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Bloomsbury Publishing
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«With more than 15,000 definitions, this book provides a definitive guide to the use of slang today. It deals with drugs, sport and contemporary society, as well as favourite slang topics such as sex and bodily functions. In this convenient paperback edition of the highly acclaimed «Dictionary of Contemporary Slang», language and culture expert, Tony Thorne explores the ever-changing underworld of the English language, bringing back intriguing examples of eccentricity and irreverence from the linguistic front-line.» |
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The topics covered in this title include travel, tourism, ticketing, hotels and staff, restaurants, kitchens, table settings, service and cooking, along with general business, accounting and personnel terms. Handy supplements include quick-reference lists of airline and airport codes, currencies, international dialling codes, time zones, balance sheets and international public holidays. This work is ideal for students, employers, or employees who work in any part of the hotel or tourism industry or who need to use specialist English vocabulary for their work or studies. |
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Jess is in a fix. She has to write a letter to Edouard, her French exchange, before he comes to visit, and her normal ability to write charismatic, charming and seductive letters has deserted her. But there is an even worse problem. She has to send a photo. The idea fills Jess with a special sort of fear. But she has a solution — a digitally enhanced solution — and who better to ask to help than her best mate Fred! Fans will lap up this prequel as it charts Fred and Jess's relationship — and Jess's relationships with others — before Fred and Jess actually get together. The whole book sparkles with Sue Limb's characteristic wit and humour, and will send fans racing to read the rest of the books in the series. |
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It's just before New Year, and Frank, an overweight American tourist, has hired Kenji to take him on a guided tour of Tokyo's nightlife. But, Frank's behaviour is so odd that Kenji begins to entertain a horrible suspicion: his client may in fact have murderous desires. Although Kenji is far from innocent himself, he unwillingly descends with Frank into an inferno of evil, from which only his sixteen-year-old girlfriend, Jun, can possibly save him. |
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«Faerie is never as far away as you think. Sometimes you find you have crossed an invisible line and must cope, as best you can, with petulant princesses, vengeful owls, ladies who pass their time embroidering terrible fates or with endless paths in deep, dark woods and houses that never appear the same way twice. The heroines and heroes bedevilled by such problems in these fairy tales include a conceited Regency clergyman, an eighteenth-century Jewish doctor and Mary, Queen of Scots, as well as two characters from «Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell»: Strange himself and the Raven King.» |
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«One minute John is the cornerstone of Eva's world, rock to his two teenage stepdaughters and his own son Theo; the next he is tossed through the air in a traffic accident, and killed. His sudden death changes everything. Eva struggles with the desolation of loneliness, finding herself drawn back to her untrustworthy ex-husband; Emily, the eldest daughter, grapples with her new-found independence and responsibility. Little Theo can only begin to fathom the permanence of his father's death. But for the middle child Daisy, John's absence opens up a whole world of confusion. Just at the onset of adolescence and blossoming sexuality, Daisy is exposed to the terrifying duplicity of life, the instability that hovers just beyond the safety of parental love, and the powerlessness of that love to protect or even console her. In steps a man only too willing to take advantage of her emotions. «Lost in the Forest» is a powerful and gorgeously layered testament to the fluidity of life and the web of connections that bind us, divide us, and drive us on. A finely observed portrait of marriage and family; an intensely sensual journey through the consuming realms of grief and sex; and an unforgettable evocation of adolescent yearning and vulnerability, this is Sue Miller at her inimitable best.» |
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Blart is not an average boy. He lives on a pig farm with his grandfather and doesn't care about being heroic or famous or legendary, but he does know that if you want to catch a pig you have to sneak up behind it and take it by surprise. So when a great wizard visits and explains that humankind depends on Blart joining his quest, Blart says no — until the wizard threatens his pigs. Reluctantly, Blart embarks on a very epic quest stuffed with brilliant characters: a feisty princess who likes dragons, a warrior who's a big softie at heart, a disaffected dwarf, and evil Zorab, trapped in a mountain, waiting for his mignons to dig him out... |
