This is an evocative family memoir & unique portrait of Afghanistan from a young Afghan journalist. Hamida Ghafour's family fled Kabul after the Russian invasion. In 2003, she was sent back by the Telegraph to cover the country's reconstruction. She finds a place changed utterly from the world her parents had described & her grandmother
- an Afghan Virginia Woolf
- had written about. All around her is the West's first post-9/11 experiment with an Islamic democracy. But the people she meets reveal a different kind of nation building: the 'beautician without borders' whose school teaches women a new kind of independence; her cousin's determined parliamentary campaign; &, the archaeologist digging for his country's lost civilization in the form of a giant sleeping Buddha. As she participates in her country's present, its elusive past & her family's own story come vividly together for Hamida. But only when she's standing by her grandmother's grave
- after a heavily escorted Chinook trip to the wildest corner of the land
- does she start to find her own place in it all.



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An enchanting take on the legend of King Arthur from War Horse author & former Children`s Laureate Michael Morpurgo.` There stood before me an ancient man swathed in a dark & tattered fleece, his long hair & beard matted with filth, his face grey with grief & age. Holding the sword out in front of me, I backed away until I felt the sink behind me & I could go no further. His eyes followed me all the way.` When Bun Bendle is struck blind, he feels like he is drowning in blackness. But the discovery of an ancient tomb & a strangely familiar sword changes him forever. The Sleeping Sword weaves a contemporary tale with Arthurian legend in a way that is utterly spellbinding. A gripping children`s adventure from the master storyteller of An Eagle in the Snow, Listen to the Moon, Shadow, Arthur, High King of Britain & An Elephant in the Garden.------Former Children`s Laureate Michael Morpurgo needs no introduction. He is one of the most successful children`s authors in the country, loved by children, teachers & parents alike. Michael has written more than forty books for children including the global hit War Horse, which was made into a Hollywood film by Steven Spielberg in 2011. Several of his other stories have been adapted for screen & stage, including My Friend Walter, Why the Whales Came & Kensuke`s Kingdom. Michael has won the Whitbread Award, the Smarties Award, the Circle of Gold Award, the Children`s Book Award & has been short-listed for the Carnegie Medal four times. He started the charity Farms for City Children in 1976 with his wife, Clare, aimed at relieving the ”poverty of experience” many young children feel in inner city & urban areas. Michael is also a patron of over a dozen other charities. Living in Devon, listening to Mozart & working with children have provided Michael with the ideas & incentive to write his stories. He spends half his life mucking out sheds with the children, feeding sheep or milking cows; the other half he spends dreaming up & writing stories for children. ” For me, the greater part of writing is daydreaming, dreaming the dream of my story until it hatches out
- the writing down of it I always find hard. But I love finishing it, then holding the book in my hand & sharing my dream with my readers.” Michael received an OBE in December 2006 for his services to literature.
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Christopher Clark’s “ Sleepwalkers” is a highly acclaimed study of the causes of World War I. Charting the problems leading up to the Great War, from the polarization of Europe in 1887 – 1907 to the actual commencement of the fighting, the book presents the personalities & the unfolding events in London, Paris, Berlin, St. Petersburg, Vienna & Belgrade in considerable detail, but its author never looses sight of the simple fact that serious books on history should also be readable & enjoyed by the wider public. The book received great reviews from fellow authors & historians, & was selected by several newspapers & periodicals as one of their books of 2102. AWARDS: The Sleepwalkers was shortlisted for the PEN Hessell-Tiltman Prize for History & finalist for the Mark Lynton History Prize, & is the winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for History, French Prix Aujourd`hui, Cundill Recognition of Excellence Prize, Bruno Kreisky Prize for Political Literature, & the Braunschweiger Geschichtspreis A SELECTION FROM THE REVIEWS: Max Hastings, Sunday Times: ” Formidable.. .one of the most impressive & stimulating studies of the period ever published”. Niall Ferguson: ”A lovingly researched work of the highest scholarship. It is hard to believe we will ever see a better narrative of what was perhaps the biggest collective blunder in the history of international relations”. Harold Evans, New York Times Book Review: ”[ Reading The Sleepwalkers], it is as if a light had been turned on a half-darkened stage of shadowy characters cursing among themselves without reason...[ Clark] demolishes the standard view... The brilliance of Clark`s far-reaching history is that we are able to discern how the past was genuinely prologue... In conception, steely scholarship & piercing insights, his book is a masterpiece ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Christopher Clark is Professor of Modern History at the University of Cambridge & a Fellow of St Catharine`s College. He is the author of The Politics of Conversion, Kaiser Wilhelm II, & Iron Kingdom – a history of Prussia. Widely praised around the world, Iron Kingdom became a major bestseller. He has been awarded the Officer`s Cross of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany. ...

