Morais pens this comprehensive biography of one of the world's most popular and widely-read novelists Paulo Coelho, author of The Alchemist.

«Mirror-image twins Julia and Valentina seem to be going nowhere in life, in this second novel from the author of The Time Traveler's Wife, until a packet arrives at their Chicago home. Their aunt Elspeth — their mother's twin, whom they never knew — has died and left them her London flat. Once there, the girls find their aunt's obsessive-compulsive neighbor Martin, who writes crossword puzzles, and her grief-stricken lover Robert, who is writing a history of next-door Highgate Cemetery. Then they meet Elpseth herself, now a disembodied spirit, and find that she is still very much a part of the living world. Audrey Niffenegger's deliciously gothic ghost tale is full of obsessive and possessive loves, exchanged lives and traded souls. «The endurance of love animates this gothic story set in and around Highgate Cemetery, in London. When Elspeth Noblin dies of cancer, she leaves her estate, including an apartment overlooking the graveyard, to the twin daughters of her twin sister, from whom she has been estranged for twenty years... Audrey Niffenegger has a knack for taking the romantic into the realm of creepiness, and she constructs a taut mystery around the secrets to be found in Elspeth's diaries and the lengths to which she will go to reunite with her younger lover. It's no small achievement that the revelations are both organic and completely unexpected».»

Donna Leon's eighteen novels have won her countless fans, heaps of critical acclaim, and a place among the top ranks of international crime writers. Through the warm-hearted, perceptive, and principled Commissario Guido Brunetti, Leon's best-selling books have explored Venice in all its aspects: history, tourism, high culture, food, family, but also violent crime and political corruption. In About Face, Leon returns to one of her signature subjects: the environment, which has reached a crisis in Italy. Incinerators across the south of Italy are at full capacity, burning who-knows-what and releasing unacceptable levels of dangerous air pollutants, while in Naples, enormous garbage piles grow in the streets. In Venice, with the polluted waters of the canals and a major chemical complex across the lagoon, the issue is never far from the fore. Environmental concerns become significant in Brunetti's work when an investigator from the Carabiniere, looking into the illegal hauling of garbage, asks for a favor. But the investigator is not the only one with a special request. His father-in-law needs help and a mysterious woman comes into the picture. Brunetti soon finds himself in the middle of an investigation into murder and corruption more dangerous than anything he's seen before.

Though considerably toned down for readers 7 to 10, this visual treatment of Bram Stoker's 1897 novel Dracula remains largely true to the original story, with journal entries, clippings, and news articles augmenting the action and sidebars with helpful techniques for how to spot, capture, and kill a vampire. Solicitor Jonathan Harker is menaced in Transylvania by his new client, Count Dracula; the Count makes his way to England and turns Lucy Westenra into a vampire; and Mina Harker, Dracula's next victim, wavers between her vampire and human self before helping Jonathan and Van Helsing kill the Count. The book includes several practical inserted elements, including a travel guide to Transylvania (with hilarious ads for products like neck protectors), a pullout map of Dracula's castle, and a pop-out horde of bloodthirsty rats, as well as a playable board game of the race to Dracula's castle.

«This ingenious debut of Rory Clements' historical series introduces John Shakespeare, Will's older brother and an intelligencer for Elizabeth I's spymaster Sir John Walsingham. In a burnt-out house, one of the queen's aristocratic cousins is found murdered, her flesh marked with profane symbols. At the same time, a plot to assassinate Sir Francis Drake is discovered, which, if it succeeds, would leave the country vulnerable to the Spanish Armada. Shadowed by his rival, the Queen's chief torturer, who employs his own methods of terror, Shakespeare begins to piece together a complex conspiracy whose implications are almost too horrific to contemplate. «There is a great deal going on in this novel... A beautiful and highborn young woman, a cousin of the queen, is found tortured to death, in a manner that suggests a Catholic killer. Another woman's beloved infant is kidnapped and a deformed infant left in its place. We glimpse England's 'first ever state funeral for a nonroyal', that of the beloved soldier and poet Sir Philip Sidney: 'Seven hundred official mourners followed the cortege as it wove slowly through the streets of London from Aldgate to St Paul's'. Shakespeare encounters a witch and falls in love with a beautiful Catholic, not a good career move. Clements, a former London journalist, shows us not only great lords and ladies in his first novel but also whores and cutthroats. We meet the delightfully named prostitutes Starling Day and Parsimony Field and the brave soldier Boltfoot Cooper. Do those names recall some in Shakespeare? The author does have Shakespeare on his mind, in that his hero has a younger brother named William, an actor. The handsome and resourceful Will appears only briefly in Martyr, but given that the novel is presented as the first of a series, we can expect to see more of the brothers Shakespeare. On the basis of this outing, they will be welcome».»