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It's 3 a.m. and Elizabeth Gilbert is sobbing on the bathroom floor. She's in her thirties, she has a husband, a house, they're trying for a baby — and she doesn't want any of it. A bitter divorce and a turbulent love affair later, she emerges battered and bewildered and realises it is time to pursue her own journey in search of three things she has been missing: pleasure, devotion and balance. So, she travels to Rome, where she learns Italian from handsome, brown-eyed identical twins and gains twenty-five pounds, an ashram in India, where she finds that enlightenment entails getting up in the middle of the night to scrub the temple floor, and Bali where a toothless medicine man of indeterminate age offers her a new path to peace: simply sit still and smile. And slowly happiness begins to creep up on her. |
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When a letter arrives for unhappy but ordinary Harry Potter, a decade-old secret is revealed to him that apparently he's the last to know. His parents were wizards, killed by a Dark Lord's curse when Harry was just a baby, and which he somehow survived. Escaping his hideous Muggle guardians for Hogwarts, a wizarding school brimming with ghosts and enchantments, Harry stumbles upon a sinister adventure when he finds a three-headed dog guarding a room on the third floor. Then he hears of a missing stone with astonishing powers which could be valuable, dangerous, or both. |
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Mr and Mrs Brown are always having great difficulty with their numerous and incredibly naughty children. They try all the agencies but the nurses, governesses and nannies never stay long with the Brown children. 'The person you want is Nurse Matilda', they are told. And when Nurse Matilda does arrive very strange things begin to happen. Brought together in one volume are the three remarkable tales of Nurse Matilda — Nurse Matilda, Nurse Matilda Goes to Town and Nurse Matilda Goes to Hospital. Having delighted generations of readers since their first publication in the sixties, the books have now formed the inspiration for the newly-released and fabulous Nanny McPhee, written and adapted for the big screen by Emma Thompson who stars as Nanny McPhee opposite Colin Firth as Mr Brown. This collection of stories from Christianna Brand is sure to charm and entertain all readers new and old. |
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On 20 July 1944, Adolf Hitler narrowly escaped death when an assassin's bomb failed to kill him. The conspirators, among them Axel von Gottberg, were hunted down and hanged from meat-hooks, and their executions were filmed. Sixty years later, Conrad Senior is left a legacy of von Gottberg's papers and letters and becomes obsessed with what they reveal and with finding the film of those brutal executions. Award-winning writer Justin Cartwright has conjured a masterwork that addresses the nature of friendship and what it means to be human, and it is a remarkable tapestry of passion, ideas, frailty and courage. |
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When Lucy hears noises from behind the wall she tries to warn her parents that there are wolves banging about. But her parents don't listen. When the wolves finally take over the house and Lucy and her family are evicted to live in the garden, her parents realise perhaps they should have listened. But Lucy is no shrinking violet and pretty soon she has the wolves out and the family back in the house. So what was that noise Lucy heard coming from behind the wall? This is a brilliant, witty and inventive picture book with cutting-edge art, which is sure to be a hit with existing fans of Neil Gaiman as well as young readers. |
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«1978: Lower East Side, New York. Fifteen-year-old Finn Earl's mother, Liz, is a thirty-two year-old masseuse with a taste for cocaine. When Liz's habit forces them to flee the city, they find protection under the wing of one of her clients, ageing billionaire Mr Osborne. In Vlyvalle, a golden playground for the super-rich, Finn discovers a people who are stranger, more savage, and more secretive than any tribe in National Geographic. Offered a new life and new friends amongst the decadent and beautiful denizens of Osborne's empire, Finn falls in love and grows up fast. He's living a twisted approximation of the American dream — and for a moment everything he wants is there for the taking. But in America, social-climbing is a blood sport. Even on what should be the happiest night of Finn's life, on an island in the middle of a private lake, naked and high with Maya, Osborne's bewitching granddaughter, someone is watching him from the depths of the forest and laughing. This is a modern coming-of-age novel in the tradition of «Huckleberry Finn», and a portrait of America as vivid and strange as «The Great Gatsby, Fierce People» marks the emergence of a dazzling new talent.» |
