A novel of family secrets hidden through two generations, set against the stunning backdrop of the Lake District in midwinter. From the author of The Villa in Italy. One family Christmas uncovers two generations of secrets… The year of 1936 is drawing to a close. Winter grips Wetmoreland and causes a rare phenonmenon: the lakes freeze. For two local families, the Richardsons and the Grindleys, the frozen lake entices long-estranged siblings and children to return home for Christmas. Some are aware of the storm clouds of war gathering over Europe, yet everyone wants to put troubles aside, however personal, to enjoy a frozen Christmas. But one visitor carries a seed of violence and not even the matriarch of the Richardson clan can prevent the carefully buried secrets of the past from erupting to change everything. A compelling blend of family closeness and strife, dazzling passion and the dark influence of history, this is an enthralling read to curl up and savour.

From the author of THE FROZEN LAKE comes an enthralling novel of love, betrayal and idealism, as three very different young women go up to Oxford in the years immediately before World War Two. Vee – the clergyman’s daughter. Boyish, alluring, she plans to use her time at Oxford to put right everything that went wrong in her loveless childhood. Her friendship with Alfred introduces her to politics and the subversive attractions of secret societies; it will lead to her career as a secret agent, but at what cost to old loyalties and her true feelings? Claudia, radiant, intense, aristocratic, is equally drawn to the secret society and one member in particular; his dazzling influence will see her travel to Berlin and come under the spell of Fascism as war looms. And Lally, glamorous daughter of an Irish-American senator, is sceptical of the society and the arguments from both sides. Her own choices will bring her into Vee’s new life, with all its dangers and betrayals. As the world becomes embroiled in the events of war, what price personal values, losses and loves?

Following the phenomenal success of Grumpy Old Men, the quintessential grumpy old man, David Quantick, has taken a well-deserved holiday. But no matter where you go, there is always something to moan about. You're stuck behind endless caravans on the M4, waiting for a non-existent filthy train, hanging around looking at crap luggage in an airport. Is it going to be worth the effort? Of course is b****y well isn't. David Quantick here explores everything that makes the rest of the world different – and therefore worse – than Britain and lets us know exactly why it is safer to stay at home than to become grumpy old men on holiday. The indispensable guide to the grumpy old xenophobe in us all.

The classic foraging guide to over 200 types of food that can be gathered and picked in the wild, Food for Free returns in its 40th year as a sumptuous, beautifully illustrated and fully updated anniversary edition. Originally published in 1972, Richard Mabey’s classic foraging guide has never been out of print since. Food for Free is a complete guide to help you safely identify edible species that grow around us, together with detailed artwork, field identification notes and recipes. In this stunning 40th anniversary edition, Richard Mabey’s fully-revised text is accompanied by photographs, new recipes and a wealth of practical information on identifying, collecting, cooking and preparing, history and folklore. Informatively written, beautifully illustrated and produced in a new, larger format, Food for Free will inspire us to be more self-sufficient and make use of the natural resources around us to enhance our lives.

With a foreword by Richard Dawkins, and based on the BAFTA award-winning Channel 4 TV series, Inside Nature’s Giants gets under the skin of the largest animals on the planet. See them as you've never seen them before – from the inside out. Inside Nature’s Giants explores the anatomy of the largest animals on the planet to reveal how these amazing creatures really work. Rather than simply telling you how an animal behaves, the book features dissection, CGI and wildlife photography to show how millions of years of evolution have enabled animals to thrive across the world. This is natural history as you’ve never seen it before – from the inside out. Join the Inside Nature’s Giants team of scientists and anatomical experts, including, among others, veterinary scientist Mark Evans, enthusiastic, scalpel-wielding anatomist Joy Reidenberg, science presenter Simon Watt and evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, as they unlock the secrets behind some of nature's most extraordinary beasts. Why doesn’t a giraffe keel over and faint, when its head is so far above its heart? Why are crocodiles hopeless at chewing, when they have the strongest bite of all animals, and why does a giant squid have three hearts and pass food through its brain? By rolling up their sleeves to delve into these animals the team discover the answers to these, and many other fascinating, questions, revealing how evolution by natural selection is responsible for the bizarre biology of elephants, sharks, giraffes, big cats, hippos, crocodiles, camels, whales, kangaroos, giant squids and more. Using an interactive approach, Inside Nature’s Giants offers an exciting, alternative take on natural history. By opening the single- and double-page gatefolds readers can go beneath the skins of the animals to experience for themselves how evolution has shaped the anatomy of some of nature’s most magnificent animals.