«The Dashwood sisters are evicted from their childhood home and sent to live on a mysterious island full of savage creatures and dark secrets. While sensible Elinor falls in love with Edward Ferrars, her romantic sister Marianne is courted by both the handsome Willoughby and the hideous man-monster Colonel Brandon. Following the massive success of «Pride Prejudice and Zombies», and the impressive pre-pub sales of «Sense and Sensibility» and «Sea Monsters», this title lets the suspense build as we discover what new monster mayhem will descend upon us this Spring.»

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies features the original text of Jane Austen's beloved novel with all-new scenes of bone crunching zombie action.

With Tigger as their guide, youngsters are sure to relish an adventure featuring letters, numbers, animals, shapes, opposites, and more on pages packed with surprises hidden under flaps. Full color.

On a hot summer afternoon in 1972, three teenagers drove into an unfamiliar neighborhood and six lives were altered forever. Thirty five years later, one survivor of that day reaches out to another, opening a door that could lead to salvation. But another survivor is now out of prison, looking for reparation in any form he can find it. THE TURNAROUND takes us on a journey from the rock-and-soul streets of the '70s to the changing neighborhoods of D.C. today, from the diners and auto garages of the city to the inside of Walter Reed Army Medical Hospital, where wounded men and women have returned to the world in a time of war. A novel of fathers and sons, wives and husbands, loss, victory and violent redemption, THE TURNAROUND is another compelling, highly charged novel from George Pelecanos, the best crime novelist in America.

An acclaimed historian presents a revelatory look at the greatest statesman of the twentieth century. For eminent historian Paul Johnson, Winston Churchill remains an enigma in need of unraveling. Soldier, parliamentarian, Prime Minister, orator, painter, writer, husband, and leader all of these facets combine to make Churchill one of the most complex and fascinating personalities in history. In Churchill, Johnson applies a wide lens and an unconventional approach to illuminate the various phases of Churchill's career. From his adventures as a young cavalry officer in the service of the Empire to his role as an elder statesman prophesying the advent of the Cold War, Johnson shows how Churchill's immense adaptability combined with his natural pugnacity to make him a formidable leader for the better part of a century. Johnson's narration of Churchill's many triumphs and setbacks, rich with anecdote and quotation, illustrates the man's humor, resilience, courage, and eccentricity as no other biography before. Winston Churchill's hold on contemporary readers has never slackened, and Paul Johnson's lively, concise biography will appeal to historians and general nonfiction readers alike.

#1 New York Times — bestselling author J. D. Robb takes us to the New York City of 2060, where Lieutenant Eve Dallas faces down a cop killer. Amarylis Coltraine may have recently transferred to the New York City police force from Atlanta, but she's been a cop long enough to know how to defend herself against an assailant. When she's taken down just steps away from her apartment, killed with her own weapon, for Eve the victim isn't just one of us. Dallas's friend Chief Medical Examiner Morris and Coltraine had started a serious relationship, and from all accounts the two were headed for a happy future together. But someone has put an end to all that. After breaking the news to Morris, Eve starts questioning everyone from Coltraine's squad, informants, and neighbors, while Eve's husband, Roarke, digs into computer data on Coltraine's life back in Atlanta. To their shock, they discover a connection between this case and their own painful, shadowy pasts. The truth will need to be uncovered one layer at a time, starting with the box that arrives at Cop Central addressed to Eve containing Coltraine's guns, badge, and a note from her killer: You can have them back. Maybe someday soon, I'll be sending yours to somebody else. But Eve Dallas doesn't take too kindly to personal threats, and she is going to break this case, whatever it takes. And that's a promise.

