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Castle in the Air
Castle in the Air
Diana Wynne Jones
¥51.50
A magical Arabian Nights tale from the captivating creator of fantasy, Diana Wynne Jones. The dazzling sequel to Howls Moving Castle, now a major animated film. Far to the south in the Land of Ingary, lives a young carpet merchant called Abdullah. In his dreams, he is the long-lost son of a great prince. This dream is a complete castle in the air… or is it? Abdullah’s day-dreams suddenly start to come true when he meets the exquisite Flower-in-the-Night, daughter of the ferocious Sultan of Zanzib. Fate has destined them for each other, but a bad-tempered genie, a hideous djinn, and various villanous bandits have their own ideas. When Flower-in-the-Night is carried off, Abdullah is determined to rescue her – if he can find her.
Witch Week (The Chrestomanci Series, Book 3)
Witch Week (The Chrestomanci Series, Book 3)
Diana Wynne Jones
¥51.50
Glorious new rejacket of a Diana Wynne Jones favourite, featuring Chrestomanci – now a book with extra bits! SOMEONE IN THIS CLASS IS A WITCH When the note, written in ordinary ballpoint, turns up in the homework books Mr Crossley is marking, he is very upset. For this is Larwood House, a school for witch-orphans, where witchcraft is utterly forbidden. And yet magic keeps breaking out all over the place - like measles! The last thing they need is a visit from the Divisional Inquisitor. If only Chrestomanci could come and sort out all the trouble.
The Sunflower Forest
The Sunflower Forest
Torey Hayden
¥45.62
Bestselling author Torey Hayden’s novel poignantly tells of a daughter’s attempt to grow up in the shadow of her mother’s haunted past. Warm, melancholy and evocatively rendered this book captures the essence of a family touched by sadness. A haunting tale of a family who can't escape the consequences of their mother's tormented childhood. Hayden, a master storyteller, again turns her talent to fiction in this novel that combines a psychological thriller with a nuanced family drama. Lesley’s Hungarian mother Mara – charming, childlike, lovable – is traumatized by her adolescent Holocaust experiences. Though her American husband and daughters try to live a normal life, Mara holds them thrall to her moods and quirks. Lesley struggles to understand, but dealing with Mara is a severe strain which sets her apart from her peers. But when Mara’s psychosis results in tragedy, Lesley goes to Wales in search of her mother’s remembered joy.
Madness: A Bipolar Life (Text Only)
Madness: A Bipolar Life (Text Only)
Marya Hornbacher
¥72.30
A searing, unflinching and deeply moving account of Marya Hornbacher’s personal experience of living with bipolar disorder. From the age of six, Marya Hornbacher knew that something was terribly wrong with her, manifesting itself in anorexia and bulimia which she documented in her bestselling memoir ‘Wasted’. But it was only eighteen years later that she learned the true underlying reason for her distress: bipolar disorder. In this new, equally raw and frank account, Marya Hornbacher tells the story of her ongoing battle with this most pervasive and devastating of mental illnesses; how, as she puts it, ‘it crept over me like a vine, sending out tentative shoots in my childhood, taking deeper root in my adolescence, growing stronger in my early adulthood, eventually covering my body and face until I was unrecognizable, trapped, immobilized’. She recounts the soaring highs and obliterating lows of her condition; the savage moodswings and impossible strains it placed on her relationships; the physical danger it has occasionally put her in; the endless cycle of illness and recovery. She also tackles the paradoxical aspects of bipolar disorder – how it has been the drive behind some of her most creative work – and the reality of a life lived in limbo, ‘caught between the world of the mad and the world of the sane’. Yet for all the torment it documents, this is a book about survival, about living day to day with bipolar disorder – the constant round of therapy and medication – and managing it. As well as her own highly personal story, the book includes interviews with family, spouses and friends of sufferers, the people who help their loved ones carry on. Visceral and inspiring, lyrical and sometimes even funny, ‘Madness’ will take its place alongside other classics of the genre such as ‘An Unquiet Mind’ and ‘Girl, Interrupted’.
Disguise
Disguise
Hugo Hamilton
¥66.22
Hugo Hamilton, the internationally acclaimed author of ‘The Speckled People’ and ‘Sailor in the Wardrobe’, turns his hand back to fiction with a compelling drama tracing Berlin's central historical importance throughout the twentieth century. 1945. At the end of the second world war in Berlin, a young mother loses her two-year-old boy in the bombings. She flees to the south, where her father finds a young foundling of the same age among the refugee trains to replace the boy. He makes her promise never to tell anyone, including her husband – still fighting on the Russian front – that the boy is not her own. Nobody will know the difference. 2008. Gregor Liedmann is a Jewish man now in his sixties. He's an old rocker who ran away from home, a trumpet player, a revolutionary stone-thrower left over from the 1968 generation. On a single day spent gathering fruit in an orchard outside Berlin with family and friends, Gregor looks back over his life, sifting through fact and memory in order to establish the truth. What happened on that journey south in the final days of the war? Why did his grandfather Emil disappear, and why did the Gestapo torture uncle Max? Here, in the calmness of the orchard, along with his ex-wife Mara and son Daniel, Gregor tries to unlock the secret of his past. In his first novel since the best-selling memoir ‘The Speckled People’, Hugo Hamilton has created a truly compelling story of lost identity, and a remarkable reflection on the ambiguity of belonging.
