A gripping children`s story from War Horse author & former Children`s Laureate Michael Morpurgo.” We all knew what was going to happen. We`d seen it before. A ship about to founder staggers before she falls. A huge wave broke over her stern & she did not come upright again.” Life on the Scilly Isles in 1907 is bleak & full of hardship. Laura`s twin brother, Billy, disappears, & then a storm devastates everything. It seems there`s little hope. But then the Zanzibar is wrecked on the island`s rocks, & everything changes... The Wreck of the Zanzibar is a gripping historical adventure from the author of An Eagle in the Snow, Listen to the Moon, Shadow, & An Elephant in the Garden. Michael Morpurgo is the master storyteller of such modern classic children`s books as War Horse, Friend or Foe, Private Peaceful, & Kensuke`s Kingdom. He has written more than one hundred books for children & 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. ...

` Beautiful, eerie, dark & dreamy` MELINDA SALISBURY` Thrilling & otherworldly` SUNDAY TIMES Every winter, Wren Silke is chased through the forest in a warped version of a childhood game. The boys who haunt her are judges, powerful & frightening pursuers, who know nothing of her true identity. If they knew she was an augur, their sworn enemy, the game would turn deadly. But Wren is on the hunt, too. Sent undercover as an intern to the Harkness Foundation
- enemy headquarters
- her family`s survival rests on finding a secret meant to stay hidden. As the enmity between two ancient magics reaches breaking point, Wren is torn between old loyalties & new lies. & trapped in the most dangerous game of her life. Part thriller, part love story, this captivating debut novel will leave readers spellbound.

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From the bestselling author of The Robin: A Biography The wren is a paradox of a bird. On the one hand wrens are ubiquitous. They are Britain’s most common bird, with 8.5 million breeding pairs & have by far the loudest song in proportion to their size. They also thrive up & down Britain & Ireland: from the smallest city garden to remote offshore islands, blustery moors to chilly mountains. Yet many people, particularly a younger generation, are not sure if they have ever seen a wren. Perhaps because the wren is so tiny, weighing just as much as two A4 sheets of paper, & so busy, always on the move, more mouse than bird. However if we cast our eyes back to recent history wrens were a mainstay of literary, cultural & popular history. The wren was on postage stamps & the farthing, it featured in nursery rhymes & greetings cards, poems & rural ‘wren hunts’, still a recent memory in Ireland particularly. With beautiful illustrations throughout, this captivating year-in-the-life biography reveals the hidden secrets of this fascinating bird that lives right on our doorstep. ...

Frantz Fanon`s seminal work on the trauma of colonization, ” The Wretched of the Earth” made him the leading anti-colonialist thinker of the twentieth century. This ” Penguin Modern Classics” edition is translated from the French by Constance Farrington, with an introduction by Jean-Paul Sartre. Written at the height of the Algerian war for independence from French colonial rule & first published in 1961, Frantz Fanon`s classic text has provided inspiration for anti-colonial movements ever since, analysing the role of class, race, national culture & violence in the struggle for freedom. With power & anger, Fanon makes clear the economic & psychological degradation inflicted by imperialism. It was Fanon, himself a psychotherapist, who exposed the connection between colonial war & mental disease, who showed how the fight for freedom must be combined with building a national culture, & who showed the way ahead, through revolutionary violence, to socialism. Many of the great calls to arms from the era of decolonization are now of purely historical interest, yet this passionate analysis of the relations between the great powers & the ` Third World` is just as illuminating about the world we live in today. Frantz Fanon (1925-61) was a Martinique-born French author essayist, psychoanalyst, & revolutionary. Fanon was a supporter of the Algerian struggle for independence from French rule, & became a member of the Algerian National Liberation Front. He was perhaps the preeminent thinker of the 20th century on the issue of decolonization & the psychopathology of colonization. His works have inspired anti-colonial liberation movements for more than four decades. If you enjoyed ” The Wretched of the Earth”, you might like Edward Said`s ” Orientalism”, also available in ” Penguin Modern Classics”. ” In clear language, in words that can only have been written in the cool heat of rage, he showed us the internal theatre of racism”. (” Independent”). ...

