Second Officer Herbert Stone, in charge of the midnight watch on the SS Californian sitting idly a few miles north, saw the distress rockets that the Titanic fired. He alerted the captain, Stanley Lord, who was sleeping in the chartroom below, but Lord did not come to the bridge. Eight rockets were fired during the dark hours of the midnight watch, and eight rockets were ignored. The next morning, the Titanic was at the bottom of the sea and more than 1,500 people were dead. When they learned of the extent of the tragedy, Lord and Stone did everything they could to hide their role in the disaster, but pursued by newspapermen, lawyers, and political leaders in America and England, their terrible secret was eventually revealed. The Midnight Watch is a fictional telling of what may have occurred that night on the SS Californian, and the resulting desperation of Officer Stone and Captain Lord in the aftermath of their inaction.Told not only from the perspective of the SS Californian crew, but also through the eyes of a family of third-class passengers who perished in the disaster, the narrative is drawn together by Steadman, a tenacious Boston journalist who does not rest until the truth is found. The Midnight Watch is a powerful and dramatic debut novel--the result of many years of research in Liverpool, London, New York, and Boston, and informed by the author's own experiences as a ship's officer and a lawyer.

    She had come to Kenya from Denmark with her husband, and when they separated she stayed on to manage the farm by herself, visited frequently by her lover, the big-game hunter Denys Finch-Hatton, for whom she would make up stories "like Scheherazade." In Africa, "I learned how to tell tales," she recalled many years later. "The natives have an ear still. I told stories constantly to them, all kinds." Her account of her African adventures, written after she had lost her beloved farm and returned to Denmark, is that of a master storyteller, a woman whom John Updike called "one of the most picturesque and flamboyant literary personalities of the century."Isak Dinesen (1885-1962_ was born Karen Christence Dinesen in Rungsted, Denmark. She wrote poems, plays, and stories from an early age, including 'Seven Gothic Tales', 'Winter's Tales', 'Last Tales', 'Anecdotes of Destiny', 'Shadows on the Grass' and 'Ebrengard'. 'Out of Africa' is considered her masterpiece.

    In “Plays With Cars,” the former Porsche manager covers some of his most ridiculous decisions, like buying an old Land Rover sight unseen, taking a Mercedes AMG station wagon to a rural Georgia dragstrip, and roadtripping across the United States in a Lotus Elise without air conditioning. He’s also reviewed his former cars, which range from a Mercedes G-wagen to a Nissan Cube. Most importantly, he wrote this entire description himself in the third person.

    Inside turned the terrible wheel of drug addiction, part family curse, part legacy of the footloose surf culture he'd done so much to legitimise. Tom's family and friends struggled with him, kept his secrets, and looked on in anger and fear as the wheel began to grind him down.

    With seemingly nothing to lose, she makes the biggest decision of her life – to stay. But Emily's attempts to bridge a yawning loneliness spur a downward spiral of recklessness, as she hurtles from one sexual encounter to the next. It will take a truly terrifying experience for her to understand that sex is both a weapon and a wound in her battle for self-worth and empowerment.Delicately interweaving past and present, The Lotus Eaters is a sharply written story of self-redemption from an exciting young voice in Australian memoir that dissects the patterns of blame and shame women can form around their bodies and relationships.

    The personal story of the youngest person to sail around the world single handedly from October 2009 to May 2010 - at the age of 16: 240 days and 23,000 nautical miles.

    Fleeing the boredom that comes with comfort, he set off on a secondhand bicycle. The aim was simple: to pedal to the furthest point in each of Europe, Asia and Africa. He didn’t train or plan. He just started. The journey was an escape from an unremarkable existence, a pursuit of hardship, and a chance to shed the complacency of middle England. From the brutality of winter on the Tibetan plateau, to the claustrophobia of the Southeast Asian jungle, the quest provided Charlie with ample opportunity to test his mettle. Ultimately, though, the toughest challenge was entirely unforeseen.

    On June 15, 1862 a gang of bushrangers pulled off the largest gold robbery in Australia's history atEugowra Rocks. The gang escaped with bank notes and 77kg of gold, worth about $10 million today. It remains Australia's largest gold robbery. The story of how Ben Hall, Frank Gardiner, John O'Mealley, John Gilbert, Harry Manns, Alex Fordyce, John Bow and Dan Charters - planned and executed the robbery and what happened to all that gold is the stuff of a brilliant, modern, exciting crime book. This is Australian history on the very best crime-writing steroids from Australia's number one true crime writer.

