From The New York Times best-selling author of Paris to the Moon and beloved New Yorker writer, a memoir that captures the romance of New York City in the 1980s. When Adam Gopnik and his soon-to-be-wife, Martha, left the comforts of home in Montreal for New York, the city then, much like today, was a pilgrimage site for the young, the arty, and the ambitious. But it was also becoming a city of greed, where both life's consolations and its necessities were increasingly going to the highest bidder. At the Stranger's Gate builds a portrait of this particular moment in New York through the story of this couple's journey—from their excited arrival as aspiring artists to their eventual growth into a New York family. Gopnik transports us to his tiny basement room on the Upper East Side, and later to SoHo, where he captures a unicorn: an affordable New York loft. He takes us through his professional meanderings, from graduate...

A tiny gazelle in Africa outwits a cheetah.

A gripping adventure story from Bear Grylls, packed with real survival details and dangers at every turn!When Beck Granger is ship-wrecked in the open seas, he needs all of his survival skills to save a small group of passengers.But the sinking was no accident. In order to stay alive, he'll have to work out who wants him dead, and why.That is, if the sharks don't get him first . . .

“What John Irving or Kurt Vonnegut might produce if they wrote a novel about crime and real estate set in the Florida keys…hilarious and deeply satisfying,” Ft. Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel Dennis “Doom” Lewis is a small-time conman who paid a big-price: a five-year prison sentence for forging a novel by Eleanor Roosevelt that became an international bestseller. He gets an early release to attend his crooked father’s funeral…and discovers that he’s inherited a sailboat and a Florida town that’s sinking into the sea. But the town is on prime real estate that two warring developers want badly enough to have already killed his father for and will go to outrageous lengths to snatch away from him. Dodging bombs, corrupt cops, and crazed killers, Doom teams up with a Nyquil-chugging history professor, two documentary film-makers named Anne, and a drop-dead-sexy scuba instructor and her Seminole grandmother in an elaborate plot to swindle the swindlers and save himself from fatally living up to his nick-name. “A flamboyant, comic nightmare. The author's best inventions are his characters -- gaudy as comic-strip villains, unpredictable as ancient gods and given to mighty mock-heroic combat of epic consequence. There is fun here, but also real fury in Mr. Murphy’s raging imagination,” The New York Times “Dallas Murphy is right up there with Elmore Leonard and Carl Hiaasen. I loved it” Donald Westlake “Masterful. Apparent Wind is much more than an excellent crime novel,” Palm Beach Post “A loopy, cynical, romantic caper novel. Daring and funny and smart,” Miami Herald **From Library Journal Released early from prison to attend his con-man father's Florida funeral, unflappable Dennis "Doom" Loomis (incarcerated for literary fraud) inherits a large sailboat; a sinking, decrepit town on Omnium Key; and his father's oddball friends. Soon tangled up with two deluded and rapacious descendants of early Florida land developers, who attempt to wreak further havoc on the neighborhood, Doom and entourage retaliate with clever disguises and precocious procedures. As their off-the-wall antics grow more absurdly successful, the plot becomes funnier and funnier. An unusual, noteworthy effort from the author of Lover Man (Scribner, 1987). Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc. Book Description “What John Irving or Kurt Vonnegut might produce if they wrote a novel about crime and real estate set in the Florida keys…hilarious and deeply satisfying,” Ft. Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel Dennis “Doom” Lewis is a small-time conman who paid a big-price: a five-year prison sentence for forging a novel by Eleanor Roosevelt that became an international bestseller. He gets an early release to attend his crooked father’s funeral…and discovers that he’s inherited a sailboat and a Florida town that’s sinking into the sea. But the town is on prime real estate that two warring developers want badly enough to have already killed his father for and will go to outrageous lengths to snatch away from him. Dodging bombs, corrupt cops, and crazed killers, Doom teams up with a Nyquil-chugging history professor, two documentary film-makers named Anne, and a drop-dead-sexy scuba instructor and her Seminole grandmother in an elaborate plot to swindle the swindlers and save himself from fatally living up to his nick-name. “A flamboyant, comic nightmare. The author's best inventions are his characters -- gaudy as comic-strip villains, unpredictable as ancient gods and given to mighty mock-heroic combat of epic consequence. There is fun here, but also real fury in Mr. Murphy’s raging imagination,” The New York Times “Dallas Murphy is right up there with Elmore Leonard and Carl Hiaasen. I loved it” Donald Westlake “Masterful. Apparent Wind is much more than an excellent crime novel,” Palm Beach Post “A loopy, cynical, romantic caper novel. Daring and funny and smart,” Miami Herald

When Daily Telegraph correspondent Tim Butcher was sent to cover Africa in 2000 he quickly became obsessed with the idea of recreating H.M. Stanley's famous expedition -- but travelling alone.Despite warnings that his plan was 'suicidal', Butcher set out for the Congo's eastern border with just a rucksack and a few thousand dollars hidden in his boots. Making his way in an assortment of vessels including a motorbike and a dugout canoe, helped along by a cast of characters from UN aid workers to a campaigning pygmy, he followed in the footsteps of the great Victorian adventurers. Butcher's journey was a remarkable feat, but the story of the Congo, told expertly and vividly in this book, is more remarkable still.

A book about how Shakespeare became fascinated with the world, and how the world became fascinated with Shakespeare - the first book of its kindThere are 83 copies of the First Folio in a vault beneath Capitol Hill, the world's largest collection. Well over 150 Indian movies are based on Shakespeare's plays-more than in any other nation. If current trends continue, there will soon be more high-school students reading The Merchant of Venice in Mandarin Chinese than in early-modern English. Why did this happen-and how? Ranging ambitiously across four continents and 400 years, Worlds Elsewhere is an eye-opening account of how Shakespeare went global. Seizing inspiration from the playwright's own fascination with travel, foreignness and distant worlds, Dickson takes us on an extraordinary journey-from Hamlet performed by English actors tramping through Poland in the early 1600s to twenty-first century Shanghai, where...

With these words Ailsa Piper's journey begins. Less than a month later she finds herself hiking through olive groves and under translucent pink blossoms, making her way from the legendary city of Granada, towards the cliffs at Finisterre in the far north-west of Spain.On her back she carries an unusual cargo - a load of sins. In the tradition of medieval believers who paid others to carry their sins to holy places, and so buy forgiveness, Ailsa's friends and colleagues donated sins in order to fund her quest. She's received anger and envy, pride and lust, among many.Through glorious villages and inspiring landscapes, miracles find her. Matrons stuff gifts of homemade sausages into her pack. Angels in both name and nature ease her path.Sins find her too. Those in her pack and many others tempt her throughout her journey.And she falls in love: with kindness, with strangers, and with Spain.Sinning Across Spain celebrates the mysteries of faith, the possibilities...

A century has now gone by, yet the Gallipoli campaign of 1915-16 is still infamous as arguably the most ill conceived, badly led and pointless campaign of the entire First World War. The brainchild of Winston Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty, following Turkey's entry into the war on the German side, its ultimate objective was to capture the Gallipoli peninsula in western Turkey, thus allowing the Allies to take control of the eastern Mediterranean and increase pressure on the Central Powers to drain manpower from the vital Western Front.