'He said that Shamil had ordered Hadji Murat to be taken dead or alive....' Two masterly Russian tales of freedom, fighting and great warriors in the majestic mountains of the Caucasus, inspired by Tolstoy's years as a soldier living amid the Cossack people.A new series of twenty distinctive, unforgettable Penguin Classics in a beautiful new design and pocket-sized format, with coloured jackets echoing Penguin's original covers.

    The story portrays the political situation of Europe in the later Viking Age, Andalusia under Al-Mansur Ibn Abi Aamir, Denmark under Harold Bluetooth, followed by the struggle between Eric the Victorious & Sweyn Forkbeard of Denmark, Ireland under Brian Boru, England under Ethelred the Unready, the Battle of Maldon, all before the backdrop of the gradual Christianisation of Scandinavia, contrasting the pragmatic Norse pagan outlook with Islam & Christianity.

    This is the real stuff: dynamic, messy, baffling adoptive parenting, rooted in domestic life.Award-winning columnist and adoptive parent Sally Donovan offers savvy, compassionate advice on how to be 'good enough' in the face of both day-to-day and more bewildering challenges – how to respond to 'red mist' meltdowns, crippling anxieties about new routines and, most importantly, how to meet the intimidating challenge of being strong enough to protect and nurture your child.Full of affecting and hilarious stories drawn from life in the Donovan household, The Unofficial Guide to Adoptive Parenting offers parents a refreshing counterblast to stuffy parenting manuals -- read it, weep, laugh and learn.

    Take Vishnu, who achieves every material success but never knows happiness; or Venkat, who talks so much that he has no time to listen. In other stories, a young girl goes on a train journey that changes her life forever; an impoverished village woman provides bathing water to hundreds of people in a drought-stricken area; a do-gooder ghost decides to teach a disconsolate young man Sanskrit; and in the title story, a woman in a flooded village in Odisha teaches the author a life lesson she will never forget.

    Tests are similar to recent actual GREs in length, question types, and degree of difficulty. The manual also reviews all GRE test topics: antonym, analogy, and sentence-completion questions, reading comprehension, analytical writing, quantitative comparison questions, data interpretation, and math.

    Instead he was fixated on Brexit, his own political destiny and a myriad of personal issues, all while presiding over the UK government’s botched response to the global coronavirus pandemic. After missing key Cobra meetings, embracing and abandoning herd immunity and dithering over lockdown, Johnson left the NHS facing an unmanageable deluge of patients. His inaction resulted in the deaths of many thousands of British people and his own hospitalisation at the hands of the pandemic, yet further reckless decisions allowed a deadly second wave to sweep across the country in the autumn months with the economy on the brink of collapse.With access to key figures at the top of government during the most tumultuous year of modern British history, Failures of State is an exhaustive and thrillingly told story – and one of the most essential pieces of investigative reporting for a generation.

    Hansen's best known and popular fictions. Published in 1950, the story, which takes place shortly after World War II, is told in the first person and concerns the inhabitants of a tiny island in the Danish archipelago. In this absorbing psychological work, the author probes deeply into the mind of Johannes Vig, the local schoolmaster, a lonely figure whose relationship with his fellow islanders is gradually revealed in the diary on which he retrospectively comments. The story lays bare not only his self-doubts, but his belief in the goodness of man, both of which become increasingly more complex and contradictory as the story unfolds.

    Four women work together for a small nonprofit in Copenhagen that disseminates information on genocide. When two of them receive death threats, they immediately believe that they are being stalked by Mirko Zigic, a Serbian torturer and war criminal, whom they have recently profiled in their articles. As the tensions mount among the women, their suspicions turn away from Zigic and toward each other. The threats increase and soon the office becomes a battlefield in which each of the women's move is suspect. Their obsession turns into a witch hunt as they resort to bullying and victimization. Yet these are people who daily analyze cases of appalling cruelty on a worldwide scale, and who are intimate with the psychology of evil. The cruelty which the women have described from a safe distance is now revealed in their own world. They discover that none of them is exactly the person she seems to be. And then they learn that Interpol has traced Mirko Zigic to Denmark. THE EXCEPTION is a unique and intelligent thriller, heralding Christian Jungersen as a gifted storyteller and keen observer of the human psyche.

    So begins Yusef Salaam telling his story. No one's life is the sum of the worst things that happened to them, and during Yusef Salaam's seven years of wrongful incarceration as one of the Central Park Five, he grew from child to man, and gained a spiritual perspective on life. Yusef learned that we're all "born on purpose, with a purpose." Despite having confronted the racist heart of America while being "run over by the spiked wheels of injustice," Yusef channeled his energy and pain into something positive, not just for himself but for other marginalized people and communities.Better Not Bitter is the first time that one of the now Exonerated Five is telling his individual story, in his own words. Yusef writes his narrative: growing up Black in central Harlem in the '80s, being raised by a strong, fierce mother and grandmother, his years of incarceration, his reentry, and exoneration. Yusef connects these stories to lessons and principles he learned that gave him the power to survive through the worst of life's experiences. He inspires readers to accept their own path, to understand their own sense of purpose. With his intimate personal insights, Yusef unpacks the systems built and designed for profit and the oppression of Black and Brown people. He inspires readers to channel their fury into action, and through the spiritual, to turn that anger and trauma into a constructive force that lives alongside accountability and mobilizes change.This memoir is an inspiring story that grew out of one of the gravest miscarriages of justice, one that not only speaks to a moment in time or the rage-filled present, but reflects a 400-year history of a nation's inability to be held accountable for its sins. Yusef Salaam's message is vital for our times, a motivating resource for enacting change. Better, Not Bitter has the power to soothe, inspire and transform. It is a galvanizing call to action.

