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 Walking Home,Lynn Schooler In the spring of 2007, hard on
the heels of the worst
winter in the history of Juneau, Alaska, Lynn Schooler finds himself
facing the far side of middle age and exhausted by labouring to
handcraft a home as his marriage slips away. Seeking solace and escape
in nature, he sets out on a solo journey into the Alaskan wilderness,
travelling first by small boat across the formidable Gulf of Alaska,
then on foot along one of the wildest coastlines in North America.
Walking Home is filled with stunning observations of the natural world, and rife with nail-biting adventure as Schooler fords swollen rivers and eludes aggressive grizzlies. But more important, it is a story about finding wholeness—and a sense of humanity—in the wild. His is a solitary journey, but Schooler is never alone; human stories people the landscape—tales of trappers, explorers, marooned sailors, and hermits, as well as the mythology of the region’s Tlingit Indians. Alone in the middle of several thousand square miles of wilderness, Schooler conjures the souls of travellers past to learn how the trials of life may be better borne with the help and community of others.   Agatha Christie's Secret
Notebooks, John Curran A fascinating exploration of
the contents of Agatha Christie’s 73
recently discovered notebooks, including illustrations, deleted
extracts, and two unpublished Poirot stories.
When Agatha Christie died in 1976, aged 85, she had become the world's most popular author. With sales of more than two billion copies worldwide, she had achieved the impossible - more than one book every year since the 1920s, every one a bestseller. So prolific was her output, it was even claimed that Agatha must have a photographic memory. Was this true? Or did she resort over those 55 years to more mundane methods of planning her ingenious crimes? Following the death of Agatha's daughter, Rosalind, at the end of 2004, a remarkable legacy was revealed. Unearthed among her affairs at the family home of Greenway were Agatha Christie's private notebooks, 73 handwritten volumes which, though known about for years, had been largely ignored, probably because Agatha's unmistakable handwriting was so hard to read. But when archivist John Curran began deciphering the notebooks, the extent of this treasure trove became apparent… This book lifts the lid on Agatha Christie's biggest secret - how her pencilled notes, lists and drafts led to her many successful books, plays and stories. Alternative plots, titles and characters, deleted scenes, even her plans for the books she didn't get to write - John Curran's investigation reveals a wealth of unpublished material, including two complete Hercule Poirot short stories never before published   Field Guide To Edible
Mushrooms Of Britain & Europe, Peter Jordan The fields, woods and gardens of Britain and Europe are home to a wide range of edible mushrooms, a number of which are not simply good but truly excellent to eat. Now available for the first time in paperback, this is a practical, user-friendly guide to collecting edible wild fungi species across Britain and Europe. Covering over 70 edible mushroom and truffle species, along with over 50 poisonous species to avoid, the entries provide detailed information on size, appearance, occurrence and habitat, backed up with specially commissioned colour photography, shot in situ and in natural light. With tips on when and where to hunt for mushrooms, invaluable advice on preserving, storing and cooking them and advice on environmentally friendly collecting, this book provides all the information a mushroom forager could need.  264 wood and ivory carvings, none of them larger than a matchbox: potter Edmund de Waal was entranced when he first encountered the collection in the Tokyo apartment of his great uncle Iggie. Later, when Edmund inherited the ‘netsuke’, they unlocked a story far larger than he could ever have imagined… The Ephrussis came from Odessa, and at one time were the largest grain exporters in the world; in the 1870s, Charles Ephrussi was part of a wealthy new generation settling in Paris. Marcel Proust was briefly his secretary and used Charles as the model for the aesthete Swann in Remembrance of Things Past. Charles’s passion was collecting; the netsuke, bought when Japanese objets were all the rage in the salons, were sent as a wedding present to his banker cousin in Vienna. Later, three children – including a young Ignace – would play with the netsuke as history reverberated around them. The Anschluss and Second World War swept the Ephrussis to the brink of oblivion. Almost all that remained of their vast empire was the netsuke collection, smuggled out of the huge Viennese palace (then occupied by Hitler’s theorist on the ‘Jewish Question’), one piece at a time, in the pocket of a loyal maid – and hidden in a straw mattress. In this stunningly original memoir, Edmund de Waal travels the world to stand in the great buildings his forebears once inhabited. He traces the network of a remarkable family against the backdrop of a tumultuous century. And, in prose as elegant and precise as the netsuke themselves, he tells the story of a unique collection which passed from hand to hand – and which, in a twist of fate, found its way home to Japan.   