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St Petersburg, 1914. Dr. Otto Spethmann, a famous psychoanalyst, is implicated in a murder. But he is preoccupied with Avrom Rozental, the brilliant chess master who is due to play the most important competition of his life but is on the verge of a breakdown. With the city rife with speculation and alarm, Spethmann broods over his own chessboard, its pieces frozen mid-battle, and contemplates the forces — political, historical, sexual — that are holding him in their grasp. |
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Marvel at the sheer brilliance of invention, from glass to underpants, the noble compass to the humble pencil. Not forgetting, of course, the undeniably indispensable banana suitcase. Filled with fascinating details about everything from the most common everyday object to inventions which changed society, it will also distinguish the strokes of genius from discoveries of sheer chance, or millennia of evolution... and reveal the real reason why Alfred Nobel had to establish a peace prize (tut, tut). Expand your knowledge of man's accomplishments in the most compelling — and irreverent — way possible. |
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On 4 October 1957, at the height of the Cold War, the Soviet Union secretly launched Sputnik, Earth's first artificial moon. Powered by a car battery, it passed over the stunned American continent once every 101 minutes and propelled the USSR from backward state to superpower and pioneer of the Space Age. This is the pulse-racing story of a time when two nations and ideologies were pitted against each other in a quest that laid the foundations of the modern technological world. |
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Just as Blart is settling down to enjoy his teenage years on a fabulous pig farm with the proceeds from saving the world, Capablanca returns — with bad news. A terrible oversight in his original world-saving research has led to accusations of no less than collusion with evil Zoltab himself. And now he is a wanted man — and so, by assocation, is Blart. To prove their innocence or else be hounded to the four corners of the earth by a bloodthirsty army, they must locate their comrades from the original quest. Together they may stand a chance of proving that Capablanca's was an innocent mistake, by finding the answer to a great mystery — what exactly did they do with Zoltab? And how could they be so careless as to forget... And so begins another hilarious and unforgettable adventure (with pigs) and a brilliant cast of characters including newcomers Uther Slywort the merchant and sociopathic Baron Killbride. |
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«Princess Lois has been kidnapped by Anatoly the Handsome, who wants to marry her. Cue ‘damsel in distress’ to be rescued by none other than our own heroic Blart. He sets out on the good ship «The Golden Pig» with Olaf the innocent – who believes what everyone says all the time – and Kupverstich the Strange – an explorer-come-scientist whose ingenious explanations for the natural world have one thing in common: they’re all wrong. They must battle cut-throat pirates, a sixteen-tentacled octopus, escape the suffocating bureaucracy of Triplicat, where they are briefly marooned, not to mention evade the Guild of Assassins, who have a contract to kill Blart, in their selfless (well, almost) bid to rescue poor Lois. But will they make it in time?» |
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It is August 1616, the whaling ship Heartsease has ventured deep into the Arctic, but the crew must return home before the ice closes in. All, that is, save Thomas Cave. He makes a wager that he will remain there alone until the next season, though no man has yet been known to have survived a winter this far north. So he is left with provisions, shelter, and a journal — should he not live to tell the tale... |
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Tip and Teddy are becoming men under the very eyes of their adoptive father, Bernard Doyle. A student at Harvard, Tip is happiest in a lab, whilst Teddy thinks he has found his calling in the Church, and both are increasingly strained by their father's protective plans for them. But when they are involved in an accident on an icy road, the Doyles are forced to confront certain truths about their lives, how the death of Doyle's wife Bernadette has affected the family, and an anonymous figure who is always watching. |
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