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Bloomsbury Publishing
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Dealing with difficult people at work has become an essential survival skill in today’s office place. Whether an impossible customer or an occasional tense situation with a coworker or the more extreme case of an office bully, this fully revised and updated edition of Tackle Office Nightmares offers clear solutions and step-by-step advice on a wide range of these interpersonal workplace issues. You’ll learn how to diffuse situations before they get out of control and separate the facts to determine the difference between an uncomfortable, awkward situation and an actionable human resource issue such as discrimination. You’ll also learn the best practices to keep your work life as peaceful as possible and when it’s appropriate to step in to help others. With a tough job market and more demands placed on employees, workplace stress is on the rise. This practical and informative book will help diffuse workplace conflicts, which directly affect office productivity, employee health, and business survival. |
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Where does the Queen keep her armies? Up her sleevies! Laugh your way through this hilarious book packed with hundreds of splendidly silly jokes on every topic under the sun, such as animals, school and family, plus plenty of good old knock, knock jokes and lots of royalty themed jokes. Handy practical tips will advise you on crucial regal accomplishments, such as how to perfect the royal wave and how to pull off headscarf chic when walking one's corgis. Interactive elements include devising your Fantasy Royal Family and designing your own palace. A bonus fact section at the back of the book contains fascinating and little-known facts about the Queen and the Royal Family — did you know that Buckingham Palace has its own cinema, post office, chapel, swimming pool, staff cafeteria and doctor's surgery? |
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What better way to get to grips with animal words than in the company of the selfish crocodile! Stars, flowers and insects bring the pages to life in this fantastic first word book for children who like their books snappy. |
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A brother is as easily forgotten as an umbrella. James Joyce, Ulysses Recently having abandoned his RD Laing-influenced experiment in running a therapeutic community — the so-called Concept House in Willesden — maverick psychiatrist Zack Busner arrives at Friern Hospital, a vast Victorian mental asylum in North London, under a professional and a marital cloud. He has every intention of avoiding controversy, but then he encounters Audrey Dearth, a working-class girl from Fulham born in 1890 who has been immured in Friern for decades. A socialist, a feminist and a munitions worker at the Woolwich Arsenal, Audrey fell victim to the encephalitis lethargica sleeping sickness epidemic at the end of the First World War and, like one of the subjects in Oliver Sacks' Awakenings, has been in a coma ever since. Realising that Audrey is just one of a number of post-encephalitics scattered throughout the asylum, Busner becomes involved in an attempt to bring them back to life — with wholly unforeseen consequences. Is Audrey's diseased brain in its nightmarish compulsion a microcosm of the technological revolutions of the twentieth century? And if Audrey is ill at all — perhaps her illness is only modernity itself? And what of Audrey's two brothers, Stanley and Albert: at the time she fell ill, Stanley was missing presumed dead on the Western Front, while Albert was in charge of the Arsenal itself, a coming man in the Imperial Civil Service. Now, fifty years later, when Audrey awakes from her pathological swoon, which of the two is it who remains alive? Radical in its conception, uncompromising in its style, Umbrella is Will Self's most extravagant and imaginative exercise in speculative fiction to date. |
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Can the worlds of science and philosophy work together to recognise our destructive emotions such as hatred, craving, and delusion? Bringing together ancient Buddhist wisdom and recent breakthroughs in a variety of fields from neuroscience to child development, Daniel Goleman's extraordinary book offers fresh insights into how we can recognise and transform our destructive emotions. Out of a week-long discussion between the Dalai Lama and small group of eminent psychologists, neuroscientists, and philosophers, Goleman weaves together a compelling narrative account. Where do these destructive emotions (craving, anger and delusion, known in Buddhism as the three poisons) come from? And how can we transform them to prevent them from threatening humanity's collective safety and its future? |
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Life at work has become increasingly demanding with endless emails and 24/7 connectivity which now requires workers at all levels to become experts at managing their time effectively. This fully revised and updated business resource helps you establish and prioritize your work flow. You’ll find step-by-step guidance on how to manage overwhelming information overload which usually begins at your email IN box. You’ll also learn how to create systems to organize your tasks and establish routine protocols so you’ll quickly know when to delegate, when to send something to the recycle bin and when in the process you need to act to have maximum effect in completing the task. |
