Paris, 1939: the pavement rumbles with the footfall of marching Nazi soldiers along the Champs-Elysees. A young writer, recently arrived from Ireland to make his mark, smokes a last cigarette with his lover before the city they know is torn apart. As war takes hold, he will put his own life and that of his loved ones in mortal danger by joining the Resistance. Inspired by the life of Samuel Beckett, this is a story of life at the edges of human experience, and how one man came to translate it all into literature.
""In this worthy successor to Longbourn, Baker skillfully captures Beckett's world, the rhythms of his bare-bones prose, and the edginess of his point of view." - Publishers Weekly
>> A country road. A tree.
From the 2015 winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, Svetlana Alexievich, comes the first English translation of her latest work, an oral history of the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the emergence of a new Russia. Bringing together dozens of voices in her distinctive documentary style, Second-Hand Time is a monument to the collapse of the USSR, charting the decline of Soviet culture and speculating on what will rise from the ashes of Communism. As in all her books, Alexievich gives voice to women and men whose stories are lost in the official narratives of nation-states, creating a powerful alternative history from the personal and private stories of individuals.
What made Bowie the cultural icon he is today? And what made millions of people around the world tune into his peculiar wavelength and find exactly what they'd been looking for all along? These are the questions asked by Simon Critchley in this keen-eyed, textured tribute to Bowie. Each of the two dozen short chapters looks at Bowie from a new angle, slowly unfolding the enigma that was his artistic life. From the author's earliest childhood exposure to the bizarre musical and sexual contours of Ziggy Stardust right through to the supernova glow of Blackstar, and covering everything in between, Critchley traces the development of Bowie's music and lyrics to tell the story of how he tapped into zeitgeist and hooked the hearts of millions.
>> The soundtrack to this book.
No matter how much you fight against it, dust pervades everything. It gathers in even layers, adapting to the contours of things and marking the passage of time. In itself, it is also a gathering place, a random community of what has been and what is yet to be, a catalog of traces and a set of promises: dead skin cells and plant pollen, hair and paper fibers, not to mention dust mites who make it their home. And so, dust blurs the boundaries between the living and the dead, plant and animal matter, the inside and the outside, you and the world. This book treats one of the most mundane and familiar phenomena, showing how it can provide a key to thinking about existence, community, and justice.
"Somewhere I have the notes for a long-form essay on dust I began some years ago. I am, therefore, looking forward to reading this." - Thomas
"The knowledge of everyone they're about to hurt is not an element easy to breathe in. They're the lovers. You can blame them now, if you want to. That's your choice: this is the director's cut." Seventeen powerful stories of contemporary New Zealand life.
What is the first duty of scientists in a crisis - to the government, to their employer, or to the wider public desperate for information?
Speaking from Samoa, Christchurch, Gaza, and New York - Avia's fearless voice combines mythic with the everyday stories, never shying away from moments of pain nor strange wonder.
With Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Thomas Piketty wrote a bestselling book that was widely agreed to be 'extraordinarily important' (Martin Wolf, Financial Times). His powerful, evidence-based analysis and solutions - including progressive wealth taxes to reduce inequality - were praised as much as his wonderful range of reference and panache. Bringing readers the same expert eye, breadth of thought and practical ideas - but in very short pieces - Chronicles provides Piketty's analysis of the financial crisis, and of subjects and individuals, from productivity in Britain to Barack Obama.
Spain's most popular cookbook, 1080 Recipes, was published in 1972, and sold over 3 million copies in Spain. Quick and Easy Spanish Recipes culls the quickest and easiest recipes for an updated collection geared toward busy home cooks. Culinary novices and experts can master iconic Spanish recipes such as paella, patatas bravas, tortilla española, churros, and crema catalana, among many others.
Vera and David have been passionately in love since the day they met more than twenty years ago. They live in the Blue Mountains where Vera is a sculptor and David makes furniture. Their son, Ben, is at university in Sydney. Or at least he was. What the Light Hides begins five months after Ben's death, an apparent suicide. Vera is trying to pick up the pieces, but David cannot let go, cannot believe that Ben is dead. He goes to Sydney, ostensibly to work, but cannot get Ben out of his mind. He keeps seeing him in the street, visits the room where he was living, goes in pursuit of Ben's friends. His refusal to come to terms with the death of his son is destroying his relationship with Vera, but he cannot help himself, in spite of all the evidence.
