SMALL WELL APPOINTED FUTURE. SEMI DETACHED. If the end of the world is nigh then surely its only sensible to make alternative arrangements. Certainly the Earth has its points but what most people need is something smaller & more manageable. Of course there are those who say thats planetary treason but who cares what the weirdos & terrorists think? Not Nathan. All he cares is that his movie gets made & that theres somebody left to see it. In marketing terms the end of the world will be very big. Anyone trying to save it should remember that. ...

Heddy Partridge was never my friend. I have to start with that. Heddy Partridge was never my friend because I was pretty popular clever & blonde & my friends were pretty popular clever & generally blonde too. Heddy Partridge was none of these things. Laura Hamley is the woman who has everything: a loving & successful husband two beautiful children an expensive home & a set of equally fortunate friends. But Lauras perfect world is suddenly threatened when she receives an unwelcome phone call from Mrs Partridge mother of Heddy
- the girl Laura & her friends bullied mercilessly at school. Heddy has been hospitalized following a mental breakdown & Mrs Partridge wants Lauras help to get her released. As Laura reluctantly gets drawn back into the past she is forced to face the terrible consequences of her cruelty. But as her secrets are revealed so too is another even more devastating truth & the perfect world Laura has so carefully constructed for herself begins to fall apart. This Perfect World" is the debut novel from a brilliant dark new voice. See Judys Review See Richards Review See Suzanne Bugler talk about her book Reading Group Questions Read our exclusive Q&A with Suzanne Bugler Write a Review for This Perfect World Judys Review Suzanne Bugler writes about psychological & physical bullying
- well lets call a spade a spade: its torture really
- so forensically & so darkly one wonders if she was once a victim of it herself. Your heart bleeds for poor Heddy so efficiently belittled & tormented by the golden girls in her class. I went to an all-girl High School & I thank God I didnt witness
- or experience
- anything like this. Even as Laura agrees to try & undo the damage shes wreaked shes hard as nails. Heddy Partridge was never my friend she tells us bluntly. Thats because I was pretty popular clever & blonde & my friends were pretty popular clever & generally blonde too. Nice. But there is a mystery at the heart of this arresting story a puzzle that slowly plays itself out as Laura tries to undo the terrible damage she has caused. She was the ringleader of the nasty little gang after all; it behoves her to make amends. But why did her parents
- in particular her father
- try so hard to force her to be friends with Heddy while the girls were growing up? What was the hidden connection between Lauras middle-class parents & the working-class Partridges? Why did Lauras father become incandescent with rage when she refused point-blank to allow Heddy into her charmed schoolgirl circle? The answer comes in a shocking twist. & the way the chaos & poison in Heddys life begins to seep into Lauras perfect world is shocking too. There is little comfort for bullies to be found in these pages & even less for the bullied. Richards "






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It is 1964. Red Road is rising out of the fields. To the families who move in it is a dream & a shining future. It is 2010. The Red Road Flats are scheduled for demolition. Inhabited only by intrepid asylum seekers & a few stubborn locals the once vibrant scheme is tired & out of time. Between these dates are the people who filled the flats with laughter life & drama. Their stories are linked by the buildings; the sway & buffet of the tower blocks in the wind the creaky lifts the views & the vertigo. This Road is Red is a compelling & subtle novel of Glasgow. ...

On a bitter winters day in 1916 deep below the streets of New York a group of men is working in one of the huge pressurized tunnels that will make up the subway system. Suddenly a tiny hole appears in the roof of the tunnel & the air rushes in sucking the men up through the bed of the Hudson to be suspended on a spume of water high above the river. Almost 90 years later Treefrog a homeless man stumbles through the same corridor under the twirling flakes of snow to his makeshift home under the city. A love story in three generations this is also about hope & despair & survival. ...

These sumptuous new hardback editions mark the 70th anniversary of Fitzgeralds death. Increasingly disillusioned by the rejection slips that studded the walls of his room & his on/off engagement to Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald began his third revision of the novel that was to become This Side of Paradise". It is the story of a young mans painful sexual & intellectual awakening that echoes Fitzgeralds own career it is also a portrait of the lost generation that followed straight on from the First World War grown up to find all Gods dead all wars fought all faiths in man shaken & wanting money & success more than anything else." ...

This Side of Paradise tells the story of Amory Blaine the only child of wealthy parents whose journey from adolescence to adulthood follows him from prep school through to Princeton University where his literary talents flourish in contrast to his academic failure. A sequence of love affairs with beautiful young women are fatally damaged by the collapse of his family's fortune & the novel ends with him poised to face the challenge of making his own way in the world. Composed in an unconventional narrative mode the novel is a rich fusion of satiric & romance idioms & found a captivated audience on its publication in 1920. It made Fitzgerald rich & famous overnight. The Beautiful & Damned is a bleaker version of the corrosive power of wealth & its privileges one of Fitzgerald's abiding subjects. Anthony Patch is heir to a huge fortune whose marriage to the beautiful & indolent Gloria is increasingly shadowed by Anthony's fall into alcoholism. Though he wins a lawsuit to gain his inheritance of millions of dollars it is a pyrrhic victory for he is now a physically & morally broken man. ...

Rugby League football in an industrial northern city circa 1960 is a life of grime mud sweat intrigue & naked ambition. In This Sporting Life David Storey recounts the fortunes of gladiator hero Arthur Machin from the day of his inclusion in the local team to the match when he begins to feel age creeping up on him. Through Arthur we are taken into his raw often brutal world of players backers Saturday crowds bloody noses & broken teeth landladies & communal baths. ...

In 1831 Charles Darwin set off in HMS Beagle under the command of Captain Robert Fitzroy on a voyage that would change the world. Tory aristocrat Fitzroy was a staunch Christian who believed in the sanctity of the individual in a world created by God: Darwin the liberal cleric & natural historian went on to develop a theory of evolution that would cast doubt on the truth of the Bible & the descent of man. The friendship forged during their epic expeditions on land & sea turned into bitter enmity as Darwins theories threatened to destroy everything Fitzroy stood for.. . ...

These loosely connected hypnotic stories about memory & desire from Giller Prize winner Johanna Skibsrud introduces us to an astonishing array of characters who time & again find themselves face to face with what they didnt know at the exact point of intersection between impossibility & desire. A young maid at a hotel in France encounters a man who asks to paint her portrait only later discovering that he is someone other than who we think he is. A divorced father who fears estrangement from his thirteen-year-old daughter allows her to take the wheel of his car realising too late that hes made a grave mistake. Taking readers from South Dakota to Paris to Japan into art galleries foreign apartments farms & beach hotels This Will Be Difficult to Explain" is a masterful & perceptive series of tales from one of fictions brightest new voices." ...

Over 150 of the worlds leading scientists & thinkers offer their choice of the ideas strategies & arguments that will help all of us understand our world & its future better.

Includes:: contributions from: Richard Dawkins Stephen Pinker Daniel Dennett Clay Shirky Daniel Goleman Sam Harris Lee Smolin Matt Ridley Mark Henderson David Rowan Sir Martin Rees Craig Venter Brian Eno Jaron Lanier & David Brooks...among others. With his organisation Edge.org the literary agent & all-purpose intellectual impresario John Brockman has brought together the most influential thinkers of our age. Every year he sets them a question this year that question was: What Scientific Concept Would Improve Everybodys Cognitive Toolkit? Their answers are collected in this book & explore philosophy psychology economics & other disciplines
- & all share one aim: to provide the most reliable ways of gaining knowledge about anything whether it be human behaviour corporate behaviour the fate of the planet or the future of the universe.


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