In eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe everyone lived 'off the land' in one way or another. In Ireland, however, almost everyone lived 'on the land' as well. Agriculture was the only economic resource for the vast majority of the population outside the north-east of the country. Land was vital. But most of it was owned by a class of Protestant, English and often aristocratic landlords. The dream of having more control over their farms, even of owning them, drove many of the most explosive conflicts in the Irish countryside. The struggle for the land was crucial in Irish history.In this vast and epic narrative, Myles Dungan explores two hundred years of agrarian conflict from the ruinous famine of 1741 to the eve of World War Two. Told in two parts, the book examines pivotal moments in Irish history: the rise of 'moonlighting', the infamous Whiteboys and Rightboys, the insurrection of Captain Rock, the Tithe War of 1831-36, the Great Famine of 1845 that devastated the country and drastically reduced the Irish population, and the Land War of 1878-1909, which ended by transferring almost all the landlords' holdings to their tenants. This was an agrarian revolution that fundamentally shaped modern Ireland. These events take place against the backdrop of prevailing British rule and stark class and wealth inequality.Land Is All that Matters is a sweeping, immersive story that captures both the human experience and the global relationships at the heart of Irish history.
From leading MP Chris Bryant, the inside story of misconduct in parliament - and how we can help solve it.'Takes a bulldozer to the crumbling edifice of parliamentary standards' JAMES O'BRIEN'Absolutely riveting. I read, I blink, I gasp' REVEREND RICHARD COLES'Vital. It should serve as a wake-up call to all of us' ALASTAIR CAMPBELL The extraordinary turmoil we have seen in British politics in the last few years has set records. We have had the fastest turnover of ministers in our history and more MPs suspended from the House than ever. Rules have been flouted repeatedly, sometimes in plain sight. The government seems unable to escape the brush of sleaze. And just when we think it's all going to calm down a bit, another scandal breaks. As Chair of the Committees on Standards and Privileges, Chris Bryant has had a front-row seat for the battle over standards in parliament. Cronyism, nepotism, conflicts of interest, misconduct and lying: politicians are engaging in these activities more frequently and more publicly than ever before. The result? The work of honest and accountable MPs is tarnished. Public trust is worn thin. And when nearly two thirds of voters think that MPs are out for themselves, democracy is in trouble. It is time for a better brand of politics. Taking us inside the Pugin-carpeted corridors of Westminster, from the prime minister's office to the Strangers' Bar, Code of Conduct examines every angle of parliamentary conduct and suggests how parliament might - at last - get its house in order.
It's thirty years from now. We're making progress, mitigating climate change, slowly but surely. But what about all the angry old people who can't let go?For young Americans a generation from now, climate change isn't controversial. It's just an overwhelming fact of life. And so are the great efforts to contain and mitigate it. Entire cities are being moved inland from the rising seas. Vast clean-energy projects are springing up everywhere. Disaster relief, the mitigation of floods and superstorms, has become a skill for which tens of millions of people are trained every year. The effort is global. It employs everyone who wants to work. Even when national politics oscillates back to right-wing leaders, the momentum is too great; these vast programs cannot be stopped in their tracks.But there are still those Americans, mostly elderly, who cling to their red baseball caps, their grievances, their huge vehicles, their anger. To their "alternative" news sources that reassure them that their resentment is right and pure and that "climate change" is just a giant scam.And they're your grandfather, your uncle, your great-aunt. And they're not going anywhere. And they're armed to the teeth.The Lost Cause asks: What do we do about people who cling to the belief that their own children are the enemy? When, in fact, they're often the elders that we love?
FROM PULITZER-PRIZE FINALIST KELLY LINKLaura, Daniel and Mo disappeared without trace a year ago. They have long been presumed dead. Which they were. But now they are not. And it is up to the resurrected teenagers to discover what happened to them. Revived by Mr Anabin - the man they knew as their high school music teacher - they are offered a chance to return to the mortal realm if they can solve solve the mystery of their deaths, learn how to use the magic they now possess, and identify the mysterious fourth soul that crossed back over with them.But their return has upset a delicate balance that has held - just - for millennia.
