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The curiously named Isamay is trying to write a coherent thesis about grandmothers in history - from Sarah Bernhardt and George San to the matriarchal Queen Victoria - while constantly ambushed by the secrets of her own family. An only child, she is named after her grandmothers, Isa and May, who have formed and influenced her in very different ways. Jealous of each other, they both want to be first in their granddaughter's affections. Isa has an edge, in that young Isamay looks like her. But from May, Isamay inherits her stubborn determination. Now Isamay, almost 30, begins to want a child of her own, but her live-in lover, Ian (always mysterious about his own family history) is sure that he does not want children. And Isamay soon has her heart set on the idea.

Two men meet in the picturesque backstreets of Athens. Chester MacFarlane is a conman with multiple false identities, near the end of his rope and on the run with his young wife Colette. Rydal Keener is a young drifter looking for adventure: he finds it in one evening as the law catches up to Chester and Colette, and their fates become fatally entwined. Patricia Highsmith draws us deep into a cross-European game of cat and mouse in this masterpiece of suspense from the author of The Talented Mr Ripley. Now a major film starring Viggo Mortensen, Kirsten Dunst and Oscar Isaac (Drive, Inside Llewelyn Davis). This special edition includes a foreword by director and screenwriter Hossein Amini.

Forced to flee Revolutionary France after the brutal guillotining of her beloved father, Isabella de Savigny arrives at Nethergate, the Suffolk house of her cousin, hoping for sympathy and succour. Instead, as a poor relation, she is forced to live the life of a servant and suffer the casual cruelty of lady's maid Martha Pratt. When she is seduced and abandoned by the son of the house, Isabella is forced to marry Martha's brother, and her struggle to survive truly begins. However, her misery is lessened when her daughter is born, and for her sake she decides to fight back against a hostile world.

There is an alternate story of the life of Jesus. One the early Church fathers found so menacing they outlawed the books that documented it, ordered them burned, and threatened anyone found copying them with death. International bestselling authors and award-winning archaeologists Kathleen O'Neal Gear and W. Michael Gear put more than thirty years of exhaustive research into this fascinating novel. In A.D. 325, Brother Barnabas is a student of the ancient holy texts. These books paint a portrait of Jesus that is radical, heretical, and irresistible. In the writings of Mary Magdalene, Phillip, and James, Barnabas finds clues to a secret he must protect at all costs. But the Ecumenical Council of Bishops has just declared his cherished books "a hotbed of manifold perversity." Emperor Constantine has decreed that the documents must be burned and that anyone found copying them will be executed as a heretic. Barnabas's monastery is attacked. Brother Barnabas flees with his trusted companions, but they are being followed, for the True Church cannot allow them to find the most sacred place on Earth. In fact, it will do anything to stop them...

Paris, 1903. Major-General Sir Hector Macdonald, one of the greatest heroes of the British Empire, is facing ruin when he meets the notorious occultist, Aleister Crowley. As they set out into the night on a wild journey through the sinful city, the story of Macdonald's tragedy begins to unfold - with startling revelations both for the general and the aspiring magician. A tale that ranges from the battlefields of Sudan to the backstreets of Edinburgh, bringing alive a fascinating, forgotten figure of history, and a world trembling on the brink of a brutal new era. Black magic, Baden-Powell and Islamic revolution are just some of the ingredients in this novel, which explores imperialism, sexuality and the very nature of belief.

When Julia was eight, she was asked to be a bridesmaid at her glamorous cousin's wedding. Her mother saw this as a chore - expensive, inconvenient - but Julia was absolutely thrilled. When the time came, even the fact that her bridesmaid's dress didn't fit, and was plain cream rather than the pink she'd hoped for, couldn't ruin the perfection. But after this day things started to go wrong for Julia, starting with an episode involving her cousin's baby, a pram and an unauthorised trip around the block. A lifetime later, Julia is a child psychologist who every day deals with young girls said to be behaving badly. Some are stealing, some are running away from home, some are sullen, some won't get out of bed or are on strike. But one day, Julia's own past starts to creep back into her present. And as she struggles to come to terms with this, she must confront the possibility that the truth may not be as devastating as she feared.

It is March 1914, and Jim Stringer is uneasy about his next assignment. It's not so much the prospect of a Scarborough lodging house in the gloomy off-season that bothers him, or even the fact that the last railwayman to stay in the house has disappeared. It's more that his chief inspector seems to be holding back details of the case - and that Jim has been sent to Scarborough with a trigger-happy assistant. Although the lodging house doesn't live up to its name, Paradise, it is home to the seductive and beautiful Amanda Rickerby, a woman capable of derailing Jim's marriage. As a storm brews in Scarborough, it becomes increasingly unlikely that Jim will ever ride the train back to York.

