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A Small Dog Saved My Life
A Small Dog Saved My Life
Bel Mooney
¥88.39
A story of survival, transformation and love. In a beautiful and powerful memoir which mixes honest, personal revelation with literature, history, and inspirational self-help, Bel Mooney tells the story of her rescue dog, Bonnie, who in turn rescued Bel when her world fell apart with the all-too public break-up of her 35-year marriage. SMALL DOGS CAN SAVE YOUR LIFE really is a story of survival, and also one of love. This is an account of six years in Bel's life, from when she first acquired Bonnie from a rescue home, through Bel’s years of personal heartbreak and disappointment, and on to the happiness which she has now found in a new marriage and a new life, with the Maltese at her side all the way. This is a book about transformation and change, about picking yourself up and attacking life in the way that a small dog will go for the postman's trousers - and about celebrating life, much as your canine companion will always celebrate your return, even from the shortest trip. Beautifully engaging, entertaining, full of personal anecdotes and deeply moving, SMALL DOGS CAN SAVE YOUR LIFE will take the reader on an inspirational walk with one very small but very remarkable dog - a dog who became a symbol for all that is best about dogs, and about we humans too. Bel Mooney is a journalist with almost forty years' experience. Well-loved by millions for her advice columns, first for the Times and now in the Daily Mail, as well as countless programmes for radio and television, Bel takes the reader on a journey of discovery, in which she finds herself transformed into a dog-lover by one small and lively bundle of white fur, as well as telling her own gripping story.
The Friendship: Wordsworth and Coleridge
The Friendship: Wordsworth and Coleridge
Adam Sisman
¥91.23
The first book to explore the extraordinary story of the legendary friendship – and quarrel – between Wordsworth and Coleridge, two giants of English Romanticism. Wordsworth and Coleridge’s passionate intimacy, shared ambition and subsequent estrangement contribute to a tragic tale. But Sisman’s biography of this most remarkable friendship – the first to devote itself wholly to exploring the impact of their relationship on each other – seeks to re-examine the orthodox assumption that these two poets flourished as a result of it. Instead, Sisman argues that it was a meeting that may well have been disastrous for both: for it was Wordsworth’s rejection of Coleridge, and not primarily his opium addiction, that destroyed the latter as a poet, and that Coleridge’s impossible ambitions for Wordsworth pushed the latter towards failure and disappointment. Underlying the poignancy of the tale is the intriguing subject of the influence one writer can have on another. Sisman seeks to answer fundamental questions about this relationship: why was Wordsworth so reliant on Coleridge, and why was he so easily swayed in the most critical decision of his career? Was it in Coleridge’s nature to play second fiddle? Would it, in fact, have been better for both men if they had never met?
Silent Boy
Silent Boy
Torey Hayden
¥45.62
From the author of Sunday Times bestsellers One Child and Ghost Girl comes a heartbreaking story of a boy trapped in silence and the teacher who rescued him. When special education teacher Torey Hayden first met fifteen-year-old Kevin, he was barricaded under a table. Desperately afraid of the world around him, he hadn’t spoken a word in eight years. He was considered hopeless, incurable. But Hayden refused to believe it, though she realised it might well take a miracle to break through the walls he had built around himself. With unwavering devotion and gentle, patient love, she set out to free him – and slowly uncovered a shocking violent history and a terrible secret that an unfeeling bureaucracy had simply filed away and forgotten. Torey refused to give up on this tragic “lost case.” For a trapped and frightened boy desperately needed her help – and she knew in her heart she could not rest easy until she had rescued him from the darkness.
