To rescue her family from poverty & avoid marrying her slope-shouldered cousin seventeen-year-old Orchid competes to be one of the Emperors wives. When she is chosen as a lower-ranking concubine she enters the erotically charged & ritualised Forbidden City. But beneath its immaculate facade lie whispers of murders & ghosts & the thousands of concubines will stoop to any lengths to bear the Emperors son. Orchid trains herself in the art of pleasuring a man bribes her way into the royal bed & seduces the monarch drawing the attention of dangerous foes. Little does she know that China will collapse around her & that she will be its last Empress. ...

Lincoln Rhyme has travelled to a world-famous spinal cord injuries center in North Carolina for some risky experimental surgery. It may make him a tiny bit better it may kill him. But before he has a chance to undergo it the local police department are drafting in Rhyme & Amelia using their forensic skills to help find two women kidnapped by a psychotic young man known locally as the Insect Boy. After a cat & mouse game through the abandoned swamps of North Carolina Lincoln & Amelia manage to find him
- then Amelia convinced of his innocence breaks the boy out of jail. & Lincoln has to find them both while Amelia uses all the skills her mentor & lover has taught her to evade him. Her actions are to have more disastrous consequences than either of them anticipate.. .
...

To the outside world Charlotte is the privileged daughter of the local vicar. Behind closed doors however she is the prisoner of her controlling father. As she grows up Charlotte longs for freedom but her captivating innocence leads her into trouble. Sent to Ireland to hide a shameful pregnancy she discovers that once again her father has deceived her. She is forced into a convents harsh & humiliating regime where she must eventually give up the one thing that makes her life worthwhile. When Charlotte returns to England older than her years she chooses to forget the past. Becoming a London midwife she longs only to help other women at this hardest & most joyful moment in their lives. But her deep compassion & desire to prevent anyone else suffering the same horror she did leads her into a darker & more dangerous place. ...

To the outside world Charlotte is the privileged daughter of the local vicar. Behind closed doors however she is the prisoner of her controlling father. As she grows up Charlotte longs for freedom but her captivating innocence leads her into trouble. Sent to Ireland to hide a shameful pregnancy she discovers that once again her father has deceived her. She is forced into a convent's harsh & humiliating regime where she must eventually give up the one thing that makes her life worthwhile. When Charlotte returns to England older than her years she chooses to forget the past. Becoming a London midwife she longs only to help other women at this hardest & most joyful moment in their lives. But her deep compassion & desire to prevent anyone else suffering the same horror she did leads her into a darker & more dangerous place. ...

In 1986 Margaret Humphreys a Nottingham social worker investigated a woman's claim that aged four she had been put on a boat to Australia by the British government. At first incredulous Margaret discovered that this was just the tip of an enormous iceberg. Up to 150 000 children some as young as three years old had been deported from children's homes in Britain & shipped off to a 'new life' in distant parts of the Empire right up until as recently as 1970. Many were told that their parents were dead & parents were told that their children had been adopted. In fact for many children it was to be a life of horrendous physical & sexual abuse far away from everything they knew. Margaret & her team reunited thousands of families before it was too late brought authorities to account & worldwide attention to an outrageous miscarriage of justice. ...

Virginia Keile has a secret dream. To have a second chance at loving the tall handsome Cornish farmer she met
- & foolishly lost
-

...

More than half a million parents confront the empty nest for the first time each year. It is one of the most challenging phases of parenting often creating feelings of loss lack of purpose & crisis of identity which can lead to depression. Yet it receives little recognition. & contrary to popular opinion it doesn't only affect women who've put their careers on hold: working mothers & fathers suffer too. Equally it can be a period of liberation & discovery of new challenges when marriages long overstressed by childcare can be rejuvenated. The book will include plenty of people's experiences; expert comment & advice; & there will be a practical strand full of ideas inspiration & tips. There will be a strong focus on the positive as well as how to handle the changing relationship with your children to ensure a fulfilling & good relationship going forward an area of parenting often ignored. ...

Ann Rule brilliantly dissects the convoluted love affairs that all too often end in violence in this unnerving collection drawn from her personal crime files. From traditional courtships to Internet relationships the passions that rule the heart can also fuel the destructive fires of rage jealousy & murder. There are stalkers driven by obsession gay lovers who learn too late that things are not as they appear & conjugal visits in the shadow of prison walls. Ann Rule goes far beyond the headlines made by these unusual stories to chronicle the downward spiral that begins when promises are broken
- a descent that may wrenchingly unfold to a bloody conclusion or occur so rapidly that the reader wants to cry watch out. The title story deals with an adulterous affair that slashed the trust in a seemingly ideal marriage the violence that ensued & a missing-persons search that was ultimately solved with forensic science computers & the dedicated kindness of the victims friends. Powerful because they strike so close to home the cases in EMPTY PROMISES will leave readers shaken with the realities of love gone terribly wrong.
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In The Empty Space" groundbreaking director Peter Brook draws on a life in love with the stage to explore the issues facing any theatrical performance. Here he describes important developments in theatre from the last century as well as smaller scale events from productions by Stanislavsky to the rise of Method Acting from Brecht's revolutionary alienation technique to the free form Happenings of the 1960s & from the different styles of such great Shakespearean actors as John Gielgud & Paul Scofield to a joyous impromptu performance in the burnt-out shell of the Hamburg Opera just after the war. Passionate unconventional & fascinating his book shows how theatre defies rules builds & shatters illusions & creates lasting memories for its audiences." ...

EMPTY SPACE is a space adventure. We begin with the following dream: An alien research tool the size of a brown dwarf star hangs in the middle of nowhere as a result of an attempt to place it equidistant from everything else in every possible universe. Somewhere in the fractal labyrinth beneath its surface a woman lies on an allotropic carbon deck a white paste of nanomachines oozing from the corner of her mouth. She is neither conscious nor unconscious dead nor alive. There is something wrong with her cheekbones. At first you think she is changing from one thing into another -- perhaps its a cat perhaps its something that only looks like one -- then you see that she is actually trying to be both things at once. She is waiting for you she has been waiting for you for perhaps 10 000 years. She comes from the past she comes from the future. She is about to speak-- EMPTY SPACE is a sequel to LIGHT & NOVA SWING three strands presented in alternating chapters which will work their way separately back to this image of frozen transformation. ...