Number one bestselling author David Walliams presents his first picture book, illustrated by artistic genius Tony Ross. What's big, blue, bossy, & turns up uninvited? A slightly annoying elephant, of course! Introducing a magnificently warm & funny picture book from two remarkable talents. Adopt your copy today! ...

Number one bestselling author David Walliams presents his first picture book, illustrated by artistic genius Tony Ross. What`s big, blue, bossy, & turns up uninvited? A slightly annoying elephant, of course! Introducing a magnificently warm & funny picture book from two remarkable talents. Adopt your copy today! ...

Guidebook to trekking the Slovenian High Level Mountain Trail or Transverzala, 550km across Slovenia. Beginning at Maribor near the Austrian border to Ankaran on the Adriatic coast, the route is described as a series of 3 to 6-day treks through the region of Pohorje & the limestone mountains of the Karavanke & Kamnik-Savinja & Julian Alps. ...

An absorbing travel book, a meditation on geology, photography, Romanesque art & the romance of physical decline, The Slow Breath of Stone throws a mirror on Europe of the Middle Ages & its hold on us today. In the years following the devastations of the first world war, a brilliant, young American couple, Kingsley & Lucy Porter, travelled to south-west France to document the abbeys & basilicas of the Romanesque period. Their extraordinary photographs revealed some of the most feverishly inventive stonescapes in Europe, stories chiselled from the Bible & nightmares: rams playing harps & devils eating men's brains; a female centaur pulling a mermaid's hair; women suckling snakes at their breasts. For the Porters, these were images of an imagined world that unlocked secrets of the eleventh century but, menacingly, cast a dark shadow over their marriage. In The Slow Breath of Stone, Pamela Petro rents a car &, using the Porter's photographs & Lucy's journal as her map, retraces their journey through the wild landscapes of the Rouergue. She visits the beautiful & disturbing sculptures of monsters & animals devouring prey that adorn the cathedrals of Cahors & Carcassonne, & she explores a limestone quarry from where these great slabs of stone were hewn a thousand years ago. She walks the routes of pilgrimages, testaments to the tenacity of human hope, meeting people along the way & savouring the local food & wine. Above all, she journeys deep into the strange relationship of the sexually incompatible Lucy & Kingsley, following them to Donegal where their marriage was to end tragically & mysteriously on the cliffs of Inishbofin. ...

A twenty-six-year-old Indian journalist decides to give up his job & travel to a country where he can 'escape the deadness of his life'. So he arrives in Guyana, a forgotten colonial society of raw, mesmerising beauty. From the beautiful, decaying wooden houses of Georgetown, through coastal sugarcane plantations, to the dark rainforest interior scavenged by diamond-hunters, he is absorbed by the fantastic possibilities of this place where the descendants of the enslaved & the indentured have made a new world. But he is not just seduced by the country: he is also captivated by the feisty yet fragile Jan, & together they embark on an adventure which will take them into a new country & change both their lives. In his dazzling & ambitious debut novel, Rahul Bhattacharya has created a story that follows the shape & rhythms of life, not art. Part picaresque, in part a meditation, The Sly Company of People Who Care captures the heady adventures of travel, the overheated restlessness of youth, & the paradoxes of searching for life's meaning in the escape from home. ...

A twenty-six-year-old Indian journalist decides to give up his job & travel to a country where he can `escape the deadness of his life`. So he arrives in Guyana, a forgotten colonial society of raw, mesmerising beauty. From the beautiful, decaying wooden houses of Georgetown, through coastal sugarcane plantations, to the dark rainforest interior scavenged by diamond-hunters, he is absorbed by the fantastic possibilities of this place where the descendants of the enslaved & the indentured have made a new world. But he is not just seduced by the country: he is also captivated by the feisty yet fragile Jan, & together they embark on an adventure which will take them into a new country & change both their lives. In his dazzling & ambitious debut novel, Rahul Bhattacharya has created a story that follows the shape & rhythms of life, not art. Part picaresque, in part a meditation, The Sly Company of People Who Care captures the heady adventures of travel, the overheated restlessness of youth, & the paradoxes of searching for life`s meaning in the escape from home. ...

This is the chilling tale of a man in the grip of a small, invisible h&...A ghost story by the author of ” The Woman in Black” & ” The Man in the Picture”, to be read by the fire on a cold winter`s night. Returning home from a visit to a client late one summer`s evening, antiquarian bookseller Adam Snow takes a wrong turning & stumbles across the derelict old White House. Compelled by curiosity, he approaches the door, &, standing before the entrance feels the unmistakeable sensation of a small hand creeping into his own, `as if a child had taken hold of it`. Intrigued by the encounter, he determines to learn more, & discovers that the owner`s grandson had drowned tragically many years before. At first unperturbed by the odd experience, Snow begins to be plagued by haunting dreams, panic attacks, & more frequent visits from the small hand which become increasingly threatening & sinister... ...