The Mitfords: Letters between Six Sisters
The Mitfords: Letters between Six Sisters
Charlotte Mosley
¥100.26
Carefree, revelatory and intimate, this selection of unpublished letters between the six legendary Mitford sisters, compiled by Diana Mitford’s daughter-in-law, is alive with wit, passion and heartbreak. The letters chronicle the social quirks and political upheavals of the twentieth century but also chart the stormy, enduring relationships between the uniquely gifted – and collectively notorious – Mitford sisters. There’s Nancy, the scalding wit and bestselling novelist; Pamela, who craved a quiet country life; Diana, the fascist wife of Sir Oswald Mosley; Unity, whose obsession with Adolf Hitler led to personal tragedy; Jessica, the runaway communist; and Deborah, the socialite who became Duchess of Devonshire. Writing to one another to confide, tease, rage and gossip, the Mitford sisters set out, above all, to amuse. A correspondence of this scope is rare; a collection penned by six born storytellers is irreplaceable.
Elizabeth and Mary: Cousins, Rivals, Queens
Elizabeth and Mary: Cousins, Rivals, Queens
Jane Dunn
¥81.52
This is the first biography of the fateful relationship between Elizabeth I and Mary Queen of Scots. It was the defining relationship of their lives and marked the intersection of the great Tudor and Stuart dynasties. At its core were their rival claims to the throne of England. Distinguished biographer Jane Dunn reveals an extraordinary story of two queens ruling in one isle, both embodying opposing qualities of character, ideals of womaliness and divinely ordained kingship. Theirs is a drama of sex and power, recklessness, ambition and political intrigue, with a rivalry that could only be resolved by death. As regnant queens in an overwhelmingly masculine world they were deplored for their femaleness, compared unfavourably with each other, and courted by the same men. By placing this dynamic and ever-changing relationship at the centre of the book, Dunn throws new light and meaning on the complexity of their natures. She reveals an Elizabeth revolutionary in her insistence on ruling alone and inspired in her use of celibacy as a political tool, yet deeply feeling and more sympathetic than the usual picture of the virgin queen. Mary, too, is not the romantic victim of history but a courageous adventurer with a reckless heart, and a magnetic influence over men and women alike. Vengeful against her enemies and the more ruthless of the two, she was untroubled by plotting Elizabeth’s murder. Elizabeth, however, was in anguish at having to sanction Mary’s death warrant for treason. Jane Dunn brings her skills as a biographer to bear on history’s two most charismatic queens. Working almost exclusively from contemporary letters and writings, she lets them speak to us across more than 400 years, their voices and responses surprisingly familiar to our own, their characters vivid, by turns touching and terrible. The death in 1603 of Elizabeth, our greatest English queen, was to mark the end of the Tudors and the posthumous triumph of Mary, whose son, James I united the English and Scottish thrones under a Stuart king.
Nobody’s Son: Part 3 of 3: All Alex ever wanted was a family of his own
Nobody’s Son: Part 3 of 3: All Alex ever wanted was a family of his own
Cathy Glass
¥20.60
Born in a prison and removed from his drug-dependent mother, rejection is all that 7-year-old Alex knows. When Cathy is asked to foster little Alex, aged 7, her immediate reaction is: Why can’t he stay with his present carers for the last month? He’s already had many moves since coming into care as a toddler and he’ll only be with her a short while before he goes to live with his permanent adoptive family. But the present carers are expecting a baby and the foster mother isn’t coping, so Alex goes to live with Cathy. He settles easily and is very much looking forward to having a forever family of his own. The introductions and move to his adoptive family go well. But Alex is only with them for a week when problems begin. What happens next is both shocking and upsetting, and calls into question the whole adoption process.
