THE INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER Spanning the intense years of war, The Dressmaker of Dachau is a dramatic tale of love, conflict, betrayal & survival. It is the compelling story of one young woman`s resolve to endure & of the choices she must make at every turn
- choices which will contain truths she must confront. London, spring 1939. Eighteen-year-old Ada Vaughan, a beautiful & ambitious seamstress, has just started work for a modiste in Dover Street. A career in couture is hers for the taking
- she has the skill & the drive
- if only she can break free from the dreariness of family life in Lambeth. A chance meeting with the enigmatic Stanislaus von Lieben catapults Ada into a world of glamour & romance. When he suggests a trip to Paris, Ada is blind to all the warnings of war on the continent: this is her chance for a new start. Anticipation turns to despair when war is declared & the two are trapped in France. After the Nazis invade, Stanislaus abandons her. Ada is taken prisoner & forced to survive the only way she knows how: by being a dressmaker. It is a decision which will haunt her during the war & its devastating aftermath.


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When the Taliban took control of Kabul, Kamila Sidiqi & all the women of Kabul saw their lives transformed. Overnight, they were banned from schools & offices & even forbidden from leaving their front doors on their own. The economy collapsed & young men left the city in search of work & security. Desperate to help her family & support her five brothers & sisters at home, Kamila began sewing cothes in her living room. Little did she know that the tailoring business she started to help her siblings would be the beginning of a dressmaking business that would create jobs & hope for one hundred neighbourhood women & would come to mean the difference between starvation & survival for hundreds of families like her own. ...

Calling all dressmakers! This is a fully updated version of the best selling The Dressmaker`s Technique Bible, complete with an all-new fabric guide to choosing the right fabric for the right garment. Dressmaking is having a renaissance, driven by hugely successful programmes such as the Great British Sewing Bee & Project Runway. This dressmaking handbook offers all the guidance you need to create beautiful clothes, whether you are following a pattern, adding embellishments or starting from scratch. This is a fully updated, new edition of best selling book, The Dressmaker`s Technique Bible, which has sold thousands of copies due to its in depth instruction & comprehensive content. It

Includes:: step by step instructions for a wide range of dressmaking techniques from basic patterns through to couture designs making it suitable for beginners as well as more experienced sewers. Easy-to-follow, highly illustrated instructions explain the essential dressmaking techniques
- allowing you to work confidently from a pattern to create beautiful clothes that fit perfectly. It features an at-a-glance guide to basic garment shapes & styles, cross referenced with the relevant techniques throughout the book. Suitable for beginners, or those who are already designing or making their own clothes, this is the perfect reference book for anyone interested in dressmaking & sewing.


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Intelligent, ambitious & a rising star in the French artillery, Captain Alfred Dreyfus appeared to have everything: family, money, & the prospect of a post on the General Staff. But his rapid rise had also made him enemies
- many of them aristocratic officers in the army`s High Command who resented him because he was middle-class, meritocratic & a Jew. In October 1894, the torn fragments of an unsigned memo containing military secrets were retrieved by a cleaning lady from the waste paper basket of Colonel Maximilien von Schwartzkoppen of the German embassy in Paris. When French intelligence discovered they harboured a spy in their midst, Captain Dreyfus, on slender evidence, was charged with selling military secrets to the Germans, found guilty of treason by unanimous verdict & sentenced to life imprisonment on the notorious Devil`s Isl&. The fight to free the wrongfully convicted Dreyfus
- over twelve long years, through many trials
- is a story rife with heroes & villains, courage & cowardice, dissimulation & deceit. One of the most infamous miscarriages of justice in history, the Dreyfus affair divided France, stunned the world & unleashed violent hatreds & anti-Semitic passions which offered a foretaste of what was to play out in the long, bloody twentieth century to come. Today, amid charged debates over national & religious identity across the globe, its lessons throw into sharp relief the conflicts of the present. In the hands of historian, biographer & prize-winning novelist Piers Paul Read, this masterful epic of the struggle between a minority seeking justice & a military establishment determined to save face comes dramatically alive for a new generation.


