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Bloomsbury Publishing
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It is the beginning of the summer term, and there is a big surprise for the third years — a very special treasure hunt! But even though the rest of the third years are very excited, Twink cannot find it in her heart to enjoy it. Twink's grandmother is very ill. She is in 'the Doldrums' which is an unshakeable sadness and nobody seems able to find the right 'shock of joy' that will bring her back to good health. Will Twink be able to think of something to help her beloved grandmother? 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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Far away, in the ancient empire of Greater Fallowfields, things are falling apart. The imperial orchestra is presided over by a conductor who has never played a note, the clocks are changed constantly to ensure that the sun always sets at five o' clock, and the Astronomer Royal is only able to use the observatory telescope when he can find a sixpence to put in its slot. But while the kingdom drifts, awaiting the return of the young emperor, who has gone abroad and communicates only by penny post, a sinister and unfamiliar enemy is getting closer and closer... A Cruel Bird Came to the Nest and Looked In is a surreal portrait of a world that, although strange and distant, contains rather too many similarities to our own for the alien not to become brilliantly familiar and disturbingly close to home. It is comic writing at its best — and it is Magnus Mills's most ambitious, enjoyable and rewarding novel to date. |
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In 1962, when Walter Cousins sleeps with his British au pair, Diane Burroughs, he can have no sense of the magnitude of his error: 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 most powerful men. But beneath the gripping 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 novel reaches its shattering conclusion. |
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A hurricane is building over the Gulf of Mexico, threatening the coastal town of Bois Sauvage, Mississippi, and Esch's father is growing concerned. A hard drinker, largely absent, he doesn't show concern for much else. Esch and her three brothers are stocking food, but there isn't much to save. Lately, Esch can't keep down what food she gets; she's fourteen and pregnant. Her brother Skeetah is sneaking scraps for his prized pitbull's new litter, dying one by one in the dirt. While brothers Randall and Junior try to stake their claim in a family long on child's play and short on parenting. As the twelve days that comprise the novel's framework yield to the final day and Hurricane Katrina, the unforgettable family at the novel's heart — motherless children sacrificing for each other as they can, protecting and nurturing where love is scarce — pulls itself up to struggle for another day. A wrenching look at the lonesome, brutal, and restrictive realities of rural poverty, Salvage the Bone is muscled with poetry, revelatory, and real. |
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Newly arrived from Ghana with his mother and older sister, eleven-year-old Harrison Opoku lives on the ninth floor of a block of flats on a London housing estate. The second best runner in the whole of Year 7, Harri races through his new life in his personalised trainers — the Adidas stripes drawn on with marker pen — blissfully unaware of the very real threat all around him. With equal fascination for the local gang — the Dell Farm Crew — and the pigeon who visits his balcony, Harri absorbs the many strange elements of his new life in England: watching, listening, and learning the tricks of inner-city survival. But when a boy is knifed to death on the high street and a police appeal for witnesses draws only silence, Harri decides to start a murder investigation of his own. In doing so, he unwittingly endangers the fragile web his mother has spun around her family to try and keep them safe. A story of innocence and experience, hope and harsh reality, Pigeon English is a spellbinding portrayal of a boy balancing on the edge of manhood and of the forces around him that try to shape the way he falls. |
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Filled with fabulous photographs, this book is a stunning fashion retrospective of the iconic and well-loved rock star. Apart from documenting five decades of Bowie's unique sense of style, it also discusses the cultural and artistic influences that have shaped him, and how he has influenced others in turn. |
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Throughout his career as a novelist, William Boyd has never stopped writing non-fiction, providing a fascinating counterpoint to the world of his novels. Bamboo gathers together Boyd's writing on literature, art, the movie business, television, people he has met, places he has visited and autobiographical reflections on his African childhood and his years at boarding school. From Pablo Picasso to the allure of the British caff, from Charles Dickens to Catherine Deneuve, from mini-cabs to Brideshead Revisited, this collection proves an engrossing and revealing companion to the work of one of Britain's leading novelists. |
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When two young women meet under extraordinary circumstances in the eighteenth century West Indies, they are unified in their desire to escape their oppressive lives. The first is a slave, forced to work in a plantation mansion and subjected to terrible cruelty at the hands of the plantation manager. The second is a spirited and rebellious English girl, sent to the West Indies to marry well and combine the wealth of two respectable families. But fate ensures that one night the two young women have to save each other and run away to a life no less dangerous but certainly a lot more free. As pirates, they roam the seas, fight pitched battles against their foes and become embroiled in many a heart-quickening adventure. Written in brilliant and sparkling first-person narrative, this is a wonderful novel in which Celia Rees has brought the past vividly and intimately to life. |