Broken Soup
Broken Soup
Jenny Valentine
¥44.15
An intriguing, compelling and moving novel from the award-winning author of Finding Violet Park. When the good-looking boy with the American accent presses the dropped negative into Rowan's hand, she's sure it's all a big mistake. But next moment he's gone, lost in the crowd of bustling shoppers. And she can't afford to lose her place in the checkout queue – after all, if she doesn't take the groceries home, nobody else will. Rowan has more responsibilities than most girls her age. These days, she pretty much looks after her little sister single-handedly – which doesn't leave much time for friends or fun. So when she finds out that Bee from school saw the whole thing, it piques her curiosity. Who was the boy? Why was he so insistent that the negative belonged to Rowan?
Garden Natural History (Collins New Naturalist Library, Book 102)
Garden Natural History (Collins New Naturalist Library, Book 102)
Stefan Buczacki
¥192.67
In a much-anticipated addition to the New Naturalist library, Stefan Buczacki takes a broad look at the relatively unexplored world of the garden, and its relevance within the context of natural history overall. Though gardens are often viewed merely as artificial creations rather than easily accessible places to observe and encourage wildlife, ‘Garden Natural History’ rectifies this misconception. By viewing gardens within the wider context of the British ecological landscape, Buczacki follows the garden's development as a habitat within which vertebrates, invertebrates and native and alien plants alike have been introduced and to which they have adapted. ‘Garden Natural History’ offers a fascinating insight into the diversity of organisms and ecological processes that constitute the garden, whilst also highlighting the role of the gardener as conservator and showing how the garden can inspire all naturalists.
Black Dog (Cooper and Fry Crime Series, Book 1)
Black Dog (Cooper and Fry Crime Series, Book 1)
Stephen Booth
¥11.77
Dark, intense and utterly compelling, Black Dog was an extraordinary first novel from a writer who has rapidly become the most promising crime author to emerge in the genre in years. ‘Where Cooper stood was remote and isolated… but the smell that lingered under the trees was of blood’ The long hot Peak District summer came to an end when they found Laura Vernon's body. But for local policeman Ben Cooper the work has just begun. His community is hiding a young girl’s killer and a past as dark as the Derbyshire night. It seems Laura was the keeper of secrets beyond her years and, in a case where no-one is innocent, everyone is a suspect. But Cooper’s local knowledge and instincts are about to face an even greater challenge. The ambitious DC Diane Fry has been called in from another division, a woman as ruthless as she is attractive…
Blind to the Bones (Cooper and Fry Crime Series, Book 4)
Blind to the Bones (Cooper and Fry Crime Series, Book 4)
Stephen Booth
¥79.76
A death in the family-from-hell bring Detectives Fry and Cooper to a remote and unfriendly rural community in their fourth psychological thriller. 'And as it grew dark, Withens became almost entirely silent. Except for the screaming.' A small village in the Peak District, Withens is troubled by theft and vandalism, mostly generated by local family-from-hell, the Oxleys. Now it is the focus of a murder investigation – a man's body has been found on the bleak moors nearby, and the man is an Oxley. To crack the case, DC Ben Cooper must break open the delinquent clan. His boss, DS Diane Fry, is also in Withens. Grim new evidence has turned up in the case of a missing student but her parents refuse to believe she could be dead. The darkness in Withens's heart is growing. And things are only going to get nastier…
Daddy’s Girls
Daddy’s Girls
Tasmina Perry
¥61.51
The book beaches were made for. The Balcon sisters are London's paparazzi darlings. Serena, the country's most beautiful actress, Venetia the glamorous designer, Camilla the rising political star and Cate the feisty magazine editor. They have wealth, privilege and sizzling sex lives. But money doesn't buy you love. When their aristocratic and tyrannical father Oswald Balcon is found dead, the finger of suspicion points towards his glamorous daughters and their dazzling lives. Suddenly we find that beneath the ritzy fa?ade of the Balcon family lies a web of deceit and betrayal that hides a thirty-year-old secret that threatens to destroy them all. From the sun drenched beaches of Mustique to Manhattan's elite society circuit. From the exclusive fashion houses of Milan to the star-studded streets of Cannes, the Balcon Sisters play out their lives in a whirl of glitz and the ultra chic. But as tragedy and danger stalks each one of them, the scene is set for a stunning climax.