What if the only way to keep your children is to let them go? Perfect for all fans of Jodi Picoult. Losing a husband is unbearable. But losing her children too would be one heartbreak too many... Ella is happily settled in family life with her husband Joe and their two young children, Zach and Annie. Then the unthinkable happens - Joe is killed in a tragic accident. Distraught, Ella's only solace is the children, who she clings to for dear life. But she can't help feeling that the happiness she took for granted is over for good. Her worst fears are realised when Joe's beautiful ex-wife Paige, who deserted her family three years earlier, turns up at his funeral, determined to reclaim her children. Struggling with her own grief, Ella is now forced to battle for her family and the life which she loves. And when pushed to the limits, Ella must decide who is the best mother for her children.

Lawrence brings the Broken Empire series to its devastating conclusion The path to the throne is broken – only the broken can walk it The world is cracked and time has run through, leaving us clutching at the end days. These are the days that have waited for us all our lives. These are my days. I will stand before the Hundred and they will listen. I will take the throne no matter who stands against me, living or dead, and if I must be the last emperor then I will make of it such an ending. This is where the wise man turns away. This is where the holy kneel and call on God. These are the last miles, my brothers. Don't look to me to save you. Run if you have the wit. Pray if you have the soul. Stand your ground if courage is yours. But don't follow me. Follow me, and I will break your heart.

A remarkable short novella, a modern fable that is weird, uplifting and romantic all at the same time. A robber charges into a bank with a loaded gun, but instead of taking any money he steals an item of sentimental value from each person. Once he has made his escape, strange things start to happen to the victims. A tattoo comes to life, a husband turns into a snowman, a baby starts to shit money. And Stacey Hinterland discovers that she’s shrinking, a little every day, and there is seemingly nothing that she or her husband can do to reverse the process. The Tiny Wife is a weird and wonderful modern fable. Small, but perfectly formed, it will charm, delight and unnerve in equal measure.

"Who Is The Fairest One Of All…?" A new reality show plans to answer that old question with on-air makeovers. Even though it isn't her idea of reality, model Quinn Hunter reluctantly agrees to host the show. That way, she can help a needy friend and follow her true calling - teaching children with special needs. Her latest student is very special, and so is his father. Widower Jack Harmon is as far from the shallow fashion world as Quinn could imagine. But he and his little boy are teaching her more about beauty - and reality - than any TV show ever would!

Create reports and solve common report problems with minimal fuss. About This Book ? Use this unique book to master the basics and advanced features of Pentaho 8 Reporting. ? A book showing developers and analysts with IT skills how to create and use the best possible reports using the Pentaho platform. ? Written with a very practical approach: full of tutorials and practical examples (source code included). Who This Book Is For This book is written for two types of professionals and students: Information Technologists with a basic knowledge of Databases and Java Developers with medium seniority. Developers will be interested to discover how to embed reports in a third-party Java application. What You Will Learn ? The basics of Pentaho Reporting (Designer and SDK) and its initial setup. ? Develop the most attractive reports on top of a wide range of data sources. ? Perform detailed customization of layout, parameterization, internationalization, behaviors, and more for your custom reports developed with Pentaho Reporting. ? Integrate Pentaho reports into third-party Java application with full control over interactions, layout, and behavior in general. ? Use Pentaho reports in the other components of the Pentaho Suite (BA Platform and PDI). In Detail This hands-on tutorial, filled with exercises and examples, introduces the reader to a variety of concepts within Pentaho Reporting. With screenshots that show you how reports look at design time as well as how they should look when rendered as PDF, Excel, HTML, Text, Rich-Text-File, XML, and CSV, this book also contains complete example source code that you can copy and paste into your environment to get up-and-running quickly. Updated to cover the features of Pentaho 8, this book will teach you everything you need to know to build fast, efficient reports using Pentaho. If your interest lies in the technical details of creating reports and you want to see how to solve common reporting problems with a minimum of fuss, this is the book for you. Style and approach A step-by-step guide covering technical topics relating to environments, best practices, and source code, to enable the reader to assemble the best reports and use them in existing Java applications.

He Knew All About Angry Teen Boys - He'd Been One Himself As the local high school principal, Peter Stone knew troubled student Sean Williams needed his expert assistance. And as a Christian, Peter knew God was leading him to help. Yet it was the boy's mother who captured Peter's notice. Laura, a widow caring for her four children and ailing aunt, had no time for romance or religion. Somehow, despite her protests, Laura found herself and her brood frequent visitors to Peter's ranch and the church he attended. Soon it seemed her family was meant to complete Peter's life.

The new temporary pastor of Hope Community Church was everything Mara Zimmer was trying to avoid. Jacob Durand was young, good-looking and interested. She was terrified that if he learned about her tragic past, he'd turn his back on her, too. Jacob didn't know what Mara was hiding, only that somehow she'd managed to steal his heart. Yet, he had no right to feel the way he did. Soon his tenure as pastor would be over, and he'd move on to greater opportunities. How could he leave behind the woman he longed to marry?