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In 1962, actuary Walter Cousins makes the biggest mistake of his life. When mild-mannered Walter — 'a man who weighs risk for a living' — sleeps with the sharp-tongued, not-quite-legal British au pair, Diane Burroughs, he can have no sense of the magnitude of his error. For this brief affair sets in motion a tragedy of epic proportions, upending Sophocles's immortal tale of fate, free will, and forbidden desire. At the centre is Ed King, an infant given up for adoption who becomes one of the world's richest and most powerful men. But beneath the sizzling story of Ed's seemingly inexorable rise to fame and fortune is a dark and unsettling destiny, one that approaches with ever-increasing suspense as the book reaches its shattering and surprising conclusion. An assured, propulsively written epic novel of unstoppable force, Ed King is a classic of contemporary American life: a daringly told story of a man and a myth, of blindness and narcissism, and of the precarious foundations on which carefully constructed lives are built — and timeless stories are created. From the bestselling author of Snow Falling on Cedars, a dazzling, darkly funny, extraordinary modern take on an ancient tragedy, quite unlike anything we've seen before. |
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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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The appearance of a hastily-constructed barbed wire entanglement through the heart of Berlin during the night of 12-13 August 1961 was both dramatic and unexpected. Within days, it had started to metamorphose into a structure that would come to symbolise the brutal insanity of the Cold War: the Berlin Wall. A city of almost four million was cut ruthlessly in two, unleashing a potentially catastrophic East-West crisis and plunging the entire world for the first time into the fear of imminent missile-borne apocalypse. This threat would vanish only when the very people the Wall had been built to imprison, breached it on the historic night of 9 November 1989. The Berlin Wall reveals the strange and chilling story of how the initial barrier system was conceived, then systematically extended, adapted and strengthened over almost thirty years. Patrolled by vicious dogs and by guards on shoot-to-kill orders, the Wall, with its more than 300 towers, became a wired and lethally booby-trapped monument to a world torn apart by fiercely antagonistic ideologies. The Wall had tragic consequences in personal and political terms, affecting the lives of Germans and non-Germans alike in a myriad of cruel, inhuman and occasionally absurd ways. The Berlin Wall is the definitive account of a divided city and its people. |
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When Coraline moves with her parents to a new house she is fascinated by the fact that their 'house' is only half of the building! Divided into flats years ago, there is a brick wall behind a door where once there was a corridor. Coraline, being an inquisitive and bored girl, opens the door one day to find that the wall has gone and in its place is a corridor. As she wanders down it little does she know a nightmarish mystery is beginning for her, one that takes her into the arms of alternate parents who are strangely like her own and a family life that seems almost normal — but just isn't! Will Coraline ever find her way back to her real parents? Stephen King has called Neil Gaiman 'a treasure house of story'. In this wonderful novel, which has been likened to both Alice in Wonderland and the Narnia Chronicles, we get to see Neil at his storytelling best. |
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I'd gone along there, as a Pommy writer passing through, to do a quick interview and be asked how I thought I could get to the bottom of the place if I was passing through so quickly. You are always asked this by Australians. They can't believe that you have come to their country and aren't prepared to give at least seven years of your life to savouring the distinctive flavour, fathoming the peculiar mystery, of every one-horse town the bus happens to spill you out in. Australia: the sixth largest country in the world — and most of it empty. Of the inhabited continents, it has the driest, hottest and harshest terrain. Undaunted, and somewhat bemused by the challenge, Howard Jacobson set off on an adventure around Australia — all the way around. Travelling across Darwin, the Kimberleys, Perth, Kalgoorlie, Alice Springs, the Great Barrier Reef, Sydney and almost every one-horse, godforsaken town in between, Jacobson attempts to find out exactly what it is that makes the people of Australia tick. Along the way, he ponders questions of Aboriginal land rights, national identity, and the most flummoxing matter of all: the Australian male. Peppered with brilliantly witty observations and larger-than-life characters, In the Land of Oz is a wry, incisive and hugely affectionate portrait of life Down Under. |
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On 8 September 1941, eleven short weeks after Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa, his brutal surprise attack on the Soviet Union, Leningrad was surrounded. The siege would not be lifted for two and a half years and during the 872 days of blockade and bombardment as many as two million Soviet lives would be lost. Had the city fallen, the history of the Second World War — and of the twentieth century — would have been very different. Leningrad is a gripping narrative history interwoven with personal stories — immediate accounts of daily siege life drawn from diarists and memoirists on both sides. These twentieth-century European civilians living through unbearable hardship reveal the terrible details of life in the blockaded city: the all-consuming and daily search for food; crawling up ice-rounded steps on hands and knees, hauling a bucket of water; a woman who has just buried her father noticing how the cemetery guards have used a frozen corpse with outstretched arm and cigarette between its teeth as a signpost to a mass grave; another using a dried pea to make a rattle for her evacuated grandson's first birthday, and putting it away in a drawer when she hears, six months later, that he has died of meningitis. In Leningrad, Anna Reid answers many of the previously unanswered questions about the siege. How good a job did Leningrad's leadership do — would many lives have been saved if it had been better organised? How much was Stalin's and Moscow's wariness of western-leaning Leningrad (formerly the Tsars' capital, St Petersburg) a contributing factor? How close did Leningrad come to falling into German hands? And, above all, how did those who lived through it survive? |