Keys To The Cage,Sue Leonard The book comprises 14 interviews with men and women, of all ages, from all around Ireland, who have been through depression, anxiety and related illnesses. Through their sometimes heartrending stories, it concentrates on the tools they used to help them recover. The book includes an appendix with a list of all the therapies, support groups and books that helped them. This important book will go some way to breaking the silence and stigma surrounding issues of mental health, and discusses how real people manage to cope with their illnesses on a day-to-day basis. Tim Parks ‘Just when the medical profession had given up on me and I on it, just when I seemed to be walled up in a life sentence of chronic pain, someone proposed a bizarre way out: sit still, they said, and breathe...’ Teach Us To Sit Still is the visceral, thought-provoking and improbably entertaining story of Tim Parks’ quest to overcome ill health. Bedevilled by a crippling condition which nobody could explain or relieve, he confronts hard truths about the relationship between the mind and the body, the hectic modern world and his life as a writer. Following a fruitless journey through the conventional medical system he finds solace in an improbable prescription of breathing exercises that eventually leads him to take up meditation. This was the very last place Parks expected or wanted to find answers; anything New Age simply wasn’t his scene. Meantime, he is drawn to consider the effects of illness on the work of other writers, the role of religions in shaping our sense of self, and the influence of sport and art in our attitudes to health and well-being. Most of us will fall ill at some point; few will describe that journey with the same verve, insight and radiant intelligence as Tim Parks. Captivating and inspiring, Teach Us To Sit Still is an intensely personal – and brutally honest – story.  Driving Home,Jonathan Raban Charting a course through the Pacific Northwest, through American history and recent world events, Driving Home is a must for fans of Jonathan Raban, as well as the perfect introduction to anyone not yet familiar with his writing. For over thirty years now, Jonathan Raban has written about movement; about people and places in transition, of journeys undertaken and destinations never quite reached but, also, of what it means to belong, to feel rooted. Yet if these themes are evident in any one of Raban's books, then it is Driving Home -- a collection of pieces spanning two decades -- where we can see Raban's preoccupations most clearly. Writing about public, personal and political spaces, about books, current affairs and literature, his tone is intimate yet, with an outsider's eye for the absurd, never nostalgic, and always fresh. Variously frank, witty and provocative, Driving Home is part essay collection, part diary -- and wholly engrossing.  Absence Of Mind,Marilynne Robinson In this ambitious book, acclaimed writer Marilynne Robinson applies her astute intellect to some of the most vexing topics in the history of human thought - science, religion, and consciousness. Crafted with the same care and insight as her award-winning novels, Absence of Mind challenges postmodern atheists who crusade against religion under the banner of science. In Robinson's view, scientific reasoning does not denote a sense of logical infallibility, as thinkers like Richard Dawkins might suggest. Instead, in its purest form, science represents a search for answers. It engages the problem of knowledge, an aspect of the mystery of consciousness, rather than providing a simple and final model of reality. By defending the importance of individual reflection, Robinson celebrates the power and variety of human consciousness in the tradition of William James. She explores the nature of subjectivity and considers the culture in which Sigmund Freud was situated and its influence on his model of self and civilization. Through keen interpretations of language, emotion, science, and poetry, Absence of Mind restores human consciousness to its central place in the religion-science debate. Greg Baxter ‘Traditional autobiography is composed after the experience has passed. I wrote this book in the very panic of the experiences that inspired it . . . ' In his early thirties, Greg Baxter found himself in a strange place. He hated his job, he was drinking excessively, he was sabotaging his most important relationships, and he was no longer doing the thing he cared about most: writing. Strangest of all, at this time he started teaching evening classes in creative writing — and his life changed utterly. A Preparation for Death is a document of the chaos and discovery of that time and of the experiences that led Greg Baxter to that strange place — an extraordinarily intimate account of literary failure (and its consequences), personal decay, and redemption through reading, writing and truth-telling. Studded with vivid, loving portraits of the people closest to him — his Austrian grandmother, who narrowly survived the Second World War; his mother and father, both described with heartbreakingly close attention; and his cousin Walter, whose own demons provide a striking counterpoint to the author’s — it is above all a stunningly vivid and searching self-portrait: possibly the most honest book you’ll ever read.  