This quirky guide explains the chemistry & botanical history of over 150 plants, trees, flowers & fruits, showing how they form the bases of our favourite cocktails. Amy Stewart offers gardeners growing tips & provides cocktail enthusiasts with 50 drink recipes, as well as a rounded knowledge of the processes & plants which go into popular concoctions. ...

Amid the worst drought to ravage Australia in a century, it hasn`t rained in small country town Kiewarra for two years. Tensions in the community become unbearable when three members of the Hadler family are brutally murdered. Everyone thinks Luke Hadler, who committed suicide after slaughtering his wife & six-year-old son, is guilty. Policeman Aaron Falk returns to the town of his youth for the funeral of his childhood best friend, & is unwillingly drawn into the investigation. As questions mount & suspicion spreads through the town, Falk is forced to confront the community that rejected him twenty years earlier. Because Falk & Luke Hadler shared a secret, one which Luke`s death threatens to unearth. & as Falk probes deeper into the killings, secrets from his past & why he left home bubble to the surface as he questions the truth of his friend`s crime. ...

Dubliners is a wonderfully engaging & accessible collection of stories by James Joyce, an author famed for being difficult to read. It contains The Dead, made into a memorable film by John Huston. This beautiful new edition has been chosen as the One Book, One City title for Dublin in 2012 & will be heavily promoted with events & advertising as well as in the press. ...

In her relationship with Charles that has survived for more than forty years, Camilla`s story has seen a great many myths. This book is the definitive account. The relationship between Charles, Prince of Wales & Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall, is one of the most remarkable love stories of the age. It has endured against all the odds, & in the process nearly destroyed the British monarchy. It is a rich & remarkable story that has never been properly told
- indeed, it is one of the most extraordinary, star-crossed love stories of the past fifty years.
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The Duchesses tells the story of the ` Princess Coronation` class of locomotives -the streamlined embodiments of raw, bulked-up muscle & formidable power that any enthusiast will tell you were the finest steam engines in Britain. Conceived of by the London, Midland & Scottish Railway to rival the LNER`s illustrious `A4 Pacifics`, these trains heralded in the last golden age of steam. Designed by the great William Stanier, theirs is a story of grand beginnings, a slow trajectory of decline & a recent, celebrated rebirth. Today, there are two ` Duchesses` still in existence: Duchess of Hamilton & Duchess of Sutherland are now restored to their original streamlined appearance. As The Duchesses` beautiful cover illustration suggests, these Coronation locomotives were beautiful to behold; truly majestic feats of engineering. Andrew Roden`s book tells the story of their time in British Railways service; the class` decommissioning in the 1960s; the extraordinary saga of two trains` unlikely preservation by Billy Butlin at his holiday camps; & their eventual return to steam on the main line. The Duchesses completes a trilogy of railway books from Aurum, joining Mallard
- the story of the world`s fastest steam locomotive
- & Flying Scotsman -that of the world`s most famous.

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In the world of rare books everything has its price. But when the book is a satanic tract, the currency is not money but life. A well-know bibliophile is found hanged days after selling a rare manuscript of Alexander Dumas`s classic, The Three Musketeers. Across Madrid, Spain`s wealthiest book dealer has finally laid his hands on a 17th-century manual for summoning the devil. Lucas Corso, solitary & obsessive, is the detective hired to authenticate both texts. But the further he follows the trail of devil worship, the more it leads him back to Dumas. He`s the unwitting protagonist in someone`s evil plot, but is he sleuth or hero, Sherlock Holmes or d` Artagnan? ...

