Isis Hardcover

"Crown of Aloes" is presented as a personal chronicle. Within the framework of known fact and detail drawn from hitherto unexploited contemporary Spanish sources, a novelist's imagination and understanding have provided motives, thoughts, and private conversations, helping to build up the fascinating character Isabella must have been. Her fortunes were varied indeed: she knew acute poverty, faced anxiety and danger with high courage, gave much, suffered much, lived to the full. At the end she was mainly aware of her failures. It was left to others to realize how spectacular her successes had been.

In 1938 Allan Ahlberg was picked up in London by his new adoptive mother and taken back to Oldbury in the Black Country. Now one of the most successful children's book writers in the world, here Allan writes of an oddly enchanted childhood lived out in an industrial town; of a tough and fiercely protective mother; of fearsome bacon slicers; of 'fugitive memories, the ones that shimmer on the edges of things: trapdoors in the grass, Dad's dancing overalls'. Of 'two mothers, two fathers and me like a parcel or a baton (or a hot potato!) passed between them'. Using a mix of prose and poetry, supported by new drawings by his daughter Jessica and old photographs, THE BUCKET brings to life the childhood that inspired Allan's classic picture books.

Een spermadonor met terminale kanker gaat op zoek naar zijn onbekende, maar inmiddels volwassen biologische kinderen.

These are dark days for England; the Tudor succession hangs precariously in the balance, along with the lives of its people. The wrong religion can all too easily mean a brutal death in a time when the difference between 'faithful' and 'heretic' rests on the monarch alone. With the shadow of the dreaded Inquisition looming across the continent from Spain, one family, lead by two brave men - daring and adventurous Felipe and his cousin, reserved and thoughtful Richard - struggles to survive against the overwhelming odds.