This is a very sweet Christmassy touch-&-feel book from Ladybird. Toddlers & young children will love interacting with the festive touch-&-feel snowmen in this sturdy board book. Have fun reading the rhymes together & finding the feely areas on the snowmen each time. Stroke a soft woolly scarf or feel a ridged carrot nose as each little snowman is different. Then think of a name for the last little snowman at the end! A perfect first Christmas touch-&-feel book for all young snowman fans This Little Snowman" helps to develop sensory & language awareness in preschool children." ...

Remy is a cynic when it comes to love. Let down by her absent musician dad & witness to her mother's four failed marriages she doesn't intend ever to let anyone that close. So when Dexter comes crashing into her life why is it suddenly so hard for Remy to follow her own rules? He's everything she hates: messy disorganised impulsive & worst of all a musician like her absent father... ...

WINNER of the Irish Book Awards Childrens Book of the Year 2012. An exquisite new book featuring a boy & his moose from internationally bestselling multi-prize-winning picture book creator Oliver Jeffers. Wilfred owned a moose. He hadnt always owned a moose. The moose came to him a while ago & he knew just KNEW that it was meant to be his. He thought he would call him Marcel." Most of the time Marcel is very obedient abiding by the many rules on How to Be a Good Pet. But one dark day while deep in the woods someone else claims the moose as their own... Is Marcel really Wilfreds pet after all? An beautifully-illustrated witty & thought-provoking story exploring the concept of ownership." ...

SMALL WELL APPOINTED FUTURE. SEMI DETACHED. If the end of the world is nigh then surely its only sensible to make alternative arrangements. Certainly the Earth has its points but what most people need is something smaller & more manageable. Of course there are those who say thats planetary treason but who cares what the weirdos & terrorists think? Not Nathan. All he cares is that his movie gets made & that theres somebody left to see it. In marketing terms the end of the world will be very big. Anyone trying to save it should remember that. ...

Heddy Partridge was never my friend. I have to start with that. Heddy Partridge was never my friend because I was pretty popular clever & blonde & my friends were pretty popular clever & generally blonde too. Heddy Partridge was none of these things. Laura Hamley is the woman who has everything: a loving & successful husband two beautiful children an expensive home & a set of equally fortunate friends. But Lauras perfect world is suddenly threatened when she receives an unwelcome phone call from Mrs Partridge mother of Heddy
- the girl Laura & her friends bullied mercilessly at school. Heddy has been hospitalized following a mental breakdown & Mrs Partridge wants Lauras help to get her released. As Laura reluctantly gets drawn back into the past she is forced to face the terrible consequences of her cruelty. But as her secrets are revealed so too is another even more devastating truth & the perfect world Laura has so carefully constructed for herself begins to fall apart. This Perfect World" is the debut novel from a brilliant dark new voice. See Judys Review See Richards Review See Suzanne Bugler talk about her book Reading Group Questions Read our exclusive Q&A with Suzanne Bugler Write a Review for This Perfect World Judys Review Suzanne Bugler writes about psychological & physical bullying
- well lets call a spade a spade: its torture really
- so forensically & so darkly one wonders if she was once a victim of it herself. Your heart bleeds for poor Heddy so efficiently belittled & tormented by the golden girls in her class. I went to an all-girl High School & I thank God I didnt witness
- or experience
- anything like this. Even as Laura agrees to try & undo the damage shes wreaked shes hard as nails. Heddy Partridge was never my friend she tells us bluntly. Thats because I was pretty popular clever & blonde & my friends were pretty popular clever & generally blonde too. Nice. But there is a mystery at the heart of this arresting story a puzzle that slowly plays itself out as Laura tries to undo the terrible damage she has caused. She was the ringleader of the nasty little gang after all; it behoves her to make amends. But why did her parents
- in particular her father
- try so hard to force her to be friends with Heddy while the girls were growing up? What was the hidden connection between Lauras middle-class parents & the working-class Partridges? Why did Lauras father become incandescent with rage when she refused point-blank to allow Heddy into her charmed schoolgirl circle? The answer comes in a shocking twist. & the way the chaos & poison in Heddys life begins to seep into Lauras perfect world is shocking too. There is little comfort for bullies to be found in these pages & even less for the bullied. Richards "






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On a bitter winters day in 1916 deep below the streets of New York a group of men is working in one of the huge pressurized tunnels that will make up the subway system. Suddenly a tiny hole appears in the roof of the tunnel & the air rushes in sucking the men up through the bed of the Hudson to be suspended on a spume of water high above the river. Almost 90 years later Treefrog a homeless man stumbles through the same corridor under the twirling flakes of snow to his makeshift home under the city. A love story in three generations this is also about hope & despair & survival. ...

These sumptuous new hardback editions mark the 70th anniversary of Fitzgeralds death. Increasingly disillusioned by the rejection slips that studded the walls of his room & his on/off engagement to Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald began his third revision of the novel that was to become This Side of Paradise". It is the story of a young mans painful sexual & intellectual awakening that echoes Fitzgeralds own career it is also a portrait of the lost generation that followed straight on from the First World War grown up to find all Gods dead all wars fought all faiths in man shaken & wanting money & success more than anything else." ...

Amory Blaine intent on rebelling against his staid Midwestern upbringing longs to acquire the patina of Eastern sophistication. In his quest for sexual & intellectual enlightenment he progresses through a series of relationships until he is cast out into the real world. ...

This Side of Paradise tells the story of Amory Blaine the only child of wealthy parents whose journey from adolescence to adulthood follows him from prep school through to Princeton University where his literary talents flourish in contrast to his academic failure. A sequence of love affairs with beautiful young women are fatally damaged by the collapse of his family's fortune & the novel ends with him poised to face the challenge of making his own way in the world. Composed in an unconventional narrative mode the novel is a rich fusion of satiric & romance idioms & found a captivated audience on its publication in 1920. It made Fitzgerald rich & famous overnight. The Beautiful & Damned is a bleaker version of the corrosive power of wealth & its privileges one of Fitzgerald's abiding subjects. Anthony Patch is heir to a huge fortune whose marriage to the beautiful & indolent Gloria is increasingly shadowed by Anthony's fall into alcoholism. Though he wins a lawsuit to gain his inheritance of millions of dollars it is a pyrrhic victory for he is now a physically & morally broken man. ...

Rugby League football in an industrial northern city circa 1960 is a life of grime mud sweat intrigue & naked ambition. In This Sporting Life David Storey recounts the fortunes of gladiator hero Arthur Machin from the day of his inclusion in the local team to the match when he begins to feel age creeping up on him. Through Arthur we are taken into his raw often brutal world of players backers Saturday crowds bloody noses & broken teeth landladies & communal baths. ...