To the world he is Sri Ramakrishna - godly avatar, esteemed spiritual master, beloved guru. To Rani Rashmoni, he is the Brahmin fated to defy tradition. But to Hriday, his nephew and long-time caretaker, he is just Uncle - maddening, bewildering Uncle, prone to entering trances at the most inconvenient of times, known to form dangerous acts of self-effacement, who must be vigilantly safeguarded not only against jealous enemies but also against that most treasured yet insidious of sulphur-rich vegetables: the cauliflower.
"Dazzlingly inventive and brilliantly comic, irreverent and mischievous, The Cauliflower delivers us into the divine playfulness of 'one of the most exhilarating, audacious, and ballsy writers of her generation." - Observer
What's hidden in the woods? At first glance, all is still and quiet in the woods. But look closely through three coloured transparent sheets to discover hidden secrets. As if by magic, each sheet shows animals and plants coming to life. Watch nature's surprises emerge in front of your eyes! A wonderful book.
Follows and complements her wonderful Persiana.
Helene Wong writes about her New Zealand childhood, about student life in the 1960s, and coming of age in Muldoon's New Zealand. What her Chinese ancestry means to her gradually illuminates the book as it sheds new light on her own life. Drawing on her experience of writing for New Zealand films, she takes the narrative forward through the places of her family's history - the ancestral village of Sha Tou in Zengcheng county, the rural town of Utiku where the Wongs ran a thriving business, the Lower Hutt suburbs of her childhood, and Avalon and Naenae.
Paper is one of the simplest and most essential pieces of human technology. For the past two millennia, the ability to produce it in ever more efficient ways has supported the proliferation of literacy, media, religion, education, commerce and art. It has created civilisations, fostering the fomenting of revolutions and the stabilising of regimes. History's greatest press run produced 6.5 billion copies of Mao zhu xi yu lu, Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung and Leonardo da Vinci left behind only 15 paintings but 4,000 works on paper. Now, on the cusp of "going paperless"-and amid speculation about the effects of a digitally dependent society-we've come to a world-historic juncture to examine what paper means to civilisation. Who better than Mark Kurlansky to riffle through this history with us?
A graphically stunning volume of nautical codes for children This extraordinary visual reference is an introduction to maritime communication through nautical flags, along with Morse code, the phonetic alphabet, and semaphore signaling.
The Young British Artists (YBAs) stormed on to the contemporary art scene in 1988 with their attention-grabbing, ironic art. They exploded art-world conventions with brazen disdain. Dismissed as trivial gimmickry and praised for its witty energy, their art made a mark both on the art scene and on public consciousness that continues to reverberate today. Now, almost three decades after they emerged, Artrage! tells the story of the YBAs with the benefit of perspective. Among the artists discussed are Damien Hirst, Rachel Whiteread, Tracey Emin, Jake and Dinos Chapman, Sarah Lucas and Gary Hume.
Follows his early New York days right through to his recent practice. Focus moments include his international breakthrough in the early 2000s, his porcelain Sunflower Seeds at the Turbine Hall of the Tate Modern, his response to the Sichuan earthquake of 2008, and his police detention in 2011.
Berger's rejigging of the relationship between art and history makes for stimulating reading.
If you are going to start your own shop, and want to offer an alternative to e-retail, this book is packed full of inspiring examples of shops that get it right.
Can women be geniuses? Or are their arms too short? Why did we learn about only three women at school? What were all the others doing?
"Jacky Fleming nails it with her razor-sharp observational writing and drawing in this very funny and fresh take on women in history. Fleming is a genius but with normal hair" - Simone Lia
"The surgery may have been performed on patients under anaesthetic but readers of this book have no such protection from discomfort. Beautifully executed chromolithographs of procedures and instruments abound. Fortunately there are fewer pictorial horrors on the text pages, which lack enables the reader to stay the long enough to read." - Thomas
We are al critics anyway, so learning to be better ones is probably a good idea.
An eleven-year-old girl named Rose is riding her bike in the woods near her home in Deadwood, USA, when the ground disappears beneath her feet. When she comes to, she finds herself in a deep pit, lying in the palm of a giant metallic hand. Seventeen years later, Dr Rose Franklyn is leading a top-secret scientific investigation into the strange artefact she unwittingly discovered all those years ago. It is clear to Rose and her team that the hand is not only ancient but also not of this world. A search begins for the rest of this vast creation. What they find defies their imaginations: it is perhaps the greatest mystery humanity has ever faced. But even more terrifying is the power it begins to unleash.
Ever since his mum died, Owen has felt lost. But he's got football trials coming up soon, and his dad to look out for ...Then one day in school, Owen gets sucked out of real life into a terrifying world: a wasteland where a Storm of darkness plagues the city, threatening the lives of everyone in it. Owen's dad is a writer and he uses his imagination to help his sadness. But every time he writes, Owen gets pulled into this dangerous story. To help his dad, Owen must brave the terrible Storm in this other world. But what if the darkness gets him and he never manages to find his way back home?