Immortal Milk,Eric LeMay Is there a food more delightful, ubiquitous, or accessible than cheese? This book is a charming and engaging love letter to the food that Clifton Fadiman once called "milk’s leap toward immortality." Examining some cheeses we know as well as some we don’t; the processes, places, and people who make them; and the way cheeses taste us as much as we taste them, each chapter takes up a singular and exciting aspect of cheese: Why do we relish cheese? What facts does a cheese lover need to know? How did cheese lead to cheesiness? What’s the ideal way to eat cheese—in Paris, Italy, and Wisconsin? Why does cheese comfort us, even when it reeks? Finally, what foods pair well with which cheeses? Eric LeMay brings us cheese from as near as Formaggio Kitchen in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to as far as the Slow Food International Cheese Festival in Bra, Italy. In the witty, inventive, and wise company of his best girl, Chuck, he endures surly fromagers in Paris and dodges pissing goats in Vermont, a hurricane in Cambridge, and a dispiriting sense of hippie optimism in San Francisco; looks into curd and up at the cosmos; and even dons secondhand polyester to fathom America’s 1970s fondue fad. The result is a plucky and pithy tour through everything worth knowing about cheese. |
 Dog Boy,Eva Hornung Four-year-old Romochka is left alone in a dark, empty Moscow apartment. After a few days, hunger drives him outside, where he sees a large, yellow dog loping past and follows her to her lair on the outskirts of the city. During the seasons that follow, Romochka changes from a boy into something far wilder. He learns to see in the dark, attack enemies with tooth and claw, and understand the strict pack code. But when he begins to hunt in the city, the world of human beings, it is only a matter of time before the authorities take an interest... Manuel de Lope On the cusp of the Spanish Civil War in a coastal village in the Basque country, three men stop off at Extarri’s bar on their way to the wedding of Captain Herráiz to Isabel Cruces. One of the men suffers a stroke in the latrine, and this bizarre and undignified event, seemingly so incidental, marks the beginning of a powerful story about two women whose bond – and whose secret – will endure even in death. Abandoned by her parents shortly after the outbreak of war, sixteen-year-old María Antonia Extarri is left at the mercy of the soldiers taking up residence in the bar - and she is raped. Isabel, meanwhile, enjoys a blissful honeymoon with her Captain in Biarritz, but just months later, the valiant Herráiz is shot as a traitor. Both María and Isabel suddenly find themselves violently altered, alone, and pregnant. A crippled young doctor, Castro, is the only witness to the mysterious and silent agreement these two women form in the loneliness and desperation of their mutual suffering.  Mockingjay,Suzanne Collins Against all odds, Katniss Everdeen has survived the Hunger Games twice. But now that she's made it out of the bloody arena alive, she's still not safe. The Capitol is angry. The Capitol wants revenge. Who do they think should pay for the unrest? Katniss. And what's worse, President Snow has made it clear that no one else is safe either. Not Katniss's family, not her friends, not the people of District 12. Powerful and haunting, this is the thrilling final installment of Suzanne Collins's groundbreaking The Hunger Games trilogy.  The Rebel Prince,Celine Kiernan After a joyful reunion, it seems that the years of war have left their scars on brothers Alberon and Razi, and it’s not long before their differences come between them. Alberon is determined to protect the Kingdom by strength rather than diplomacy. He proudly reveals his great hope – Lorcan Moorehawke’s ‘Bloody Machine’. But Razi fears the Machine will rot the Kingdom’s soul and undo all the good that their father has achieved in his short reign. Despite her qualms about Alberon’s choice of allies, Wynter finds herself siding with him against her friends. But when the last envoys to Alberon’s camp turn out to be the Loups-Garous, Wynter’s loyalty to the Kingdom and its future are stretched to their limit. How can she stand by as Alberon negotiates with the tribe that blighted Cristopher’s life? Kate Atkinson A day like any other for security chief Tracy Waterhouse, until she makes a purchase she hadn't bargained for. One moment of madness is all it takes for Tracy's humdrum world to be turned upside down, the tedium of everyday life replaced by fear and danger at every turn. Witnesses to Tracy's Faustian exchange in the Merrion Centre in Leeds are Tilly, an elderly actress teetering on the brink of her own disaster, and Jackson Brodie who has returned to his home