The Accidental is Ali Smith`s dazzling novel about a family holiday & a stranger who upends it. Arresting & wonderful, The Accidental pans in on the Norfolk holiday home of the Smart family one hot summer. There a beguiling stranger called Amber appears at the door bearing all sorts of unexpected gifts, trampling over family boundaries & sending each of the Smarts scurrying from the dark into the light. A novel about the ways that seemingly chance encounters irrevocably transform our understanding of ourselves, The Accidental explores the nature of truth, the role of fate & the power of storytelling. ”A beguiling page-turner.. .a brilliant creation. To read The Accidental is to be excited from first to last”. (Independent). ” Joyous, a shot across the bows...writing as rapture, as giddy delight”. (The Times). ” Brilliant & engaging, frequently hilarious... Smith makes one look at the world afresh”. (Sunday Telegraph). ...

The Accidental Adventurer by Ben Fogle tells the story of this extraordinary explorer & TV presenter. Follow him tracing back adventures that raised money for charity & took him around the world: rowing across the Atlantic, walking to the South Pole & running the Sahara are just a few. Ben Fogle offers a fine example & answer to a universal dilemma about how one could live a life different from expectations. Here is the story of a man who chose to follow his heart on a journey that saw him treading an unconventional route. Packed with action, challenges & setbacks, this book also cast some light on how it all started & some pictures just add more colours to the story. Get ready for a rollercoaster! ...

Meet Charles Rangeley-Wilson. He’s one of Britain’s best-kept secrets – angler, conservationist, traveller. He’s also one of our finest fishing writers. Now join him on the trip of a lifetime, on a journey that will make the familiar new, & the strange familiar. Published to accompany the new BBC TV series, The Accidental Angler takes us from London suburbs to Bhutan, Icelandic moonscapes to the Seychelles – in fact, anywhere a fishing rod leads. In The Accidental Angler you’ll battle titanic monsters on a tropical atoll & make-believe sharks on the mushy-peas-&-gravy Wash. You’ll chase inscrutable grayling through back gardens in Provence, or phantom sea trout in downtown Southampton. & you’ll dance in Brazilian carnivals & find secret rivers hidden beneath the streets. Because fishing can take you to the heart of a landscape in a way few other forms of travel can match. A fishing rod will break the ice with locals, guides, farmers, shopkeepers, taxi drivers & bar-flies. Whether in the world’s most outlandish & awe-inspiring places or just at the end of your road, fishing will introduce you to crabby weather & crabbier locals, moon-phases, rip-tides, floods, droughts, remarkable tales, & of course fantastic slippery beasts. ...

Sunday Times bestselling author Caroline Taggart takes her usual gentle & gently humorous approach to punctuation, pointing out what really matters & what doesn`t. In Roman times, blocks of text were commonly written just as blocks without even wordspacingnevermindpunctuation to help the reader to interpret them. Orators using such texts as notes for a speech would prepare carefully so that they were familiar with the content & didn`t come a cropper over a confusion between, say, therapists & the rapists. As we entered the Christian era & sacred texts were widely read (by priests if not by the rest of us), it became ever more important to remove any likelihood of misinterpretation. To a potential murderer or adulterer, for example, there is a world of difference between ` If you are tempted, yield not, resisting the urge to commit a sin` & ` If you are tempted, yield, not resisting the urge to commit a sin`. & the only surface difference is the positioning of a comma. So yes, you SMS-addicts & `let it all hang out` Sixties children, punctuation does matter. &, contrary to what people who tear their hair out over apostrophes believe, it is there to help
- to clarify meaning, to convey emphasis, to indicate that you are asking a question or"ing someone else`s words. It also comes in handy for telling your reader when to pause for breath. Caroline Taggart, who has made a name for herself expounding on the subjects of grammar, usage & words generally (and who for decades made her living putting in the commas in other people`s work), takes her usual gentle & gently humorous approach to punctuation. She points out what matters & what doesn`t; why using six exclamation marks where one will do is perfectly OK in a text but will lose you marks at school; why hang glider pilots in training really need a hyphen; & how throwing in the odd semicolon will impress your friends. Sometimes opinionated but never dogmatic, she is an ideal guide to the (perceived) minefield that is punctuation.
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In life you never get what you deserve: you get what you negotiate… What would you do if, out of the blue, a billionaire industrialist decided to make you the CEO of his company? No prior business experience necessary. There is only one catch: you need to pass seven tests from the `textbook of life`. This is the offer made to Sapna Sinha, an ordinary salesgirl in an electronics boutique in downtown Delhi, by Vinay Mohan Acharya, one of India`s richest men. Thus begins the most challenging journey of Sapna`s life, one that will test her character, her courage & her capabilities. Along the way she encounters a host of memorable personalities, from a vain Bollywood superstar to a kleptomaniac Gandhian. At stake is a business empire worth ten billion dollars, & the future she has always dreamt of. But are the seven tests for real or is Acharya playing a deeper game, one driven by a perverse fantasy? From the acclaimed author of Slumdog Millionaire, one of the biggest films of the decade, comes this compelling, suspenseful tale of the power of dreams, the lure of money & the universal need to know who we are. ...

