Istanbul`s only crime bookshop. When the German director of a film starring an old school friend is found murdered in his hotel room Kati cannot resist the temptation to start her own maverick investigation. After all her friend Petra is the police`s principal suspect & reading all those detective novels must have taught Kati something. This is a crime story but also a wonderful book about Istanbul & Turkish society. It uses humour, social commentary & even erotic fantasy to expose Western European prejudices about Turkey as well as Turkish stereotyping of other Europeans. ...

Rio de Janeiro. A family hotel whose clients reflect Brazilian society, multi-racial, with starkly contrasting backgrounds, & destitute. Rio is the perfect backdrop with its dictatorships, drug wars, child gangs & violent policing tactics. The first victim is found decapitated in bed, the head lying on the floor of his room. An eerie Mona Lisa smile on the victim`s face & no evidence of a struggle indicate a murderer received as a friend. Other hotel guests are eventually killed, all decapitated. A classical crime novel in one way but really an opportunity for the author to describe Brazilian society, especially those left behind. Fascinating back stories are told such as that of the maid who dreams of making it in television soaps, & the female pimp who has survived incestuous rape, wrapped in a suspenseful intrigue that could have been thought up by Ruth Rendell. ...