Ghost Girl: The true story of a child in desperate peril – and a teacher who sav
Ghost Girl: The true story of a child in desperate peril – and a teacher who sav
Torey Hayden
¥56.11
A stunning and poignant account of an extraordinary teacher's determination from the author of the #1 Sunday Times bestsellers The Tiger's Child and One Child. Jadie never spoke, never laughed, never cried. She spent every waking hour locked in her own private world of shadows. But nothing in Torey Hayden's experience had prepared her for the nightmare Jadie revealed to her when finally persuaded to break her self-imposed silence. It was a story too painful, too horrific for Hayden's professional colleagues to acknowledge. But Torey Hayden could not close her ears… or her heart. A little girl was trapped in a living hell of unspeakable memories. And it would take every ounce of courage, compassion, and love that one remarkable teacher possessed to rid the "Ghost Girl" of the malevolent spirits that haunted her.
Somebody Else’s Kids
Somebody Else’s Kids
Torey Hayden
¥63.77
From the author of Sunday Times bestsellers One Child and Ghost Girl comes a heartbreaking story of one teacher's determination to turn a chaotic group of damaged children into a family. They were all just "somebody else's kids" – four problem children placed in Torey Hayden's class because nobody knew what else to do with them. They were a motley group of kids in great pain: a small boy who echoed other people's words and repeated weather forecast; a beautiful seven-year-old girl brain damaged by savage parental beatings; an angry ten-year-old who had watched his stepmother murder his father; a shy twelve-year-old who had been cast out of Catholic school when she became pregnant. But they shared one thing in common: a remarkable teacher who would never stop caring – and who would share with them the love and understanding they had never known to help them become a family.
Mother of the Bride
Mother of the Bride
Kate Lawson
¥51.50
3 women. 1 wedding. Whose big day is it anyway…? Grab your big hat and pearls for the funniest read of the year, a must-read for fans of Carole Matthews and Jane Green. Molly Foster's daughter Jess is getting married… To Molly's delight - and surprise. And with Molly's show featuring a wedding countdown, the whole town of Wells-next-the Sea is ecstatic - even as Molly worries that groom-to-be Max's commitment may not be all it seems… Meanwhile, Jess's control freak step-mother Marnie is determined to turn the event into a chi-chi society bash - a world away from the day that Jess envisaged. But does Jess really know what she wants? Especially when she meets the gorgeous Oliver… Though there's no going back now - is there? Can Jess take back control of her wedding - or will the mothers of the bride run the show?
Dartmoor (Collins New Naturalist Library, Book 111)
Dartmoor (Collins New Naturalist Library, Book 111)
Ian Mercer
¥385.34
New Naturalist Dartmoor explores the complex and fascinating history of one of southern England's greatest National Parks, an area of enormous interest to naturalists and tourists alike. Dartmoor is said to be the loneliest wilderness in England. This has been said more often of Dartmoor than any other part of our country. Traditionally in the world of fiction as well as that of fact, Dartmoor has been renowned as a vast and empty moorland area, the property of nature rather than of man. It has always been the public's idea of a lonely place. Not many generations ago it was regarded with a certain amount of awe and nowadays it is one of our most important centres of recreation, an island in upland England of abundant interest to the naturalist. In 1951 it became a National Park, one of the first of several places that have been so designated in Great Britain, helping to conserve and promote both its beauty and cultural heritage. Spanning miles of open moorland, whilst also hiding small secluded river valleys, rare plants and endangered birds, Dartmoor is a place of variety, and has evolved in the public's mind from a forbidding place to that of romance and mystery. In the latest addition to the long-running New Naturalist series, Ian Mercer sets out to explore every aspect of this important area of southern Devon. Focusing not only on its extensive history and physical landscape, but also its cultural place within Great Britain, this is both a comprehensive and engaging look at the wild and rugged landscape that has inspired so many poets, painters and musicians over countless centuries.
Leonardo and the Death Machine
Leonardo and the Death Machine
Robert J. Harris
¥45.22
Adventure thriller set in Renaissance Italy starring Leonardo da Vinci as a young apprentice who witnesses a murder and becomes involved in a plot to take over the city. LEONARDO AND THE DEATH MACHINE is first and foremost a thriller, set against the background of Renaissance Italy. However, the Leonardo of the title is in fact Leonardo da Vinci. This is a totally fictional adventure, but it COULD have happened. When we first meet Leonardo we find him apprenticed to a successful artist in Florence. But although he yearns to be a great artist himself, he's rather disillusioned with his apprenticeship, which has made him more of an errand boy than an art student. Then, when an impromptu street football match ends in an arm injury for his friend Sandro (whom history will know as Botticelli), Leonardo leaps at the opportunity to help out the unfortunate painter who has been commissioned to paint a portrait for the rich Medici family. Little does our young hero know that soon he will be dragged into murder and intrigue, and will be fleeing for his life!