America`s most beguiling metropolis started out as a snake-infested, hurricane-battered swamp. Through intense imperial rivalries & ambitious settlers who risked their lives to succeed in colonial America, the site became a crossroads for the Atlantic world. Powell gives us the full sweep of the city`s history from its founding through statehood. ...

The sequel to Jonas Jonasson’s international bestseller The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out of the Window & Disappeared It all begins with a hot air balloon trip & three bottles of champagne. Allan & Julius are ready for some spectacular views, but they’re not expecting to land in the sea & be rescued by a North Korean ship, & they could never have imagined that the captain of the ship would be harbouring a suitcase full of contraband uranium, on a nuclear weapons mission for Kim Jong-un … Soon Allan & Julius are at the centre of a complex diplomatic crisis involving world figures from the Swedish foreign minister to Angela Merkel & President Trump. Things are about to get very complicated … Praise for The Hundred-Year-Old Man:‘A mordantly funny & loopily freewheeling debut novel about ageing disgracefully’ Sunday Times‘ Imaginative, laugh-out-loud... a brilliant satire on the foibles of mankind’ Daily Telegraph‘ Fast-moving & relentlessly sunny’ Guardian ...

Ben Fogle's life was changed by the arrival Inca, his black Labrador, who was introduced to the nation back in 2000 on the BBC's Castaway. Before Inca were Liberty & Lexington, the family dogs he grew up with. The explorer & author has always been surrounded by animals, & his passion for wildlife has seen him travel all over the world
- from Africa's sun-drenched plains to Antarctica's icy wilderness, where he's helped operate on a cheetah & played with penguins. The Accidental Naturalist reveals Ben's incredible experiences with animals. Heartfelt, touching & funny, this is one man's tale of how animals changed his life. Buy your copy today!
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Pilgrimage has been an important practice in Christianity since the fourth century, but most people`s notion of pilgrimage is one of travelling to the site of an apparition, in search of inspiration or miracles. THE ACCIDENTAL PILGRIM shows that pilgrimage is not just a relic of Catholic history, but can remain a significant practice for twenty-first century Christians today.THE ACCIDENTAL PILGRIM gives a lively overview of the history of pilgrimage & the popular pilgrim routes, exploring the mix of spiritual & other motives that have inspired pilgrims both past & contemporary. It then explores how people both inside & outside the Church can rediscover pilgrimage within twenty-first century culture. Illustrated throughout, & written by one of the UK`s most popular theologians, THE ACCIDENTAL PILGRIM is a compelling invitation to all on the journey of faith. ...

How does a man addicted to routine
- a man who flosses his teeth before love-making
- cope with the chaos of everyday life?

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