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An inspiring and heart-warming short story of canine devotion and bravery.Smoky, a baseball-size mass of brown fur, was found in a foxhole in the depths of the New Guinea jungle in the middle of the Second World War. The soldier who found her took the Yorkshire Terrier pup back to base and sold her to Bill, the US serviceman who would adopt her, for three Australian dollars.It was the start of a partnership that saw Smoky save US war plans and ground crew from bombings and bring a life line to stranded men when she laid phone lines through pipes under the runway.Extracted from the bestselling title Beyond The Call Of Duty, this is the story of a remarkable little dog who saw no boundaries. She stayed at Bill’s side throughout the action and to the end of the war.

A BOY WITHOUT HOPE is the heart-breaking story of a boy who didn’t know the meaning of love. A history of abuse and neglect has left Miller destined for life’s scrap heap. But in this turbulent story of conflict and struggle, Casey Watson is determined to help Miller overcome his demons, show him love and give him hope.Casey Watson is back, doing the job she does best – rolling up her sleeves and fostering the children who, on first meeting, seem like hopeless cases. But when she meets Miller and discovers the truth about his disturbing childhood, even Casey begins to doubt if this child will ever be able to accept love.Found naked and alone on a railway track, Miller was just five when he was first admitted into the care system. Emotionally tormented by his biological parents, Miller has never understood how to establish meaningful relationships, and his destructive past, and over 20 failed placements, is sealing his fate in society’s social scrap heap.After a torrent of violent behaviour and numerous failed attempts to help Miller, Casey decides to make an intervention, implementing a severe regime that strips Miller of all control. But soon the emotional demands of Miller’s case start to take their toll on Casey and Mike. Just how far is Casey willing to go to help Miller and save him from his inner demons?

A BOY WITHOUT HOPE is the heart-breaking story of a boy who didn’t know the meaning of love. A history of abuse and neglect has left Miller destined for life’s scrap heap. But in this turbulent story of conflict and struggle, Casey Watson is determined to help Miller overcome his demons, show him love and give him hope.Casey Watson is back, doing the job she does best – rolling up her sleeves and fostering the children who, on first meeting, seem like hopeless cases. But when she meets Miller and discovers the truth about his disturbing childhood, even Casey begins to doubt if this child will ever be able to accept love.Found naked and alone on a railway track, Miller was just five when he was first admitted into the care system. Emotionally tormented by his biological parents, Miller has never understood how to establish meaningful relationships, and his destructive past, and over 20 failed placements, is sealing his fate in society’s social scrap heap.After a torrent of violent behaviour and numerous failed attempts to help Miller, Casey decides to make an intervention, implementing a severe regime that strips Miller of all control. But soon the emotional demands of Miller’s case start to take their toll on Casey and Mike. Just how far is Casey willing to go to help Miller and save him from his inner demons?

What could cause a mother to believe that giving away her newborn baby is her only option? Cathy Glass is about to find out. From author of Sunday Times and New York Times bestseller Damaged comes a harrowing and moving memoir about tiny Harrison, left in Cathy’s care, and the potentially fatal family secret of his beginnings.When Cathy is first asked to foster one-day old Harrison her only concern is if she will remember how to look after a baby. But upon collecting Harrison from the hospital, Cathy realises she has more to worry than she thought when she discovers that his background is shrouded in secrecy.She isn’t told why Harrison is in foster care and his social worker says only a few are aware of his very existence, and if his whereabouts became known his life, and that of his parents, could be in danger. Cathy tries to put her worries aside as she looks after Harrison, a beautiful baby, who is alert and engaging. Cathy and her children quickly bond with Harrison although they know that, inevitably, he will eventually be adopted.But when a woman Cathy doesn’t know starts appearing in the street outside her house acting suspiciously, Cathy fears for her own family’s safety and demands some answers from Harrison’s social worker. The social worker tells Cathy a little but what she says is very disturbing . How is this woman connected to Harrison and can she answer the questions that will affect Harrison’s whole life?