Nine-year-old Ada has never left her one-room flat. Her mother is too humiliated by Ada's twisted foot to let her outside. So when her little brother Jamie is shipped out of London to escape the war, Ada doesn't waste a minute - she sneaks out to join him. So begins a new adventure for Ada, and for Miss Susan Smith, the woman who is forced to take in the two children. As Ada teaches herself to ride a pony, learns to read, and watches for German spies, she begins to trust Susan - and Susan begins to love Ada and Jamie. But in the end, will their bond be enough to hold them together through wartime?
When you're settling down to sleep, do you like to have your ears tickled?
An accidental fatal shooting of a 5-year-old boy near the boundary of an Indian reservation in North Dakota opens Louise Erdrich’s new novel, detonating a story of revenge, sacrifice and restitution.
How do you punish an immortal? By making him human. After angering his father Zeus, the god Apollo is cast down from Olympus. Weak and disorientated, he lands in New York City as a regular teenage boy. Now, without his godly powers, the four-thousand-year-old deity must learn to survive in the modern world until he can somehow find a way to regain Zeus's favour. But Apollo has many enemies - gods, monsters and mortals who would love to see the former Olympian permanently destroyed. Apollo needs help, and he can think of only one place to go ...an enclave of modern demigods known as Camp Half-Blood. Return to Percy Jackson's world in this exciting new series!
When a pandemic wipes out the entire population of a remote Scottish island, only a small group of children survive. How will they fend for themselves?
Ray's journey from working-class Muswell Hill to the Rock 'n' Roll Hall of Fame with The Kinks was tumultuous in the extreme, featuring breakdowns, bitter lawsuits, spectacular punch-ups and a ban from entering the USA.
>> The cure to all our ills.
North London in the twenty-first century: a place where a son will swiftly adopt an old lady and take her home from hospital to impersonate his dear departed mother, rather than lose the council flat. A time of golden job opportunities, though you might have to dress up as a coffee bean or work as an intern at an undertaker or put up with champagne and posh French dinners while your boss hits on you. A place rich in language - whether it's Romanian, Ukrainian, Russian, Swahili or managementese.
"This book is a delightful critique of modern life and current government policies of neo-liberalism, where human decency and care is sacrificed and people have to make allowances to satisfy current political philosophy." - Peter
Have a look through this - you will want to take it home.
Celebrates and discusses the work of forty-five urban artists, extraordinarily diverse but united by one basic principle: their work is completely fresh, original and the epitome of creativity - the perfect antidote to the jaded imagery that fills our streets and our media.
Tiny magical gardens in their own glass-walled world.
In 1971 comedians on the working men's club circuit imagined that they would be free to go on telling their tired, racist, misogynistic gags forever but their nemesis, a 19 year old Marxist art student with a bizarre concern for the health of British manufacturing was slowly coming to meet them. Through the next decade Alexei Sayle would be a student at Chelsea Art School, a clerk in a DHSS office (where nobody did any work), one of London's bottom ten freelance illustrators, a school dinner lady and a college lecturer (who kidnapped his students), before he became the original MC of London's first modern comedy club, the Comedy Store, and the landscape of British comedy was altered forever.
>> 'Ullo John, Got a new motor?
Octogenarian Anthony Smith's journey was inspired by the incredible story of the survivors of a 1940 boat disaster, who spent 70 days adrift in the Atlantic, eventually reaching land emaciated and close to death. While this might sound like a voyage no-one would wish to emulate, to octogenarian Anthony Smith it sounded like an adventure.
>> Ready to go.
Nearly three years have passed since Dow Amber escaped the ruin of the Twelfth Kingdom. In that time, war has raged across the Four Isles, but Dow himself has been hidden away by his Twin Islands hosts, relegated to a backwater of the war in the company of the beguiling Cassandra. But when word reaches Dow that Ignella of the Cave has been imprisoned on the infamous Ship Kings dungeon-isle of Banishment, he can be patient no longer. He sets forth on an epic voyage that will take him halfway around the world - defying storm and monster, betrayal and despair - to the heart of the greatest battle of the age, and to the discovery at last of his true purpose upon the high seas.
In the North West corner of the South Island a ghost has awakened. A long-forgotten gold miners’ road has been revived as a mountain biking and tramping trail – connecting the old dray road in the Lyell (Upper Buller Gorge) to the mighty Mokihinui River in the north.
>> Website.
Useful.