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Action-packed fantasy romance with a heroine as deadly as she is beautiful, in a world where either fact could make her fortune or seal her fate. Celaena Sardothien is a daredevil assassin with unrivalled fighting skills. After a year's hard labour in the salt mines of the kingdom of Endovier, Celaena is offered her freedom on one condition — she must fight as handsome Prince Dorian's champion in a contest sponsored by the king, facing the deadliest thieves and assassins in the land in a series of set-piece battles in the country's stunning glass palace. But there is more at stake than even her life — for Celaena is destined for a remarkable future... |
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Documentary-maker Aoyama hasn't dated anyone in the seven years since the death of his beloved wife, Ryoko. Now even his teenage son Shige has suggested he think about remarrying. So when his best friend Yoshikawa comes up with a plan to hold fake film auditions so that Aoyama can choose a new bride, he decides to go along with the idea. Of the thousands who apply, Aoyama only has eyes for Yamasaki Asami, a young, beautiful, delicate and talented ballerina with a turbulent past. But there is more to her than Aoyama, blinded by his infatuation, can see, and by the time he discovers the terrifying truth it may be too late Ryu Murakami delivers his most subtle and disturbing novel yet, confirming him as Japan's master of the psycho-thriller. |
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D-Day, 6 June 1944, the turning point of the Second World War, was a victory of arms. But it was also a triumph for a different kind of operation: one of deceit... At the heart of the deception was the Double Cross System, a team of double agents whose bravery, treachery, greed and inspiration succeeded in convincing the Nazis that Calais and Norway, not Normandy, were the targets of the 150,000-strong Allied invasion force. These were not conventional warriors, but their masterpiece of deceit saved thousands of lives. Their codenames were Bronx, Brutus, Treasure, Tricycle and Garbo. This is their story. |
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Until now, home cooking has remained stubbornly out of touch with technological development but Heston Blumenthal, the champion of the scientific kitchen, is set to change all that with his radical new book. With meticulous precision, he explains what the most effective techniques are and why they work. The first part of the book maps out the new techniques in 15 sections: 1) Taste and flavour 2) Seasoning and the five tastes 3) Stocks and infusing 4) Soups and purees 5) Brining, curing, marinating, macerating 6) Meat 7) Fish 8) Vegetables 9) Pasta, grains, pulses 10) Sauces, emulsions, thickening 11) Tarts and other doughs and pastries 12) Chocolate 13) Ice cream, sorbets, custards 14) Sous-vide cookery 15) Taking control of the kitchen In the second part, there are 150 specially chosen recipes. Here at last is the secret to irrefutably perfect fish and chips, as well as a few more unconventional dishes like salmon with liquorice, or lardy cake with whisky ice cream. Heston at Home will change the way you think about cooking forever — prepare for a culinary revolution! |
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It is the 1970s in Northern California. A farmer and his teenage daughters, Anna and Claire, work the land with the help of Coop, the enigmatic young man who lives with them. Theirs' is a makeshift family, until they are riven by an incident of violence — of both hand and heart — that sets fire to the rest of their lives. This is a story of possession and loss, about the often discordant demands of family, love, and memory. Written in the sensuous prose for which Michael Ondaatje's fiction is celebrated, Divisadero is the work of a master story-teller. |
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Putting food on the table for the family quickly and economically doesn't mean you have to compromise on quality. This book shows how Hugh's approach to food can be adapted to suit any growing, working family, or busy young singles and couples for that matter. Breakfast, baking, lunchboxes, quick suppers, healthy snacks, eating on the move and weekend cooking for the week ahead — all these, and more, are covered in River Cottage Every Day. As Hugh says: I make no prior assumptions about where you shop, what you may or may not know about growing vegetables or keeping livestock, whether you can tell the difference between a swede and turnip, or know what to do with a belly of pork and a breast of lamb. Instead, I'll show you easy and confidence-inspiring ways with cuts of meat, types of fish and other ingredients you may not have tried before. And I'll offer you new approaches that I hope will breath new life to familiar staples, like rice, spuds, beans, and your daily bread. Above all, I intend to tempt you irresistibly towards a better life with food, with a whole raft of recipes that I think you will love. I hope some of them will become your absolute favourites, and the favourites of your dear friends and beloved family. I hope that the dishes you like best will infiltrate and influence your cooking, giving you increased confidence and fresh ideas. In short, I hope that before long, cooking simple and delicious food from the best seasonal ingredients becomes second nature and first priority for you, not just once in a while, but every day. |
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BARYSHNIKOV: IN BLACK IN WHITE is a stunning book of photographs of one of the great dancers of the 20th century. Taken by leading dance photographers, here are over 170 chronologically ordered photographs that chart Baryshnikov's evolution and capture his legendary athleticism, energy and charisma. Stunningly designed, with an introduction by his biographer and New Yorker dance critic Joan Acocella, BARYSHNIKOV: IN BLACK IN WHITE is the definitive visual companion to Baryshnikov's extraordinary career. |
