At the core of A Burglar's Guide to the City is an unexpected and thrilling insight: how any building transforms when seen through the eyes of someone hoping to break into it. Studying architecture the way a burglar would, Geoff Manaugh takes readers through walls, down elevator shafts, into panic rooms, up to the buried vaults of banks, and out across the rooftops of an unsuspecting city.
It is 2029. The Mandibles have been counting on a sizable fortune filtering down when their 97-year-old patriarch dies. Yet America's soaring national debt has grown so enormous that it can never be repaid. Under siege from an upstart international currency, the dollar is in meltdown. A bloodless world war will wipe out the savings of millions of American families. Their inheritance turned to ash, each family member must contend with disappointment, but also - as the effects of the downturn start to hit - the challenge of sheer survival. Recently affluent Avery is petulant that she can't buy olive oil, while her sister Florence is forced to absorb strays into her increasingly cramped household. As their father Carter fumes at having to care for his demented stepmother now that a nursing home is too expensive, his sister Nollie, an expat author, returns from abroad at 73 to a country that's unrecognizable. Perhaps only Florence's oddball teenage son Willing, an economics autodidact, can save this formerly august American family from the streets. This is not science fiction.
Laced through with humour, empathy, and rare and magical descriptive powers these nine stories navigate the fragile space between love and loneliness. McCracken impressed at the Auckland Writers Festival this month.
Ed and Taylor, both aspiring young writers, fall in love during a summer of aimless drinking and partying in their university town of Missoula, Montana. Lonely and looking for love, they connect despite their profound differences: Ed is brooding, ambitious and self-destructive, living in denial of a mysterious tumour spreading from his limbs to his brain. Beautiful Taylor is a pure soul, positive, full of hope and emotional generosity. Their difficult relationship is intense, exciting yet doomed from the start, complicated further when Taylor falls pregnant. As Ed resists the harmony she brings to his life, Taylor's need to protect herself and their child also grows...
"A round of applause for Ted McDermott, please. He's earned it. The Minor Outsider is spirited, audacious, and drolly funny." - Patrick deWitt
This wonderful game will allow your family to create its own fairy tales. The box contains 20 cards, printed on both sides, which can be interchanged, allowing for all kinds of plots. With three alternative endings! Can you save the missing elf before he is eaten by the big, bad wolf? Is the witch offering you a poisoned apple, or will she help you - by magically shrinking the giant pink rabbit that is terrorizing your castle? Tell a different story each time you play, in this 8-foot-long fairytale puzzle.
"Irresistible." - Thomas
And attractive, easy-to-follow cookbook for children (to use on their own!), packed with delicious recipes.
>> Let's Garden, too!
At the age of sixty, Cory Taylor is dying of melanoma-related brain cancer. Her illness is no longer treatable. She now weighs less than her neighbour's retriever. Written in the space of a few weeks, in a tremendous creative surge, this remarkable book is a clear-eyed account of what Taylor has learned from dying.
>> "We are all just a millimeter away from death."
When English naturalist Joseph Banks accompanied Captain Cook on his historic mission into the Pacific, he took with him a team of collectors and illustrators who returned with unprecedented collections of artefacts, specimens and drawings, opening up a whole world of knowledge as yet undiscovered by Europeans. The book features original voyage specimens together with illustrations and descriptions of them, showing a rich diversity of newly discovered species. It also shows how Banks organised this material, planning but ultimately failing to publish it.
At six years old Carmen Aguirre was a Chilean refugee adjusting to life in North America. At eighteen she was a revolutionary dissident married to a man she couldn't fully love. In her twenties she fought to find herself as an actress and break away from the stereotypes thrust upon her - housekeeper, hotel maid, Mexican Hooker #1. But alongside these many identities was another that was hard to embrace and impossible to escape: that of the thirteen-year-old girl attacked by one of Canada's most feared rapists. Thirty-three years after the assault, Carmen decided it was time to meet the man who changed her life.
"As long as the general population is passive, apathetic, diverted to consumerism or hatred of the vulnerable, the powerful can do as they please and those who survive will be left to contemplate the outcome."
The Germans' most destructive raid on Britain left hundreds dead and thousands homeless. It also removed many qualms about the night raids on German cities, notably the fire-bombing of Dresden, that followed.
In this dramatic narrative of Europe's economic rise and spectacular fall, Yanis Varoufakis, former finance minister of Greece, shows that the origins of the collapse go far deeper than our leaders are prepared to admit - and that we have done nothing so far to fix them.
"The emerging rock star of Europe's anti-austerity uprising." - Telegraph
The consequences of the technological revolution are about to hit hard: unemployment will spike as new technologies replace labor in the manufacturing, service, and professional sectors of an economy that is already struggling. The end of work as we know it will hit at the worst moment imaginable: as capitalism fosters permanent stagnation, when the labor market is in decrepit shape, with declining wages, expanding poverty, and scorching inequality. Only the dramatic democratization of our economy can address the existential challenges we now face.