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No one writes about food or cooking quite like Anthony Bourdain. In his books Kitchen Confidential and A Cook's Tour, Bourdain captivated readers all over the world with his gritty, action-packed tales of the kitchen. Now he brings his inimitable style and energy to Anthony Bourdain's Les Halles Cookbook. It features over a hundred mouth watering recipes from lobster bisque to cassoulet, and from boeuf bourguignon to creme brulee, all from Anthony's own restaurant, the Brasserie Les Halles in New York. Also including Anthony's words of wisdom and general principles, this is guaranteed to be as much a good read as a guide to cooking up a storm in the kitchen. |
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Kirpal Singh is travelling on the slow train to Kashmir. As India passes by the window in a stream of tiny lights, glistening fields and huddled, noisy towns, he reflects on his destination, which is also his past: a military camp to which he has not returned for fourteen years... Kirpal, Kip to his friends, is timorous and barely twenty when he arrives for the first time at General Kumar's camp, nestled in the shadow of the mighty Siachen Glacier that claimed his father's life. He is placed under the supervision of Chef Kishen, a fiery, anarchic mentor with long earlobes and a caustic tongue, who guides Kip towards the heady spheres of food and women. The smell of a woman is a thousand times better than cooking the most sumptuous dinner, kid, he muses, over an evening beer. Kip is embarrassed — he has never slept with a woman, though a loose-limbed nurse in the local hospital has caught his eye. In Srinagar, Kashmir, a contradictory place of erratic violence, extremes of temperature and high-altitude privilege, Kip learns to prepare indulgent Kashmiri dishes such as Mughlai mutton and slow-cooked Nahari, as well as delicacies from Florence, Madrid, Athens and Tokyo. Months pass and, though he is Sikh, Kip feels secure in his allegiance to India, the right side of this interminable conflict. Then, one muggy day, a Pakistani terrorist with long, flowing hair is swept up on the banks of the river, and changes everything. Mesmeric, mournful and intensely lyrical, Chef is a brave and compassionate debut about hope, love and memory, set against the devastatingly beautiful, war-scarred backdrop of occupied Kashmir. |
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England, 31st August 1939: the world is on the brink of war. As Hitler prepares to invade Poland, thousands of children are evacuated from London to escape the impending Blitz. Torn from her mother, eight-year-old Anna Sands is relocated with other children to a large Yorkshire estate which has been opened up to evacuees by Thomas and Elizabeth Ashton, an enigmatic childless couple. Soon Anna gets drawn into their unravelling relationship, seeing things that are not meant for her eyes — and finding herself part-witness and part-accomplice to a love affair, with unforeseen consequences. |
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A feral boy is captured and civilised in the Languedoc region. A young woman is hired to look after a cloned dog that cost its owners $250,000. A widower in a self-satisfied suburb engulfs his loneliness in a sea of rats. A weary city GP is baffled by a Mexican boy, the son of a taco-seller, who can feel no pain. A junior film editor invents the death of his own daughter because he can't face going in to work. A vindictive teenager with a gasoline fixation runs into trouble with his Japanese neighbour. Two washed-up crooners in 1950s New York get creative while recording a schmaltzy Christmas special. In this beguiling new collection of stories, T. C. Boyle, one of the world's greatest storytellers, explores the improbable, the tragic, the allegorical and the altogether ordinary. |
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It is Moscow, in 1939. In the recesses of the infamous Lubyanka prison, a young archivist is sent to verify the authorship of an unfinished story, confiscated from one of the many political prisoners there. The writer is Isaac Babel. The great author of Red Cavalry is spending his last days forbidden to write, his final works consigned to the archivist, Pavel Dubrov — who will ultimately be charged with destroying them. Pavel, a former schoolmaster and a lover of literature, a reluctant minion in Stalin's system, makes a reckless decision: he will save the last stories of the writer he admires, whatever the cost. Pavel's daring in the face of a vast bureaucracy of evil invigorates a life that had slowly lost its meaning, even as it guarantees his almost certain undoing. A story of suspicion, courage and unexpected grace, The Archivist's Story is ultimately a tribute to the enduring power of the written word. |
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Twink is looking forward to her second year Summer term, but when she gets to Peony Branch she is surprised to see a new fairy, Jax. And then unpleasant pranks start being played in the Branch — the rosepetal duvet covers are torn to shreds and homework is stolen. Could it be something to do with the new girl? Or is it something more complicated than that? Glitterwings Academy is a lovingly created series by acclaimed author Lee Weatherly, writing as Titania Woods. Readers of the series can be assured of accomplished narrative, as well as stylish and exciting illustration. |
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