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On April 12, 1961, Yuri Gagarin became the first person in history to leave the Earth's atmosphere and venture into space. His flight aboard a Russian Vostok rocket lasted only 108 minutes, but at the end of it he had become the most famous man in the world. Back on the ground, his smiling face captured the hearts of millions around the globe. Film stars, politicians and pop stars from Europe to Japan, India to the United States vied with each other to shake his hand. Despite this immense fame, almost nothing is known about Gagarin or the exceptional people behind his dramatic space flight. Starman tells for the first time Gagarin's personal odyssey from peasant to international icon, his subsequent decline as his personal life began to disintegrate under the pressures of fame, and his final disillusionment with the Russian state. President Kennedy's quest to put an American on the Moon was a direct reaction to Gagarin's achievement--yet before that successful moonshot occurred, Gagarin himself was dead, aged just thirty-four, killed in a mysterious air crash. Publicly the Soviet hierarchy mourned; privately their sighs of relief were almost audible, and the KGB report into his death remains secret. Entwined with Gagarin's history is that of the breathtaking and highly secretive Russian space program — its technological daring, its triumphs and disasters. In a gripping account, Jamie Doran and Piers Bizony reveal the astonishing world behind the scenes of the first great space spectacular, and how Gagarin's flight came frighteningly close to destruction. |
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«With gold edged pages, gold ribbon and gold illustrated cloth slipcase, each signed and numbered special edition is sumptuous and ultra-desirable. Once upon a time there was a Chef called Heston who opened a small restaurant called the Fat Duck. At first, he served only simple French classics but gradually, as is the way of things, the Chef's curiosity got the better of him and he began thinking up more unusual dishes, such as Snail Porridge and Chocolate Wine. Word spread and reached the ears of the Executives who ran a television channel, and they summoned the Chef to their glass fortress. «We command you to create six Fantastical Feasts, « they said. «These must be based on history, but you may draw on fairytales and legends. We should warn you that the Quest will involve journeys to Transylvania in search of the legendary Leech Recipe of Sibiu, and to the Black Forest to eat the eyes of the Wild Boar of Munstertal. You must resist the temptations of the Burlesque Girls, and you must turn chocolate cake into a raging fireball and chicken's testicles into jelly beans. There will be hunting for hallucinogenic mushrooms and cooking with Play-Doh. Out of this, you must create the most magical dishes imaginable. « «Well, how about lickable wallpaper, a savoury Zoom lolly, a chocolate-covered iceberg, a golden egg and an edible graveyard? « offered the Chef. «It's a start, « said the Executives. «Oh, and once you have achieved the Quest, you must bring us proof, in the form of a Book. But not just any Book. We want tales of extravagant ingredients, of revolutionary techniques, of familiar kitchen appliances put to unfamiliar uses. We want to see what you see. Taste what you taste. In short, we want complete and unparalleled access to your fantastical world. «» |
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First, I'll tell about the robbery our parents committed. Then the murders, which happened later. In 1956, Dell Parsons' family came to a stop in Great Falls, Montana, the way many military families did following the war. His father, Bev, was a talkative, plank-shouldered man, an airman from Alabama with an optimistic and easy-scheming nature. Dell and his twin sister, Berner, could easily see why their mother might have been attracted to him. But their mother Neeva — from an educated, immigrant, Jewish family — was shy, artistic and alienated from their father's small-town world of money scrapes and living on-the-fly. It was more bad instincts and bad luck that Dell's parents decided to rob the bank. They weren't reckless people. In the days following the arrest, Dell is saved by a family friend before the authorities think to arrive. Driving across the Montana border into Saskatchewan his life hurtles towards the unknown, towards a hotel in a deserted town, towards the violent and enigmatic American Arthur Remlinger, and towards Canada itself — a landscape of rescue and abandonment. But as Dell discovers, in this new world of secrets and upheaval, he is not the only one whose own past lies on the other side of a border. |
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Meet Chu. Chu is a small panda with a very big sneeze. When Chu sneezes, you REALLY don't want to get in the way. But a whole day of adventure will test Chu's sneeze-resisting powers to the limit — there's the library (dusty books), the diner (pepper), and then the circus (all those animals). How big can a sneeze really be? Just wait and see... |
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From the Big Bang, to the present day, via Ancient China, The Roman Empire, Attila the Hun, The Dark Ages, Enlightenment, Revolution! etc. The entire history of the world has been packed into one hilarious, irreverent comic strip. From Goths and Visigoths, to Newton and Copernicus, all the significant facts and titillating trivias of the world's most important periods, starting with the Big Bang, have been condensed for your entertainment and of course, education. Written by Tracey Turner (101 Things) and illustrated by celebrated cartoonist Sally Kindberg, this is the ultimate book for absolutely everyone. (Why let kids have all the fun). |
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