A Time of War
A Time of War
Katharine Kerr
¥80.25
Book seven of the celebrated Deverry series, an epic fantasy rooted in Celtic mythology that intricately interweaves human and elven history over several hundred years. Book seven of the celebrated Deverry series, an epic fantasy rooted in Celtic mythology that intricately interweaves human and elven history over several hundred years.
The Fire Dragon
The Fire Dragon
Katharine Kerr
¥44.73
Book eleven of the celebrated Deverry series, an epic fantasy rooted in Celtic mythology that intricately interweaves human and elven history over several hundred years. The Fire Dragon tells two separate stories: one set in the “present” of 1117, and one set in the past, the era of the Civil Wars. In the present, Raena’s trouble-making in Cerr Cawnen leads to terrible death and destruction but may ultimately succeed in offering the final working-out of Rhodry’s Wyrd. In the past, Nevyn and Lilli attempt to solve the riddle of the curse tablet, but the price will be high. In this, the eleventh volume in the Deverry cycle and third of the Dragon Mage series, storylines begun in Dawnspell: The Bristling Wood, A Time of Exile and The Black Raven – both the ‘present’ of 1117 and the past – will reach their triumphant and spellbinding conclusion. But there will be more Deverry books to unravel the situation that climaxes The Fire Dragon…
Velocity
Velocity
Dean Koontz
¥56.11
The international bestseller Dean Koontz delivers a masterclass of storytelling suspense in this thriller. What would you do if a serial killer forced you to choose who he murders next? On the windscreen of his SUV, Billy finds the first note. It gives him a choice. If he takes the note to the police, an elderly woman will be killed. If he doesn’t approach the police, a schoolteacher will die. He thinks it’s a hoax. The schoolteacher is killed. Further notes taunt Billy’s conscience, forcing him to decide who lives and who dies. He must think the unthinkable, fast, in an accelerating nightmare. More communications from the killer follow with ever tighter deadlines. Each is more personal, more confrontational than the last until he is isolated, with no one to rely on but himself. Finally, he must risk everything to save the helpless, clueless victims…
Best Loved Hymns and Readings
Best Loved Hymns and Readings
Martin Manser
¥100.06
An indispensable combination of 200 best loved hymns, poems and readings for every occasion, and ideal for personal reflection. Complete with a brief introduction to each piece and its author, this book is a wonderful personal reference and devotional guide. From Away in a Manger to God Save the Queen, and the famous Bible passage on love, 1 Corinthians 13, to Tennyson’s Crossing the Bar, it has passages suitable for every occasion, and has all you need to plan a baptism, a wedding or, should the need arise, a funeral.
Bigger than Hitler – Better than Christ
Bigger than Hitler – Better than Christ
Rik Mayall
¥73.58
In this electrifying autobiography, Rik stands naked in front of his vast legions of fans and disciples and invites them to take communion with the blood he has spilled for them during his thirty year war on show business. He invented alternative comedy with The Young Ones, he brought down the Thatcher administration with The New Statesman and he changed the face of global culture with his masterpiece Bottom. Not only was his number one single ‘Living Doll’ the saviour of rock 'n' roll but he also rescued the British film industry with the vast revenues created by his legendary movie Drop Dead Fred. In 1998, he survived an assassination attempt and spent five days in a coma before he literally came back from the dead. Having completed countless phenomenal feature films, TV series, live extravaganzas and radio voice-overs since then, Rik Mayall is now poised on the brink of a whole new epoch-shattering revolution. For the first time ever, Rik reveals in print the deep inner truth behind his gargantuan ascent to the pinnacle of international light entertainment – the mental hospitals he has broken out of, the television executives he has assaulted, the drugs he has definitely not taken, the charities he has bankrupted, the countless pregnancies he has engendered, and so much more.
Bombs on Aunt Dainty
Bombs on Aunt Dainty
Judith Kerr
¥34.14
Partly autobiographical, this is the second title in Judith Kerr’s internationally acclaimed trilogy of books following the life of Anna through war-torn Germany, to London during the Blitz and her return to Berlin to discover the past… It is hard enough being a teenager in London during the Blitz, finding yourself in love and wondering every night whether you will survive the bombs. But it is even harder for Anna, who is still officially classified as an “enemy alien”. Those bombs are coming from Germany – the country that was once her own. If Hitler invades, can she and her beloved refugee family possibly survive? This was previously published as The Other Way Round.