It's hard being an older sister when everybody is admiring your newly born younger brother - particularly on your birthday. Especially when that younger brother is noisy, smelly and slimy - just like a tiny squid!
The phenomenon of globalization, with cultures colliding and melding as never before, offers rich and complex sources of inspiration for artists. Frontiers Reimagined examines the results of these cultural entanglements through the work of forty-four artists who are exploring the notion of cultural boundaries. These artists-who come from a vast geographical area stretching from the West to Asia and Africa-share a truly global perspective, both in their physical existence, living and working between cultures, and their artistic endeavors.
Drawing on VanRooyen's personal experiences and those of his colleagues in international humanitarian medicine, he takes readers into clinics, wards, and field hospitals around the world where medical personnel work with inadequate resources under dangerous conditions to care for civilians imperiled by conflict.
What do you do when you start talking to yourself on the bus? If you're the writer Brigid Lowry, you change tack and write a book about what it means to be an ageing woman in the 21st century.
Bringing disparate images and items together, collage transcends the boundaries between artistic disciplines. Inspiring.
Arleen spends nearly all her money on rent but is kicked out with her kids in Milwaukee's coldest winter for years. Doreen's home is so filthy her family call it 'the rat hole'. Lamar, a wheelchair-bound ex-soldier, tries to work his way out of debt for his boys. Scott, a nurse turned addict, lives in a gutted-out trailer. This is their world. And this is the twenty-first century: where fewer and fewer people can afford a simple roof over their head. From abandoned slums to shelters, eviction courts to ghettoes, Matthew Desmond spent years living with and recording the stories of those struggling to survive - yet who won't give up.
"Essential. A compelling and damning exploration of the abuse of one of our basic human rights: shelter." - Owen Jones
Tells the story of a coal mining family - a couple and their four children - living through the latest mining boom and dealing with the mountaintop removal and strip mining that is ruining what is left of their mountain life.
Ten cautionary tales and a delightfully dreadful cast of characters! Are you ready to meet the World's Worst Children? Five beastly boys and five gruesome girls! Like Sofia Sofa - a TV super-fan so stuck to the sofa that she's turning into one! Or Dribbling Drew - a boy whose drool gets him into trouble on a school trip! And not forgetting Blubbering Bertha - a girl who bawls and tells terrible tales!
Sydney thinks her mum Amy is the best mum in the world - even if she is a bit different. When everyone else kept growing, Amy got to four feet tall and then stopped right there. The perfect height, in Sydney's opinion: big enough to reach the ice cream at the supermarket, small enough to be special. Sydney's dad died when she was only five, but her memories of him, her mum's love and the company of her brave big sister Jade means she never feels alone ...But when the family are forced to move house, things get tricky. Sydney and Jade must make new friends, deal with the bullies at their new school and generally figure out the business of growing up in a strange new town. And Sydney doesn't want to grow up - not if it means getting bigger than her mum...
The story of one nation under a plague, contaminated by greed, hate, and disease and host to transcendent acts of courage and kindness. In this first volume, which runs up to the 1950s, we meet prehistoric monkeys who spread a peculiar virus; a Native American shaman whose sexual explorations mutate into occult visions; and early English settlers who establish loving same-sex couples only to fall prey to the forces of bigotry. George Washington and Alexander Hamilton revel in unexpected intimacies, and John Wilkes Booth's motives for assassinating Abraham Lincoln are thoroughly revised. In the twentieth century, the nightmare of history deepens as a religious sect conspires with eugenicists, McCarthyites, and Ivy Leaguers to exterminate homosexuals and the AIDS virus begins to spread. Against all this, Kramer sets the story of a middle-class family outside Washington, D.C, trying to cope with the darkest of times.
Peekaboo! Who's hiding on the farm? Lift the flap to find out!
>> And how about some Peekaboo! in the Jungle, too?
Is Paul Mannering New Zealand's answer to Terry Pratchett? Read the idiosyncratic sequel to the idiosyncratic Vogel Award-winning Engines of Empathy and find out (and have rather a lot of idiosyncratic fun doing so!).
In 1946, Walter Westhaus, a German Jew who spent the war years at Tagore's ashram in India, arrives at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York City, where he meets Sol Kerem, a promising rabbinical student. A brilliant nonbeliever, Walter is the perfect foil for Sol's spiritual questions-and their extraordinary connection is too wonderful not to share with Sol's free-spirited fiancee Rosalie. Soon Walter and Rosalie are exchanging notes, sketches, and secrets, and begin a transcendent love affair in his attic room, a temple of dusty tomes and whispered poetry. Months later they shatter their impossible bond, retreating to opposite sides of the country-Walter to pursue an academic career in Berkeley and Rosalie and Sol to lead a congregation in suburban New York.
Mr Moon always sleeps. He naps during hide-and-seek, passes out on puzzles and dozes during adventure stories. But what would happen if Mr Moon ever woke up? Would he lead us to hidden, dream-like worlds, filled with fantastic friends and exciting games? And if he did, would we remember in the morning?
