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Macmillan Publishers
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Ever wondered why bad musicians always win the Eurovision Song Contest, or how incompetent politicians get elected? You need some Quirkology in your life. While other scientists beaver away on obvious problems, Richard Wiseman has been busy uncovering the secret ingredients of charisma, exploring how our personalities are shaped by when we are born and examining why people usually miss the obvious signs of their partner's infidelity. Using scientific methods to investigate offbeat topics that interest the general public as well as the scientific community, Quirkology brings a new understanding to the backwaters of the human mind and takes us to places where mainstream scientists fear to tread. Comparable to Freakonomics, but British, far more populist, and a lot funnier. Findings include: How does your surname influence your life? What does the way you walk reveal about your personality? Why should women have men write their personal ads? What is the funniest joke in the world? |
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Nothing happens the way you plan it. A lot of people were surprised by The Pillars of the Earth, including me. I was known as a thriller writer. In the book-business, when you have had a success, the smart thing to do is write the same sort of thing once a year for the rest of your life. Clowns should not try to play Hamlet; pop stars should not write symphonies. I should not have risked my reputation by writing something out of character and overarobitious. What's more, I don't believe in God. I'm not what you would call a spiritual person, According to my agent, my greatest problem as a writer is that I'm not a tortured soul. The last thing anyone would have expected from me was a story about building a church So Pillars was an unlikely book for me to write — and I almost didn't. I started it, then dropped it, and did not look at it again for ten years. This is how it happened... |
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Macmillan English Explorers reading programme introduces, teaches and develops essential reading skills and gives continuity at each age level. They contain a balance of whole class teaching, shared reading and individual activities. With important high frequency words included in the authentic natural language, Macmillan English Explorers will help make children want to read and encourage reading as a habit. |
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What's your poison? Fethering residents, Jude and Carole, get more than they bargained for when a lunchtime meal in their local pub leaves everyone with food poisoning. The landlord is horrified and when a series of disasters start to befall his business, it looks like it could be the end of the road for the Crown and Anchor. Left with a bad taste in their mouths — and not just from the food — the two amateur lady detectives wonder if it might just be more than a run of bad luck, which is forcing their favourite pub into bankruptcy. When Ray, a young man with the mental age of a five year old, is found in the kitchen of the pub with a knife through his heart — Carole and Jude swing into action. There's a killer on the loose in Fethering and Carole and Jude need to uncover who it is before it's last orders for the pub — and themselves. |
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Deep in the research wing of the Natural History Museum is a prize specimen, something that comes along much less often than once in a lifetime: a perfect, and perfectly preserved, giant squid. But what does it mean when the creature suddenly and impossibly disappears? For curator Billy Harrow it's the start of a headlong pitch into a London of warring cults, surreal magic, apostates and assassins. It might just be that the creature he's been preserving is more than a biological rarity: there are those who are sure it's a god — A god that someone is hoping will end the world. |
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Victor Smiley and his wife Joan have been married for nearly twenty years, but each barely recognises the person they wake up with every morning. Victor is so fed up with his job at the local egg-box factory — as well as distracted by his visits to his favourite prostitute, Kamila — that he hardly notices his wife's constant ridicule. Joan has resigned herself to the fact that Victor will never see beyond her double-chin to a new hair cut or outfit. She even puts up with his constant snoring which keeps her up night after night. Just. For unbeknownst to Victor, Joan is taking her sweet revenge: spending large amounts of money on his credit card, kitting herself out in a sexy new wardrobe, to impress her secret lover, Don. But then, as the bills mount, Victor loses his job. Soon he realises that the only way he can achieve his dream of setting up home with Kamila is to get Joan out of the picture. But Victor is about to get a nasty surprise. For he's not the only one with murder on his mind. |
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'Find what you were looking for, Inspector'? Every day the same question. A different uniform but the same question. They thought Lucia enjoyed being here. They thought that was why she kept coming back. But they were asking the wrong thing. She had found what she was looking for — she had found what she had been sent to discover — but she had found out more besides. The question was what to do about it. The question was whether to do anything at all. In the depths of a sweltering summer, teacher Samuel Szajkowski walks into his school assembly and opens fire. He kills three pupils and a colleague before turning the gun on himself. Lucia May, the young policewoman who is assigned the case, is expected to wrap up things quickly and without fuss. The incident is a tragedy that could not have been predicted and Szajkowski, it seems clear, was a psychopath beyond help. Soon, however, Lucia becomes preoccupied with the question no one else seems to want to ask: what drove a mild-mannered, diffident school teacher to commit such a despicable crime? Piecing together the testimonies of the teachers and children at the school, Lucia discovers an uglier, more complex picture of the months leading up to the shooting. She realises too that she has more in common with Szajkowski than she could have imagined. As the pressure to bury the case builds, she becomes determined to tell the truth about what happened, whatever the consequences. |
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Ever and Damen have travelled through countless past lives — and fought off the world's darkest enemies — in search of each other. But just when their destiny seems finally within reach, a powerful curse falls upon them. A single touch of their hands, a soft brush of their lips will mean death for Damen — cast into the darkness of the Shadowland. But as she seeks to break the curse, Ever meets Jude — a green-eyed, golden surfer boy who understands magick, and understands Ever better than she realises. And she begins to ask a terrifying question: even if you're immortal, can true love really last forever? |
