' Fire as she bears. Rake her lads.' Winter 1793. Newly promoted Master & Commander Charles Hayden's orders are to deliver the frigate HMS Themis to Lord Admiral Hood whose fleet is sheltering in the Mediterranean. Only hours out of port however & the Themis is engaging with the French navy. Hayden's destination is Toulon a French port under Lord Hood's protection. But there Hayden's captaincy & seamanship are stretched to their limits. For Toulon holds a deadly surprise for the unwary.. .A Battle Won" is the brilliant second instalment in the epic maritime adventures of Charles Hayden. This is a masterpiece in the tradition of Bernard Cornwell & Patrick O' Brian." ...

Epic fantasy in the tradition of Trudi Canavan Fiona Mc Intosh & Robert Jordan. A thousand years ago the people of Achar drove the Forbidden from their lands. But now the northern tribes of the Ravensbund are fleeing south again with nightmarish tales of creatures who feed upon the terror of their prey. Winter has come early & with it the promise of war. Axis bastard son of the dead Princess Rivkah is sent north to the battlefront at Gorkenfort with his elite Axe-Wielders. Once there he must hand over command to his hated half-brother Borneheld Duke of Ichar & heir to the throne. But during the long journey Axis falls in love with Faraday -- Bornehelds betrothed -- & finds himself reassessing the very essence of his beliefs. With the fate of the world hanging in the balance Axis must unite the feuding lands under one banner before it is too late & the evil rising in the north engulfs them all for good. ...

The stories in Battleborn all unfold in Watkinss home state of Nevada from down south in Nye County & Las Vegas to Reno Lake Tahoe Virginia City & the Black Rock Desert the site of Burning Man. We are introduced to a very specific small-town America to those homes & lives off the highway
- the ones travellers & writers usually bypass on their way to somewhere else. While the locations are ordinary the characters & Watkinss telling of their lives is anything but. There is the man who finds a cache of letters pills & a photograph abandoned by the side of the road & as he writes to the man he imagines left them behind reveals moving truths about himself (The Last Thing We Need); the man in late middle age who finds a troubled pregnant teen dying in the desert & through her begins to dream of regaining the family he lost (Man-O-War); the brothers caught in the early days of the gold rush (The Diggings); & the sisters unable to comfort each other following their mothers suicide (Graceland). & there is the first story (Ghosts Cowboys) a semi-autobiographical account of a troubled
- & infamous
- family history. These are stories to take the reader right to the heart of a truly American experience
- face pressed up against a window peeking past the unwashed panes to watch lives unfold. In their very specificity these are stories that are also universal.



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The Battlecruiser
- in their time this class of ships was considered one of the great triumphs of the Royal Navy as swift as a
...

Spetsnaz used to be a name to strike fear into the hearts of Russia's enemies. But now that the country has gone to the dogs Dima Mayakovsky
- once a revered figure inside the elite Special Forces unit
- wants no part of it any more. But when a dangerous fugitive surfaces in Tehran Dima is the man Kremlin wants to bring him in. There is no option: the ex-Spetsnaz legend must lead his team of battle-hardened operatives into combat not something you can hide from the US recce satellites circling above. This means that Dima & his men become Marine Sergeant Henry ' Black' Blackburn's problem. As Iran descends into chaos Dima & Black are forced to question everything they believed in & to fight to survive for their comrades their honour & the lives of millions. They're on their own. & the clock is ticking?

...

Jack Hinson never planned to become a deadly sniper. A prosperous & influential Kentucky plantation owner in the 1850s Hinson was devoted to raising his growing family & working his l&. Yet by 1865 Hinson had likely killed more than one hundred men & had single-handedly taken down an armed Union transport in his one-man war against Grants army & navy. By the end of the Civil War the Union had committed infantry & cavalry from nine regiments & a specially equipped amphibious task force of marines to capture Hinson who was by that time nearly sixty years old. They never caught him. Since then the story of Jack Hinson has evaded astute historians & until now he has remained invisible in the history of sniper warfare. John S. Old Jack Hinson watched the start of the Civil War with impartial disinterest. A friend of Ulysses S. Grant & Confederate officers alike" ...

You wake up in a dark room with no idea where you are. You are gagged & forced into a waiting truck. You have done nothing wrong. What would you do? Fourteen-year-old Ben travels to Pakistan on a school exchange programme. Ben & his Pakistani host Aaarya find themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time. They see something they're not supposed to & are kidnapped by some strange men. Caught up in a terrifying planned terrorist attack that could destroy Southern Afghanistan killing thousands Ben & Aarya are dragged through the most terrifying battleground in the world. ...

From its south-eastern tip Sussex is little more than sixty miles from continental Europe & the countys coastline some seventy-six miles long occupies a large part of Britains southern frontier. Before the days of Macadam & the Turnpike water travel could prove more certain than land transportation & the seas that define the borders of our nation aided rather than deterred the invader. Though the last successful invasion of Britain took place almost 1 000 years ago the gently shelving beaches of Sussex have tempted the prospective invader with the promise of both an easy disembarkation & a short & direct route to London
- the last time being just seven decades ago. As the authors demonstrate the repeated threat of invasion from the Continent has shaped the very landscape of the county. The rounded tops of the Iron Age hill forts the sheer walls of the medieval castles the squat stumps of Martello towers the moulded Vaubanesque contours of the Palmerstone redoubts & the crouched concrete blocks & bricks of the Second World War pillboxes constitute the visible evidence of Sussexs position on Britains front line.
...

The launch in 1906 of HMS Dreadnought the world's first all-big-gun battleship rendered all existing battle fleets obsolete but at the same time it wiped out the Royal Navy's numerical advantage so expensively maintained for decades. Already locked in an arms race with Germany Britain urgently needed to build an entirely new battle fleet of these larger more complex & more costly vessels. In this she succeeded spectacularly: in little over a decade fifty such ships were completed almost exactly double what Germany achieved. It was only made possible by the country's vast industrial nexus of shipbuilders engine manufacturers armament firms & specialist armour producers whose contribution to the creation of the Grand Fleet is too often ignored. This heroic achievement & how it was done is the subject of this book. It charts the rise of the large industrial conglomerates that were key to this success looks at their reaction to fast-moving technical changes & analyses the politics of funding this vast national effort both before & during the Great War. It also attempts to assess the true cost
- & value
- of the Grand Fleet in terms of the resources consumed. & finally by way of contrast it decribes the effects of the post-war recession industrial contraction & the very different responses to rearmament in the run up to the Second World War.

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As a part of the acclaimed DC Comics
- The New 52 event of September 2011 Batwomans new series finally begins! The creative team
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