Just when you thought things couldn't get any weirder, WeirDo's been to the dentist and has come back with braces! How will he hide them from everyone, especially with a big trip to the Fun Fair coming up?! It won't be easy . . . but it will be funny! Views: 32
Sahib is a magnificent history of the British soldier in India from Clive to the end of Empire, making full use of personal accounts from the soldiers who served in the jewel in Britain's Imperial Crown.This is a stunning account of Indian soldiering in peace and war, from the barrack rooms to the cavalry swirling across open plains. Bestselling military historian Richard Holmes not only illuminates the lives and feelings of the men who served, but also those of the women who followed them across a vast continent, bore their children, and suffered alongside them in the merciless conditions. Views: 32
Robert Stevens and Tim Albright are in their final term at Oxford. Their exams are looming larger and larger on the horizon. But more important to both of them is the production of the fierce Jacobean tragedy, 'The Changeling', which Robert is directing. Along with them, we follow the fortunes of Gina, the seductive and enigmatic leading lady in the play; Chetwynd, the bizarre older student who travels around with a revolver; and Anne, the gentle wife of Robert's tutor. Spiced with humour and anarchy, 'The Noonday Devil' is a masterly work of fiction whose underlying theme, the deadly trap of sloth, leads to an unexpected and almost unbearable climax.'A gently philosophical, violently human commentary... a story that holds its ironical secrets to the bitter end' Mail on Sunday'Mr Judd has imparted a wholly original flavour... The novel is so well made, so vibrant with life, that it is a pleasure to read' Scotsman Views: 32
A little girl discovers that eating ice cream from her grandfather's old ice-cream truck gives her the power to travel through time, in this brilliant, funny and heartwarming story from bestselling author Tom Fletcher. Views: 32
A young man searches for meaning, creates art, and grapples with fame as he traverses the stomping grounds of the Beat Generation—from Mexico City to Manhattan—in Jack Kerouac's semi-autobiographical novel This urgently paced yet deeply introspective novel closely tracks On the Road author Jack Kerouac's own life. Jack Duluoz journeys from the Cascade Mountains to San Francisco, Mexico City, New York, and Tangier. While working as a fire lookout on Desolation Peak in the Cascades, Duluoz contemplates his inner void and the distressing isolation brought on by his youthful sense of adventure. In Tangier he suffers a similar feeling of desperation during an opium overdose, and in Mexico City he meets up with a morphine-addicted philosopher and seeks an antidote to his solitude in a whorehouse. As in Kerouac's other novels, Desolation Angels features a lively cast of pseudonymous versions of his fellow Beat poets, including William S.... Views: 32
A gripping true story of racism, murder, rape, and the law, Devil in the Grove brings to light one of the most dramatic court cases in American history, and offers a rare and revealing portrait of Thurgood Marshall that the world has never seen before. As Isabel Wilkerson's The Warmth of Other Suns did for the story of America's black migration, Gilbert King's Devil in the Grove does for this great untold story of American legal history, a dangerous and uncertain case from the days immediately before Brown v. Board of Education in which the young civil rights attorney Marshall risked his life to defend a boy slated for the electric chair—saving him, against all odds, from being sentenced to death for a crime he did not commit. Views: 32
Hemingway's Brain is an innovative biography and the first forensic psychiatric examination of Nobel Prize–winning author Ernest Hemingway. After committing seventeen years to researching Hemingway's life and medical history, Andrew Farah, a forensic psychiatrist, has concluded that the writer's diagnoses were incorrect. Contrary to the commonly accepted diagnoses of bipolar disorder and alcoholism, Farah provides a comprehensive explanation of the medical conditions that led to Hemingway's suicide.Hemingway received state-of-the-art psychiatric treatment at one of the nation's finest medical institutes, but according to Farah it was for the wrong illness. Hemingway's death was not the result of medical mismanagement, but medical misunderstanding. Farah argues that despite popular mythology Hemingway was not manic-depressive and his alcohol abuse and characteristic narcissism were simply pieces of a much larger puzzle. Through a thorough examination of biographies,... Views: 31
The extraordinary 1950s London childhood of one of Britain's best-loved politicians.Alan Johnson's childhood was not so much difficult as unusual, particularly for a man who was destined to become Home Secretary. Not in respect of the poverty, which was shared with many of those living in the slums of post-war Britain, but in its transition from two-parent family to single mother and then to no parents at all.This is essentially the story of two incredible women: Alan's mother, Lily, who battled against poor health, poverty, domestic violence and loneliness to try to ensure a better life for her children; and his sister, Linda, who had to assume an enormous amount of responsibility at a very young age and who fought to keep the family together and out of care when she herself was still only a child.Played out against the background of a vanishing community living in condemned housing, the story moves from post-war austerity in pre-gentrified Notting Hill, through the race riots, school on the Kings Road, Chelsea in the Swinging 60s, to the rock-and-roll years, making a record in Denmark Street and becoming a husband and father whilst still in his teens.This Boy is one man's story, but it is also a story of England and the West London slums which are so hard to imagine in the capital today. No matter how harsh the details, Alan Johnson writes with a spirit of generous acceptance, of humour and openness which makes his book anything but a grim catalogue of miseries. Views: 31