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After eight years as a soldier, Peter Ash came home from Iraq & Afghanistan with only one souvenir: what he calls `white static`, a buzzing claustrophobia due to post-traumatic stress that has driven him to spend a year roaming the US Pacific coast`s mountains & forests, sleeping under the stars. But when a friend from the Marines commits suicide, Ash returns to civilization to help the man`s widow & two young children. While repairing her dilapidated porch, he makes two unwelcome discoveries: the first is a dog, the largest, meanest, ugliest dog he`s ever laid eyes on; the second surprise is what the dog is guarding
- a suitcase containing $400, 000 in cash & four slabs of plastic explosive. Just what was his friend caught up in during his final days? Ash will find that the demons of war aren`t easy to leave behind...
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Described as `a metaphysical shocker` at the time of its release, Muriel Sparks` The Driver`s Seat is a taut psychological thriller, published with an introduction by John Lanchester in Penguin Modern Classics. Lise has been driven to distraction by working in the same accountants` office for sixteen years. So she leaves everything behind her, transforms herself into a laughing, garishly-dressed temptress & flies abroad on the holiday of a lifetime. But her search for adventure, sex & new experiences takes on a far darker significance as she heads on a journey of self-destruction. Infinity & eternity attend Lise`s last terrible day in an unnamed southern city, as she meets her fate. One of six novels to be nominated for a ` Lost Man Booker Prize`, The Driver`s Seat was adapted into a 1974 film, Identikit, starring Elizabeth Taylor. Muriel Spark (1918
- 2006) wrote poetry, stories, & biographies as well as a remarkable series of novels, including The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961), The Mandelbaum Gate (1965) which received the James Tait Black Prize, & The Public Image (1968) & Loitering with Intent (1981), both of which were shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Spark was awarded the T.S. Eliot Award for poetry in 1992, & the David Cohen Prize for literature in 1997. If you enjoyed The Driver`s Seat, you might like Spark`s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, also available in Penguin Modern Classics. ` An extraordinary tour de force, a crime story turned inside out` David Lodge ` Her spiny & treacherous masterpiece` New Yorker
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On an East Coast isl&, full of tall pine moaning with sea gusts, Delilah moves into a cottage by the shore. The neighbours gossip as they watch her clean, her black hair tied back in a white rubber b&. They don`t like it when she plants a garden out front
- orange red Carpinus caroliniana & silvery blue hosta. Very unusual, they whisper. Across the driveway lives a man who never goes out. Delilah knows he`s watching her too & she likes the look of him, but perhaps life is too complicated already...
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This is the story of a drop of water, told by a science writer & illustrated with remarkable paintings. Meredith Hooper takes us back thousands of years to see where the Earth`s water came from, & how life began in the oceans & later moved onto l&. She describes the water cycle, the relationship between water & living things & between water & erosion. She also discusses important environmental issues & provides a fascinating collection of water facts. ...

` It is time Mick Herron was recognised in his own right as the best thriller writer in Britain today` Sunday Express Old spooks carry the memory of tradecraft in their bones, & when Solomon Dortmund sees an envelope being passed from one pair of hands to another in a Marylebone cafe, he knows he`s witnessed more than an innocent encounter. But in relaying his suspicions to John Bachelor, who babysits retired spies like Solly, he sets in train events which will alter lives. Bachelor himself, a hair`s breadth away from sleeping in his car, is clawing his way back to stability; Hannah Weiss, the double agent whose recruitment was his only success, is starting to enjoy the secrets & lies her role demands; & Lech Wicinski, an Intelligence Service analyst, finds that a simple favour for an old acquaintance might derail his career. Meanwhile, Lady Di Taverner is trying to keep the Service on an even keel, & if that means throwing the odd crew member overboard, well: collateral damage is her speciality.A drop, in spook parlance, is the passing on of secret information. It`s also what happens just before you hit the ground. ...

Jonathan is a private investigator in a decaying eastern European city, consumed by his work & his failing marriage. Approached one day by an elderly couple, he is presented with a faded photograph of their daughter, missing for nearly two decades. Troubled by the image of the little girl, who was the same age when she vanished as his own daughter is now
- he is compelled to find her. But one night, soon after taking on the case, as he walks across the bridge spanning the river that divides the city, he encounters a young woman crouched at the foot of a stone angel
- a woman who suddenly leaps into the icy water below. Without thinking, Jonathan plunges after her, & is soon drawn into her ghostly world of confusion, coincidence & intrigue, & the city he thought he knew turns strange & threatening. Haunting & deeply moving, The Drowned Detective is an intoxicating, atmospheric exploration of relationships, lies & betrayal
- confirming Neil Jordon as a master storyteller & a vital literary voice.


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