    The beauty. The grime. The colours and thoughts and songs and sounds and children and dogs. The taste of strawberries, the sky, first métro, last métro, the bells, the dreams …The city of light, it seems, has its own plans for Jayne. Drawn there in an entirely unforeseen way, she finds herself in a vibrant and dizzying neighbourhood, living in a former monastery, studying at a famous theatre school, falling in love with a Frenchman too beautiful to be real. She will forget her past and disappear into the culture if it kills her. And one strange night, it nearly does.Sharp, funny and unflinchingly honest, Jayne Tuttle’s writing lifts you off the page and into a Paris far beyond the postcards. Paris or Die is a headlong plunge into not just life in Paris, but life itself.

    He lives in Canberra. In 1858, fourteen-year-old French cabin boy Narcisse Pelletier was aboard the trader Saint-Paul when it was wrecked off the eastern tip of New Guinea. Scrambling into a longboat, Narcisse and the other survivors crossed almost 1000 kilometres of the Coral Sea before reaching the shores of Far North Queensland. If not for the local Aboriginal people, Narcisse would have perished. For seventeen years he lived with them, growing to manhood and participating fully in their Uutaalnganu world. Then, in 1875, his life was again turned upside down.Drawing from firsthand interviews with Narcisse after his return to France and other contemporary accounts of exploration and survival, and documenting the spread of European settlement in Queensland and the brutal frontier wars that followed, Robert Macklin weaves an unforgettable tale of a young man caught between two cultures in a time of transformation and upheaval.

    This new, expanded edition features exclusive, unpublished photos taken by the 23-year-old Ernesto on his journey across a continent, and a tender preface by Aleida Guevara, offering an insightful perspective on the man and the icon.Features of this edition include:A preface by Che Guevara’s daughter AleidaIntroduction by Cintio Vintier, well-known Latin American poetPhotos & maps from the original journeyPostcript: Che’s personal reflections on his formative years: “A child of my environment.”  Published in association with the Che Guevara Studies Center, Havana

    Mackinnon quits his job in Australia, he knows only that he longs to travel to the Well at the World’s End, a mysterious pool on a remote Scottish island whose waters, legend has it, hold the secret to eternal youth.Determined not to fly (‘It would feel like cheating’), he sets out with a rucksack, some fireworks and a map of the world and trusts chance to take care of the rest. By land and by sea, by train, truck, horse and yacht, he makes his way across the globe – and through a series of hilarious adventures. He survives a bus crash in Australia, marries a princess in Laos, is attacked by Komodo dragons and does time in a Chinese jail. The next lift – or the next near-miss – is always just a happy accident away.This is the astonishing true story of a remarkable voyage, an old-fashioned quest by a modern-day adventurer.

    All three books are set on the enchanted island of Corfu in the 1930s, and tell the story of the eccentric English family who moved there. For Gerald, the budding zoologist, Corfu was a natural paradise, teeming with strange birds and beasts that he could collect, watch and care for. But life was not without its problems - his family often objected to his animal-collecting activities, especially when the beasts wound up in the villa or - even worse - the fridge. With hilarious yet endearing portraits of his family and their many unusual hangers-on, The Corfu Trilogy also captures the beginnings of the author's lifelong love of animals. Recounted with immense humour and charm, this wonderful account of Corfu's natural history reveals a rare, magical childhood.

    This edition removes the technical appendices. the historical sections on previous attempts to penetrate the fiedl, and the detailed account of the Eskimos. The record of the journey, however, remains intact.

    Located on the border of China and Pakistan, K2 has some of the harshest climbing conditions in the world. Ninety women have scaled Everest but of the six women who reached the summit of K2, three lost their lives on the way back down the mountain and two have since died on other climbs.In Savage Summit, Jennifer Jordan shares the tragic, compelling, inspiring, and extraordinary true stories of a handful of courageous women -- mothers and daughters, wives and lovers, poets and engineers -- who defeated this formidable mountain yet ultimately perished in pursuit of their dreams.