"The man who invented the Commitments back in the 1980s is now 47, with a loving wife, 4 kids...and bowel cancer. He isn't dying, he thinks, but he might be. Jimmy still loves his music, and he still loves to hustle--his new thing is finding old bands and then finding the people who loved them enough to pay money online for their resurrected singles and albums. On his path through Dublin, between chemo and work he meets two of the Commitments--Outspan Foster, whose own illness is probably terminal, and Imelda Quirk, still as gorgeous as ever. He is reunited with his long-lost brother, Les, and learns to play the trumpet.... This warm, funny novel is about friendship and family, about facing death and opting for life"--

When Daisy Holt was dismissed from her post as a nursemaid she set off cheerfully into the jungle of mid-Victorian London. When Kitty Hammond, proprietress of the 'select establishment' off Leicester Square discovered her she was quick to realise that Daisy had a rare talent and would make a successful entertainer. And there it was that she met the impoverished artist John Skelton. To him Daisy represented the perfect model - the one to inspire his work. But Daisy fell completely and hopelessly in love with him - a love which was to launch her on a stormy career in which luxury, admiration and suffering were all to play a part ...

In the summer of 1942, Gyles Mackrell - a decorated First World War pilot and tea plantation overseer, performed a series of heroic rescues in the hellish jungles of Japanese-occupied Burma - with the aid of 20 elephants. At the age of 53, Mackrell went into the Chaukan Pass on the border of North Burma and Assam. Here, Mackrell and a team of elephant riders rescued Indian army soldiers, British civilians and their Indian servants, from the pursuing Japanese, directing the elephants through jungle passes and raging rivers, and territory infested with sand flies, mosquitoes and innumerable leeches. Those he saved were all on the point of death from starvation or fever: that summer was spent in a fight against time.

213 pages (large print) : 24 cm

Meet Arnold Trevellyan - charismatic, exuberant and somewhat strange. His love of mushrooms is matched only by a passion for Flora, his wife of twelve years. One day, while searching for mushrooms, Arnold makes a wondrous discovery that will turn his world upside down. He abandons Flora and heads to the South Pacific where he finds himself marrying the queen of a remote tropical island. But all is not as it seems in Arnold's idyllic realm. In a series of cassettes to his oldest friend, he reveals he is trapped in an international conspiracy in which mushrooms hold the key to life or death.

In 1949, eight years after the Peace with Honor was negotiated between Great Britain and Nazi Germany, England has completed its slide into fascist dictatorship. The last hopes of democracy seem extinguished. Then a bomb explodes in a London suburb. The brilliant, but compromised Inspector Carmichael of Scotland Yard is assigned the case. What he finds leads him to a conspiracy of peers and communists - of staunch King-and-country patriots and hardened IRA gunmen - to murder the Prime Minister and his ally, Adolf Hitler.

Really elided first volume of O'Toole's autobiography. Those hot for chat about the star's great films (Lawrence of Arabia, etc.) and the great actors and drinkers with whom he has worked and busted up the world must wait for the next installment. Born in 1932 in (perhaps) Ireland (a fact counterfacted by there being an English as well as an Irish birth record), and raised as a native of the now vanished (he says) town of Hunsbeck in Yorkshire, O'Toole writes in a lingual ecstasy whose charms will enfroth many and will often have readers untangling congested diction, including baby talk much like Joyce's in his portrait of the artist as a young moo-cow and a striving for hip underclass lyricism of a richness much like Dylan Thomas's brush-work on the fey folk of Under Milk Wood (O'Toole played Captain Cat in the film version). One must go with O'Toole and his inner merriment; at times, he strikes off an engaging passage for which his mannered voice fits the action. Less happily, O'Toole sandbags us with a halfpenny life of Adolf Hitler as seen through the eyes of Childe Peter--a third of the book! All right, Hitler loomed large, but O'Toole's Adolf is both a boy's reaction to newsreel Nazis (``Childhood meant war, barbed wire...'') and a skim from standard Hitler bios. Better moments include his tour in the Royal Navy (``My sea had been black; black and grey with great lumps of roaring white water crashing over our bows to rush swilling along the lurching deck. Often I had stood, gloved hands gripping a rail or a stanchion, just gazing, awed by this immense world of black and brutal water''), and his rather pastel auditions for the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts. Too, his sporting dad's life as a bookie, thumbed onto the page with large gobs of paint, looms big in his limericky dashabout high jinks. High lumpen. Wordsman, be spare. (Photographs.)

Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically. The cataclysm has happened, we are among the ruins, we start to build up new little habitats, to have new little hopes. It is rather hard work: there is now no smooth road into the future: but we go round, or scramble over the obstacles. We've got to live, no matter how many skies have fallen.

