Fifteen-year-old Laurence Roach just wants a normal life but it's not easy when your mum is a depressed alcoholic & your six-year-old brother thinks he's a dog. When Mum fails to come home one night Laurence tells nobody terrified he & his brother will be taken into care if anyone finds out. Instead he attempts to keep up the pretence that Mum is still around: dressing up in her clothes to trick the neighbours & spinning an increasingly complicated tangle of lies. After two weeks on their own running out of food & money & with suspicious adults closing in Laurence finally discovers what happened to his mother. & that's when the trouble really starts.. .A compelling thriller filled with some hilarious & surreal moments. Fifteen Days Without a Head is a tender honest story about family forgiveness & hope. ...

Sexy tender funny & haunting by turns the stories in Alison Mac Leods daring new collection are tales of lovers would-be lovers & lovers gone wrong. Here we discover ECT patient Gloria who falls for her anaesthetist Dr Numb; the cerebral Nick who chases after the heavily pregnant Katie at an Ikea sale; & the legendary lovers Heloise & Abelard re-imagined for the twenty-first century. With settings that range from a cheap Paris cafe to Londons Hayward Gallery & from the Brighton seafront to the Nova Scotia coast these stories are at times magical at times grittily real but always affecting. ...

To many the First World War conjures up exclusively a picture of trench warfare in which the armies of both sides remained locked in the mud & despair of their static positions. The war of movement with which the conflict opened & closed is less well remembered. This book originally published in 1976 is an attempt to correct that situation by providing a detailed daily account of the actions of one of the finest of the battalions of the original British Expeditionary Force that crossed over to France in the summer of 1914 the 2nd Battalion Grenadier Guards
- The Models. The story is told in the words of the officers of the Battalion few of whom survived the war taken from their diaries & letters & covers all the major actions of the first five months of the War
- Mons & the Retreat the Marne the Aisne culminating in the dark & desperate days of First Ypres. By the end of that battle the Battalion had lost 959 men killed wounded & missing
- practically its entire strength. for the most part the story is told by Major Ma Jeffreys later General the Lord Jeffreys whose diaries supplemented on occasion by the diaries & letters of some of his brother officers & others provide a very complete graphic & deeply moving picture of those turbulent days as seen by an ordinary regimental officer of the old school.


...

Based on the New York Times" bestselling book " The Fifth Agreement" the 48 cards in this deck offer a fresh perspective on the Four Agreements & a powerful new agreement for transforming our lives into our personal heaven. " The Fifth Agreement" takes us to a deeper level of awareness of the power of the Self & returns us to the authenticity we were born with. In this compelling sequel to the book that has changed the lives of millions of people around the world we are reminded of the greatest gift we can give ourselves: the freedom to be who we really are." ...

Before Breakfast at Tiffany's Audrey Hepburn was still a little-known actress with few film roles to speak of; after it
- indeed
...

A classic tale from Doris Lessing Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature 2007 of a family torn apart by the arrival of Ben their feral fifth child. Listening to the laughter the sounds of children playing Harriet & David would reach for each others hand & smile & breathe happiness. Four children a beautiful old house the love of relatives & friends Harriet & David Lovatts life is a glorious hymn to domestic bliss & old-fashioned family values. But when their fifth child is born a sickly & implacable shadow is cast over this tender idyll. Large & ugly violent & uncontrollable the infant Ben full of cold dislike tears at Harriets breast. Struggling to care for her new-born child faced with a darkness & a strange defiance she has never known before Harriet is deeply afraid of what exactly she has brought into the world... ...

Peter Senge founder & director of the Society for Organisational Learning & senior lecturer at MIT has found the means of creating a learning organisation. In The Fifth Discipline he draws the blueprints for an organisation where people expand their capacity to create the results they truly desire where new & expansive patterns of thinking are nutured where collective aspiration is set free & where people are contually learning together. The Fifth Discipline fuses these features together into a coherent body of theory & practice making the whole of an organisation more effective than the sum of its parts. Mastering the disciplines will: * Reignite the spark of learning driven by people focused on what truly matters to them. * Bridge teamwork into macro-creativity. * Free you from confining assumptions & mind-sets. * Teach you to see the forest & the trees. * End the struggle between work & family time. The Fifth Discipline is a remarkable book that draws on science spiritual values psychology the cutting edge of management thought & Senges work with leading companies which employ Fifth Discipline methods. Reading it provides a searching personal experience & a dramatic professional shift of mind. This edition contains more than 100 pages of new material about how companies are actually using & benefiting from Fifth Discipline practices as well as a new foreword from Peter Senge about his work with the Fifth Discipline over the last 15 years. ...

They say that diplomacy is a gentle art. That its finest practitioners are subtle sophisticated individuals for whom nuance & subtext are meat & drink. & that mastering it is a lifetime's work. But you do need a certain inclination in that direction. It's not something you can just pick up on the job. Which is a shame if you find yourself dropped unaccountably into a position of some significant diplomatic responsibility. If you don't really do diplomacy or haven't been to school with the right foreign bigwigs or aren't even sure whether a nod is as good as a wink to anyone sighted or otherwise then things are likely to go wrong. It's just a question of how badly... ...

Sam Vimes is a man on the run. Yesterday he was a duke a chief of police & the ambassador to the mysterious fat-rich country of Uberwald. Now he has nothing but his native wit & the gloomy trousers of Uncle Vanya (dont ask). Its snowing. Its freezing. & if he cant make it through the forest to civilization theres going to be a terrible war. But there are monsters on his trail. Theyre bright. Theyre fast. Theyre werewolves
- & theyre catching up. The Fifth Elephant" is Terry Pratchetts latest installment in the " Discworld" cycle this time starring dwarfs diplomacy intrigue & big lumps of fat."
...

School life has never been so splendid as in these br&-new editions of the classic Blyton series St Clare's. The O' Sullivan twins & their friends are among the oldest girls at St Clare's now with their own studies! & soon there will be a decision about who is to be head girl next year. But in the meantime there is the poet Anne-Marie & the musician Felicity to contend with. Will they ever get along or will this term be just one long caterwaul? ...