This powerful collection of stories, set in the mid-West among the lonely men and women who drink, fish and play cards to ease the passing of time, was the first by Raymond Carver to be published in the UK. With its spare, colloquial narration and razor-sharp sense of how people really communicate, the collection was to become one of the most influential literary works of the 1980s.

Full of magic and appealing characters, this classic novel takes readers on a remarkable adventure. It's Omri's birthday, but all he gets from his best friend, Patrick, is a little plastic Indian brave. Trying to hide his disappointment, Omri puts the Indian in a metal cupboard and locks the door with a mysterious skeletonkey that once belonged to his great-grandmother. Little does Omri know that by turning the key, he will transform his ordinary plastic Indian into a real live man from an altogether different time and place! Omri and the tiny warrior called Little Bear could hardly be more different, yet soon the two forge a very special friendship. Will Omri be able to keep Little Bear without anyone finding out and taking his precious Indian from him?

Cricket defines Englishness like no other national pastime. From its earliest origins in the sixteenth century (or an early version played by shepherds called creag in the 1300s), through the formation of the MCC and the opening of Lord's cricket ground in 1787, to the spread of county cricket in the next century, when the Wisden Cricketers' Almanack was first published and the Ashes series was born, this simple sport of bat and ball has captured the imagination of the masses. Throughout its 500-year history, cricket has been a mirror for society as a whole, reflecting the changes that have brought us from the quintessential village green to Freddie Flintoff's pedalo, from W G Grace to Monty Panesar, via a fair number of eccentrics, heroes and downright villains. William Hill Award-winning writer Simon Hughes, no mean player himself, has lived and breathed cricket his whole life and now takes his analytical skills and typically irreverent eye to charting the history of English cricket. But this is no dry, dusty tome. It is the story of the mad characters who inhabit the game, the extraordinary lengths people will go to watch and play it, the tale of a national obsession. It debunks the myth of cricket sportsmanship, showing the origins of sledging and match-fixing in centuries of subterfuge, corruption and violence. And it takes us beyond sport, to the heart of what it really means to be English.

Harry is in trouble. He's burned down the family kitchen so now has to spend a week of his summer hols with his uncle Tristram — who's heading off to stay with a new girlfriend — Morning Glory — on a tiny British island. Harry doesn't expect it to be a lot of fun — with just a wacky competition at the end of the week to look forward to. He certainly didn't expect to discover all the beards. Or the angel on the mountain. Or the helicopters circling overhead all week. And he definitely didn't think it would be so wet...

The latest Little Golden Book Classic — with a summertime theme! Nancy and Timmy hop out of their beds one summer morning and help pack their swimsuits and lunch. And then it's off to the seashore! In a charming rhyme, this Little Golden Book from 1951 (then titled A Day at the Beach) describes what preschoolers will find there: You can catch little crabs — if you're quick! You can draw great big pictures right on the beach with a piece of a shell or a stick. Oh, what fun! From Kathryn and Byron Jackson, authors of the popular Little Golden Book The Saggy Baggy Elephant, and Corinne Malvern, illustrator of the Little Golden Books Doctor Dan the Bandage Man and Nurse Nancy.

Un hombre y una mujer, motivados por una busqueda espiritual, viajan hacia la aridez y el supuesto vacio del desierto de Mojave. A lo largo de cuarenta dias, rodeados de dudas y tentaciones, entraran en contacto con sus mas intimos conflictos y cuestionamientos. Paulo Coelho advierte que este ha sido un libro dificil de escribir porque revela episodios y sentimientos de su propia vida; porque dudaba poder narrar esta historia y porque marca la fragil distancia entre la tradicion magica a la que pertenece y el hombre que realmente es. Una nueva guerra va a comenzar, de la cual nadie podra escapar. Veremos dos ejercitos. De un lado quienes todavia creen en la raza humana, en los poderes ocultos del hombre, y saben que nuestro siguiente paso esta en el crecimiento de los dones individuales. Del otro lado estaran los que creen que la vida termina en la materia.

What's a better present than a classic Beginner Book? Six of them for less than the price of two! Following on the success of The Big Blue Book of Beginner Books and The Big Green Book of Beginner Books, we've taken the complete text and art of P. D. Eastman's Sam and the Firefly, Robert Lopshire's I Want to Be Somebody New!, Marilyn Sadler's The Very Bad Bunny, Mike McClintock's Stop That Ball!, Al Perkins's The Digging-est Dog, and Joan Heilbroner's Robert the Rose Horse and bound them together in one sturdy hardcover omnibus. This is a perfect introduction to reading that will whet young readers' appetites for additional books in the Beginner Book series.

Frank and Leon are two men from different times, discovering that sometimes all you learn from your parents' mistakes is how to make different ones of your own. Frank is trying to escape his troubled past by running away to his family's beach shack. As he struggles to make friends with his neighbors and their precocious young daughter, Sal, he discovers the community has fresh wounds of its own. A girl is missing, and when Sal too disappears, suspicion falls on Frank. Decades earlier, Leon tries to hold together his family's cake shop as their suburban life crumbles in the aftermath of the Korean War. When war breaks out again, Leon must go from sculpting sugar figurines to killing young men as a conscript in the Vietnam War.

