Thor Bjorgolfsson is a self-styled adventure capitalist who became Iceland's first billionaire: by his 40th birthday he had assets of around $4 billion. Among them was investment in Iceland's oldest bank, Landsbanki - but in the 2008 financial meltdown, Landsbanki crashed, taking Bjorgolfsson with it. He lost nearly everything, yet amazingly by 2014 had made good his losses, repaid his creditors and rebuilt his empire. This new and extensively revised edition brings the buccaneering story of his extraordinary and ambitious achievements fully up to date.
* FROM THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF GIRL IN TRANSLATION * 'A hugely atmospheric and suspenseful mystery' LUCY FOLEY'A heart-tugging exploration of love, belonging and the meaning of family' RUTH WARE'Kwok is an impressive talent' KARIN SLAUGHTER'I will find my daughter. No matter the cost...'Jasmine Yang thought her daughter was dead at birth. But five years after she was taken from her arms, she learns that her controlling husband sent the baby to America to be adopted, a casualty of China's One Child Policy. Fleeing her rural Chinese village, Jasmine arrives in New York City with nothing except a desperate need to find her daughter. But with her husband on her trail, the clock is ticking, and she's forced to make increasingly risky decisions if she ever hopes to be reunited with her child.Meanwhile, Rebecca Whitney seems to have it all: a high-powered career, a beautiful home, a handsome husband, and an adopted Chinese daughter she adores. But when an industry scandal threatens to jeopardize not only Rebecca's job but her marriage, this perfect world begins to crumble. Two women in a divided city, separated by wealth and culture, yet bound together by their love for the same child. And when they finally meet, their lives will never be the same again...'A beautiful, propulsive story' - LAURA DAVE'As gorgeous as it is thrilling' - JULIA PHILLIPS
Sir Horace Jones (1819-1887) was the architect of Tower Bridge, designed in collaboration with John Wolfe Barry. But while some of his surviving buildings are world famous, Jones himself is relatively unknown.For over twenty years he was architect and surveyor to the City of London, during which time he designed and built Billingsgate, Leadenhall and Smithfield Markets, and from 1864 until his death completed many important buildings for the City of London. From 1882 to 1885 he was also president of the Royal Institute of British Architects. This is the first published biography of Jones and is fully illustrated with examples of his designs and finished works, including Smithfield Market, shortly to reopen as the new home for the Museum of London on the edge of the City.
Britain's health service is in dire straits. Gavin Francis shows us how we can save it.Since its birth in 1948, the powers that be have chipped away at the NHS. Now, under threat from government underfunding and private medicine, cradle-to-grave may be fast approaching the end of its lifespan.In the wake of the pandemic, a 'new normal' took shape. UK healthcare professionals are forced to work with levels of staffing and support woefully short of what they have been trained to expect. Junior doctors are striking for the first time in almost ten years and practitioners are quitting in record numbers, burned out and chewed up.As the NHS has shifted into permanent crisis mode, chronic illnesses, cancer and other serious conditions get pushed down the list. Outpatient referrals have years-long waiting lists. Corners end up cut - and the cost, all too often, is human life.But for those who believe in the future of the NHS, all is not lost. This is painful but essential reading from the bestselling author of Recovery and Intensive Care.
Lena has always lived in the jungle with Mother. There they look after a holiday home in surroundings that burst with colour and crawl with danger. Lena's only other friend is Isabella, who once visited regularly with her wealthy parents and security drone, Anton. But Isabella and her family haven't been seen in years.Mother is not like other mothers. She gets angry when Lena draws her with a face. When Lena challenges her to portray herself, she paints a tiny yellow dot surrounded by swirling black. She is a bastion of light, she says, against an army of darkness. Outside, rebels are fighting to take over the country. Mother is determined nothing will change inside the security fence, nothing to threaten her bond with Lena, or endanger the family. But there are secrets that need to emerge. How did Lena end up here? And what has happened to the family who no longer visit? What has Mother been planning, and what is gathering around them to change their lives forever?
Some years ago, Ingrid Swenson began collecting found shopping lists from the same North London Waitrose.Enlightening and funny, fascinating, and poetic, these private notes to self-detailing someone's weekly shop-rocket and antibacterial wipes, treacle and prawns, fags and milk - invite us to speculate on and imagine the private universes of their authors. They are, in effect, domestic haikus, scribbled on the back of letters and bills.Having formed the basis of an exhibition at the Art Workers' Guild in 2017, Shopping Lists documents a consuming fascination - of both Swenson's and her subjects' - providing an amusing, insightful and occasionally profound insight into the lives of ordinary Londoners.
