You know what its like. Dark at teatime & sleeping indoors: nothing ever happens in the winter holidays. Or so Nancy thinks. Then the lake ices over completely & the Swallows & Amazons along with Dick & Dorothea
- the Ds
- plan a race to find the North Pole. How will they reach it if they cant sail? By sledges of course! But when a blizzard blows up & there is a mix up about signals the Ds disappear into the Arctic night. Disaster looms. Can the Swallows & Amazons save their friends?

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' You know what it's like. Dark at teatime & sleeping indoors: nothing ever happens in the winter holidays.'" Or so Nancy thinks. Then the lake ices over completely & the Swallows & Amazons along with Dick & Dorothea -- 'the D's' -- plan a race to find the North Pole. How will they reach it if they can't sail? By sledges of course! But when a blizzard blows up & there is a mix up about signals the D's disappear into the Arctic night. Disaster looms. Can the Swallows & Amazons save their friends?" ...

' Well ' said Nancy ' You know what it's like. Dark at teatime & sleeping indoors: nothing ever happens in the winter holidays.' Nothing
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When Marnie receives a phone call that summons her to the side of a once-beloved friend she is wrenched from her orderly London life & sent back into a past from which she has fled but never escaped. Ralph Marnie & Oliver once knew each other well & are still inextricably bound by ties of love & betrayal. Now they meet again in Ralph's secluded cottage in the Scottish highlands to spend the precious days that Ralph has left with each other. As they reminisce Marnie is taken back to the summer years ago when everything changed between them & heartbreak & desire broke up their little group. Will Ralph have the chance to say what needs to be said before it's too late? & can they put the devastating events of twenty years ago to rest & rekindle the intimacy they once shared? ...

After assignments as a Canadian diplomat in Mexico Colombia Sudan & South Africa Nicholas Coghlan & his wife Jenny unwind by sailing Bosun Bird a 27foot sailboat from Cape Town across the South Atlantic & into the stormy winter waters of the Beagle Channel Tierra del Fuego & the Strait of Magellan. Coghlan recalls earlier adventures in Patagonia when taking time off from his job as a schoolteacher in Buenos Aires in the later seventies & with both Argentina & Chile in the grip of harsh military dictatorships he & his wife explored the region over three successive summers. & now as they negotiate the labyrinth of channels & inlets around snow-covered Fireland he reflects on the voyages of past explorers: Magellan Cook Darwin Slocum & others. Sailing enthusiasts & readers of true adventures will want to add Coghlans world-wise narrative to their libraries. Coghlan revisits their past adventures in Patagonia: Twenty-five years prior he was a school teacher in Buenos Aires; he & Jenny would lead trekking expeditions to remote areas in the South of Argentina & Chile while both nations were in the grips of military dictatorships. This time as they negotiate the labyrinth of channels & inlets around Tierra del Fuego Coghlan reflects on the voyages of past explorers
- Magellan Cook Darwin & others. Sailing enthusiasts & readers of true adventures will want to add Coghlans world-wise narrative to their libraries.
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On January 3 2011 exactly one month before his sixty-fourth birthday Paul Auster sat down & wrote the first entry of Winter Journal" his unorthodox beautifully wrought examination of his own life as seen through the history of his body. Composed in the manner of a musical fugue the journal advances from one autobiographical fragment to the next jumping backward & forward in time as the various themes intersect bounce off one another & ultimately merge in a great chorus of multiple voices of one voice multiplied into many. Writing in the second person as if addressing himself as a stranger which at the same time establishes an uncanny intimacy with the reader Auster takes us from childhood to the brink of old age as he summons forth a universe of physical sensation of pleasures & pains moving from the awakening sexual desire as an adolescent to the ever deepening bonds of married love from the shocks of violent accidents to an account of his mothers sudden death in 2002 from meditations on eating & sleeping to the "scalding epiphanic moment of clarity" in 1978 that set him on a new course as a writer. Thirty years after the publication of " The Invention of Solitude" his first book of prose Paul Auster has now given us a second memoir of uncommon power & grace. " Winter Journal" is a book that looks straight into the heart of what it means to be alive." ...

In 1851 the fortunes of the Morland family are more buoyant than they have been for years. Morland Place is recovering under Benjamin's steady hands
- happy at last with Sibella. Charlotte now Duchess of Southport is shortly to give birth to hersecond child & on the point of opening her modern hospital for the poor. Cavendish's engagement to the ethereally beautiful but slightly silly Miss Phipps causes a stir in the drawing rooms of Mayfair & his wedding causes his family some misgivings. Then the storms in Europe spill in to Britain when the army is forced to defend Turkey against the Tsar. Within weeks Cavendish is in the Crimea & disappears in the Charge of the Light Brigade. Another moving & beautifully portrayed episode in the riveting Morland saga.
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Winner of the HW Fisher best first biography prize Spectator books of the year 2012 Sunday Times" " Daily Telegraph" " Tls" " Financial Times" " Guardian" " Daily Mail" & " Sunday Telegraph Books of the Year 2011". " He were a dark prince & infinitely suspicious & his times full of secret conspiracies & troubles". (Sir Francis Bacon). In his remarkable debut Penn vividly recreates the dark & turbulent reign of Henry VII. He traces the transformation of a young vulnerable boy Prince Henry into the aggressive teenager who would become Henry VIII & of Catherine of Aragon his future queen. & at the book's heart is the tragic magnetic figure of Henry VII
- controlling paranoid avaricious with a Machiavellian charm & will to power."
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In the great floating city of Sanctaphrax blizzards howl through the streets as the Edgeworld descends into an endless winter. Quint the son of a sky pirate has just begun his training at the Knights Academy
- training that involves heading out over the Edge on tethers to develop his flying skills. But when Quint breaks the rules & head out to Open Sky on his own he runs into the great sky leviathan known as a cloud-eater & must use all his skill & ingenuity if catastrophe is not to strike the Edgeworld...
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Snow is falling the fire is roaring
- curl up this winter with a Susan Wiggs Jennys lived her whole life in Willow Lake finding
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