Bad Boris
¥58.76
Read all about the badness of Bad Boris... Though his mother's pride and joy, Boris was a nervous boy, But Boris had a cunning plan - one day he'd be superman, He whizzed around the crowded streets,Smash doors and stealing sweats,Whilst shouting out some very rude names,Boris stole computer games.
Kings and Queens - A Very Peculiar History
¥58.76
Which king's guards massacred a group of his supporters by mistake? Who had an oversized tongue and had to slobber when they ate food? Who was so large when they died that they had to be buried in a square coffin? Who survived seven assassination attempts? As you can tell from the bizarre questions above, it wasn't all thrones and sceptres for British kings and queens. Some of them were completely batty, and others were downright vicious. On the other hand, some monarchs were an icon to the people and represented the power and importance of Britain and England. 'Kings & Queens, A Very Peculiar History' explores some of the most marvellous monarchs to have ruled Britain and ekes out their bizarre habits and idiosyncracies, featuring quirky stories and fascinating facts and lists.
Pulitzer Prize Poetry
¥58.76
Poetry is a fascinating use of language. With almost a million words at its command it is not surprising that the English language have produced some of the most beautiful, moving and descriptive verse through the centuries. In this series we look at individual poets who have shaped and influenced their craft and cement their place in our heritage. In this volume we look at the works of Edwin Arlington Robinson who won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry three times including the very first ever awarded.
Star Wars Epic Yarns: A New Hope
¥58.76
Jedi apprentices and little princesses will delight in this (heart)felt retelling of the Star Wars saga. And so will Star Wars fans of any age! The series launches with the original trilogy, and every word counts in these small but perfectly formed yarns. That's because each volume features 12 iconic scenes, handcrafted in felt and pithily summarized in just a single word. The attention to detail is eye-opening; the proportions are just-right for small hands; the fun is guaranteed. In A New Hope, Princess Leia sends a hologram message through R2-D2, Luke Skywalker will learn how to use a lightsaber, and our heroes triumph. and TM Lucasfilm Ltd. Used Under Authorization
This I May
¥58.76
Dominic Clemow first began to write poems as a way of expressing feelings of sadness and loss after a relationship ended. His interest in poetry has grown and developed since then. He writes with feeling and passion, particularly about the pivotal moments of life, such as going on a date, marriage and break-ups - times when we are faced with choices that may transform our lives for ever. I love you more than words can say, More and more every single day, You're the one I think about before I go to sleep, And the one I'm happy with, so I'm yours to keep.
Ninjas Have Issues
¥58.76
Ninjas are awesomestealthy, cunning experts of infiltration and close combat. But like us all, they must sometimes grapple with the small but significant problems of everyday life. For instance, ninjas have issues with squirrels. They also have trouble with chimneys, pigeons, blow darts, and mimes. They really like hiding, going undercover, and piatas, but have MAJOR issues with samurai, giant fighting robots, and unicorns. Through it all, they secretly long for just one thing. Author of the breakout hit Zombies Hate Stuff, Greg Stones turns his popular, playfully absurd illustration style to the badass but surprisingly issue-fraught world of ninjas, detailing their inner lives and mortal combat with a subversive sense of the absurd.
Cruel to Be Kind: Saying no can save a child’s life
¥58.86
Cruel To Be Kind is the true story of Max, aged 6. He is fostered by Cathy while his mother is in hospital with complications from type 2 diabetes. Fostering Max gets off to a bad start when his mother, Caz, complains and threatens Cathy even before Max has moved in. Cathy and her family are shocked when they first meet Max. But his social worker isn’t the only one in denial; his whole family are too.
In My Dreams I Dance
¥58.86
Struck down with polio at the age of two and a half, Anne overcame the prejudice rife in her native village in Kenya, where neighbours believed she was cursed and called her a snake because of her disability, which left her paralysed below the waist. Losing her mother at a tender age, and sent to a school far away from home, she achieved fantastic academic results, amidst the challenges of a military coup. She went to university and qualified as a teacher, and fell in love with a British man who truly valued her defiant spirit. She moved from a world with no running water to make a life for herself in modern Britain. Where, against all odds, she bore a child, and went on to being the first East African to compete in her sport internationally. Anne is currently in further training, hoping to represent Great Britain at the 2012 Paralympics.