county in search of someone else's roots. All three characters learn that the past is never history and that no good deed goes unpunished. Kate Atkinson dovetails and counterpoints her plots with Dickensian brilliance in a tale peopled with unlikely heroes and villains. Steven Amsterdam Richly imagined, dark, and darkly comic, Things We Didn't See Coming follows a man over three decades as he tries to survive - and to retain his humanity - in a world savaged by successive cataclysmic events. Opening on the eve of the millennium, when the world as we know it is still recognisable, we meet the then nine-year-old narrator fleeing the city with his parents, just ahead of a Y2K breakdown of the grid which signals the world’s transformation and decline. In the wake of this develop strange, sometimes horrific, sometimes unexpectedly funny circumstances as he goes about the no longer simple act of survival: trying to protect squatters against floods in a place where the rains never stop; harassed (and possibly infected) by a man wracked with plague; functioning as a salaried embezzler of 'the state'; escorting the gravely ill on adventure trips. Yet despite the violence and brutality of these days, we learn that even as the world is spinning out of control essential human impulses still hold sway - that we never entirely escape our parents, envy the success of those around us and, chiefly, that we crave love.  The Red Queen, Philippa Gregory The second book in Philippa's stunning new trilogy, The Cousins War, brings to life the story of Margaret Beaufort, a shadowy and mysterious character in the first book of the series, The White Queen, but who now takes centre stage in the bitter struggle of The War of the Roses. The Red Queen tells the story of the child-bride of Edmund Tudor, who, although widowed in her early teens, uses her determination of character and wily plotting to infiltrate the house of York under the guise of loyal friend and servant, undermine the support for Richard III and ultimately ensure that her only son, Henry Tudor, triumphs as King of England. Through collaboration with the dowager Queen Elizabeth Woodville, Margaret agrees a betrothal between Henry and Elizabeth's daughter, thereby uniting the families and resolving the Cousins War once and for all by founding of the Tudor dynasty. like Margaret Beaufort, Gregory puts her many imitators to shame by dint of unequalled energy, focus, and unwavering execution. ~ Publishers Weekly José Saramago Solomon the elephant’s life is about to be upturned. For two years he has been in Lisbon, brought from the Portuguese colonies in India. Now King Dom João III wishes to make him a wedding gift for the Hapsburg archduke, Maximilian. It’s a nice idea, since it avoids the Portuguese king offending his Lutheran cousin with an overtly Catholic present. But it means the poor pachyderm must travel from Lisbon to Vienna on foot – the only option when transporting a large animal such a long way. So begins a journey that will take the stalwart Solomon across the dusty plains of Castile, over the sea to Genoa and up to northern Italy where, like Hannibal’s elephants before him, he must cross the snowy Alps. Accompanying him is his quiet keeper, Subhro, who watches while – at every place they stop – people try to turn Solomon into something he is not. From worker of holy miracles to umbrella stand, the unassuming elephant suffers the many attempts of humans to impose meaning on what they don’t understand. Saramago’s latest novel is an enchanting mix of fact (an Indian elephant really did make this journey in 1551), fable and fantasy. Filled with wonderful landscapes and local colour, peppered with witty reflection on human failings and achievements, it is, in the end, about the journey of life itself.  Super Sad True Love Story,Gary Shteyngart The author of two critically acclaimed novels, The Russian Debutante’s Handbook and Absurdistan, Gary Shteyngart has risen to the top of the fiction world. Now, in his hilarious and heartfelt new novel, he envisions a deliciously dark tale of America’s dysfunctional coming years—and the timeless and tender feelings that just might bring us back from the brink. In a very near future—oh, let’s say next Tuesday—a functionally illiterate America is about to collapse. But don’t that tell that to poor Lenny Abramov, the thirty-nine-year-old son of an angry Russian immigrant janitor, proud author of what may well be the world’s last diary, and less-proud owner of a bald spot shaped like the great state of Ohio. Despite his job at an outfit called Post-Human Services, which attempts to provide immortality for its super-rich clientele, death is clearly stalking this cholesterol-rich morsel of a man. And why shouldn’t it? Lenny’s from a different century—he totally loves books (or “printed, bound media artifacts,” as they’re now known), even though most of his peers find them smelly and annoying. But even more than books, Lenny loves Eunice Park, an impossibly cute and impossibly cruel twenty-four-year-old Korean American woman who just graduated from Elderbird College with a major in Images and a minor in