This ebook does not include illustrations.From the author of The Man Who Loved Only Numbers, winner of the prestigious Rhone-Poulenc science award: the history of aviation told through the extraordinary story of Alberto Santos-Dumont, the forgotten man who battled to be the first to free himself from the confines of the earth.Ask most people who flew the first aeroplane and you'll get the same response: Orville and Wilbur Wright. But ask a Brazilian the same question and you will get a different answer: Alberto Santos-Dumont, the man they have crowned the 'father of aviation'.Fearless Alberto Santos-Dumont was a slight and wiry man who built flying machines that could hold no one heavier than himself and required a daredevil dexterity to stay aloft. Never before or since has there been an aeroplane in which the pilot has had to stand up for the whole flight (he had to perfect the rumba in order to get his Bird of Prey into the air at all). Nor has anyone else had a personal flying machine – a small powered balloon that he kept tied to a lamp post outside his apartment when he was not bar-hopping, handing the reins of the airship to the doorman at his favourite night spot. His genius and charisma led him to be celebrated in Paris, London and New York: he dined with the Cartiers, the Rothschilds and the Roosevelts, and fast became the darling of the press.With his blithe faith in the future of technology, Santos-Dumont did not foresee the destructive power of his beloved machines. Yet his indomitable spirit was slowly crushed as competition grew and the skies became full of hazardous aircraft. With the dawn of World War I, he saw their potential for devastation and began to blame himself for every fatality. The guilt placed too great a weight on his mind, and as he became distracted from his aeronautical dream, family and friends began to fear for his sanity. On his last attempt to fly he glued feathers to his arms and tried to launch himself through a window in a sanatorium.

This edition contains a limited number of images.The Sunday Times bestselling biography of one of the towering figures in British history who became Prime Minister at the age of twenty-four, written by the youngest-ever leader of the Tory Party.The younger William Pitt – known as the ‘schoolboy’ – began his days as Prime Minister in 1783 deeply underestimated and completely beleaguered. Yet he annihilated his opponents in the General Election the following year and dominated the governing of Britain for twenty-two years, nearly nineteen of them as Prime Minister. No British politician since then has exercised such supremacy for so long.Pitt presided over dramatic changes in the country’s finances and trade, brought about the union with Ireland, but was ultimately consumed by the years of debilitating war with France. Domestic crises included unrest in Ireland, deep division in the royal family, the madness of the King and a full-scale naval mutiny. He enjoyed huge success, yet died at the nadir of his fortunes, struggling to maintain a government beset by a thin majority at home and military disaster abroad; he worked, worried and drank himself to death. Finally his story is told with the drama, wit and authority it deserves.

Wilfred Thesiger, the last of the great gentlemen explorer-adventurers, became a legend in his own lifetime. This authorised biography by a longstanding friend and associate delves into his little-known character and motivations, as well as recounting the details of his extraordinary life.Wilfred Thesiger, the great explorer-adventurer and author of ‘Arabian Sands’ and ‘The Marsh Arabs’, and one work of autobiography ‘The Life of my Choice’, became a legend in his own lifetime, but his character and motivations have remained an intriguing enigma.In this authorised biography – written with Thesiger’s support before he died in 2003 and with unique access to the rich Thesiger archive – Alexander Maitland investigates this fascinating figure’s family influences, his wartime experiences, his philosophy as a hunter and conservationist, his writing and photography, his friendships with Arabs and Africans amongst whom he lived, and his now-acknowledged homosexuality.