` The Dumpling Sisters are super cute, they know how to cook, they`ve got good flavours goin` on!` JAMIE OLIVER Amy & Julie Zhang have been entertaining & educating their thousands of followers on You Tube with their recipes for deliciously easy homemade Chinese food. Destined to be adored by every Chinese food lover, THE DUMPLING SISTERS COOKBOOK is full of Chinese-food favourites, impressive sharing dishes & even sweet treats. Beginning with the simple; Best Ever Fried Rice, & working up to the more elaborate Cracking Five-Spice Roast Pork Belly, the recipes are interspersed with the insider tips & tricks that the girls` You Tube fans adore. With insight into Chinese culture & eating etiquette (for perfecting those chopstick skills), including sharing menu planners & a guide to shopping at Chinese supermarkets, Amy & Julie take us on a journey to discover real Chinese cooking. ...

John Lister-Kaye has spent a lifetime exploring, protecting & celebrating the British landscape & its wildlife. Lister-Kaye`s joyous childhood holidays
- spent scrambling through hedges & ditches after birds & small beasts, keeping pigeons in the loft & tracking foxes around the edge of the garden
- were the perfect apprenticeship for his two lifelong passions: exploring the wonders of nature, & writing about them. Warm, wise & full of wonder, The Dun Cow Rib is a captivating coming of age tale by one of the founding fathers of nature writing.

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Journeys in the Levant. ” How to speak of the imaginative reach of a land habitually seen as a seedbed of faiths & heresies, confluences & ruptures...trouble spot & findspot, ruin & renewal, fault line & ragged clime, with a medley of people & languages once known with mingled affection & wariness as Levantine?” So begins poet Gabriel Levin in his journeys in the Levant, the exotic land that stands at the crossroads of western Asia, the eastern Mediterranean, & northeast Africa. Part travelogue, part field guide, & part literary appreciation, ” The Dune`s Twisted Edge” assembles six interlinked essays that explore the seaboard of the Levant & its deserts, bringing to life this enigmatic part of the world. Striking out from his home in Jerusalem in search of a poetics of the Fertile Crescent, Levin probes the real & imaginative terrain of the Levant, a place that beckoned to him as a source of wonder & self-renewal. His footloose travels take him to the Jordan Valley; to Wadi Rumm south of Petra; to the semiarid Negev of modern-day Israel & its Bedouin villages; &, in his recounting of the origins of Arabic poetry, to the Empty Quarter of Arabia where the pre-Islamic poets once roamed. His meanderings lead to encounters with a host of literary presences: the wandering poet-prince Imru al-Qays, Byzantine empress Eudocia, British naturalist Henry Baker Tristram, Herman Melville making his way to the Dead Sea, & even New York avantgarde poet Frank O` Hara. When he is not confronting ghosts, Levin finds himself stumbling upon the traces of vanished civilizations. He discovers a ruined Umayyad palace on the outskirts of Jericho, the Greco-Roman hot springs near the Sea of Galilee, & Nabatean stick figures carved on stones in the sands of Jordan. Vividly evoking the landscape, cultures, & poetry of this ancient region, ” The Dune`s Twisted Edge” celebrates the contested ground of the Middle East as a place of compound myths & identities. ...

The Durrell family are immortalised in Gerald Durrell`s My Family & Other Animals & its ITV adaptation, The Durrells. But what of the real life Durrells? Why did they go to Corfu in the first place
- & what happened to them after they left? The real story of the Durrells is as surprising & fascinating as anything in Gerry`s books, & Michael Haag, with his first hand knowledge of the family, is the ideal narrator, drawing on diaries, letters & unpublished autobiographical fragments. The Durrells of Corfu describes the family`s upbringing in India & the crisis that brought them to England & then Greece. It recalls the genuine characters they encountered on Corfu
- Theodore the biologist, the taxi driver Spiro Halikiopoulos & the prisoner Kosti
- as well as the visit of American writer Henry Miller. & Haag has unearthed the story of how the Durrells left Corfu, including Margo`s & Larry`s last-minute escapes before the War. An extended epilogue looks at the emergence of Larry as a world famous novelist, & Gerry as a naturalist & champion of endangered species, as well as the lives of the rest of the family, their friends & other animals. The book is illustrated with family photos from the Gerald Durrell Archive, many of them reproduced here for the first time.


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