A delightful festive murder mystery from the Sunday Times bestselling author of The Appeal, in which the characters return for panto season - and a murder.
This overview of the financial history of St John's College, Oxford from the College's foundation in 1555 up until 1980 documents in detail how the richest college in Oxford very nearly lost everything. As well as providing a window on the past, Intellectual Capital also gives historical perspective to challenges the College faces today. Drawing on three main data sources - including the College's own archives and the Ministry of Housing and local government records available at the National Archives - Intellectual Capital establishes a quantitative overview of College's financial history and investigates in depth the financial decision-making behind, and consequences of, the development of North Oxford. Despite St John's' extensive records and a more varied financial history than almost any other Oxbridge college, this is the first time the finances of St John's have received such detailed attention.
'A sparkling tour through the stories of the symbols we know so well' - Tim MarshallStarting with flags that we know, this captivating history explains the origins and hidden meanings of flags, taking a chatty but always entertaining path through this universal subject. Each chapter starts with a well-known flag - such as the French tricolor - and shows how that flag led to a number of other flags - in this case to the red, white and green tricolor of Italy, thought to represent the red of struggle, the white of the Alps and the green of Italy's lush vegetation. And then to a host of other tricolors in different parts of the world.Many of the over 200 colour illustrations feature alternative versions of existing flags - the flags that might have been - such as the red Canadian maple leaf between two bands of blue, representing the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.First published in Ukrainian six months before the start of the Ukrainian-Russian War, this entertaining and very likeable history of flags was written by Ukrainian businessman and ex-cabinet minister Dmytro Dubilet as a lockdown project.
Six decades ago, researchers achieved the impossible: developing a treatment that transformed kidney failure from a death sentence to a manageable condition. Yet, in the hands of a predatory medical industry, this triumph led to skyrocketing costs and worsening care.A gripping account of privatised healthcare gone wrong, How to Make a Killing recounts how the optimism of the 1950s and 1960s - when transplants and dialysis machines offered hope - gave way to anguished debates about the ethics of rationing and profiting from life-saving care, and how Big Dialysis proliferated at the expense of its patients.A triumph of investigative research, Tom Mueller's book features an unforgettable cast of characters: CEOs who dress as musketeers to exhort more aggressive profit-seeking, nephrologist insiders who reveal the substandard care this causes, and heroic patients who risk their lives to reveal the truth.
The extraordinary secret life of a great novelist, which his biographer could not publish while le Carré was alive. The SECRET LIFE OF JOHN LE CARRÉ reveals a hitherto-hidden perspective on the life and work of the spy-turned-author and a fascinating meditation on the complex relationship between biographer and subject.
The poems in Cowboy are knowing, millennial, internet-sick, funny, with deep undercurrents: of embodied and disembodied spiritualities; of the knowledge of animals; of familial mythologies; of grief and longing; of autism and navigating diagnoses; of early and enduring disappointment; of the wildness underneath the smooth glass-and-chrome surfaces of contemporary life.The echo of a question permeates the collection - where does a person grow up? - moving restlessly between rural Wales, London and the American South; between the esoteric spaces of the internet; between the artlessness of childhood and adolescence transfigured inexplicably into a disquieting adulthood, with its attendant weirdness of rent-paying, cohabiting, the churn of mindless work and alienation.The generous abundance of Cowboy's references - memes, early noughties television shows, pop songs, cities and their suburbs, video games - bring anxiety and pressure, joy and glory to this singularly impressive debut.
A beautifully illustrated exploration of the art of calligraphy in Hebrew, from the Sacred Scrolls to modern Hebrew graffiti. Calligrapher and scribe Izzy Pludwinski is in love with letters, and this love shines through in this ground-breaking book. Here you will find examples of writing and design from Biblical times to the present day that showcase the art of lettering as well as the beauty inherent in the forms themselves.Individual chapters look at historical manuscripts and their influence, traditional calligraphy and lettering, aleph-bets and individual letters, abstract and decorative calligraphy, the use of Hebrew calligraphy in fine art and street art, with a final a section on scripts from sacred objects.With more than 200 illustrations that span the history of the Hebrew alephbet over three millennia, this book will engage, delight, and surprise.
This heart wrenching novella honours all the wonders of life through the lens of one woman's journey towards death
A dazzling debut collection that refuses to look away as it grapples with pain, control, decadence, love and grief, in poems of wit, sharp intelligence, and a linguistic restlessness.
A powerful prison story that renews a grand Russian tradition of fabulist existential uncertainty
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