Breaking the Silence
¥58.86
From the Sunday Times bestselling author comes a true story of two deeply troubled boys both in need of a loving home. This is the sixth title in the series. The Watsons are astonished when they answer their front door to find their case worker with a small boy on the doorstep. Jenson is just nine years old. He was removed from his home thirty minutes earlier when it was discovered his mother had left him at home while she went on holiday with her boyfriend. A couple of weeks later Casey is in for a second shock when she is asked to take a second nine-year-old boy, Georgie. Georgie is autistic and has been in a children’s home since he was a toddler. The home is closing and social services need somewhere temporary for him to stay. With her own grown up son, Kieron, having Asperger’s (a mild form of autism), Casey knows this is one child she cannot say no to. The relationship between Jenson and Georgie is difficult from the outset. Jenson is rebellious and full of attitude and he kicks off at anything, constantly winding Georgie up. Georgie doesn’t cope well with change and is soon in a permanent state of stress. Despite Casey’s best efforts, her innate love for the children is being tested and she begins to question if she can handle Jenson’s cruelty. But over time it becomes clear that the boys have formed an unlikely bond. Could this be the solution to all of their troubles?
Days Like These:A life cut short by cancer, a love that touched the world
¥58.86
When Kristian Anderson received the diagnosis that every devoted husband and father fears, he refused to resign himself silently to fate. He began a brave and candid blog as he underwent treatment for cancer: sharing the joy of each small victory, the devastation in every setback, and the agonising realisation that he wouldn’t always be able to protect and comfort his little boys when they were lonely or afraid, or grow old with his wife and soulmate. His posts full of hope, faith, and breathtaking honesty captured Australian hearts, then swept across the Pacific, gathering followers. A poignant video tribute for his wife Rachel became an internet phenomenon, attracting messages from well-wishers across the globe. After his death, their love inspired Rachel to bring together Kristian’s blog entries combined with her own intimate reflections. Days Like These is a heartbreaking account of her husband’s final battle, his strength and courage, but it is also a story about coming back from grief, and learning how to live again.
The Girls Who Went to War:Heroism, heartache and happiness in the wartime women’
¥58.86
The personal accounts of three young women who joined up in 1940. In the summer of 1940, Britain stood alone against Germany. The British Army stood at just over one and a half million men, while the Germans had three times that many, and a population almost twice the size of ours from which to draw new waves of soldiers. Clearly, in the fight against Hitler, manpower alone wasn’t going to be enough. Eighteen-year-old Jessie Ward defied her mother to join the ATS, Margery Pott signed up for the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force, and nanny Kathleen Skin the WRNS. They left quiet homes for the rigours of training, the camaraderie of the young women who worked together so closely and to face a war that would change their lives for ever. Overall, more than half a million women served in the armed forces during the Second World War. This book tells the story of just three of them – one from the Army, one from the Navy and one from the Air Force. But in their stories are reflected the lives of hundreds of thousands of others like them – ordinary girls who went to war, wearing their uniforms with pride.
Another Forgotten Child
¥58.86
A new memoir from Sunday Times and New York Times bestselling author Cathy Glass. Eight-year-old Aimee was on the child protection register at birth. Her five older siblings were taken into care many years ago. So no one can understand why she was left at home to suffer for so long. It seems Aimee was forgotten. The social services are looking for a very experienced foster carer to look after Aimee and, when she reads the referral, Cathy understands why. Despite her reservations, Cathy agrees to Aimee on – there is something about her that reminds Cathy of Jodie (the subject of ‘Damaged’ and the most disturbed child Cathy has cared for), and reading the report instantly tugs at her heart strings. When she arrives, Aimee is angry. And she has every right to be. She has spent the first eight years of her life living with her drug-dependent mother in a flat that the social worker described as ‘not fit for human habitation’. Aimee is so grateful as she snuggles into her bed at Cathy’s house on the first night that it brings Cathy to tears. Aimee’s aggressive mother is constantly causing trouble at contact, and makes sweeping allegations against Cathy and her family in front of her daughter as well. It is a trying time for Cathy, and it makes it difficult for Aimee to settle. But as Aimee begins to trust Cathy, she starts to open up. And the more Cathy learns about Aimee’s life before she came into care, the more horrified she becomes. It’s clear that Aimee should have been rescued much sooner and as her journey seems to be coming to a happy end, Cathy can’t help but reflect on all the other ‘forgotten children’ that are still suffering…
Our Vinnie
¥58.86
The infamous Canterbury Estate in Bradford, a hotbed of crime, drink and drugs, was a law unto itself in the ’70s. So when one of their own was wronged in any way, the community always had its own way of dealing with it. The first title in a series of gritty family sagas, Our Vinnie accounts the dramatic true story of a brother’s determination to avenge his younger sister’s rape. Josie was just 11 when her Vinnie, then 14, was taken away to a detention centre. Distraught by his absence and left alone with indifferent parents, when she escapes from one of their rows she naively enters the house of a neighbour, Melvin, who – horrifically – leads her upstairs and overpowers her. Convinced by her friend Carol, Josie tells her sister Lyndsey about the rape but, with Vinnie out of the picture, Lyndsey uses the information for her own ends. When Vinnie returns, hardened by years inside the system, his outrage on discovering the truth is severe. And with new abuses continually coming to light, a cataclysmic series of violent events begins to spiral out of control… Dramatic and shocking, Our Vinnie is an unbelievable page-turner, documenting a community forsaken by society, and one brother’s unrelenting determination to take justice into his own hands.
