The only truly global collection of love poetry, bringing together the most stunning and inspiring poems from all around the world
The story of one man, a DIY DNA test and a family reunion. Guest list? Everyone.
';Beatty insistently finds poetry in the projects, dignity on the street.' Guardian ';Beatty's blunt, impious, streetwise eloquence [is] transfixing' New York Times ';The writing here is seamless and teeming with momentum' New York Times Book Review Winston ';Tuffy' Foshay is a 19-year-old, 24-stone ';player-king' to a hapless gang in Spanish Harlem, a denizen who breaks jaws and shoots dogs. His best friend is a disabled Muslim man who wants to rob banks, his guiding light is an ex-hippie Asian woman who worked for Malcolm X, and his wife he married over the phone whilst in jail. When the frustrated Tuffy agrees to run for City Council, so begins a zany, riotous concoction of nonstop hip-hop chatter and brilliant mainstream social satire, as the indomitable Beatty again demonstrates why he is hailed as one of the shrewdest cultural commentators and hilarious cutups of his generation.
';Shockingly original' The Times ';A literary freestyler with brio to burnscabrous and very funny' Guardian ';A no-holds-barred comedic romp' Junot Diaz After creating the perfect beat, DJ Darky goes in search of Charles Stone, aka the Schwa, a little known avant-garde jazzman, to play over his sonic masterpiece. His quest brings him to a recently unified Berlin, where he stumbles through the city's dreamy streets ruminating about race, sex, love, Teutonic gods and the Berlin Wall in search of his artistic and spiritual other. Ferocious, bombastic and laugh-out-loud funny, Slumberland is the second novel from Man Booker-winner Paul Beatty, a comic genius at the top of his game.
';If one keeps on walking, everything will be alright.' So said Danish writer Sren Kierkegaard, and so thought philosophy buff Gary Hayden as he set off on Britain's most challenging trek: to walk from John O'Groats to Land's End. But it wasn't all quaint country lanes, picture-postcard villages and cosy bed and breakfasts. In this humorous, inspiring and delightfully British tale, Gary finds solitude and weary limbs bring him closer to the wisdom of the world's greatest thinkers. Recalling Rousseau's reverie, Bertrand Russell's misery, Plato's love of beauty and Epicurus' joy in simplicity, Walking with Plato offers a breath of fresh, country air and clarity for anyone craving an escape from the humdrum of everyday life.
Rosie Strange doesn't believe in ghosts or witches or magic. No, not at all. It's no surprise therefore when she inherits the ramshackle Essex Witch Museum, her first thought is to take the money and run. Still, the museum exerts a curious pull over Rosie. There's the eccentric academic who bustles in to demand she help in a hunt for old bones, those of the notorious Ursula Cadence, a witch long since put to death. And there's curator Sam Stone, a man about whom Rosie can't decide if he's tiresomely annoying or extremely captivating. It all adds up to looking like her plans to sell the museum might need to be delayed, just for a while. Finding herself and Sam embroiled in a most peculiar centuries-old mystery, Rosie is quickly expelled from her comfort zone, where to her horror, the secrets of the past come with their own real, and all too present, danger as a strange magic threatens to envelope them all.
Willow has everything: a rich daddy, a pony and a place at a prestigious boarding school. Everything except the one thing she really wants: a father who cares enough to find her when she runs away from home. On the eve of her father's wedding, Willow runs again into the unknown. Her mother was a circus performer and Willow longs to follow in her footsteps. But when all of her money is stolen and her only friend, a street performer called Suz, betrays her, Willow is left penniless and alone. So begins a gripping, exhilarating journey. Will Willow ever make it to the big top and find a place she can truly call home?
On 19 September 1989, 170 people were killed when French Airlines UTA Flight 772 was destroyed by a suitcase bomb while en route from Chad to Paris. Despite being one of the deadliest acts of terrorism in history, it remained overshadowed by the Lockerbie tragedy that had taken place ten months earlier. Both attacks were carried out at the instruction of Libyan dictator Qaddafi, but while ';Lockerbie' became synonymous with international terrorism, UTA 772 became the ';forgotten flight'. As a lawyer, Stuart H. Newberger represented the families of the seven Americans killed in the UTA 772 attack. Now he brings all the pieces together to tell its story for the first time, revealing in riveting prose how French investigators cracked the case and taking us inside the courtroom to witness the litigation against the Libyan state that followed. In the age of globalization, The Forgotten Flight provides a fascinating insight into the pursuit of justice across international borders.
