In the quiet of a New Zealand winter's night a rescue helicopter is sent to airlift a five-year-old boy with severe internal injuries. He's fallen from the upstairs veranda of an isolated farmhouse & his condition is critical. At first Finn's fall looks like a horrible accident; after all he's prone to sleepwalking. Only his frantic mother Martha Mc Namara knows how it happened. & she isn't telling. Not yet. Maybe not ever. Tragedy isn't what the Mc Namara family expected when they moved to New Zeal&. For Martha it was an escape. For her artist husband Kit it was a dream. For their small twin boys it was an adventure. For sixteen-year-old Sacha it was the start of a nightmare. They end up on the isolated east coast of the North Island seemingly in the middle of a New Zealand tourism campaign. But their peaceful idyll is soon shattered as the choices Sacha makes lead the family down a path which threatens to destroy them all. Martha finds herself facing a series of impossible decisions each with devastating consequences for her family. ...

The master of a Victorian mansion dies suddenly
- & his sister is convinced it was murder... When Cora is savagely murdered with
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BBC Radio 4 full-cast dramatisation starring John Moffatt as the great Belgian detective. When Richard Abernethie last master of Enderby Hall dies suddenly in his sleep the family are eager to discover how hiw riches have been divided. However the reading of the will is rudely interrupted by his youngest sister Cora
- 'he was murdered wasn't he?' she blurts out. Used to her inopportune remarks the family ignore her. But the next day when Cora herself is found brutally killed they start to wonder...
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In this long-awaited volume Jeremy Shearmur & Piers Norris Turner bring to light Poppers most important unpublished & uncollected writings from the time of The Open Society until his death in 1994. After The Open Society: Selected Social & Political Writings reveals the development of Poppers political & philosophical thought during & after the Second World War from his early socialism through to the radical humanitarianism of The Open Society. The papers in this collection many of which are available here for the first time demonstrate the clarity & pertinence of Poppers thinking on such topics as religion history Plato & Aristotle while revealing a lifetime of unwavering political commitment. After The Open Society illuminates the thought of one of the twentieth centurys greatest philosophers & is essential reading for anyone interested in the recent course of philosophy politics history & society. ...

Eleven years ago Jem Catterick & Ralph Mc Leary fell in love. They thought it would be for ever that they'd found their happy ending. Then two became four a flat became a house. Romantic nights out became sleepless nights in. & they soon found that life wasn't quite so simple any more. Now the unimaginable has happened. Two people who were so right together are starting to drift apart
- Ralph is standing on the sidelines & Jem is losing herself. Something has to change. As they try to find a way back to each other back to what they once had they both become dangerously distracted
- but maybe it's not too late to recapture happily ever after.. .

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In 1945 Germany was a nation in tatters. Swathes of its population were despairing homeless bombed-out & on the move. Refugees streamed towards the West & soldiers made their way home often scarring the villages they passed through with parting shots of savagery. Politically the country was neutered carved into zones of occupation. While Britain & America were loathe to repeat the crippling reparations demands of the First World War Russia bayed for blood stripping their own zone of everything from rail tracks to lavatory bowls. After the Reich is the first history to give the full picture of Germany's bitter journey to reconstruction. Giles Macdonogh expertly charts the varied experiences of all who found themselves in the German melting pot. His people-focused narrative unveils shocking truths about how people continued to treat each other even outside the confines of war. It is a crucial lesson for our times. ...

The Gulf monarchies (Saudi Arabia & its five smaller neighbours: the United Arab Emirates Kuwait Qatar Oman & Bahrain) have long been governed by highly autocratic & seemingly anachronistic regimes. Yet despite bloody conflicts on their doorsteps fast-growing populations & powerful modernising & globalising forces impacting on their largely conservative societies they have demonstrated remarkable resilience. Obituaries for these traditional monarchies have frequently been penned but even now these absolutist almost medieval entities still appear to pose the same conundrum as before: in the wake of the 2011 Arab Spring & the fall of incumbent presidents in Egypt Tunisia & Libya the apparently steadfast Gulf monarchies have at first glance re-affirmed their status as the Middle Easts only real bastions of stability. In this book however noted Gulf expert Christopher Davidson contends that the collapse of these kings emirs & sultans is going to happen & was always going to. While the revolutionary movements in North Africa Syria & Yemen will undeniably serve as important if indirect catalysts for the coming upheaval many of the same socio-economic pressures that were building up in the Arab republics are now also very much present in the Gulf monarchies. It is now no longer a matter of if but when the Wests steadfast allies fall. This is a bold claim to make but Davidson who accurately forecast the economic turmoil that afflicted Dubai in 2009 has an enviable record in diagnosing social & political changes afoot in the region. ...

Percy the Park Keeper helps his animal friends in this engaging story from highly-regarded best-selling author-illustrator Nick Butterworth.

Includes:: a fabulous fold-out poster! A storm is raging outside & Percy the Park Keeper is having a sleepless night. When he gets up the following morning Percy finds that the old oak tree has been blown down. It is a disaster for his animal friends who live there but Percy is soon devising a plan to help his little friends find new homes in the best tree house they have ever seen!

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When this book begins in the reign of Edward VII Great Britain commands the mightiest empire the world has ever seen. By the time it ends with the Coronation of Elizabeth II Britain has emerged victorious from a world war but ruined as a world power. How did Britains power & influence decline? This is one of the questions which A. N. Wilson seeks to answer in his masterly follow-up to The Victorians."" ...

Liverpool 1945. Three women strong friends return home from the war trying to fit back into their old lives after they've been demobbed. They've been thrown together by the war & shared all sorts of good & bad times. Now their old lives seem dull in comparison but not for long... The younger women Maggie & Nell are both twenty-one & are full of hope & excitement; Iris on the other hand is feeling apprehensive about returning to civilian life. At the age of thirty her only wish in life is to have a baby but sadly this wish has yet to come true. When one of the women falls pregnant there begins a dramatic sequence of events so wide-reaching that the three friends' lives will become more intricately interwoven than they could ever have imagined. Over the next quarter of a century this story of three remarkable
- & very different
- women unfolds into an uplifting tale of how three ordinary families become extraordinary.

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