Lee Evans is one of the best-loved comedians in the country; a Hollywood star able to sell out arenas in the blink of eye. But he was not always such a roaring success. The Life of Lee" is an utterly hilarious & very moving autobiography charting his ups & downs on the way to the top. Lee takes us on a darkly humorous journey through his childhood spent running wild on a Bristol housing estate & his unconventional school days when he was publicly derided as 'a failure' by a sadistic teacher. In this brilliantly entertaining & engaging tale he also guides us through a grim teenage period of numerous dead-end jobs. When he was cleaning toilets & plucking turkeys he could never have imagined that one day he would be playing to thousands of adoring fans at the O2 Arena. The reading also reveals how as a boy Lee got his first taste of showbiz living out of a suitcase & accompanying his entertainer father around the smoky rowdy unforgiving working-men's club & theatre circuit. Desperately struggling to be accepted this quiet young loner always saw himself as an outsider. But he finally met the love of his life & accidentally discovered the one place where he felt at home: the stage. " The Life of Lee" is a story that is like its subject: compelling touching charming & above all fantastically funny." ...

The Life of Oa Reilly is a chronicle of the career of one of the European PGA Toura s most famous caddies--John Oa Reilly--and ita s full of funny stories as only this Irishman can tell them. Like the one about the time he & some fellow caddies were arrested & jailed in East Germany on their way to the German Open in Berlin. Or the one about the Tour pro who in a fit of temper after a bad shot put his foot through the bottom of his golf bag & could not get it out again! The Life of Oa Reilly is a rollicking ride around the world--and the world of professional golf--by one of the gamea s most interesting characters. No golf library would be complete without it. I hope that youa ll find this book as entertaining as I found Johnny to be throughout our three successful years on tour. There was never a dull moment!" ----Padraig Harrington" ...

Ospreys are one of our best known & best loved birds & the name Roy Dennis is not only synonymous with the successful return of the osprey to Scotland but is also renowned for his international work with a variety of species. From the time he saw his first osprey back in 1960 Roy has worked to help this magnificent raptor establish itself once more in a country where it had been hounded & persecuted to near-extinction over hundreds of years. This book tells the story not only of the osprey but of the osprey watcher following the birds fortunes in Scotland seeing its numbers rise from that single pair in the 1950s to close to 200 pairs today. From a look at its history in Scotland & the rest of the UK including the bad old days of egg thieves & the shooting of birds as specimens it moves to the present day with satellite radios allowing us to follow the every move of the osprey on its migration to Africa & back. Roy has pioneered the building of artificial nests for ospreys which had been instrumental in increasing their numbers & range as well as starting the first European trans-location taking chicks from their nests in the Highlands & releasing them at Rutland Water Nature Reserve in the Midlands. The book also covers the ecology of the osprey with many personal anecdotes & insights. Diary entries give a more immediate feel to the chapters & the worldwide distribution of ospreys is enlivened by that sense of immediacy. Roys writings at a time when no one knew whether or not his lifetimes work would succeed add a sense of history to this personal tale. ...

Alchemists sought gold in it. David Bowie refrigerated it to ward off evil. In the trenches of Ypres soldiers used it as a gas mask whereas modern-day terrorists add it to home-made explosives. All the Fullers Tuckers & Walkers in the phonebook owe their names to it & in 1969 four bags for storing it were left on the surface of the moon. Bought & sold traded & transported even carried to work in jugs urine has made bread rise beer foam & given us gunpowder stained glass Robin Hoods tights & Vermeers Girl With A Pearl Earring. & we do produce an awful lot of it. Humans alone make almost enough to replace the entire contents of Loch Lomond every year. Add the incalculable volume contributed by the rest of the animal kingdom & it might soon displace a small ocean. No wonder it gets everywhere. In Life of Pee Sally Magnusson unveils the secret history of civilisations most unsavoury & unsung hero & discovers how our urine footprint is just as indelible as our carbon one. ...

After the tragic sinking of a cargo ship one solitary lifeboat remains bobbing on the wild blue Pacific. The crew of the surviving vessel consists of a hyena a zebra (with a broken leg) a female orang-utan a 450-pound Royal Bengal tiger & Pi
- a 16-year-old Indian boy. The scene is set for one of the most extraordinary pieces of literary fiction of recent years. Yann Martels Life of Pi" is a transformative novel a dazzling work of imagination that will delight & astound readers in equal measure. It is a triumph of storytelling & a tale that will as one character puts it make you believe in God."
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One boy one boat one tiger.. . After the tragic sinking of a cargo ship a solitary lifeboat remains bobbing on the wild blue Pacific. The only survivors from the wreck are a sixteen year-old boy named Pi a hyena a zebra (with a broken leg) a female orang-utan & a 450-pound Royal Bengal tiger. The scene is set for one of the most extraordinary & best-loved works of fiction in recent years. ...

This hardback slipcased edition is signed by Yann Martel & illustrator Tomislav Torjanac Life of Pi" needs little introduction. Since it was first published in 2002 it has entered mainstream consciousness & remains one of the most extraordinary works of fiction in recent years. In October 2005 Canongate launched a competition with " The Times" to find an artist to illustrate Yann Martel's international bestseller. Soon the competition expanded as the " Globe & Mail" & " The Age" newspapers also launched a search in Canada & Australia. From thousands of entries Croatian artist Tomislav Torjanac was chosen as the illustrator for this new edition of " Life of Pi". ' My vision of the illustrated edition of " Life of Pi" is based on paintings from a first person's perspective
- Pi's perspective. The interpretation of what Pi sees is intermeshed with what he feels & it is shown through use of colours perspective symbols hand gestures etc.' The idea behind this approach is a kind of an extension of Mr. Martel's idea as expressed in this"e: " It seemed natural that Mr. Patel's story should be told mostly in the first person
- in his voice & through his eyes. But any inaccuracies or mistakes are mine". (Tomislav Torjanac)."

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This title is winner of the Man Booker Prize for Fiction 2002. After the tragic sinking of a cargo ship one solitary lifeboat remains bobbing on the wild blue Pacific. The crew of the surviving vessel consists of a hyena a zebra (with a broken leg) a female orang-utan a 450-pound Royal Bengal tiger & Pi
- a 16-year-old Indian boy. The scene is set for a most extraordinary piece of literary fiction. This recording is unabridged. Typically abridged audiobooks are not more than 60 per cent of the authors work & as low as 30 per cent with characters & plotlines removed.
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A poetic work of fiction on the one hand an autobiography on the other The Life of Rebecca Jones is a powerful meditative work on one familys passage through the twentieth century. In the early years of the last century Rebecca is born into a rural community in the Maesglasau valley in Wales; her family have been working the land for a thousand years but the changes brought about by modernity threaten the survival of her language & her familys way of life. Three of her siblings are afflicted with a genetic blindness & it is they who have the opportunity to be educated elsewhere & to find work while Rebecca & her remaining brother maintain the family farm amidst a gradual influx of new technologies from the waterpipe to the tractor & telephone & ultimately to television. Rebeccas reflections on the century are delivered with haunting dignity & a simple intimacy while her evocation of the changing seasons & a life that is so in tune with its surroundings is rich & poignant. The Life of Rebecca Jones has all the makings of a classic fixing on a vanishing period of rural history & the novels final unexpected revelation remains unforgettable & utterly moving. ...

A group portrait of a brilliant circle at the centre of which Boswell captures the powerful troubled & witty figure of Samuel Johnson. The book is also an intimate picture of domestic life which mingles the greatest talkers of a talkative age with the heros humbler friends. ...