Growing up in the Nairobi of the 90s, a seething boiling pot of racial tension and conflicting cultural taboos, Leena and Jai are raised to believe in a Kenya full of possibility and potential. But as they come of age and venture into a world of underground activists beyond the confines of their tight-knit East Asian community and closely guarded, gated compound, they start to see a country divided by deep ethnic allegiances and on the brink of something very sinister. Soon Leena and Jai find themselves entangled in a shady world of crooked policemen, seedy salesmen, prostitutes, and bohemian artists. As the city tightens its grip, so begins a dangerous game of corruption and conspiracy, where rebellions simmer, and a tangled web of power unravels as dark forces collide and disturbing revelations surface. A powerful tale of love and politics in contemporary Nairobi, Who Will Catch Us As We Fall depicts a Kenya on the cusp of change in all its complexity. Through two of the most memorable and remarkable characters in contemporary African fiction, Iman Verjee has penned a moving portrait of a family torn apart by national politics and prejudice, yet still painfully tethered together.
On Easter Sunday, 23 April 1916, the seven members of the Irish Republican Brotherhood's military council met to proclaim an Irish Republic with themselves as the provisional government. After a week of fighting with the British army on the streets of Dublin, the Seven were arrested, court-martialled and executed. Cutting through the layers of veneration that have seen them regarded unquestioningly as heroes and martyrs by many, Ruth Dudley Edwards provides shrewd yet sensitive portraits of Ireland's founding fathers. She explores how an incongruous group, which included a communist, visionary Catholic poets and a tobacconist, joined together to initiate an armed rebellion that changed the course of Irish history. Brilliant, thought-provoking and captivatingly told, The Seven challenges us to see past the myths and consider the true character and legacy of the Easter Rising.
Francesca Caccini. Barbara Strozzi. lisabeth Jacquet de la Guerre. Marianna Martines. Fanny Hensel. Clara Schumann. Lili Boulanger. Elizabeth Maconchy.Great composers all, but their musical legacy is still rarely acknowledged.Since the birth of classical music, those women who dared to compose have been patronised, had their sex lives scrutinised and the veracity of their authorship questioned. They worked within a musical culture where beliefs about what women could and could not do determined their every move. Yet, time and again there emerged individuals who would evade, confront and ignore the rules that sought to exclude them from the world of composition.Taking the reader on a journey from seventeenth-century Medici Florence to London in the Blitz, and beyond, Anna Beer reveals the hidden histories of eight remarkable women, explores the special communities that enabled them to compose their music, and asks tough questions about why we still dont hear their masterpieces performed.A long-overdue celebration of neglected virtuosos, Sounds and Sweet Airs presents a complex and inspirational picture of artistic endeavour and achievement that deserves to be part of our cultural heritage.
In five extraordinary apartments live five extraordinary families. Designed in the shape of a tongue, each apartment takes the name of a flavour sweet, salty, sour, bitter and umami. And the tenants are no less eccentric. In Umami lives retired food anthropologist Alf, landlord and creator of the building. At Bitter lives manic depressive Marina, who neither eats nor paints but invents colours with words; at Sour lives newly parented (as well as New Age) couple Daniel and Daniela; and at Salty lives the Perez-Walkers with their daughter Ana, aka Agatha Christie, a precocious twelve-year-old who spends her days buried in detective novels to forget the unresolved death of her younger sister. Alf is also grappling with the death of a loved one. Recently bereaved, he types letters to his dead wife in the hope she will somehow respond, and together Alf and Ana lean on and support one another until their lives threaten to spiral out of control. Darkly comic and dizzyingly inventive, Umami is a remarkable and heart-wrenching novel that is as compelling as it is whimsically devastating.Laia Jufresa's work has appeared in McSweeney's, Pen Atlas and Words Without Borders. In 2015 she was invited by the British Council to be the first ever International Writer in Residence at Hay Festival in Wales, and in the same year she was named as one of the most outstanding young writers in Mexico as part of the project Mxico20. Umami is her first novel. She lives in Cologne, Germany. Sophie Hughes is a literary translator and editor living in Mexico City. Her translations have appeared in Asymptote, PEN Atlas, and the White Review and her reviews in the Times Literary Supplement and Literary Review.
It was a defining moment, the first time ';Jihadi John' appeared. Suddenly Islamic State had a face and the whole world knew the extent of their savagery. Weeks later, when his identity was revealed, Robert Verkaik was shocked to realise that this was a man he'd interviewed years earlier. Back in 2010, Mohammed Emwazi was a twenty-one-year-old IT graduate who claimed the security services were ruining his life. They had repeatedly approached him, his family and his fiance. Had they been tracking an already dangerous extremist or did they push him over the edge? In the aftermath of the US air strike that killed Emwazi in November 2015, Verkaik's investigation leads him to deeply troubling questions. What led Emwazi to come to him for help in the first place? And why do hundreds of Britons want to join Islamic State? In an investigation both frightening and urgent, Verkaik goes beyond the making of one terrorist to examine the radicalisation of our youth and to ask what we can do to stop it happening in future.
The new novel from the award-winning author of The Marlowe Papers April is angry. Dr Finlay Logan is broken. Only nineteen, April is an elective mute, accused of a religiously motivated atrocity. Logan, a borderline suicidal criminal psychologist, must assess her sanity in a world where - ten years after the death of Richard Dawkins - moves have been made to classify religious fundamentalism as a form of mental illness. Asking fundamental questions about the nature of reality, Barber skillfully explores the balance between the emotional and rational sides of human experience. Told in Ros Barber's trademark mesmerizing prose, Devotion is an extraordinary, provocative novel from one of the brightest rising stars in fiction.
