Fatima Whitbread had the worst possible start in life. Abandoned as a baby she spent much of her childhood in & out of childrens homes. A brief disastrous stay with her birth mother saw her raped by her mothers drunken boyfriend
- while her mother held a knife to her throat to quieten her down. Fatima was only twelve at the time. Athletics was her saviour: local athletics coach Margaret Whitbread took the young Fatima under her wing eventually adopting her. Fatima competed in three Olympics winning bronze at the 1984 Los Angeles Games. In 1986 she set a world record & the following year in Rome became world champion & was voted BBC Sports Personality of the Year. But then Fatima faded from the public eye leaving many to wonder where she had gone. After the cheering stopped Fatima faced prejudice penury scandal & heartbreak. Survivor" describes how she defeated all her demons to rise triumphantly from the ashes once again this time as queen of the jungle. Almost 13 million people watched her on " Im a Celebrity" & after surviving 20 days in the Australian heat she has millions of new fans eager to know more about Fatima the woman: the forthright focused slightly bossy charismatic single mum who knows how to transform even the most devastating experiences into lessons in life. This is the unforgettable story of a true champion who triumphed against the worst hardships imaginable."
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From the eleventh storey of a Los Angeles high-rise Nate looks out on the city
- the traffic the trees the beach beyond. He breathes
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Tender Branson the last surviving member of the Creedish death cult has commandeered a Boeing 747 emptied of passengers in order to tell his story to the planes black box before it crashes. Brought up by the repressive cult & like all Creedish younger sons hired out as a domestic servant Tender finds himself suddenly famous when his fellow cult members all commit suicide. As media messiah he ascends to the very top of the freak-show heap before finally & apocalyptically spiralling out of control. ...

Samuel Carver makes bad accidents happen to worse people. He's very good at his job. But nobody's perfect. & one of Carver's targets has got away. Now the world faces a new age of conflict driven by religious fanaticism. In Russia the government have admitted they no longer know the whereabouts of one hundred small-scale 'suitcase nukes'. In Afghanistan & Kosovo ruthless terrorists plot the downfall of their hated enemies. In Texas a dying billionaire plots his own personal Armageddon. & Carver can do nothing to stop them. He was beaten & tortured & left to die but Samuel Carver is a hard man to kill. When he awakes in a Swiss sanatorium from weeks of torment he discovers that the woman he loves has vanished. Somehow he must find the strength to track her down. Carver's hunt will take him deep into the heart of a conspiracy in which the lives of millions are at stake. He must confront an agonizing choice between his duty & his heart & face the ultimate sacrifice. As the clock ticks down to doomsday who will survive the final explosive conflagration? In The Survivor" the worlds of fact & fiction collide in a thriller that grips from the first page to the last." ...

