Two weeks after September 11th, award-winning journalist Åsne Seierstad went to Afghanistan to report on the conflict there. In the following spring she returned to live with an Afghan family for several months.

For more than twenty years Sultan Khan defied the authorities
- be they communist or Taliban
- to supply books to the people of Kabul. He was arrested, interrogated & imprisoned by the communists & watched illiterate Taliban soldiers burn piles of his books in the street. He even resorted to hiding most of his stock in attics all over Kabul.

But while Khan is passionate in his love of books & hatred of censorship, he is also a committed Muslim with strict views on family life. As an outsider, Seierstad is able to move between the private world of the women
- including Khans two wives
- & the more public lives of the men. & so we learn of proposals & marriages, suppression & abuse of power, crime & punishment. The result is a gripping & moving portrait of a family, & a clear-eyed assessment of a country struggling to free itself from history.







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Life in the fast lane can be seductive, thrilling, intoxicating... But when night falls & the brakes fail, sooner or later you're gonna crash. Oscar nominee James Woods is mesmeric, & Sean Young delivers a sensitive performance in this gripping story of a loving couple's descent into the nightmare of cocaine addiction. ...

L.A cop Charlie (Jack Nicholson) & his wife move to Texas when he joins the Mexican border patrol. Initially tempted to join his new partners in the racket of corruption & illicit backhanders that presently proliferates in the department, Charlie find ...

Details:
Covering the border hills, northern Northumberland & the Southern Uplands, this full-colour third edition

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The name Borgia is synonymous with the corruption, nepotism, & greed that were rife in Renaissance Italy. The powerful, voracious Rodrigo Borgia, better known to history as Pope Alexander VI, was the central figure of the dynasty. Two of his seven papal offspring also rose to power & fame
- Lucrezia Borgia, his daughter, whose husband was famously murdered by her brother, & that brother, Cesare, who served as the model for Niccolo Machiavelli's The Prince. Notorious for seizing power, wealth, l&, & titles through bribery, marriage, & murder, the dynasty's dramatic rise from its Spanish roots to its occupation of the highest position in Renaissance society forms a gripping tale. Erudite, witty, & always insightful, Hibbert removes the layers of myth around the Borgia family & creates a portrait alive with his superb sense of character & place.
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The Borrowers follows the adventures of the dauntless tiny Clock family, parents Pod (Jim Broadbent), Homily (Celia Imrie) & their kids Peagreen & Arrietty
- a family of tiny four inch tall people who live under the floorboards of a big house surviving by 'borrowing' from the ' Human Bean' family upstairs. The Borrowers turn dental floss into tightropes, toaster handles into catapults, socks into beds, stamps into wall posters, & when their world is facing extinction
- in the form of Ocious P. Potter (John Goodman) their resourcefulness knows no bounds.

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Double bill of children's features. In ' The Borrowers' (1997), the Clock family are 'borrowers'
- four inch-high people who live
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A buried secret...

Present day: Anna is focused on growing her new gardening business & renovating her late grandmother's

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In the colourful world of fifteenth-century Italy, Luciana Vetra is young & beautiful, a part-time model & full-time whore. When she is asked to pose as the goddess Flora for Sandro Botticelli's painting La Primavera, she is willing to oblige
- until the artist abruptly sends her away without payment. Affronted, she steals an unfinished version of the painting
- only to find that somebody is ready to kill her to get it back. As friends, & associates are murdered around her, Luciana turns to the one man who has never tried to exploit her beauty, Brother Guido della Torre, a novice at the monastery of Santa Croce. Fleeing Florence together, Luciana & Guido race through the nine great cities of Renaissance Italy, desperately trying o decode the painting's secrets before their enemies stop them. Gloriously fresh & vivid, with a deliciously irreverent heroine, The Botticelli Secret is a masterful blend of historical intrigue & romantic adventure.

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Jason Bourne takes a mission to rescue his only friend in the CIA, Martin Lindros, who disappeared in Africa while tracking nuclear material. Bourne agrees to help track the money trail of the terrorists, but soon suffers from confusing flashbacks of unfamiliar places & events. Is someone brainwashing him in order to throw him off the trail? Worse still, is the man he saved really Martin Lindros? Now Bourne is on his own
- gathering evidence, while trying to stay one step ahead of the terrorists who are determined to destroy the USA.
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