There is no other company, industry or premises more closely aligned — indeed almost synonymous — with its home town than Guinness's St James's Gate brewery and Dublin city. From the company's modest beginnings in 1759 to its heyday in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and its continued strength into the twenty-first century, Guinness has had an enormous influence over the city's economic, social and cultural life. In this extensive illustrated study, Tony Corcoran examines the magnitude of the brewery's operation, and the working lives of the thousands of Dublin people who depended on Guinness for their livelihood, either directly or indirectly. The company's extremely progressive treatment of its workers — in terms of health, training and housing — is revealed in detail, as is the Guinness family's philanthropy and compassion towards the less well-off residents of the city. The book is a labor of love, full of anecdote, humor and historical insights into one of Dublin's most important and best-loved institutions.

In the history of the modern world, there have been few characters more sadistic, sinister, and deeply demented as Baron Ungern-Sternberg. An anti-Semitic fanatic with a penchant for Eastern mysticism and a hatred of communists, Baron Ungern-Sternberg took over Mongolia in 1920 with a ragtag force of White Russians, Siberians, Japanese, and native Mongolians. While tormenting friend and foe alike, he dreamed of assembling a horse-borne army with which he would retake communist controlled Moscow. In this epic saga that ranges from Austria to the Mongolian Steppe, historian and travel writer James Palmer has brought to light the gripping life story of a madman whose actions fore shadowed the most grotesque excesses of the twentieth century.

From Neil Sheehan, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning classic A Bright Shining Lie, comes this long-awaited, magnificent epic. Here is the never-before-told story of the nuclear arms race that changed history-and of the visionary American Air Force officer Bernard Schriever, who led the high-stakes effort. A Fiery Peace in a Cold War is a masterly work about Schriever's quests to prevent the Soviet Union from acquiring nuclear superiority, to penetrate and exploit space for America, and to build the first weapons meant to deter an atomic holocaust rather than to be fired in anger. Sheehan melds biography and history, politics and science, to create a sweeping narrative that transports the reader back and forth from individual drama to world stage. The narrative takes us from Schriever's boyhood in Texas as a six-year-old immigrant from Germany in 1917 through his apprenticeship in the open-cockpit biplanes of the Army Air Corps in the 1930s and his participation in battles against the Japanese in the South Pacific during the Second World War. On his return, he finds a new postwar bipolar universe dominated by the antagonism between the United States and the Soviet Union. Inspired by his technological vision, Schriever sets out in 1954 to create the one class of weapons that can enforce peace with the Russians-intercontinental ballistic missiles that are unstoppable and can destroy the Soviet Union in thirty minutes. In the course of his crusade, he encounters allies and enemies among some of the most intriguing figures of the century: John von Neumann, the Hungarian-born mathematician and mathematical physicist, who was second in genius only to Einstein; Colonel Edward Hall, who created the ultimate ICBM in the Minuteman missile, and his brother, Theodore Hall, who spied for the Russians at Los Alamos and hastened their acquisition of the atomic bomb; Curtis LeMay, the bomber general who tried to exile Schriever and who lost his grip on reality, amassing enough nuclear weapons in his Strategic Air Command to destroy the entire Northern Hemisphere; and Hitler's former rocket maker, Wernher von Braun, who along with a colorful, riding-crop-wielding Army general named John Medaris tried to steal the ICBM program. The most powerful men on earth are also put into astonishing relief: Joseph Stalin, the cruel, paranoid Soviet dictator who spurred his own scientists to build him the atomic bomb with threats of death; Dwight Eisenhower, who backed the ICBM program just in time to save it from the bureaucrats; Nikita Khrushchev, who brought the world to the edge of nuclear catastrophe during the Cuban Missile Crisis, and John Kennedy, who saved it. Schriever and his comrades endured the heartbreak of watching missiles explode on the launching pads at Cape Canaveral and savored the triumph of seeing them soar into space. In the end, they accomplished more than achieving a fiery peace in a cold war. Their missiles became the vehicles that opened space for America.