My Mam Shirley (Tales of the Notorious Hudson Family, Book 3)
¥58.86
Behind the notorious Hudson men who dominated the Canterbury Estate for over 30 years were the girls, and my mam Shirley. Whether marrying into or determined to escape from it, the third instalment of this gritty series recounts the incredible stories of the unflinching women behind the legendary Hudson family. The Canterbury Estate in Bradford during the ’50s and ’60s was a tight-knit community reared on poverty, crime and violence, and at the top of the heap were the infamous Hudson family. But it wasn’t just the boys who had a story to tell: from matriarch Annie, who gave birth to 13 children, to daughters Margaret and Eunice, who married up and out, each had a personality as indomitable as the last. Then came Shirley Read, who was just 17 when she fell in love with Keith, one of the Hudson lads. To Shirley, the only child of affluent parents, the poverty of the unruly estate was as exciting as it was mysterious; newspapers for tablecloths, jam jars for cups, and, even by that time, no electricity. But it was a friendship forged with Annie and June, the younger Hudson sisters, that would teach Shirley not only to how to survive, Canterbury-style, but would also give her the strength to overcome an unexpected personal tragedy that would soon become a nightmare for women across the world… Eye-opening and warm, this is the vivid account of the ‘Tucker’ girls; the resourceful women at the helm of a notorious Bradford family who will never be forgotten.
City Kid
¥58.86
From the author of international bestsellers A Circle of Children and Lovey comes an inspiring true story of a gifted teacher’s determination to understand the ‘rotten’ city kid everyone has given up on. Sitting quiet and withdrawn at a battered school desk, Luke had the looks of a shy angel – and a past that special needs teacher Mary MacCracken could barely believe. Already Luke had been picked up 24 times by the police. He’d set over a dozen major fires, and had a staggering record of thefts. No adult could reach him, no teacher could control him, and no policeman could cow him. All this – and Luke was only seven and a half years old. Trying to help Luke was Mary MacCracken’s job – and a seemingly impossible challenge. This is the remarkable story of how the impossible came true.
Kim Kardashian
¥58.86
Bestselling biographer Sean Smith takes on the world’s number one reality star, Kim Kardashian West. This is the ultimate insight into the reality behind the woman who has defined fame in our modern culture – her childhood, her family, her turbulent love life and the multi-millionaire lifestyle. Kim Kardashian West is a thoroughly modern woman. She enjoyed a privileged upbringing in a Beverley Hills mansion and, ironically, her childhood ambition was to appear in the long-running US reality series Real World. Instead she became the star of Keeping Up With the Kardashians while her own life story read like an X rated version of Dynasty…murder, elopement, domestic violence, sex tape, quickie divorce, churchgoing and impossibly glamorous designer dresses. Now married to one of the biggest stars on the planet, Kanye West, she has begun her own dynasty with the birth of daughter, North, and her son, Saint. In a world that follows her every move, Sean Smith uncovers what it took to get her to the top and how she intends to stay there. From her Armenian heritage and devotion to her family to the fabulous fashions and a body to die for, this is the truth behind the undisputed Queen of celebrity – the real story.
Smile Though Your Heart Is Breaking
¥58.86
A tale of Catherine Cookson-esque tragedy and Northern grit, Pauline Prescott's life story will shock and amaze. A mother and a faithful friend, Pauline is not your typical politician's wife. She is immensely proud of her role as a housewife and over the near-forty years she has been in the public eye she has remained discreet, dignified and deeply loyal. The daughter of a bricklayer, who died when she was young, Pauline came from humble backgrounds. At 15 she found herself pregnant by a married US serviceman. Resisting all attempts to give her son up for adoption, she struggled on for three years, until she was finally persuaded it was for his own good. She never expected to see him again. She trained as a hairdresser and got a good job at a salon in Chester. Soon afterwards she met John, a dashing waiter who whisked her off her feet and married her. John's dreams of becoming a union activist meant that he spent the next eight years in university. It was Pauline's wages that paid for everything. She never complained. John quickly rose through the ranks and suddenly, it seemed, he was the Deputy Prime Minister. Pauline went almost overnight from a Hull hairdresser to a key participant at political events. Always immaculate, she quickly became known for her fashion, style and stunning hats. But Pauline's world was turned upside down when, more than forty years after she put her son up for adoption, John received a call to say the press had tracked him down. The decision to give up her son had been heart-rending. All these years later, Pauline was overjoyed to be reunited with the child she had pined for for so long, finally getting the happy ending she had dreamed of for years. Throughout John's career, Pauline has had to cope with the lack of privacy his position has afforded their family. Through it all she has emerged a figure of admiration. Loyal, sharp, good humoured and articulate, Pauline has entranced the nation. Now tells us her story in her own words. Warm, moving and at times painfully sad, Pauline's autobiography is an honest account of a fascinating life.