Assertiveness. After meeting Lenny on an extended Roman holiday, blistering Eunice puts that Assertiveness minor to work, teaching our “ancient dork” effective new ways to brush his teeth and making him buy a cottony nonflammable wardrobe. But America proves less flame-resistant than Lenny’s new threads. The country is crushed by a credit crisis, riots break out in New York’s Central Park, the city’s streets are lined with National Guard tanks on every corner, the dollar is so over, and our patient Chinese creditors may just be ready to foreclose on the whole mess. Undeterred, Lenny vows to love both Eunice and his homeland. He’s going to convince his fickle new love that in a time without standards or stability, in a world where single people can determine a dating prospect’s “hotness” and “sustainability” with the click of a button, in a society where the privileged may live forever but the unfortunate will die all too soon, there is still value in being a real human being. Wildly funny, rich, and humane, Super Sad True Love Story is a knockout novel by a young master, a book in which falling in love just may redeem a planet falling apart.  Room,Emma Donoghue The story of a mother, her son, a
locked room and the outside world
It’s Jack’s birthday, and he’s excited about turning five.Jack lives with his Ma in Room, which has a locked door and a skylight, and measures 11 feet by 11 feet. He loves watching TV, and the cartoon characters he calls friends, but he knows that nothing he sees on screen is truly real – only him, Ma and the things in Room. Until the day Ma admits that there's a world outside . . . Told in Jack's voice, Room is the story of a mother and son whose love lets them survive the impossible. Unsentimental and sometimes funny, devastating yet uplifting, Room is a novel like no other. Part childhood adventure story, part adult thriller, Room is above all the most vivid, radiant and beautiful expression of maternal love I have ever read. ~ Read Declan Hughes's review  The Finkler Question, Howard Jacobson ‘He should have seen it coming. His life had been one mishap after another. So he should have been prepared for this one...’ Julian Treslove, a professionally unspectacular former BBC radio producer, and Sam Finkler, a popular Jewish philosopher, writer and television personality, are old school friends. Despite a prickly relationship and very different lives, they’ve never quite lost touch with each other – or with their former teacher, Libor Sevick, a Czech always more concerned with the wider world than with exam results. Now, both Libor and Finkler are recently widowed, and with Treslove, his chequered and unsuccessful record with women rendering him an honorary third widower, they dine at Libor’s grand, central London apartment. It’s a sweetly painful evening of reminiscence in which all three remove themselves to a time before they had loved and lost; a time before they had fathered children, before the devastation of separations, before they had prized anything greatly enough to fear the loss of it. Better, perhaps, to go through life without knowing happiness at all because that way you have less to mourn? Treslove finds he has tears enough for the unbearable sadness of both his friends’ losses. And it’s that very evening, at exactly 11:30 pm, as Treslove, walking home, hesitates a moment outside the window of the oldest violin dealer in the country, that he is attacked. And after this, his whole sense of who and what he is will slowly and ineluctably change. The Finkler Question is a scorching story of friendship and loss, exclusion and belonging, and of the wisdom and humanity of maturity. Stephen Baker Set on the windswept North-East coast of England, against the ragged industrial landscape of the Tees estuary, Hemispheres is the vivid and painful story of a son's reconnection with his long-absent father. Moving from the gas-flares of Teeside to marine adventures in the South Atlantic, Hemispheres is set between 1982 and 2000, telling the story of Yan and his son, Danny. Growing up in a family of publicans, Danny spends his youth surrounded by the angry, disaffected men of Thatcher's Britain. Yan has not returned from the Falklands War and Danny and his mother have no idea whether he is dead or has deserted. But Yan is very much alive: half a world away, on another rugged coast, a drunken game of poker sets him and a rag-tag band of deserters off on a punishing journey across the southern hemisphere. Twenty years later Yan returns - whip-thin, weathered and, he maintains, dying of cancer. For all his conflicted emotions, Danny is unable to walk away from the answers Yan can give him, from a last chance to understand his father and to say a final goodbye. The two men try to find a way to uncover the complicated feeling that have taken root during their lives apart. And what binds them, providing a refrain across the years, is a shared love of birds and birdwatching. Yan relates his story of migration in the language of birding, the whirling of gulls and guillemots, ravens and herons, nightjars and lapwings... |
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