For the first time, the 10 great speeches of Benedict XVI's pontificate are collected. From the first homily delivered as soon as he became pope to the last public hearing, these speeches reveal the depth of his theological reflection in simple language that has nourished the faith of millions.Since Pope Benedict XV1 died he has had a remarkably good press. Indeed many have argued that there is a natural evolution between Pope Benedicts mission and that of his successor Pope Francis.Dubbed and dismissed by many as an unrepentant traditionalist, we now see a man of profound intelligence and wisdom on matters relating not just to religion but to what is not termed 'The Common Good'. It is thus more important to read these texts carefully and with measure and not in garbled versions dreamt up by the Press. With this in mind, Benedict will be seen as an inspiring thinker who has a lot to teach us now and the future. Included here are his speech on visiting Auschwitz, his address to the House of Commons and House of Lords , his address to the German Bundestag in Berlin, his address to the United Nations, his notorious Regensburg speech and his speech when he finally announced his resignation.
'This novel annihilated me. I gasped, laughed, and wept my way through it' KHALED HOSSEINI'Tender and raw and funny, it's a rattling good read'COLUM MCCANN'A wildly charming debut - propulsive, funny, and profound'ELIF BATUMANTbilisi's littered with memories that await me like landmines. The dearly departed voices I silenced long ago have come back without my permission. The situation calls for someone with a plan. I didn't even bring toothpaste.Saba is just a child when he flees his home in Georgia with his older brother, Sandro, and father, Irakli, for asylum in the UK after Russia's occupation of South Ossetia. Two decades later, all three men are struggling to make peace with the past, haunted by the places and people they left behind. When Irakli decides to return to Georgia, pulled back by memories of a lost wife and a decaying but still beautiful homeland, Saba and Sandro wait eagerly for news. But within weeks of his arrival, Irakli disappears, and the final email they receive from him causes a mystery to unfold before them: 'My boys, I did something I can't undo. I need to get away from here before those people catch me. Maybe in the mountains I'll be safe. I left a trail I can't erase. Do not follow it.'In a journey that will lead him to the very heart of a conflict that has marred generations and fractured his own family, Saba must retrace his father's footsteps to discover what remains of their homeland and its people. By turns savage and tender, compassionate and harrowing, Hard by a Great Forest is a powerful and ultimately hopeful novel about the individual and collective trauma of war, and the indomitable spirit of a people determined not only to survive, but to remember those who did not.
'This astonishing book reveals some of the most important global events of the twentieth century' Afua Hirsch'An essential work of history by a great writer' Peace Adzo Medie'Perfect for fans of Frank Abignale Jr.'s Catch Me If You Can' Publishers WeeklyThe astounding, never-before-told story of how an ingenious Ghanaian con artist ran one of the 20th century's longest and most audacious frauds.When Ghana declared independence from Britain in 1957, it immediately became a target for opportunists determined to lay hold of whatever assets colonialism hadn't already stripped. The military ousted the new nation's first president, Kwame Nkrumah, then falsely accused him of stealing the country's gold and hiding it overseas.Into this story stepped one of history's most charismatic scammers, John Ackah Blay-Miezah - a con man to rival the trickster god Anansi. Born into poverty, Blay-Miezah declared himself the custodian of an alleged Nkrumah trust fund worth billions. You, too, could claim a piece, if only you would help him rescue it - with a small investment. Over the 1970s and '80s, he grew his scam to epic proportions, amassing hundreds of millions of pounds from thousands of marks all over the world. He baffled Henry Kissinger, scandalised Shirley Temple-Black, and had Nixon's former attorney-general at his beck and call. Many tried to stop him, but Blay-Miezah continued to live in luxury, protected by ex-SAS soldiers while he deceived lawyers, businessmen and investigators around the globe.In Anansi's Gold, Yepoka Yeebo chases the ever-wilder trail of Blay-Miezah - and unfolds a riveting account of Cold War entanglements and African dreams - revealing the untold story of the grifter who beat the West at its own thieving game.