In the Days of Rain: WINNER OF THE 2017 COSTA BIOGRAPHY AWARD
In the Days of Rain: WINNER OF THE 2017 COSTA BIOGRAPHY AWARD
Rebecca Stott
¥73.58
WINNER OF THE 2017 COSTA BIOGRAPHY AWARD In the vein of Bad Blood and Why be Happy when you can be Normal?: an enthralling, at times shocking, and deeply personal family memoir of growing up in, and breaking away from, a fundamentalist Christian cult. As heard on Jeremey Vine ‘At university when I made new friends and confidantes, I couldn’t explain how I’d become a teenage mother, or shoplifted books for years, or why I was afraid of the dark and had a compulsion to rescue people, without explaining about the Brethren or the God they made for us, and the Rapture they told us was coming. But then I couldn’t really begin to talk about the Brethren without explaining about my father…’ As Rebecca Stott’s father lay dying he begged her to help him write the memoir he had been struggling with for years. He wanted to tell the story of their family, who, for generations had all been members of a fundamentalist Christian sect. Yet, each time he reached a certain point, he became tangled in a thicket of painful memories and could not go on. The sect were a closed community who believed the world is ruled by Satan: non-sect books were banned, women were made to wear headscarves and those who disobeyed the rules were punished. Rebecca was born into the sect, yet, as an intelligent, inquiring child she was always asking dangerous questions. She would discover that her father, an influential preacher, had been asking them too, and that the fault-line between faith and doubt had almost engulfed him. In In the Days of Rain Rebecca gathers the broken threads of her father’s story, and her own, and follows him into the thicket to tell of her family’s experiences within the sect, and the decades-long aftermath of their breaking away.
The Goldberg Variations
The Goldberg Variations
Mark Glanville
¥68.57
From football hooligan to opera singer, from the Cockney Reds to Catullus, from a hectic household to tranquility of spirit, Mark Glanville has travelled many paths, been many people – this is his remarkable story.
The Baby Mind Reader: Amazing Psychic Stories from the Man Who Can Read Babies’
The Baby Mind Reader: Amazing Psychic Stories from the Man Who Can Read Babies’
Derek Ogilvie
¥61.51
Psychic Derek Ogilvie is the baby mind reader -- called in when parents have tried all else, Derek communicates with children to find the reasons behind their problem behaviour, tantrums and sleepless nights. This gripping memoir of his psychic adventures accompanies the Five TV series -- a fascinating cross between 'Supernanny' and 'Most Haunted'. Derek Ogilvie is one of Scotland's best-known and respected psychics. He can be seen on Five TV in 2006 with his new show 'The Baby Mind Reader', where he exhibits his rare ability of being able to communicate telepathically with babies and young children. In this, his fascinating first book published alongside his TV series, Derek shares the story of his rollercoaster life and how he rediscovered his psychic powers and his true calling in life. At the age of nine Derek realised he was psychic when his dead neighbour started visiting him every night while he was in bed. But as a young man, Derek's psychic abilities took a back seat as he concentrated on building a business empire and becoming a millionaire. However, five years ago, Derek's business went bust, his house was repossessed, his partner left him and his grandmother died. Only then did Derek take stock of his life and reconnect with his psychic gift to start helping other people. It was at this point that Derek realised he could also communicate with babies and young children, as well as animals. Funny and poignant, this is Derek's amazing story.
I Miss Mummy: The true story of a frightened young girl who is desperate to go h
I Miss Mummy: The true story of a frightened young girl who is desperate to go h
Cathy Glass
¥58.86
Alice, aged four, is snatched by her mother the day she is due to arrive at Cathy's house. Drug-dependent and mentally ill, but desperate to keep hold of her daughter, Alice's mother takes her from her parents' house and disappears. Cathy spends three anxious days worrying about her whereabouts before Alice is found safe, but traumatized. Alice is like a little doll, so young and vulnerable, and she immediately finds her place in the heart of Cathy's family. She talks openly about her mummy, who she dearly loves, and how happy she was living with her maternal grandparents before she was put into care. Alice has clearly been very well looked after and Cathy can't understand why she couldn't stay with her grandparents. It emerges that Alice's grandparents are considered too old (they are in their early sixties) and that the plan is that Alice will stay with Cathy for a month before moving to live with her father and his new wife. The grandparents are distraught—Alice has never known her father, and her grandparents claim he is a violent drug dealer. Desperate to help Alice find the happy home she deserves, Cathy's parenting skills are tested in many new ways. Finally questions are asked about Alice's father suitability, and his true colors begin to emerge.