At the Coalface: The memoir of a pit nurse
¥58.86
A heart-warming story of a woman who devoted her life to helping others. This is the memoir of Joan, who started nursing in the 1940s and whose experiences took her into the Yorkshire mining pits and through the tumult of the 1984-85 miners’ strike. Joan Hart always knew what she wanted to do with her life. Born in South Yorkshire in 1932, she started her nursing training when she was 16, the youngest age girls could do so at the time. She continued working after she married and her work took her to London and Doncaster, caring for children and miners. When she took a job as a pit nurse in Doncaster in 1974, she found that in order to be accepted by the men under her care, she would have to become one of them. Most of the time rejecting a traditional nurse’s uniform and donning a baggy miner’s suit, pit boots, a hardhat and a headlamp, Joan resolved always to go down to injured miners and bring them out of the pit herself. Over 15 years Joan grew to know the miners not only as a nurse, but as a confidante and friend. She tended to injured miners underground, rescued men trapped in the pits, and provided support for them and their families during the bitter miners’ strike which stretched from March 1984 to 1985. Moving and uplifting, this is a story of one woman’s life, marriage and work; it is guaranteed to make readers laugh, cry, and smile.
Taken
¥58.86
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’?
Notes to my Mother-in-Law
¥58.86
‘My mother-in-law Annie lived with us for 17 years and was picture-book perfect.’ It took a while before the family realised that Annie was increasingly (as she would put it) 'Mutt and Jeff'. So Phyllida began to write out the day's gossip at the kitchen table, putting her notes by Annie's bed before going to hers. One night as heer husband wandered off to bed he muttering darkly that she spent so much time each evening writing to Annie she could have written a book. 'And illustrated it!' Here it is. It is a book full of the delights of a warm and loving household. Of Boot the Cat being sick after over-indulging in spiders; the hunt for cleaning products from the dawn of time; persistently and mysteriously malfunctioning hearing aids; an unusual and potentially hilarious use for a clove of garlic; and the sad disappearance of coconut logs from the local sweetshop. It's about the special place at the heart of a home held by a woman born in another age. Who polished the brass when it was 'looking red at her'. Who still bore a scar on her hands from being hit by her employer when, as a young woman, she was in service. Who could turn the heel of a sock and the collar of a shirt, and make rock-cakes, bread pudding and breast of lamb with barley.
Not that Kinda Girl
¥58.86
Lisa Maxwell, an addition to the quick-witted Loose Women team, is a bundle of fun and laughter and a natural storyteller. Here, for the first time, she tells her astonishing story - a tale of remarkable spirit, incredible experiences and family secrets. A much-loved presenter and respected actress, Lisa got her first onscreen role at the age of just 11. In the eighties she became a TV presenter on series like Splash and No Limits, interviewing the icons of the time and partying with the likes of George Michael, Robert Downey Junior and Michael Hutchence, before moving more firmly into comedy, appearing on sketch shows like, The Les Dennis Laughter Show, The Russ Abbott Show and her very own, self-titled, The Lisa Maxwell Show. She narrowly missed out on the part of Daphne in a little show called Frasier. And then for seven years played the part of The Bill's DI Sam Nixon, before joining Loose Women in 2009, where she quickly became an audience favourite. But behind the fun, glamour and onscreen success, is a south London girl, hiding the secret she's been taught never to talk about. An illegitimate child, brought up in Elephant and Castle, Lisa's life very nearly took a different path. Lucky for her, her dear old Nan had a kind heart, and in a last minute change of plan she was brought home to her grandparent's flat on the Rockingham Estate. With warmth, honesty and humour, Lisa takes us to the heart of the Elephant, revealing a home filled with love, laughter and drama. From having the drawer of an old chest for her bed to hiding from the Tally Man, waiting for her Nan outside the betting shop to dabbling in petty crime, discovering her dad was still alive, and always looking for a way to be in the lime light, Lisa has written a colourful memoir of life as a daughter, a granddaughter, a mother, and an actress.