Dust-covered men who smell like horses are the norm at Gil Sorrent's farm. Until a trip to Emily Montague's bath shop changes their lives. Suddenly, Gil's lovelorn farmhands are sparkling clean and attracting women instead of working! So Gil barges into the shop, surprised to find Emily, his pretty polar opposite, selling soap by the truckloads. Suddenly everyone in town is not only cleaner–they're nicer. And when our bluegrass hero tries out the soap for himself, love-shy Emily better watch out!

His former wife is on his flight home for the holidays? Divorced dad Tom Wallace knows their young daughter is behind this "coincidence." He also knows Norah Wallace still makes his heart skip a beat. When a snowstorm strands the trio in the airport for the weekend, Tom rediscovers how truly blessed he used to be. Once they're finally in Wisconsin for Christmas, two sets of grandparents are suddenly generous with the mistletoe. One kiss leads to another. And soon the entire family has the same sweet Christmas wish.

Shhh! Our Town's Secret Santa Is… Burke Burdett? The alpha brother in the pack of Burdett brothers? The handsome man who disappeared from my life last summer after some very complicated family business? Yet he's asking me, Dora Hoag, a workaholic with nowhere to go for Christmas, to help fulfill his mother's dying wish. She wanted Burke to take over as "Secret Santa" for Mt. Knott, South Carolina. To help the less fortunate find something extra in their forgotten stockings. How can I say no? Especially when what I want most for Christmas is another chance at forever with the man I love.

Over 80 recipes to help you breeze through your data analysis projects using R About This Book ? Analyse your data using the popular R packages like ggplot2 with ready-to-use and customizable recipes ? Find meaningful insights from your data and generate dynamic reports ? A practical guide to help you put your data analysis skills in R to practical use Who This Book Is For This book is for data scientists, analysts and even enthusiasts who want to learn and implement the various data analysis techniques using R in a practical way. Those looking for quick, handy solutions to common tasks and challenges in data analysis will find this book to be very useful. Basic knowledge of statistics and R programming is assumed. What You Will Learn ? Acquire, format and visualize your data using R ? Using R to perform an Exploratory data analysis ? Introduction to machine learning algorithms such as classification and regression ? Get started with social network analysis ? Generate dynamic reporting with Shiny ? Get started with geospatial analysis ? Handling large data with R using Spark and MongoDB ? Build Recommendation system- Collaborative Filtering, Content based and Hybrid ? Learn real world dataset examples- Fraud Detection and Image Recognition In Detail Data analytics with R has emerged as a very important focus for organizations of all kinds. R enables even those with only an intuitive grasp of the underlying concepts, without a deep mathematical background, to unleash powerful and detailed examinations of their data. This book will show you how you can put your data analysis skills in R to practical use, with recipes catering to the basic as well as advanced data analysis tasks. Right from acquiring your data and preparing it for analysis to the more complex data analysis techniques, the book will show you how you can implement each technique in the best possible manner. You will also visualize your data using the popular R packages like ggplot2 and gain hidden insights from it. Starting with implementing the basic data analysis concepts like handling your data to creating basic plots, you will master the more advanced data analysis techniques like performing cluster analysis, and generating effective analysis reports and visualizations. Throughout the book, you will get to know the common problems and obstacles you might encounter while implementing each of the data analysis techniques in R, with ways to overcoming them in the easiest possible way. By the end of this book, you will have all the knowledge you need to become an expert in data analysis with R, and put your skills to test in real-world scenarios. Style and Approach ? Hands-on recipes to walk through data science challenges using R ? Your one-stop solution for common and not-so-common pain points while performing real-world problems to execute a series of tasks. ? Addressing your common and not-so-common pain points, this is a book that you must have on the shelf