It's 2017 at the University of Arkansas. Millie Cousins, a senior resident assistant, wants to graduate, get a job and buy a house. So when Agatha Paul, a visiting professor and writer, offers Millie an easy yet unusual opportunity, she jumps at the chance. But Millie's starry-eyed hustle becomes jeopardised by odd new friends, vengeful dorm pranks, and illicit intrigue. A fresh and intimate portrait of desire, consumption and reckless abandon, Come and Get It is a tension-filled story about money, indiscretion and bad behaviour - and the highly anticipated new novel by acclaimed and award-winning author Kiley Reid.PRAISE FOR KILEY REID AND SUCH A FUN AGE'The book of the year' Independent'A new literary star' The Times'Essential. This year's hit debut' Guardian'A biting tale of race and class' Sunday Times'I couldn't put this down' Jojo Moyes'A startling, razor-sharp debut ... Wildly fun and breathtakingly wise' Taylor Jenkins-Reid'A gripping page-turner with serious things to say about racism, class, gender, parenting and privilege' Madeline Miller
An insider's look into how Generation Z's focus on ethics, climate change and purpose will change capitalism forever. In the next ten years there will be an unprecedented wealth transfer from the so-called 'baby boomer' generation to the young. Never before will so much money - in housing, land, stocks and cash - be shifted so suddenly from one generation to the next, and never before does the next generation feel so differently about the future of the planet and of capitalism. Ken Costa works with this new generation and shows how environmental concerns and anxiety about equality and diversity are more than mere slogans; instead they are driving the future of the markets. So many issues stem from the reality of the financial gap between age groups - from cancel culture and fears about wokeness, to generation rent, protest movements and re-evaluations of history around subjects such as empire. Costa also shows how we can build a more inclusive, purposeful capitalism through co-operation, which shifts focus away from the individual and more towards collaboration, compassion and community. For readers of Rebecca Henderson's Reimagining Capitalism, and Rutger Bregman's Utopia for Realists, as well as business leaders and tech watchers, this is what the future of capitalism looks like, how our current systems may be upended, and above all how boomers must work with the invigorating and inspiring young, who see their mission not just to increase value for shareholders, but to save the planet from humanity's disastrous last 40 years.
The PHENOMENAL second children's book from TV presenter and YouTube sensation Adam B!Thirteen-year-old Adam is back in another madcap adventure about mega fame and fortune. But when his little brother Callum is facing GLOBAL EMBARASSMENT, Adam must do what he can to save him. Even if it means BREAKING the whole, entire INTERNET.
'A striking and memorable novel. With single-minded intensity, How to Love Your Daughter reckons with parent-child boundaries: the ones that are clear, and the ones that are sometimes hazy, or dangerously nonexistent' Meg WolitzerA woman stands on a dark street, thousands of kilometers from her home in Israel, and peeks through the windows of a home in a city in northern Holland. The two little girls she sees through the window are her granddaughters, whom she has never met, the daughters of her only daughter. At the center of this brilliant novel is a small family - mother, daughter, and father, in this order, a family whose mistakes, made in the name of love, accumulate gradually to create an unforgettable psychological drama. With clarity and sharpness, Hila Blum examines the delicate crevices of a mother's love for her daughter, those that we want to see and those that we would rather deny. Blum draws an intimate road map which exposes the limits of our capacity to direct and to control the fate of our children.'When I read this book, I felt . . . that a new and wonderful occurrence has transpired in Israeli literature' Neri Livne, Haaretz
From the author of October, October, winner of the Yoto Carnegie Medal, comes a heartbreaking and heart-warming story about sisterhood, found family and accepting love in the most unusual and unknown places.Fen and Rey were found curled up small and tight in the fiery fur of the foxes at the very edge of the wildlands. Fen is loud and fierce and free. She feels a connection to foxes and a calling from the wild that she's desperate to return to. Rey is quiet and shy and an expert on nature. She reads about the birds, feeds the lands and nurtures the world around her.They are twin sisters. Different and the same. Separate and connected. They will always have each other, even if they don't have a mother and don't know their beginning. But they do want answers. Answers to who their mother is and where she might be. What their story is and how it began. So when a fox appears late one night at the house, Fen and Rey see it as a sign - it's here to lead them to their truth, find their real family and fill the missing piece they have felt since they were born.But the wildlands are exactly that: wild. They are wicked and cruel and brutal and this journey will be harder and more life changing than either Fen or Rey ever imagined ...
