A beautiful handy little purse by British illustrator Alice Tait: it features London’s most iconic landmarks on a blue background & a red zip fastening. It is perfect for keeping your coins & cards safe & in order in one place & can be coordinated with other Alice Tait items. ...

A set of four coasters featuring the wonderful London skyline. Each coaster has a different iconic landmark: the Tower of London, St Paul`s Cathedral, Tower Bridge, the Parliament & Westminster Abbey. The 4 coasters can all be aligned to show the full London skyline along the River Thames. ...

War`s mess & muddle, the brutality & the inanity of fighting-few have better captured this than Isaac Babel, who was a journalist with the Soviet First Cavalry Army. His unflinching portrayal of the murderous havoc of battle is offset by an unexpected & wry humour: having seen the fighting up close, Babel is able to find the funny side of war while depicting its bloody side-in all its mesmerising & casual violence. The lyricism & bitterness that characterise the thirty-five short stories of Red Cavalry are stunningly reproduced in this new translation by the award-winning Boris Dralyuk. ...

The Red Centre, the southern part of Northern Territory with the Mac Donnell Ranges & the route from Alice Springs to Uluru/ Ayers Rock, on a road map at 1:750, 000 from Hema, with on the reverse a street plan of Alice Springs, maps of access to the Uluru/ Ayers Rock & Kata Tjuta/ The Olgas, a table of facilities in the national parks, etc. On one side is the main map at 1:750, 000, extending from well north of Alice Springs to the border with South Australia, west to include the Uluru – Kata Tjuta National Park, & east to the Old Andado Track across the Simpson Desert. Topography of this fascinating region is presented by relief shading with names of mountain rages, peaks, etc, plus graphics for sand ridges, seasonal lakes, salt flats, waterholes, areas subject to inundation, etc. Colouring highlights national parks & the map also shows boundaries of Aboriginal Lands. Road information is divided into two groups: roads & tracks which were plotted by the publishers during fieldwork plus other tracks shown on the country’s 250K topographic survey maps & on other sources. Many road junctions & other important locations are annotated with their GPS coordinates. Four routes are specially highlighted: Explorers Way, Binns Track, Red Centre Way & Old Ghan Railway Heritage Trail. A wide range of icons indicates various facilities, including rest areas, fuel supplies, camping facilities, meals & general stores, etc. Many locations are annotated with notes and/or contact details. Latitude & longitude lines are drawn at 30` intervals. On the reverse is a street plan Alice Springs, with accommodation facilities & main places of interest, an enlargement of the immediate environs of the town, plus maps of the Yulara tourist village, access from there to Uluru & Kata Tjuta, & walking tracks around the rocks. Also included are descriptions of places of interest throughout the area & a table showing tourist facilities in national parks & reserves. To see the list of other titles in Hema’s series of regional maps of Australia please click on the series link. ...

Southern part of Northern Territory, with the Mac Donnell Ranges & the route from Alice Springs to Uluru/ Ayers Rock. The map shows roads & 4WD tracks, indicating accommodation, general stores & meal facilities, fuel supplies, places of interest, etc. Topography is shown by subtle relief shading & names of mountain ranges & selected peaks. National parks & Aboriginal lands are highlighted. Latitude & longitude lines are drawn at 30' intervals with ticks at 5 ...

Three young Irish people have come to Australia, running from the economic ruins of their home country & their own unhappy lives. In this promised l&, stunned by the heat & the vast arid space of the interior, they each try to escape their past in a chaotic world of backpacker hostels, huge fruit farms & squalid factories, surrounded by new friends who are even more damaged & dangerous than they are themselves. Endless supplies of cheap drink & drugs loosen what little sense of responsibility they have, & a spiral of self-destructive behaviour forces each of them to face up to the reality of their lives. This is a story of the consequences of impulsive choices & of the places where they lead. A vulnerable young man is left alone by his friends in a remote wilderness; a desperate girl puts herself into the hands of violent sex traffickers; a once-privileged favourite son lets a drunken quarrel escalate to murder. An utterly compelling, readable novel that hooks from the first page & immerses us in an all-too topical nightmare. ...

A group of young Irish migrants leave a man called Hopper for dead on an outback road in Australia. They barely know him; no-one will miss him in their world of hostels, wild nights on cheap wine & grinding work on isolated farms. In this powerful novel about the discovery of responsibility, three young people
- Fiona, Murph & Hopper
- flee the collapse of their country`s economy. In the heat & endless spaces of Australia they try to escape their past, but impulsive cruelty, shame & guilt drag them down, & it is easy to make terrible choices.

...

` In early 1998 I went to Perth in Western Australia in order to attend the literature festival, & part of the arrangement was that I should go to Karratha to do their first ever literary dinner. Karratha is a mining town a long way further north. The landscape is extraordinary, being composed of vast heaps of dark red earth & rock poking out of the never-ending bush. I imagine that Mars must have a similar feel to it. I went exploring & discovered the bronze statue to Red Dog outside the town of Dampier. I felt straight away that I had to find out more about this splendid dog. A few months later I returned to Western Australia & spent two glorious weeks driving around collecting Red Dog stories & visiting the places that he knew, writing up the text as I went along. I hope my cat never finds out that I have written a story to celebrate the life of a dog.` Louis de Bernieres ...

` My painter friends think I am a die-hard conservative, my writer friends think I am a man of loose morals. In Jushlin Temple I am a quiet disciple, in the Propaganda Department I am a decadent youth. Women call me a cynical artist, the police call me a hooligan. Well, they can think what they like. I only have 20, 000 days left to live`. In 1983, Ma Jian turned 30 & was overwhelmed by the desire to escape the confines of his life in Beijing. All around him, China was changing. Deng Xiaoping was introducing economic reform but clamping down on ` Spiritual Pollution`; & young people were rebelling. With his long hair, denim jeans & artistic friends, Ma Jian was under surveillance from his work unit & the police. His ex-wife was seeking custody of their daughter; his girlfriend was sleeping with another man; & he could no longer find the inspiration to write or paint. One day he bought a train ticket to the westernmost border of China & set off in search of himself. Ma Jian`s journey would last three years & take him to deserts & overpopulated cities, from scenes of barbarity to havens of tranquillity & beauty. The result is an utterly unique book: an insight into the teeming contradictions of China that only a man who was both an insider & an outsider in his own country could have written. ...

Red Dust tells the fascinating account of Ma Jian`s three-year journey around China. Following his 30th birthday he becomes desperate to escape the confines of his life in Beijing. Facing surveillance from his work unit & the police as a result of Deng Xiaoping`s clamping down on ` Spiritual Pollution` he chooses to uproot himself from his bohemian lifestyle, estranged wife & child, & flee for the Chinese hinterlands in search of himself. Setting off for the westernmost border of China he immerses himself in the remotest parts of country, travelling with little or no money & surviving by doing odd jobs & publishing poetry & short stories through his remaining network of literary friends. He leads us through an array of amazing adventures, from finding himself lost in the desert with no water for three days to scaling a huge cliff in a remarkably gung-ho style. This story speaks volumes about this fascinating l&. Beautifully translated from Chinese by Flora Drew the story he tells is written from both an insider & outsider`s perspective providing a complete portrait of what life is like for ordinary Chinese people. Told with an understated & elegant style, this is a book that means that you can experience the wonders of China for yourself, seen through the eyes of a native & told in a way that no foreign writer could match. Winner of the 2002 Thomas Cook Travel Book Award ...