Pharaoh-Queen Hatusu's kingdom is rich in religion, ritual, art and education. But for all its prosperity and power, it is not without its weaknesses - or enemies. At the signing of a peace treaty between Egypt and Libya in Thebes, three of Egypt's leading scribes die violently on the Temple forecourt, the victims of a vile poisoning. And when a prosperous merchant and his young wife are found drowned, rumours soon sweep the imperial city. The Poisoner of Ptah has returned. Pharaoh Hatusu, angered that these abominations happened under her reign, orders Amerotke, Chief Judge of the Halls of Two Truths, to find the perpetrator. His hunt uncovers a mass of suspicion and danger. Now Amerotke must pit his wits against an opponent intent on vengeance ...

"Brighton, 1950. The body of a girl is found cut into three pieces. Detective Inspector Edgar Stephens is convinced the killer is mimicking a famous magic trick--the Zig Zag Girl. The inventor of the trick, Max Mephisto, is an old war friend of Edgar's. They served together in a shadowy unit called the Magic Men, a special ops troop that used stage tricks to confound the enemy. Max is on the traveling show circuit, touring seaside towns with ventriloquists, sword-swallowers and dancing girls. He's reluctant to leave this world to help Edgar investigate, but advises him to identify the victim quickly -- it takes a special sidekick to do the Zig Zag Girl. Those words come back to haunt Max when the dead girl turns out to be Ethel, one of his best assistants to date. He's soon at Edgar's side, hunting for Ethel's killer. Another death, another magic trick: Edgar and Max are sure the answer to the murders lies in their army days. And when Edgar receives a letter warning of another "trick" on the way -- the Wolf Trap -- he knows they're all in the killer's sights" --

At the age of 32, Richard the Lionheart has finally succeeded Henry II to the English throne. And, against his father’s wishes, he intends to make Berengaria, daughter of the King of Navarre, his Queen. But first he must fulfil his vow to his country to win back Jerusalem for the Christian world. Leaving England to begin his crusade, Richard entrusts his kingdom to his brother, John, who casts covetous eyes on the crown, and his sister, Joanna, who is willing to defy even a king.

When Inspector Kurt Wallander discovers a shallow grave in the garden of his new house, he investigates the truth about the residence and its previous owner.

"In this highly anticipated new novel, Irishman Jack McNulty is a "temporary gentleman"--An Irishman whose commission in the British army in World War II was never permanent. Sitting in his lodgings in Accra, Ghana, in 1957, he's writing the story of his life with desperate urgency. He cannot take one step further without examining all the extraordinary events that he has seen. A lifetime of war and world travel--as a soldier in World War II, an engineer, a UN observer--has brought him to this point. But the memory that weighs heaviest on his heart is that of the beautiful Mai Kirwan, and their tempestuous, heartbreaking marriage. Mai was once the great beauty of Sligo, a magnetic yet unstable woman who, after sharing a life with Jack, gradually slipped from his grasp"--

Alice Nutter fights for justice when a group of Pendle women are accused of witchcraft during the reign of England's James I, when being Catholic is considered an act of treason and the Latin High Mass is comparable to the satanic Black Mass.

The year is 2017. Lucy Pavlov is the CEO of PavSoft Industries, home of a revolutionary operating system that every computer in the world runs on. Her personal wealth is immeasurable, her intelligence is unfathomable, and she's been voted "Most Beautiful Woman" for three years running. One thing, however, is not quite right in Lucy's life. She doesn't realize it yet, but Lucy is a very big, and very smart bomb--and her mission is to blow up the planet known as Earth.

He was going to lose the house and everything in it.The rare pleasure of a bath, the copper pots hanging above the kitchen island, his family-again he wouldlose his family. He stood inside the house and took stock. Everything in it had been taken for granted. How had that happened again? He had promised himself not to take anything for granted and now he couldn't recall the moment that promise had given way to the everyday.Tim Farnsworth is a handsome, healthy man, aging with the grace of a matinee idol. His wife Jane still loves him, and for all its quiet trials, their marriage is still stronger than most. Despite long hours at the office, he remains passionate about his work, and his partnership at a prestigious Manhattan law firm means that the work he does is important. And, even as his daughter Becka retreats behind her guitar, her dreadlocks and her puppy fat, he offers her every one of a father's honest lies about her being the most beautiful girl in the world. He loves his wife, his family, his work, his home. He loves his kitchen. And then one day he stands up and walks out. And keeps walking.THE UNNAMED is a dazzling novel about a marriage and a family and the unseen forces of nature and desire that seem to threaten them both. It is the heartbreaking story of a life taken for granted and what happens when that life is abruptly and irrevocably taken away.