The first book to make sense of 21st Century pop Retromania" explores rocks nostalgia industry of revivals reissues reunions & remakes & argues that there has never before been a culture so obsessed with its own immediate past. Pulling together parallel threads from music fashion art & new media Simon Reynolds confronts a central paradox of our era: from iPods to You Tube were empowered by mind-blowing technology but too often its used as a time machine or as a tool to shuffle & rearrange music from yesterday. We live in the digital future but were mesmerized by our analogue past." ...

An atmospheric vibrant & moving tale of pain & passion at the heart of war-torn Spain from Victoria Hislop the million-copy bestselling author of THE ISL&. Beneath the majestic towers of the Alhambra Granada's cobbled streets resonate with music & secrets. Sonia Cameron knows nothing of the city's shocking past; she is here to dance. But in a quiet caf? a chance conversation & an intriguing collection of old photographs draw her into the extraordinary tale of Spain's devastating civil war. Seventy years earlier the caf? is home to the close-knit Ram?rez family. In 1936 an army coup led by Franco shatters the country's fragile peace & in the heart of Granada the family witnesses the worst atrocities of conflict. Divided by politics & tragedy everyone must take a side fighting a personal battle as Spain rips itself apart. ...

How would your wife react if you came home with the face of someone else? How would you continue to look at your own life? What would you do? Considered one of Walter de la Mare's finest occult stories this darkly thrilling tale tells the story of Lawford a dull suburban man who accidentally falls asleep on a grave & wakes up possessed by the spirit
- & face
- of somebody else. Denounced by his family & friends as an impostor Lawford's struggle to free himself of this possession leaves him a thoroughly changed man. Gripping & poignant THE RETURN encompasses domestic trauma unrequited love & philosophical reflection.

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Shari Cooper is dead the victim of a murderous attack. She is on the other side in a place of spirits. But she is given a rare offer. To return to Earth without having to be reborn. Into the body of a messed-up teenage girl
- Jean Rodriguez. A transfer of souls they call it. Shari is given a chance to be a Wanderer & to do a great service for humanity. It is an offer she gladly accepts. Then she is back in a human body. Yet she does not remember being Shari Cooper. At first she recalls nothing of the afterlife. Perhaps it is just as well. Not everybody on Earth welcomes Wanderers. Of the few who know of their existence some want them dead. & others the truly evil ones wish them much worse than that.
...

Van Veeteren thought back to what his friend Mahler had said the previous evening: Doing something at the right time is more important than what you actually do.. . An unmissable hospital appointment is looming for Inspector Van Veeteren when a corpse is found rolled in a rotting carpet by a young child playing in a local beauty spot. Missing head & limbs the torso is too badly decomposed for forensic identification
- bar one crucial detail.. . Circumstantial evidence soon points to a local man a double murderer who disappeared 9 months before shortly after being released on parole; a local hero turned monster after being convicted of killing two women over a span of three decades. Recuperating after an operation Van Veeteren is nevertheless directing investigations from his hospital bed for he is convinced that only the innocence of this new victim can be the motive for his murder. But the two women have been dead for long enough for any evidence to have died with them.. . And is he a little like Inspector Morse can be on occasion simply on the wrong track completely?
...

The outbreak tore the USA in two. The east remains a safe haven. The west has become a ravaged wilderness. They call it the Evacuated States. It is here that Henry Marco makes his living. Hired by grieving relatives he tracks down the dead to deliver peace. Now Homeland Security wants Marco for a mission unlike any other. He must return to California where the apocalypse began. Where a secret is hidden. & where his own tragic past waits to punish him again. But in the wastelands of America you never know who
- or what
- is watching you.. .

...

In the spring of 1839 the British invaded Afghanistan for the first time. Led by lancers in scarlet cloaks & plumed shakos nearly 20 000 British & East India Company troops poured through the high mountain passes & re-established on the throne Shah Shuja ul-Mulk. On the way in the British faced little resistance. But after two years of occupation the Afghan people rose in answer to the call for jihad & the country exploded into violent rebellion. The First Anglo-Afghan War ended in Britain's greatest military humiliation of the nineteenth century: an entire army of the then most powerful nation in the world ambushed in retreat & utterly routed by poorly equipped tribesmen. Return of a King is the definitive analysis of the First Afghan War told through the lives of unforgettable characters on all sides & using for the first time contemporary Afghan accounts of the conflict. Prize-winning & bestselling historian William Dalrymple's masterful retelling of Britain's greatest imperial disaster is a powerful & important parable of colonial ambition & cultural collision folly & hubris for our times. ...

1920. The Great War has been over for two years & it has left a very different world from the Edwardian certainties of 1914. Following the death of his wife & baby & his experiences on the Western Front Laurence Bartram has become something of a recluse. Yet death & the aftermath of the conflict continue to cast a pall over peacetime England & when a young woman he once knew persuades him to look into events that apparently led her brother John Emmett to kill himself Laurence is forced to revisit the darkest parts of the war. As Laurence unravels the connections between Captain Emmett's suicide a group of war poets a bitter regimental feud & a hidden love affair more disquieting deaths are exposed. Even at the moment Laurence begins to live again it dawns on him that nothing is as it seems & that even those closest to him have their secrets.. . ...

Paul Krugman winner of the 2008 Nobel Prize in economics shows how todays crisis parallels the events that caused the Great Depression
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Spencer is back! He & Emily kissed a few weeks ago but they havent talked since & Spencers unsure of her feelings. Itll take some ill-advised fashion choices a disastrous disco & a terrible party to convince him that Emily may actually like him
- just the way he is! Hilarious much-requested sequel to the bestselling Diary of an (Un) Teenager"."
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