Anything You Can Imagine: Peter Jackson and the Making of Middle-earth
Anything You Can Imagine: Peter Jackson and the Making of Middle-earth
Ian Nathan,Andy Serkis
¥147.35
The definitive history of Peter Jackson’s Middle-earth saga, Anything You Can Imagine takes us on a cinematic journey across all six films, featuring brand-new interviews with Peter, his cast & crew. From the early days of daring to dream it could be done, through the highs and lows of making the films, to fan adoration and, finally, Oscar glory. Lights A nine-year-old boy in New Zealand’s Pukerua Bay stays up late and is spellbound by a sixty-year-old vision of a giant ape on an island full of dinosaurs. This is true magic. And the boy knows that he wants to be a magician. Camera Fast-forward twenty years and the boy has begun to cast a spell over the film-going audience, conjuring gore-splattered romps with bravura skill that will lead to Academy recognition with an Oscar nomination for Heavenly Creatures. The boy from Pukerua Bay with monsters reflected in his eyes has arrived, and Hollywood comes calling. What would he like to do next? ‘How about a fantasy film, something like The Lord of the Rings…?’ Action The greatest work of fantasy in modern literature, and the biggest, with rights ownership so complex it will baffle a wizard. Vast. Complex. Unfilmable. One does not simply walk into Mordor – unless you are Peter Jackson. Anything You Can Imagine tells the full, dramatic story of how Jackson and his trusty fellowship of Kiwi filmmakers dared take on a quest every bit as daunting as Frodo’s, and transformed JRR Tolkien’s epic tale of adventure into cinematic magic, and then did it again with The Hobbit. Enriched with brand-new interviews with Jackson, his fellow filmmakers and many of the films’ stars, Ian Nathan’s mesmerising narrative whisks us to Middle-earth, to gaze over the shoulder of the director as he creates the impossible, the unforgettable, and proves that film-making really is ‘anything you can imagine’.
Passage Across the Mersey
Passage Across the Mersey
Robert Bhatia
¥66.22
The remarkable story of Helen Forrester, author of Twopence to Cross the Mersey, and how she turned tragedy to triumph. When Helen Forrester’s father went bankrupt in the 1930’s, she and her six siblings fell from a comfortable middle-class existence into wretched poverty. Later in life, Helen wrote a ground-breaking series of memoirs, starting with Twopence to Cross the Mersey, which told the harrowing account of her family’s struggles in Depression-era Liverpool. It was a story filled with tragedy and small triumphs but many readers wondered what happened to Helen when she grew up; what became of the fragile young girl who had so much responsibility heaped on her shoulders? Now for the first time, her son Robert recounts the unexpected life that Helen went on to live; of the remarkable love story with a young man from a background a million miles away from everything a Lancashire Lass like Helen would have known and of the astonishing lengths she went to in order to achieve happiness. Full of new revelations and fascinating detail never before revealed, Passage Across the Mersey is a story of an extraordinary woman, and of the journey that took her thousands of miles from the place she called home…
Blood-Dark Track: A Family History
Blood-Dark Track: A Family History
Joseph O’Neill
¥66.22
From the bestselling and PEN/Faulkner Award-winning author of Netherland, a fascinating, personal, and beautifully crafted family history. Joseph O'Neill's grandfathers--one Turkish, one Irish--were both imprisoned for suspected subversion during the Second World War. The Irish grandfather, a handsome rogue from a family of small farmers, was an active member of the IRA. O'Neill's other grandfather, a debonair hotelier from the tiny and threatened Turkish Christian minority, was interned by the British in Palestine on suspicion of being an Axis spy. With intellect, compassion, and grace, O'Neill sets the stories of these individuals against the history of the last century's most inhuman events.