    He eventually finds himself in the heart of southeast Asia and is quickly drawn into the underground Muay Thai boxing rings in Bangkok, Thailand. There, while trying to find out who and what he's really made of, Sal is introduced to a very new and very real kind of evil. With his superhuman abilities, he has been rising fast as a potential new champion, but when he meets a young girl who was forced as a child into sexual slavery he decides that it's up to him to save her. Under the pretense of accepting her as a gift, he begins trying to find the innocent child she still has buried deep inside. She responds slowly, but finally comes to love him as a father-figure and is thrilled when he makes efforts to purchase her from the pimp that owns her. But pimps are criminals, and when Precious is stolen away and held for ransom, Sal will stop at nothing to get her back. No matter what it costs him.

    Her inheritance is her last hope, but she needs a husband to claim what is hers. Atharv Sinha, her older sister's billionaire boss, has a proposition Sneha can't refuse—a temporary marriage for one year. She didn't see a problem with the arrangement until she started to get to know the man she married—a man with a golden heart and charm that could make any woman go weak in her knees. It wasn't hard to fall for the man Atharv Sinha was, but did he feel anything for her? If yes, then can they have their happily-ever-after when there are so many secrets he was hiding from her? What about the people who want her gone from his life?

    Over the centuries, Americans have read and written their way into a political culture of ink and type.Part civics primer, part cultural history, "The Story of America" excavates the origins of everything from the paper ballot and the Constitution to the I.O.U. and the dictionary. Along the way it presents fresh readings of Benjamin Franklin's "Way to Wealth", Thomas Paine's "Common Sense", "The Raven" by Edgar Allan Poe, and "Paul Revere's Ride" by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, as well as histories of lesser-known genres, including biographies of presidents, novels of immigrants, and accounts of the Depression.From past to present, Lepore argues, Americans have wrestled with the idea of democracy by telling stories. In this thoughtful and provocative book, Lepore offers at once a history of origin stories and a meditation on storytelling itself.Here he lyes --A pilgrim passed I --The way to wealth --The age of Paine --We the parchment --I.O.U. --A Nue Merrykin Dikshunary --His Highness --Man of the people --Pickwick in America --The humbug --President Tom's cabin --Pride of the prairie --Longfellow's ride --Rock, paper, scissors --Objection --Chan the man --The uprooted --Rap sheet --To wit

    Little did he know that among those released was Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a man who would go on to become a terrorist mastermind too dangerous even for al-Qaeda and give rise to an Islamist movement bent on dominating the Middle East.     Zarqawi began by directing hotel bombings and assassinations in Jordan from a base in northern Iraq, but it was the American invasion of that country in 2003 that catapulted him to the head of a vast insurgency. By identifying him as the link between Saddam and bin Laden, the CIA inadvertently created a monster. Like-minded radicals saw him as a hero resisting the infidel occupiers and rallied to his cause. Their wave of brutal beheadings and suicide bombings continued for years until Jordanian intelligence provided the Americans with the crucial intelligence needed to eliminate Zarqawi in a 2006 airstrike.     But his movement endured, first called al-Qaeda in Iraq, then renamed Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, or ISIS, seeking refuge in unstable, ungoverned pockets on the Iraq-Syria border. And as the Syrian civil war broke out in 2011, ISIS seized its chance to pursue Zarqawi's dream of a sweeping, ultra-conservative Islamic caliphate.      Drawing on unique access to CIA and Jordanian sources, Joby Warrick weaves together heart-pounding, moment-by-moment operational details with overarching historical perspectives to reveal the long trajectory of today's most dangerous Islamic extremist threat.From the Hardcover edition.

    Winner of top literary prizes in Sweden and France, Enquist's epic of power, love, and madness in 1760s Denmark is an extraordinarily elegant and gorgeous novel.

    Exploring globalization’s role in the evolution of inequality, Bourguignon takes an original and truly international approach to the decrease in inequality between nations, the increase in inequality within nations, and the policies that might moderate inequality’s negative effects.Demonstrating that in a globalized world it becomes harder to separate out the factors leading to domestic or international inequality, Bourguignon examines each trend through a variety of sources, and looks at how these inequalities sometimes balance each other out or reinforce one another. Factoring in the most recent economic crisis, Bourguignon investigates why inequality in some countries has dropped back to levels that have not existed for several decades, and he asks if these should be considered in the context of globalization or if they are in fact specific to individual nations. Ultimately, Bourguignon argues that it will be up to countries in the developed and developing world to implement better policies, even though globalization limits the scope for some potential redistributive instruments.An informed and original contribution to the current debates about inequality, this book will be essential reading for anyone who is interested in the future of the world economy.