On a winter day in 1903, in the Outer Banks of North Carolina, two unknown brothers from Ohio changed history. But it would take the world some time to believe what had happened: the age of flight had begun, with the first heavier-than-air, powered machine carrying a pilot. Who were these men & how was it that they achieved what they did? David Mc Cullough, two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize, tells the surprising, profoundly human story of Wilbur & Orville Wright. Far more than a couple of unschooled Dayton bicycle mechanics who happened to hit on success, they were men of exceptional courage & determination, & of far-ranging intellectual interests & ceaseless curiosity, much of which they attributed to their upbringing. In this thrilling book, Mc Cullough draws on the immense riches of the Wright Papers, including private diaries, notebooks, scrapbooks, & more than a thousand letters from private family correspondence to tell the human side of the Wright Brothers` story, including the little-known contributions of their sister, Katharine, without whom things might well have gone differently for them. ...

From the grand tour to the global village, novelists & poets have made particularly observant travellers. Many writers have been prone to wanderlust, eager to explore the world & draw inspiration from their travels. They recorded their notes in letters, journals, essays & books. In some cases, these became celebrated examples of travel writing, but there are many more accounts which remain overlooked. In The Writer Abroad, Lucinda Hawksley takes us on a literary journey around the world, through extracts from Arthur Conan Doyle in Australia, Joseph Conrad in the Congo, Charles Dickens in Italy, Henry James in France, Mary Wollstonecraft in Sweden, & many more. ...

During forty years of travel, V. S. Naipaul has created a wide-ranging body of work, an exceptional & sustained meditation on our world. Now his finest pieces of reflection & reportage
- many of which have been unavailable for some time
- are collected in one volume. With an abiding faith in modernity balanced by a sense of wonder about the past, Naipaul has explored an astonishing variety of societies & people through the prism of his experience. Whether writing about Indian mutinies & despair, Mobutu`s mad reign in Zaire, or the New York mayoral elections, he demonstrates time & again that no one has a shrewder intuition of the ways in which the world works. Infused with a deeply felt humanism, The Writer & the World attests powerfully not only to Naipaul`s status as the great English prose stylist of our time but also to his keen, often prophetic, understanding.

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Maps can transport us, they are filled with wonder, the possibility of real adventure & travels of the mind. This is an atlas of the journeys that writers make, encompassing not only the maps that actually appear in their books, but also the many maps that have inspired them & the sketches that they use in writing. For some, making a map is absolutely central to the craft of shaping & telling their tale. A writer’s map might mean also the geographies they describe, the worlds inside books that rise from the page, mapped or unmapped, & the realms that authors inhabit as they write. Philip Pullman recounts a map he drew for an early novel; Robert Macfarlane reflects on his cartophilia, set off by Robert Louis Stevenson & his map of Treasure Island; Joanne Harris tells of her fascination with Norse maps of the universe; Reif Larsen writes about our dependence on GPS & the impulse to map our experience; Daniel Reeve describes drawing maps & charts for The Hobbit trilogy of films; Miraphora Mina recalls creating ‘ The Marauder’s Map’ for the Harry Potter films; David Mitchell leads us to the Mappa Mundi by way of Cloud Atlas & his own sketch maps. & there’s much more besides. Amidst a cornucopia of images, there are maps of the world as envisaged in medieval times, as well as maps of adventure, sci-fi & fantasy, maps from nursery stories, literary classics, collectible comics – a vast range of genres. ...

China constitutes a fifth of the world`s population. Over the last twenty years its economy has doubled to make it the fifth largest economy in the world; if the pace is repeated over the next twenty it is set to become second only to the US. The speed of its development is stunning, a combination of cheap labour & commitment to science & technology that has never been matched by a developing country. The Pearl River Delta, Shanghai & Beijing have become city-regions whose growth & embrace of modernity strike the visitor with awesome force. This is a continent on the move, recovering the world position & wealth it once had. The re-emergence of China as a superpower constitutes the biggest challenge the world has had for more than a century. Never before in modern times has the financial, trade, economic & diplomatic world pecking order been so profoundly reconstituted with the challenger country itself in the grips of incredible ideological & political change. This is a transition both internally in China & externally in the world beyond beset by hazard & risk. The world`s peace & prosperity depends upon it being executed successfully. ...

Writtenby well know BBC DJ Mike Read Theauthor is Chairman of the British Plaque Trust, the body set up to revive the Blue Plaque scheme Publishedto coincide with the unveiling of the BBC`s plaque to Buddy Holly Major UK publicity & marketing campaign ...