Banco: The Further Adventures of Papillon
Banco: The Further Adventures of Papillon
Henri Charrière
¥57.09
Here at last is the sensational sequel to "Papillon" - the great story of escape and adventure that took the world by storm. "Banco" continues the adventures of Henri Charriere - nicknamed 'Papillon' - in Venezuela, where he has finally won his freedom after thirteen years of escape and imprisonment. Despite his resolve to become an honest man, Charriere is soon involved in hair-raising exploits with goldminers, gamblers, bank-robbers and revolutionaries - robbing and being robbed, his lust for life as strong as ever. He also runs night-clubs in Caracas until an earthquake ruins him in 1967 - when he decides to write the book that brings him international fame. Henri Charriere died in 1973 at the age of 66.
Little Labours
Little Labours
Rivka Galchen
¥73.67
AN OBSERVER BOOK OF THE YEAR A droll and dazzling compendium of observations, stories, lists, and brief essays about babies. ‘Beguiling … A wunderkabinett of baby-related curios … A peculiar book, and astonishing in its effect.’ Boston Globe One August day, a baby was born, or as it seemed to Rivka Galchen, a puma moved into her apartment. Her arrival felt supernatural, she seemed to come from another world. And suddenly, the world seemed ludicrously, suspiciously, adverbially sodden with meaning. But Galchen didn’t want to write about the puma. She had never been interested in babies, or in mothers before. Now everything seemed directly related to them and she specifically wanted to write about other things because it might mean she was really, covertly, learning something about babies, or about being near babies. The result is Little Labours, a slanted enchanted miscellany. Galchen writes about babies in art (with wrongly shaped head) and babies in literature (rarer than dogs or abortions, often monstrous); about the effort of taking a passport photo for a baby not yet able to hold up her head and the frightening prevalence of orange as today’s chic colour for baby gifts; about Frankenstein as a sort of baby and a baby as a sort of Godzillas. In doing so she opens up an odd and tender world of wonder.
Hotel Tiberias: A Tale of Two Grandfathers
Hotel Tiberias: A Tale of Two Grandfathers
Sebastian Hope
¥77.01
Part history, part travel journal and part autobiography, ‘Hotel Tiberias’ is a journey of many layers and resonances, as Sebastian Hope follows the tumultuous story of his family’s hotel in Palestine.
A Good Time to be a Girl: Don’t Lean In, Change the System
A Good Time to be a Girl: Don’t Lean In, Change the System
Helena Morrissey
¥110.46
Five years have passed since women were exhorted to ‘Lean In’. Over that time, the world has transformed beyond all expectations. But why should anyone ‘lean in’ to a patriarchal system that is out of date? Why not change it entirely for the good of us all? In A Good Time to be a Girl, Helena Morrissey sets out how we might achieve the next big breakthrough towards a truly inclusive modern society. Drawing on her experience as a City CEO, mother of nine, and founder of the influential 30% Club which campaigns for gender-balanced UK company boards, her manifesto for new ways of working, living, loving and raising families is for everyone, not just women. Making a powerful case for diversity and difference in any workplace, she shows how, together, we can develop smarter thinking and broader definitions of success. Gender balance, in her view, is an essential driver of economic prosperity and part of the solution to the many problems we face today. Her approach is not aimed merely at training a few more women in working practices that have outlived their usefulness. Instead, this book sets out a way to reinvent the game – not at the expense of men but in ways that are right and relevant for a digital age. It is a powerful guide to success for us all.