An ambitious, authoritative history of the Roman Catholic Church in the modern age.Despite its many crises, especially in Western Europe, there are still 1.2 billion Catholics in the world and the Church remains a powerful, controversial and defiantly archaic institution. After the French Revolution and the democratic rebellions of 1848, the Church retreated, especially under Pius IX, into a fortress of unreason, denouncing almost every aspect of modern life, including liberalism and socialism. The Pope proclaimed his infallibility; the cult of the Virgin Mary and her apparitions to semi-illiterate shepherds became articles of faith; the Vatican refused all accommodation with the modern state, until a disastrous series of concordats with fascist states in the 1930s. In Losing a Kingdom, Gaining the World, Dr Ambrogio A. Caiani narrates the epic, fascinating, entertaining and horrifying history of the Roman Catholic Church. It is an account of the Church's fraught encounter with modernity in all its forms, from representative democracy and the nation state to science, literature and secular culture.
Covid-19, monkeypox, bird flu, SARS, HIV, AIDS, Ebola; we are living in the Age of Pandemics - one that we have created. As the climate crisis reaches a fever pitch and ecological destruction continues unabated, we are just beginning to reckon with the effects of environmental collapse on our global health.Fevered Planet exposes how the way we farm, what we eat, the places we travel to and the scientific experiments we conduct create the perfect conditions for deadly new diseases to emerge and spread faster and further than ever. Drawing on the latest scientific research and decades of reporting from more than 100 countries, former Guardian environment editor John Vidal takes us into deep, disappearing forests in Gabon and the Congo, valleys scorched by wildfire near Lake Tahoe and our densest, polluted cities to show how closely human, animal and plant diseases are now intertwined with planetary destruction.From fossil fuel use raising the global temperature to increased logging polluting our landscapes, Fevered Planet exposes the perils of reckless environmental destruction - not just to our planet but to ourselves. As Vidal expertly argues, unless we transform our relationship with the rest of the natural world, the pandemics we are facing today will just be the tip of the iceberg.
An evocative and lyrical history of Cyprus and the Mediterranean.Think of a place where can you stand at the intersection of Christian and Arab cultures, at the crossroads of the British, Ottoman, Byzantine, Roman and Egyptian empires; a place marked by the struggle between fascism and communism and where the capital city is divided in half as a result of bloody internal conflict; where the ancient olive trees of Homer's time exist alongside the undersea cables which provide the world's internet.In Cypria, named after a lost Cypriot epic which was the prequel to The Odyssey, British Cypriot writer Alex Christofi writes a deeply personal, lyrical and historical portrait and history of the island of Cyprus, from ancient times to the present day.This sprawling, evocative and poetic book begins with the legend of the cyclops and the storytelling at the heart of the Mediterranean culture. Christofi travels to salt lakes, mosques and the eerie towns deserted at the start of the 1974 war. He retells the particularly bloody history of Cyprus during the twentieth century and considers his own identity as traveler and returner, as Odysseus was.Written in the same sensitive, witty and beautifully rendered prose as his last book Dostoevsky in Love, with a novelist's flair and eye for detail, Cypria combines the political, cultural and geographical history of Cyprus with reflections on time, place and belonging.
From bestselling and award-winning author Patrick deWitt comes a novel about an ordinary man who thought life's surprises were behind him - until a chance encounter changes everything Bob Comet is a retired librarian passing his solitary days surrounded by books in a mint-colored house in Portland, Oregon. One morning on his daily walk he encounters a confused elderly woman lost in a market and returns her to the senior center that is her home. Hoping to fill the void he's known since retiring, he begins volunteering at the center. Here, as a community of strange peers gathers around Bob, and following a happenstance brush with a painful complication from his past, the events of his life and the details of his character are revealed. Behind Bob Comet's straight man facade is the story of an unhappy child's runaway adventure during the last days of the Second World War, of true love won and stolen away, of the purpose and pride found in the librarian's vocation, and the pleasures of a life lived to the side of the masses. Comet's experiences are imbued with melancholy but also a bright, sustained comedy; he has a talent for locating bizarre and outsized players to welcome onto the stage of his life. With his inimitable verve, skewed humor, and compassion for the outcast, Patrick deWitt has written a wide-ranging and ambitious document of the introvert's condition. The Librarianist celebrates the extraordinary in the so-called ordinary life, and depicts beautifully the turbulence that sometimes exists beneath a surface of serenity. ________________________________________________________________________Praise for Patrick deWitt'A triumph from a writer truly in the zone' Maria Semple, author of Where'd You Go,Bernadette'deWitt remains a true original' Guardian'One of the most talented young writers around' Sunday Times
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