Young Annabel lives in the 1950s & dreams of a future with jetpacks, flying cars & robots. However, little does she know that she is living under an evil spell that could mean she has no future at all... When the curse is fulfilled on her 16th birthday & she falls asleep for 1000 years, her house is overgrown by a magnificent rose tree. A young explorer called Zoe discovers the story of Sleeping Beauty, but can she find Annabel in time to lift the curse & show her what the future actually looks like? Packed with mid-century detail, this gorgeous book will be treasured for years to come. ...

Greek cats lead an independent existence, rarely impinging on the lives of the islanders. These photographs present them engaged in their favourite pursuit
- sleeping in the sun. The cat`s ability to sleep anywhere, under any circumstances, is captured against a Mediterranean backdrop.
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Israel: Jewish state & national homeland to Jews the world over. But a fifth of its population is Arab, a people who feel themselves to be an inseparable part of the Arab nation, most of which is still technically at war with the State of Israel. In the summer of 1991 David Grossman set out on a journey into the world of Arab citizens of his country. Sleeping on a Wire is an account of what he found. It is about men & women fighting to find a voice, to pick out the pulse of their own identity in a land that doesn`t seem to be theirs. He has not written about open conflict. Rather it is a story of ferment beneath the surface, & an intensifying bitterness which can only exacerbate the troubles of the Middle East. ...

A train stops at a railway station.A young woman jumps off. She has wild hair, sloppy clothes, a distracted air. She looks Indian, yet she is somehow not. The sudden violence of what happens next leaves the other passengers gasping. The train terminates at Jarmuli, a temple town by the sea. Here, among pilgrims, priests & ashrams, three old women disembark only to encounter the girl once again. What is someone like her doing in this remote corner, which attracts only worshippers? Over the next five days, the old women live out their long-planned dream of a holiday together; their temple guide finds ecstasy in forbidden love; & the girl is joined by a photographer battling his own demons. The full force of the evil & violence beneath the serene surface of the town becomes evident when their lives overlap & collide. Unexpected connections are revealed between devotion & violence, friendship & fear, as Jarmuli is revealed as a place with a long, dark past that transforms all who encounter it. This is a stark & unflinching novel by a spellbinding storyteller, about religion, love, & violence in the modern world. ...

LONGLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE 2015 & WINNER OF THE 2016 DSC PRIZE FOR SOUTH ASIAN LITERATURE A stark & unflinching novel by a spellbinding storyteller, about religion, love & violence in the modern world. A train stops at a railway station. A young woman jumps off. She has wild hair, sloppy clothes, a distracted air. She looks Indian, yet she is somehow not. The sudden violence of what happens next leaves the other passengers gasping. The train terminates at Jarmuli, a temple town by the sea. Here, among pilgrims, priests & ashrams, three old women disembark only to encounter the girl once again. What is someone like her doing in this remote corner, which attracts only worshippers? Over the next five days, the old women live out their long-planned dream of a holiday together; their temple guide finds ecstasy in forbidden love; & the girl is joined by a photographer battling his own demons. The full force of the evil & violence beneath the serene surface of the town becomes evident when their lives overlap & collide. Unexpected connections are revealed between devotion & violence, friendship & fear, as Jarmuli is revealed as a place with a long, dark past that transforms all who encounter it. ...

The manuscript that kept sifting to the top, Sleeping with Rivers by Cath Drake, is simply full of gorgeous poems. Drake has a tendency to a longer line, a discursive manner, a narrative depth.I started to love these poems from the very first line of the first poem, ` Every morning she wakes up with rivers
- ` Drake`s tone is beautifully sensitive to the rhythms of language: knows when to pull back, when to unfurl startling imagery. There are artful poems about a childhood in Australia & poems involving the education of the female protagonist/poet. In one poem, a teacher, a `spineless` Mr Jacob, suffers a fitting destiny & in another long, strange & hilarious poem, a duck haunts the protagonist like a persistent nightmare. There is a quietly devastating wit at work.
- Amy Wack, Poetry Editor of Seren books & judge of the Mslexia pamphlet prize.

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An old man & a young boy, refugees from a civil war, seek shelter in a burnt out bus. Among the effects of a dead passenger, they discover a set of notebooks that tell of his life. As the boy reads the story to his elderly companion, the tale gradually becomes part of their own lives. Sleepwalking L&, Mia Coutos first novel, was an immediate success, & judged at the Zimbabwe Bookfair 2001 to be one of the 12 best African books of the 20th century. Set in the authors native Mozambique, the novel examines the effects of war & devastation on a newly independent African nation. A sombre book, it reflects a moment in the history of Mozambique when the country could only go forward after settling its account with the bloody past. Deftly exploring the relationship between oral tradition & the written word, truth & fiction, memory & invention, this is a memorable book that captures a critical moment in Africas history. ...

There is a sequestered glen off the east coast of the Hudson, New York state, which has long continued under the sway of some witching power; the neighbourhood abounds with tales, haunted spots & twilight superstitions. But as hapless schoolmaster Ichabod Crane will discover, the wildest of all stories in this region of shadows relate to one particularly dreadful spectre
- the Headless Horseman of Sleepy Hollow. Washington Irving`s comic horror story is the best known of this collection of stories, observations & sketches written on his travels around Britain & America in the eighteenth century. Also

Includes:: ` Rip Van Winkle` & ` Little Britain`.


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Because of the potato me & my family left our home & travelled 6, 000 miles to find a new life... Slim Hannigan & her family are poor but happy. Theirs is a life filled with love & laughter
- & a pet pig called Hamlet. But things change overnight, & suddenly they find themselves facing hunger & danger like they have never known... So they leave their village in Ireland to journey to America where, they hope, family & fortune await them. Slim soon finds herself living a life that feels just like one of those far-fetched stories her Da has always told. Can one brave girl keep her family together no matter what is thrown at them...?
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Behind the facade of sombreros & tequila, tourist traps & holiday resorts, there lies a very different Mexico. In ” Sliced Iguana”, Isabella Tree explores a town that is the heart & lifeblood of the Americas, a country of extremes & contradictions. In a land so markedly shaped by machismo, she finds a town controlled by arm-wrestling matriarchs & party-mad transvestites & in war-torn Chiapas she discovers shamans worshipping Mayan gods inside Catholic churches & conducting exorcisms with the aid of Pepsi. At a graveside vigil on the Night of the Dead, she encounters the last delicate vestige of a pre-Columbian cult that elsewhere has morphed into an Americanised Halloween. With a group of Huichol Indians, perhaps the last truly autonomous tribe in the entire American continent, she participates in rituals using peyote, the hallucinogenic cactus, to bring rain to the drought-stricken sierra & appease the forces of Nature so recklessly abused by the conquistadors & their successors. Through her narrative, Isabella Tree threads the brightly coloured history of Mexico & tells the stories of the people that have defined its fractured past & will shape its future
- kings & conquistadors, politicians & rebels, shamans & priests, mestizos & indigenous Indians. This is a story of Mexico like no other, capturing the essence of its psyche & illuminating the struggles & hopes of a people & a country on the cusp of change.
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