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Once it seemed being immortal was a gift to Ever Bloom — now it's a curse. And she's a danger to herself. Ever has been dabbling in Magyck — seeking to explore her own powers, hoping to find a future for her relationship with Damen. But she's not in control — in fact, the magyck has bound her eternally to her immortal enemy, Roman. Whenever he's near, she feels his heartbeat, his breath, his blood racing in her veins. Ever is in deep — and the one person who might be able to help her must never find out what she's done. |
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With 2 million copies of her Immortals series in print, Alyson Noel is one of the hottest paranormal teen authors writing today. Night Star continues the epic love story that has enchanted readers across the world. Ever and Damen must face bitter rivals, jealous friends and their own worst fears — all in the hope of being together forever. Night Star is guaranteed to mesmerize fans and leave them breathlessly awaiting the sixth and final book! |
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The Works 3 contains poems by 52 poets — one for every single week of the year. There are 7 poems by each poet which gives a fantastic variety to the book. All the major themes and forms of poetry are to be found within this chunky paperback and there is a biography of each poet at the beginning of their week. Another essential book for teachers but also a joyful celebration of the best poets of all time both classic and contemporary. Tennyson, Wordsworth and Shakespear rub shoulders with Brian Moses, Roger McGough and Brian Patten. A must have book. |
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This is a huge novel that follows five families through the world-shaking dramas of the First World War, the Russian Revolution, and the struggle for votes for women. It is 1911. The Coronation Day of King George V. The Williams, a Welsh coal-mining family, is linked by romance and enmity to the Fitzherberts, aristocratic coal-mine owners. Lady Maud Fitzherbert falls in love with Walter von Ulrich, a spy at the German Embassy in London. Their destiny is entangled with that of an ambitious young aide to U.S. President Woodrow Wilson and to two orphaned Russian brothers, whose plans to emigrate to America fall foul of war, conscription and revolution. In a plot of unfolding drama and intriguing complexity, Fall of Giants moves seamlessly from Washington to St Petersburg, from the dirt and danger of a coal mine to the glittering chandeliers of a palace, from the corridors of power to the bedrooms of the mighty. |
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This is the new stunning thriller from the author of Gorky Park and Stalin's Ghost. As a train pulls into Yaroslav Station, Moscow, a teenage girl wakes to discover an unimaginable horror. Her baby has been taken... When the station police are suspicious of the girl's elusive story, Maya finds herself having to search for her baby in this dangerous part of the city — Three Stations — without their help. Her only ally is a young man, Zhenya, who is drawn to her cause and who knows the dark underbelly of the city well. Increasingly disillusioned with the workings of Moscow's Prosecution Service, Arkady Renko is teetering on the brink of resignation when; trying to save the skin of his vodka-loving detective friend Victor Orlov — he becomes drawn into a strange new case. A prostitute has been found dead in a trailer in Three Stations, without a mark on her. With the local police keen to dismiss the death as a mere overdose — Renko's curiosity is piqued. And soon, as he is drawn into the extraordinary world of Moscow's super-rich, Renko will discover that nothing is quite as it seems... |
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Global is a new six-level general English course for adult learners. It is an information-rich course, sophisticated in both presentation and approach. It has international appeal, combining challenging content, intelligent topics and cross-cultural awareness. It features none of the celebrity-driven lifestyle content often found in typical general English courses for adults. The Global approach is fully aware of the needs of today's learner's, and places an emphasis on effective communication in English between both native and non-native speakers. Global helps users to learn English, to learn about English and to learn through English, and is the ideal course for students who want to communicate in a global envirnonment. |
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Global is a new six-level general English course for adult learners. It is an information-rich course, sophisticated in both presentation and approach. It has international appeal, combining challenging content, intelligent topics and cross-cultural awareness. It features none of the celebrity-driven lifestyle content often found in typical general English courses for adults. The Global approach is fully aware of the needs of today's learner's, and places an emphasis on effective communication in English between both native and non-native speakers. Global helps users to learn English, to learn about English and to learn through English, and is the ideal course for students who want to communicate in a global envirnonment. |
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This is a self-contained book and audio CD pack focusing on language and communication skills for a wide range of meeting contexts. The book is suitable for both self-study and classroom use. In the classroom context it can be used to supplement other courses or as a main coursebook for short, intensive training sessions. Input is in the form of written texts and audio dialogues with accompanying practice exercises and answers at the back of the book. This title will be the next instalment in the Macmillan Business English Skills Series, currently comprising Email English, Telephone English, Presentations in English and Networking in English. Meetings in English fills an obvious gap in the traditional business English skills repertoire and has been highly requested by the sales teams. |
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Suitable for young adult to adult beginner Chinese language learners, this book adopts a communicative and integrated approach to Chinese language learning. |
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An accompanying workbook to Discover China, Student Book One. Suitable for young adult to adult beginner Chinese language learners, it offers Chinese language learning material. |
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A lower secondary course that takes all the best elements of the original course and brings it up to date with fresh content, including new photo stories. |
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This series of Readers containing original, unsimplified stories written by famous classic and modern writers, now features four new titles. All the collections come with substantial support material for each story, including a short summary, a description of major themes, pre-reading vocabulary activities, post-reading language and comprehension exercises, a literary analysis section and essay questions. The Macmillan Literature Collections will help ease students' transition from graded Readers to authentic reading, giving them the joy of feeling that they are finally reading and studying literature just as it was written. |
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