Murder was always an insult. But the murder bloody & brutal of an entire family in their own home was a different form of evil. Nixie Swisher crept down the stairs for a drink
- & saved her own life. When Lieutenant Eve Dallas is called to the house minutes later she finds the whole family murdered in their beds. But the killers made a mistake: they left a survivor. Nixie saw everything. & unfortunately for her these elite killers soon realise they need to finish the job. So Eve & her billionaire husband Roarke give everything they can to keep Nixie safe in their own home. & then a terrifying climax reveals there may be more to Nixie than meets the eye.. .
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Survivor on the River Kwai is the heartbreaking story of Reg Twigg one of the last men standing from a forgotten war. Called up in 1940 Reg expected to be fighting Germans. Instead he found himself caught up in the worst military defeat in modern British history
- the fall of Singapore to the Japanese. What followed were three years of hell moving from one camp to another along the Kwai river building the infamous Burma railway for the all-conquering Japanese Imperial Army. Some prisoners coped with the endless brutality of the code of Bushido by turning to God; others clung to whatever was left of the regimental structure. Reg made the deadly jungle with its malaria cholera swollen rivers lethal snakes & exhausting heat work for him. With an ingenuity that is astonishing he trapped & ate lizards harvested pumpkins from the canteen rubbish heap & with his homemade razor became camp barber. That Reg survived is testimony to his own courage & determination his will to beat the alien brutality of camp guards who had nothing but contempt for him & his fellow POWs. He was a risk taker whose survival strategies sometimes bordered on genius. Reg's story is unique. Reg Twigg was born at Wigston (Leicester) barracks on 16 December 1913 just a few months before the outbreak of the First World War. After the war Reg worked as a warehouseman until retirement cycling twenty miles daily to Leicester. He still lives in Leicester & with his family he visited the sites of the POW camps in Thailand in 2006.
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A virus has wiped out 95 per cent of the worlds population in just a few weeks leaving the remaining 5 per cent to stay alive in a world devoid of the most basic amenities
- electricity transport & medicine. The few survivors of the human race are forced to fall back on the most primitive skills in order to live & re-establish some semblance of law & order. Abby Grant widowed by the plague moves through this new dark age with determination sustained by hope that her son who fled his boarding school at the onset has survived. She knows she must relearn the skills on which civilisation was built. With others she founds a commune & the group return to the soil. But marauding bands threaten their existence. For Abby theres a chance for a new life & love when she encounters James Garland the fourteenth Earl of Woodhouse who is engaged in a desperate fight to save his ancestral home. But more important she must find her son.
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A lot can change in three months: wars can be decided nations can be forged...or entire species can be brought to the brink of annihilation. The Morningstar Virus an incredibly virulent disease has swept the face of the planet infecting billions. Its hosts rampage attacking anything that remains uninfected even death cant stop the virus. Scattered across the world embattled groups have persevered. For some surviving is the pinnacle of achievement. Others hoard goods & weapons. & still others leverage power over the remnants of humanity in the form of a mysterious cure for Morningstar. Francis Sherman & Anna Demilio want only a vaccine-but to find it they must cross countryside in ruins dodging not only the infected but also the lawless living. The bulk of the storm has passed over the world leaving echoing thunder & softly drifting ashes. But for the survivors the peril remains & the search for a cure is just beginning... ...

An awe-inspiring journey through the eons of time & across the globe in search of visible traces of evolution in living creatures which have survived from earliest times & whose stories speak to us of seminal events in the history of life. Reading Richard Fortey is always pure pleasure BILL BRYSON The history of life on Earth is far older -- & far odder -- than many of us realise. In this book acclaimed author Richard Fortey traces this history not through fossil records but in the living stories of organisms that have survived nearly unchanged for hundreds of millions of years & whose existence today affords us tantalising glimpses of landscapes long vanished. For evolution has not obliterated its tracks. Scattered across the globe strange & marvellous plants & animals have survived virtually unchanged since life first began. They range from humble algal mats dating back almost two billion years to hardy musk oxen which linger as the last vestiges of Ice Age fauna. Following in Forteys questing footsteps Survivors takes us on fascinating journey to these ancient worlds. On a moonlit beach in Delaware where the horseshoe crab shuffles its way through a violent romance we catch a glimpse of life 450 million years ago shortly after it diversified on the ocean floor. Along a stretch of Australian coastline we bear witness to the sights & sounds that would have greeted a Precambrian dawn. Finally in the dense rainforests of New Zealand where the secretive velvet worm burrows into the rotting timber of the jungle floor we marvel at a living fossil which has survived unchanged since before the dissolution of the Gondwana supercontinent. Written with Forteys customary sparkle & gusto this wonderfully engrossing exploration of the worlds oldest flora & fauna brilliantly combines the best science writing about the origins of life with an explorers sense of adventure & a poets wonder at the natural world. Utterly compelling eye-opening & awe-inspiring this is a book for anyone with an interest in evolution in nature in the remarkable scope of geological time & our own modest interaction with it -- in short in life itself. ...

Four sisters four very different characters. But they have always been there for each other through the hard times as well as the good. Now they describe growing up performing from as young as two what it was like when fame suddenly hit & how it caused rifts in their close-knit family. Linda opens up about her devastation when her beloved husband died just as she was coping with breast cancer. Bernie tells how she suffered through the hearbreak of losing her unborn child & recently faced her own cancer battle Coleen talks about her marriages & reveals new secrets & Maureen describes her sadness at the devastating family feud that saw her much loved older sisters fall out with her Linda Bernie & Coleen. & they share the joy of getting back on stage for their thirtieth anniversary tour
- four survivors who found that age doesn't matter when it comes to having a great time.
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