Simplify machine learning model implementations with Spark About This Book ? Solve the day-to-day problems of data science with Spark ? This unique cookbook consists of exciting and intuitive numerical recipes ? Optimize your work by acquiring, cleaning, analyzing, predicting, and visualizing your data Who This Book Is For This book is for Scala developers with a fairly good exposure to and understanding of machine learning techniques, but lack practical implementations with Spark. A solid knowledge of machine learning algorithms is assumed, as well as hands-on experience of implementing ML algorithms with Scala. However, you do not need to be acquainted with the Spark ML libraries and ecosystem. What You Will Learn ? Get to know how Scala and Spark go hand-in-hand for developers when developing ML systems with Spark ? Build a recommendation engine that scales with Spark ? Find out how to build unsupervised clustering systems to classify data in Spark ? Build machine learning systems with the Decision Tree and Ensemble models in Spark ? Deal with the curse of high-dimensionality in big data using Spark ? Implement Text analytics for Search Engines in Spark ? Streaming Machine Learning System implementation using Spark In Detail Machine learning aims to extract knowledge from data, relying on fundamental concepts in computer science, statistics, probability, and optimization. Learning about algorithms enables a wide range of applications, from everyday tasks such as product recommendations and spam filtering to cutting edge applications such as self-driving cars and personalized medicine. You will gain hands-on experience of applying these principles using Apache Spark, a resilient cluster computing system well suited for large-scale machine learning tasks. This book begins with a quick overview of setting up the necessary IDEs to facilitate the execution of code examples that will be covered in various chapters. It also highlights some key issues developers face while working with machine learning algorithms on the Spark platform. We progress by uncovering the various Spark APIs and the implementation of ML algorithms with developing classification systems, recommendation engines, text analytics, clustering, and learning systems. Toward the final chapters, we’ll focus on building high-end applications and explain various unsupervised methodologies and challenges to tackle when implementing with big data ML systems. Style and approach This book is packed with intuitive recipes supported with line-by-line explanations to help you understand how to optimize your work flow and resolve problems when working with complex data modeling tasks and predictive algorithms. This is a valuable resource for data scientists and those working on large scale data projects.

Leverage Scala and Machine Learning to study and construct systems that can learn from data About This Book ? Explore a broad variety of data processing, machine learning, and genetic algorithms through diagrams, mathematical formulation, and updated source code in Scala ? Take your expertise in Scala programming to the next level by creating and customizing AI applications ? Experiment with different techniques and evaluate their benefits and limitations using real-world applications in a tutorial style Who This Book Is For If you’re a data scientist or a data analyst with a fundamental knowledge of Scala who wants to learn and implement various Machine learning techniques, this book is for you. All you need is a good understanding of the Scala programming language, a basic knowledge of statistics, a keen interest in Big Data processing, and this book! What You Will Learn ? Build dynamic workflows for scientific computing ? Leverage open source libraries to extract patterns from time series ? Write your own classification, clustering, or evolutionary algorithm ? Perform relative performance tuning and evaluation of Spark ? Master probabilistic models for sequential data ? Experiment with advanced techniques such as regularization and kernelization ? Dive into neural networks and some deep learning architecture ? Apply some basic multiarm-bandit algorithms ? Solve big data problems with Scala parallel collections, Akka actors, and Apache Spark clusters ? Apply key learning strategies to a technical analysis of financial markets In Detail The discovery of information through data clustering and classification is becoming a key differentiator for competitive organizations. Machine learning applications are everywhere, from self-driving cars, engineering design, logistics, manufacturing, and trading strategies, to detection of genetic anomalies. The book is your one stop guide that introduces you to the functional capabilities of the Scala programming language that are critical to the creation of machine learning algorithms such as dependency injection and implicits. You start by learning data preprocessing and filtering techniques. Following this, you'll move on to unsupervised learning techniques such as clustering and dimension reduction, followed by probabilistic graphical models such as Na?ve Bayes, hidden Markov models and Monte Carlo inference. Further, it covers the discriminative algorithms such as linear, logistic regression with regularization, kernelization, support vector machines, neural networks, and deep learning. You’ll move on to evolutionary computing, multibandit algorithms, and reinforcement learning. Finally, the book includes a comprehensive overview of parallel computing in Scala and Akka followed by a de*ion of Apache Spark and its ML library. With updated codes based on the latest version of Scala and comprehensive examples, this book will ensure that you have more than just a solid fundamental knowledge in machine learning with Scala. Style and approach This book is designed as a tutorial with hands-on exercises using technical analysis of financial markets and corporate data. The approach of each chapter is such that it allows you to understand key concepts easily.

Amelia North needs refuge, and finds it–in Refuge, Illinois. Stranded there after a car wreck, the single mother expects to be cold-shouldered. After all, she's already been rejected by her parents, her church and her daughter's father. Instead, she finds a town full of people with open hands and open hearts…including pararescue jumper Ben Dillinger. Ben wants to help Amelia and her daughter find safety and stability. Instead, he finds himself freefalling–right into love with the ready-made family.

Despite a decade apart, this isn't the reunion Mandy Manchester expected! She thought she'd put high school sweetheart Nolan Briggs behind her. Now he's back…and the pararescue jumper literally sweeps her off her feet. He's ready and willing to rekindle what they once shared.

What does hardworking single father Matthew Warren want in a wife? Responsibility, practicality and a good rapport with his child. So why isn't he interested in the responsible, practical daughter of his matchmaking mother's best friend? Could it be that another Scott sister has gotten through to his guarded heart? He can't possibly be falling for Haley Scott, his daughter's new nanny, the very woman he almost fired for her free-spirited ways! Granted, his little girl is a lot happier lately. And so is he. Sometimes the best matches are the most unexpected.