In Where the Past Begins, bestselling author of The Joy Luck Club and The Valley of Amazement Amy Tan is at her most intimate in revealing the truths and inspirations that underlie her extraordinary fiction. By delving into vivid memories of her traumatic childhood, confessions of self-doubt in her journals, and heartbreaking letters to and from her mother, she gives evidence to all that made it both unlikely and inevitable that she would become a writer. Through spontaneous storytelling, she shows how a fluid fictional state of mind unleashed near-forgotten memories that became the emotional nucleus of her novels.Tan explores shocking truths uncovered by family memorabilia – the real reason behind an I.Q. test she took at age six, why her parents lied about their education, mysteries surrounding her maternal grandmother – and, for the first time publicly, writes about her complex relationship with her father, who died when she was fifteen. Supplied with candour and characteristic humour, Where the Past Begins takes readers into the idiosyncratic workings of her writer's mind, a journey that explores memory, imagination, and truth, with fiction serving as both her divining rod and link to meaning.

From one of our greatest living writers, comes a remarkable memoir of a forgotten England.'The war went. We sang in the playground, «Bikini lagoon, an atom bomb’s boom, and two big explosions.» David’s father came back from Burma and didn’t eat rice. Twiggy taught by reciting “The Pied Piper of Hamelin”, “The Charge of the Light Brigade” and the thirteen times table. Twiggy was fat and short and he shouted, and his neck was as wide as his head. He was a bully, though he didn’t take any notice of me.’In Where Shall We Run To?, Alan Garner remembers his early childhood in the Cheshire village of Alderley Edge: life at the village school as ‘a sissy and a mardy-arse'; pushing his friend Harold into a clump of nettles to test the truth of dock leaves; his father joining the army to guard the family against Hitler; the coming of the Yanks, with their comics and sweets and chewing gum. From one of our greatest living writers, it is a remarkable and evocative memoir of a vanished England.

A NEW YORK TIMES BOOK OF THE YEAR‘Talking to you in English’, he said, ‘is like touching you with gloves.’A language barrier is no match for love. New Yorker journalist Lauren Collins discovers this first-hand when, in her early thirties, she moves to London and falls for Olivier, a Frenchman. As their relationship begins to grow, Lauren senses that there are things she doesn’t understand about Olivier, having never spoken to him in his mother tongue. (Does ‘I love you’ even mean the same thing as ‘je t’aime’?) And when they move to French-speaking Geneva, Lauren suddenly finds herself no longer able to talk to the local handymen or shop owners, let alone her husband’s parents.Fearful of one day finding herself unable to communicate with her own children, Lauren decides to learn French. Along the way, she faces a series of challenges, from awkward role-playing games at her Swiss language school, to accidentally telling her mother-in-law that she’s given birth to a coffee machine. But there are also unexpected pleasures: the delights of learning French words that have no English equivalent and the joys of winning her first argument against Olivier in his native tongue.A funny, thoughtful memoir, When in French considers how language shapes our lives, from how we think, to how we fall in love, and what happens when two languages, and two very different cultures, collide.

A NEW YORK TIMES BOOK OF THE YEAR‘Talking to you in English’, he said, ‘is like touching you with gloves.’A language barrier is no match for love. New Yorker journalist Lauren Collins discovers this first-hand when, in her early thirties, she moves to London and falls for Olivier, a Frenchman. As their relationship begins to grow, Lauren senses that there are things she doesn’t understand about Olivier, having never spoken to him in his mother tongue. (Does ‘I love you’ even mean the same thing as ‘je t’aime’?) And when they move to French-speaking Geneva, Lauren suddenly finds herself no longer able to talk to the local handymen or shop owners, let alone her husband’s parents.Fearful of one day finding herself unable to communicate with her own children, Lauren decides to learn French. Along the way, she faces a series of challenges, from awkward role-playing games at her Swiss language school, to accidentally telling her mother-in-law that she’s given birth to a coffee machine. But there are also unexpected pleasures: the delights of learning French words that have no English equivalent and the joys of winning her first argument against Olivier in his native tongue.A funny, thoughtful memoir, When in French considers how language shapes our lives, from how we think, to how we fall in love, and what happens when two languages, and two very different cultures, collide.