One man in his time plays many parts, His acts being seven ages. In this illuminating, innovative biography, Jonathan Bate, one of today's most accomplished Shakespearean scholars, has found a fascinating new way to tell the story of the great dramatist. Using the Bard's own immortal list of a man's seven ages in As You Like It, Bate deduces the crucial events of Shakespeare's life and connects them to his world and work as never before. Here is the author as an infant, born into a world of plague and syphillis, diseases with which he became closely familiar; as a schoolboy, a position he portrayed in The Merry Wives of Windsor, in which a clever, cheeky lad named William learns Latin grammar; as a lover, married at eighteen to an older woman already pregnant, perhaps presaging Bassanio, who in The Merchant of Venice won a wife who could save him from financial ruin. Here, too, is Shakespeare as a soldier, writing Henry the Fifth's St. Crispin's Day speech, with a nod to his own monarch Elizabeth I's passionate addresses; as a justice, revealing his possible legal training in his precise use of the law in plays from Hamlet to Macbeth; and as a pantaloon, an early retiree because of, Bate postulates, either illness or a scandal. Finally, Shakespeare enters oblivion, with sonnets that suggest he actively sought immortality through his art and secretly helped shape his posthumous image more than anyone ever knew. Equal parts masterly detective story, brilliant literary analysis, and insightful world history, Soul of the Age is more than a superb new recounting of Shakespeare's experiences; it is a bold and entertaining work of scholarship and speculation, one that shifts from past to present, reality to the imagination, to reveal how this unsurpassed artist came to be.

When a powerful government official scheduled to speak to a group of millionaires turns up dead, the business world clamors for a solution, and Nero Wolfe takes the case.

«Moscow, 2013. Bunin, the Ukrainian President, has joined other heads of state in an open air swimming pool to drink vodka and celebrate with Putin. During his rise to power Bunin has juggled with formidable and eccentric political and personal challenges. His troubles with his family and his women combine with his difficulties with corrupt businessmen and demanding international allies, but it is his recent heart transplant that worries him most. Since the operation he has started to develop freckles, and his heart donor's mysterious widow seems to have moved in with him...Spanning forty years, «The President's Last Love» is a hilarious satire on love, lies and life before and after the Iron Curtain.»

«Gorgeously written and with characters, who will stay with us for the rest of our lives – the eagerly awaited novel by the author of «The English Patient» and «Anil’s Ghost».»

Edgar Allan Poe served as a soldier and began his literary career composing verses modelled on Byron; soon he was trying out his 'prose-tales' — often horror melodramas such as The Fall of the House of Usher. As editor of the Literary Messenger he was influential among critics and writers of the American South. His versatile writings — including, for example, The Murders in the Rue Morgue and The Raven — continue to resonate down the centuries. Peter Ackroyd's biography of Poe opens with his end, his final days – no one knows what happened between the time when friends saw him off on the steam-boat to Baltimore and his discovery six days later dying in a tavern. This mystery sets the scene for a short life packed with drama and tragedy (drink and poverty) combined with extraordinary brilliance. Poe has been claimed as the forerunner of modern fantasy, and credited with the invention of psychological dramas (long before Freud), science fiction (before H.G. Wells and Jules Verne) and the detective story (before Arthur Conan Doyle). Tennyson described him as 'the most original genius that America has produced'. He influenced European romanticism and was the harbinger of both Symbolism and Surrealism. Peter Ackroyd, who places significance on Poe's childhood (his travelling actor parents were miserably poor, his mother had TB and he was orphaned), claims that Poe found his family among writers — writers not only of his time but of the future generations who were influenced by the power of his imagination.

Herod Antipas rules Galilee, Pontius Pilate is the new Roman governor of Judea, and the Roman Empire rules the world. These are turbulent times for Israel, a troubled land of turmoil and insurrection. Now in his thirtieth year, Jesus and his tight-knit family endure a long, dusty winter of disruption and chaos. Whispers of his virgin birth still persist, and while he struggles with the demands of his family and the weight of his great destiny, those around him wait for some sign of the path he will take. But this quiet man of Nazareth is instead called upon to found a ministry which will utterly transform an unsuspecting world …

«Hailed as a masterpiece from the moment of its first publication, «Revolutionary Road» is the story of Frank and April Wheeler, a bright, beautiful, and talented couple whose empty suburban life is held together by the dream that greatness is only just round the corner. With heartbreaking compassion and clarity, Richard Yates shows how Frank and April mortgage their hopes and ideals, betraying in the end not only each other, but their own best selves.»

«The Jorgmund Pipe is the backbone of the world, and it’s on fire. Gonzo Lubitsch, professional hero and troubleshooter, is hired to put it out – but there’s more to the fire, and the Pipe itself, than meets the eye. The job will take Gonzo and his best friend, our narrator, back to their own beginnings and into the dark heart of the Jorgmund Company itself. Equal parts raucous adventure, comic odyssey and Romantic Epic, «The Gone-Away World» is a story of – among other things – love and loss; of ninjas, pirates, politics; of curious heroism in strange and dangerous places; and of a friendship stretched beyond its limits. But it also the story of a world, not unlike our own, in desperate need of heroes – however unlikely they may seem.»

Max, Fang, Iggy, Gasman, Nudge and Angel are six extraordinary avian hybrids. The result of a cruel Biotech experiment which manipulated their DNA and turned them into recombinant life forms with wings. This flock has endured a turbulent upbringing and they have been continually faced with evil. Evading capture on a daily basis, they have endured torture and been pushed to the very brink of sanity. Hunted all their lives, they've had to fight life-threatening and belief-defying battles pitting their strength against the fearsome force of their shadowy enemies. But as their predators evolved, their unique ability to fly is no longer enough to save them. With their genes mutating to astonishing affect, the flock establishes a new set of skills to unleash as they strive for survival. But just as they struggle to get to grips with these physical changes, emotionally they face new challenges too: life on the fringe of society can be a lonely existence. Driven to the wastelands of Antarctica, each day brings a new threat for the flock. Danger is never far away and while fighting to save their own skin, they have a new mission to undertake – one with devastating global consequences…