This is the long-awaited biography of one of the twentieth century's greatest playwrights whose postwar decade of work earned him international critical and popular acclaim. Arthur Miller was a prominent figure in American literature and cinema for over sixty years, writing a wide variety of plays — including The Crucible, A View from the Bridge, All My Sons, and Death of a Salesman — which are still performed, studied and lauded throughout the world. Born in 1915 to moderately affluent Jewish-American parents, Miller wrote during a fascinating time in American history. The Great Depression was a period of deprivation for many that left an indelible mark on the national psyche, and, like many, Miller found hope for the beleaguered common man in Communism. The Second World War elevated the common man to war hero, but when the Cold War subsequently began, the ugly elements of American conservatism freely persecuted writers and artists who had embraced Communism. Miller was among them. His refusal to give evidence against others to the notorious House Un-American Activities Committee in 1956 gave him a heroic role to play. In that same year, Arthur Miller momentously married the young actress Marilyn Monroe, a marriage that remains famous to this day. Christopher Bigsby's gripping, meticulously researched biography, based on boxes of papers made available to him before Miller's death, offers new insights into their marriage, and sheds new light on how their relationship informed Miller's subsequent great plays. After his death in 2005, many respected actors, directors and producers paid tribute to Miller, calling him 'the last great practitioner of the American stage'. Christopher Bigsby's supremely authoritative biography does full justice to Miller's life and art.

From military sportswriter to roving correspondent for the National Observer, from quasi Hell's Angel to counterculture author and gonzo journalist, Hunter S. Thompson led a life of legend. Hunter S. Thompson: The Glory Years tells the remarkable insider's story. Jay Cowan, who was caretaker on Thompson's ranch and a trusted friend, paints a sensitive portrait of a man who redefined participatory journalism, who captured the decadence and depravity of an era, and generally consumed more drugs and alcohol than any other living creature on the planet. A self-professed lazy hillbilly, Hunter Thompson would immerse himself researching a story, then write it all in a multi-day frenzy of drugs and sleeplessness. In his role as America's rock star author, he was invited to the White House (where he claimed to have snorted coke with presidential aides) and rubbed elbows with the marquee celebrities of his time. Featuring previously unpublished color photos, this book provides the most compelling and readable portrait to date of one of America's most extraordinary personalities.

Jewelery has made a spectacular comeback on the fashion catwalks and is now to be seen in all the popular high-street stores. This fantastic collection of 25 projects, ranging from necklaces, chokers, bracelets, cuffs, brooches, earrings and rings, shows just how easy it is to make your own individual jewelery pieces using simple techniques and the fabulous range of semi-precious beads and stones that are now readily available: pearls, Swarovski crystals, semi-precious gems and stones, along with silver- or gold-plated findings and wire are all used. The designs are simple and sophisticated, and suitable for both daytime and evening wear. The techniques section at the start of the book works through the basic techniques you need to learn before embarking on the projects. Each project is shown in full step-by-step detail and beautifully modeled.

The whole story of The Rolling Stones is here illustrated with classic, rare and unseen photographs from the extraordinary archive of the Daily Mail.

Khrushchev's 1959 trip across America was one of the strangest exercises in international diplomacy ever conducted — a surreal extravaganza, as historian John Lewis Gaddis called it. Khrushchev told jokes, threw tantrums, sparked a riot in a San Francisco supermarket, wowed the coeds in a home economics class in Iowa, and ogled Shirley MacLaine as she filmed a dance scene in Can-Can. He befriended and offended a cast of characters including Nelson Rockefeller, Richard Nixon, Eleanor Roosevelt, Elizabeth Taylor, and Marilyn Monroe. Published for the fiftieth anniversary of the trip, K Blows Top is a work of history that reads like a Vonnegut novel. This cantankerous communist's road trip took place against the backdrop of the fifties in capitalist America, with the shadow of the hydrogen bomb hanging over his visit like the Sword of Damocles. As Khrushchev kept reminding people, he was a hot-tempered man who possessed the power to incinerate America.

Just in time for the 40th anniversary of Monty Python comes this book that celebrates the incredibly popular British comedy phenomenon. Color photos throughout.