In October 2015, the Chinese Communist Party banned its 88 million members from excessive drinking, improper sexual relationships and holding golf club memberships. But, with ';the rich man's game' about to appear in the Olympics for the first time in 112 years, they also began to spend unprecedented sums on their own national golf team. Through the lives of three men intimately involved in China's bizarre golf scene, Dan Washburn paints an arresting portrait of a country of contradictions. A villager named Wang sees his life transformed when a top-secret golf resort springs up next to his farm despite the building of golf courses being illegal. Western executive Martin, whose firm manages the construction of golf courses, is always looking over his shoulder for Beijing's ';golf police'. And for security guard Zhou, making it as a professional golfer could be his way into China's new middle class. Using the unique lens of The Forbidden Game, Washburn gleans rich insights into the politics and people of one of the most powerful and enigmatic nations on earth.
Acclaimed journalist Steve Boggan goes in search of precious metal
One of the most important yet least understood organizations in the world, the WTO is a lynchpin of globalization, allowing us to enjoy products and services from around the globe. However, it also lays bare the frailty of many industries, leading some to claim that it stokes unemployment and harms the developing world. In this engaging introduction, David Collins examines the goals of the WTO and the difficulties experienced by member countries struggling to adapt to the pressures of globalization. Refuting the argument that the WTO should expand its mandate to cover wider social issues, Collins demonstrates how this would confuse the organization's primary objective to liberalize international trade. With case studies straight from the headlines and clear explanations of complex issues like regional trade agreements and currency manipulation, this lucid exposition is an essential insight into what the WTO does and how it fits into the world we know.
A chilling and provocative scientific dissection of the psychopath's brain Fact: A psychopath is 6 times more likely to commit a new crime after release from prison. Fact: Some forms of group therapy make psychopaths more likely to commit a new crime compared to no treatment at all. Fact: A psychopath is born every 47 seconds. Kent Kiehl is the ';Psychopath Whisperer', a neuroscientist who has dedicated his career to understanding what makes a mind turn criminal. Are psychopaths ';evil' and untreatable, or do they suffer from a mental illness comparable to schizophrenia or epilespsy? Do they do we have free will? Based on breathtaking research, including personality surveys and brain imaging scans of thousands of criminals, Kiehl pinpoints the biological machinery of psychopathy and offers a radical new perspective on identifying & treating the psychopaths in our midst.
A Simon & Schuster eBook. Simon & Schuster has a great book for every reader.
For more than a century successive US and UK governments have sought to thwart nationalist, socialist and pro-democracy movements in the Middle East. Through the Cold War, the ';War on Terror' and the present era defined by the Islamic State, the Western powers have repeatedly manipulated the region's most powerful actors to ensure the security of their own interests and, in doing so, have given rise to religious politics, sectarian war, bloody counter-revolutions and now one of the most brutal incarnations of Islamic extremism ever seen. This is the utterly compelling, systematic dissection of Western interference in the Middle East. Christopher Davidson exposes the dark side of our foreign policy dragging many disturbing facts out into the light for the first time. Most shocking for us today is his assertion that US intelligence agencies continue to regard the Islamic State, like al-Qaeda before it, as a strategic but volatile asset to be wielded against their enemies. Provocative, alarming and unrelenting, Shadow Wars demands to be read now.
Praise for Steve Burrows's Birder Murder mystery series:'Most entertaining.' The Times'Delightful.' Daily Mail'Suspenseful.' Publishers Weekly
We have greatly underestimated the impact of dementia - America and Western Europe are the high risk areas
The true story that inspired The Man with the Golden Gun by Ian Fleming
An illuminating introductory volume on a system of law that has often been characterised as backward and brutal by opponents in the West
*SHORTLISTED FOR THE CWA ENDEAVOUR HISTORICAL DAGGER AWARD 2017* LONDON 1885 A woman's body is discovered on Edgware Road. Ten miles away, her head is pulled from the dark muddy waters of the Thames. For two men, this event will push them to the very brink. DETECTIVE WILLIAM PINKERTON ';Thirty-nine years old, already famous and already lonely'. In an attempt to solve this case, he must descend into the seedy, gas-lit streets, opium dens, sewers and sance halls of Victorian London. ADAM FOOLE A gentleman without a past, haunted by a love affair ten years gone. What he learns from his lover's fate will force him to confront a past, and a grief, he thought long buried.
A shocking compendium of what happens when outsourcing goes wrong - the horrifying stories, damning statistics and what we do now
A BBC History Magazine Book of the Year - the rise and fall of the women who ruled sixteenth-century Europe
KOMPROMAT: the Russian term for compromising materials about a politician or other public figure
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