Being Wagner: The Triumph of the Will
Being Wagner: The Triumph of the Will
Simon Callow
¥73.58
The perfect introduction to the Master. One hundred and thirty-five years after his death, Richard Wagner’s music dramas stand at the centre of the culture of classical music. They have never been more popular, nor so violently controversial and divisive. As a man, he was a walking contradiction: aggressive, flirtatious, disciplined, capricious, heroic, visionary and poisonously anti-Semitic. His ten great mature masterpieces constitute an unmatched body of work, created against a backdrop of poverty, revolution, violent controversy, critical contempt and hysterical hero-worship. His work often dealt with myth, but his own life had the character of a fable. At one point, in his early fifties, desperately poor after a life of heroic productivity, he had four lengthy operas written with no hope of seeing them done, when, as if in a fairy-tale, he was rescued by a beautiful young king with limitless wealth. When one of those works, Tristan and Isolde, was at last performed, it revolutionised classical music at a stroke. Wagner went on to create The Ring of the Nibelung: a vast epic in four massive segments, ushering gods and dwarves, heroes and thugs, dragons and rainbows onto the stage. This was the apotheosis of German art as he saw it, so extreme in its demands that he had to train a generation of singers and players to perform it, and erect a custom-built theatre to house it. Wagner died, exhausted, after creating one final piece – Parsifal – that seems to point to an even more radical new future for music. Simon Callow plunges the reader headlong into Wagner’s world, examining the intellectual and artistic climate in which Wagner, a composer like no other who ever lived, extreme in everything, creator of perhaps the most sublime and most troubling body of work in the history of music.
Prince Harry: The Inside Story
Prince Harry: The Inside Story
Duncan Larcombe
¥66.22
Prince Henry of Wales has emerged as the unexpected jewel in the crown of the modern British monarchy. Despite his unruly antics, for which he’s made headlines all over the world, Harry’s popularity rivals that of the Queen herself. Heartthrob and loveable rogue, he has won the public’s heart Duncan Larcombe’s insightful and highly entertaining biography of the rebellious royal recalls Harry’s Eton days, his military career and his tempestuous love life. Despite a string of exploits (not forgetting the notorious Nazi fancy dress incident), Harry has a mysterious gift. With a twinkle in his eye and natural charm in abundance, he can seemingly withstand even the most scandalous of media storms. Since his military career has ended, all eyes are on Harry wondering what life, career and love have in store for the maverick prince. This is the inside story of how the cheeky teenager has grown and matured into a respected soldier, charitable fundraiser and national figurehead who still retains his reputation as the most entertaining resident of Buckingham Palace.
Nobody’s Son: Part 1 of 3: All Alex ever wanted was a family of his own
Nobody’s Son: Part 1 of 3: All Alex ever wanted was a family of his own
Cathy Glass
¥21.97
Born in a prison and removed from his drug-dependent mother, rejection is all that 7-year-old Alex knows. When Cathy is asked to foster little Alex, aged 7, her immediate reaction is: Why can’t he stay with his present carers for the last month? He’s already had many moves since coming into care as a toddler and he’ll only be with her a short while before he goes to live with his permanent adoptive family. But the present carers are expecting a baby and the foster mother isn’t coping, so Alex goes to live with Cathy. He settles easily and is very much looking forward to having a forever family of his own. The introductions and move to his adoptive family go well. But Alex is only with them for a week when problems begin. What happens next is both shocking and upsetting, and calls into question the whole adoption process.
Taken: Part 2 of 3
Taken: Part 2 of 3
Rosie Lewis
¥24.33
Experienced foster carer, Rosie Lewis, takes on the heart-breaking case of Megan, a baby born with a drug addiction and a cleft palate. Addicted to drugs from birth because of her mother’s substance abuse during pregnancy, new-born Megan is taken into Rosie’s loving care. Rosie is supposed to help Megan find her new permanent home, but it turns out that Megan has already found her ‘forever mummy’ in Rosie. Rosie grows incredibly attached to Megan and applies to adopt her, but the system refuses her in favour of a young couple and Rosie is devastated. Against all her instincts, Rosie does her job and prepares Megan for her new ‘forever family’, but everything about Megan leaving feels wrong. When Rosie learns a few months later that Megan’s adoption has broken down, she is saddened but also filled with hope – will this little girl be allowed to return to her true ‘forever home’?