It's twenty years since Miranda then sixteen holidayed in Cornwall & her life changed forever. Now she's back again
- with her
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All that was left of the garage was a heap of charred & smouldering beams. In the driving seat of the burnt-out car were the remains of a body.. . An accident said the police. An accident said the widow. She had been warning her husband about the danger of the car for months. Murder said the famous detective Lord Peter Wimsey
- & proceeded to track down the killer. 'I admire her novels.. .she has great fertility of invention ingenuity & a wonderful eye for detail' P. D. James
...

Mohammed Dar & his three brothers were born in a boat on a lake in Kashmir a place of exquisite beauty that was to become a war zone & nuclear flashpoint. This Himalayan valley of water mist & mountains was once one of Indias greatest tourist draws. In 1989 it exploded into insurgency. Kashmir became a rallying cry for jihadi movements all over the region & Pakistans backing of the conflict triggered in part its own Islamist crisis. Mohammed Dar & his family found themselves living inside a new & foreign world of violence. Justine Hardy has stayed with the Dar family for many years reporting on the conflict. She tells their story of living through the destruction of their adored homel&. Through their eyes we see the rise of religious fundamentalism & intolerance the ethnic cleansing of the Hindu population of the valley & the recruitment of a generation to jihad. & amid the fighting families continue to try & educate their children find work & protect their physical & mental well-being while attempting to build some kind of future beyond the annihilation of their old way of life. In The Valley of Mist" is an extraordinary story of family survival at the heart of a conflict within & beyond the Muslim world." ...

Imagine being able to observe with astonishing clarity a childs delicate features as they evolve over the course of a pregnancy or witness the complex behavior of new human life in utero. Now we can thanks to the advent of innovative 3D & 4D imaging technologies that provide a powerful diagnostic tool for doctors & cast vivid light on our earliest development--and a profound new way for parents to bond with their babies on a deeper emotional level. Combining more than 140 images of life-like models based on the latest science computer-generated illustrations & 3D ultrasound images with an uplifting informative text In the Womb" is a week-by-week chronicle of the mysterious magical progress from embryo to fetus to full-term infant. Each spread features a central image & information about that particular stage as well as brief commentary explaining what we know & how we know it. For example at 24 weeks we watch a fetus open & close her eyes display facial expressions resembling a grimace & a frown & stick out her tongue (no one has yet established exactly why). & during the last trimester we learn she experiences REM sleep & can hear loud noises through the fluids of her mothers body--a first hint of the world that awaits outside the womb. Based on National Geographics acclaimed television program originally aired in 2005 & soon to be supplemented with two more 2-hour segments " In the Womb" is the perfect gift for expectant parents & a fascinating perspective for anyone captivated by the miracle of life." ...

When he was twelve years old Adam Ryan went playing in the woods one day with his two best friends. He never saw them again. Their bodies were never found & Adam himself was discovered with his back pressed against an oak tree & his shoes filled with blood. He had no memory of what had happened. Twenty years on Rob Ryan
- the child who came back
- is a detective in the Dublin police force. Hes changed his name. No one knows about his past. Then a little girls body is found at the site of the old tragedy & Rob is drawn back into the mystery. Knowing that he would be thrown off the case if his past were revealed Rob takes a fateful decision to keep quiet but hope that he might also solve the twenty-year-old mystery of the woods.

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Addy & Prue Fairweather live with Nell their widowed mother in a flat above her shop on the Scotland Road. The sisters however are very different. Addy is dark-haired plain & always in trouble whereas Prue is flaxen-haired blue-eyed & as angelic as her looks imply. To make matters worse Nell makes no secret of her preference for the younger girl increasing Addy's jealousy & resentment. On the other side of the coin Giles Frobisher & his twin sister Gillian live in a crumbling mansion near the sea in Devon. The family have lost most of their money in the Depression so Giles leaves university & joins the Fleet Air Arm. He meets the Fairweather girls briefly on a visit to Liverpool but they lose touch. When they meet again Addy & Prue are no longer children & Giles realises he is falling in love... ...

Utterly absorbing funny & humane. A romp through a twisted century in the heart of Europe". (Anna Funder author of Stasiland). " Eugen Ruge is to the GDR what Hans Fallada was to the Third Reich. In Times of Fading Light may be a novel as important in the whole literature of the Cold War & its aftermath as anything written by Alexander Solzhenitsyn". (Philip Kerr). In Times of Fading Light begins in 2001 as Alexander Umnitzer who has just been diagnosed with terminal cancer leaves behind his ailing father to fly to Mexico where his grandparents lived as exiles in the 1940s. The novel then takes us both forward & back in time creating a panoramic view of the family's history: from Alexander's grandparents' return to the GDR to build the socialist state to his father's decade spent in a Gulag for criticising the Soviet regime to his son's desire to leave the political struggles of the twentieth century in the past. With wisdom humour & great empathy & drawing on his own family history Eugen Ruge majestically traces the stories of both this particular family & the GDR while exploring the tragic intertwining of politics love & family under the East German regime." ...

While the near 1 500 victims of Titanic accounted for a huge loss of life each of the ships here had a greater number of casualties in some cases more than five times as many. In total these 27 merchant ship sinkings resulted in a staggering loss of life at sea
- more than 96 000 in total 3 840 per ship. While the circumstances were different to Titanic the outcome in each case was no less tragic. Yet despite the fact that Titanic ranks behind so many other losses so powerful has her name become that it was the inevitable choice to describe some of these other events Germanys Titanic & The Titanic of Japan being two examples. Ships include the Lancastria Britains worst maritime disaster with 3 000 lost; the Ryusei Maru a Japanese Hellship loaded with 6 000 Allied POWs torpedoed by a US submarine; & the Wilhelm Gustloff a German liner packed with 7 800 civilians sunk by a Russian submarine. There were no survivors & this tragedy was the worst maritime disaster of all time.
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Lust among the stacks... Librarian Gwendolyne Price starts finding indecent proposals & sexy stories in her suggestion box. Shocked that they seem to be tailored specifically to her own deepest sexual fantasies she begins a tantalising relationship with a man shes never met. But pretty soon erotic letters & toe-curlingly sensual emails just arent enough. She has to meet her mysterious correspondent in the flesh. ...

I just want a taste of you. Or a touch. My fantasies about you plague my every waking hour. My only comfort is imagining that similar fantasies might obsess you too. When young librarian Gwendolynne Price finds increasingly erotic love notes to her in the suggestion box at work she finds them both shocking & liberating. But who is her mystery admirer & how long will he be content to just admire her from afar...? A dark sensual romance to fuel your fantasies as recommended in Tracey Cox's ' Fifty Shades of Grey' steamy reading list in the Daily Mail. ...