Still smarting from the fact that her husband left her for a younger woman, she’s trying to cope single-handedly with a sick elderly cat, a sick elderly mother and a sick elderly car – to say nothing of two daughters who treat the house much like a comfortable hotel. And on top of everything else, she’s having trouble hanging on to her job.So why does everyone else seem to think turning fifty is the trouble? And why does everyone seem to think she’s losing her mind? She’s not really going crazy ... or is she?

    His encounters at Emperor Akbar`s Court are legendary.Birbal`s close friendship with Akbar earned him many enemies. Birbal survived countless murder attempts.Numerous stories have been spun around these plots.These stories were passed on from generation to generation. And the legend of Birbal grew.Unicorn Books presents 50 Birbal stories in this collection for children.Some Interesting Tales:*Akbar and Birbal`s First Meeting*Pulling the Emperor`s Whiskers*The Egg Trick*Stone Flowers versus Real ones*How to retrieve a ring*Unlucky ProfessionsAbout the author:Clifford Sawhney, has over 20 years experience in the print media, corporate communications and publishing industry.His writings have appeared in the Hindustan Times, Discover India, Life Positive, Parade, Parenting, Clarity, Debonair, Hotel & Food Service, Rave, e-Commerce, The Diplomatist, Training & Management and other periodicals.This book is his second venture for Unicorn Books after The Funniest Tales of Mullah Nasruddin.

    His writing skills have not improved (despite using Raymond Chandler's typewriter to bang out his hard-boiled prose), but his crime solving prowess is still first rate. He'll need it, since murder seems to abound in the little Appalachian town of St. Germaine, North Carolina. St. Germaine is in a season of change: a couple of new shops have appeared on the square; the Great Smoky Mountain Renaissance Festival has just opened out at Camp Possumtickle; and St. Barnabas Church has a new priest, straight from France. As well as having his Episcopal appointment from the bishop, Father Moneyduck is also a famous mystery author and detective. It's a good thing, because the police department has a raft of homicides on its hands with no end in sight. Of course, they do things a little differently in France ... Hayden Konig's 15th (and final!) mystery The Choir Director Wore Out It s not what you expect ... It's even funnier!

    Like most other nineteen-year-olds, she enjoys life. And, oh, how she loves to dance! The only blot on her happiness is her dreadful boss in the office where she works... One rainy day, Poppy is delivering a letter when she fails to notice two people approaching and is knocked to the ground. The couple are full of apologies but Poppy brushes aside the young man's offer to replace her ruined raincoat. As she walks away with her head held high, Andrew Wilkie-Brook says to his sister Charlotte, 'I wish she'd let me help, but she wouldn't listen to me.' Someone is listening, however, and her name is Fate...

    Their mother is all alone, only thirty-one years of age, with three young children and a Labrador. It is no wonder, when you put it like that, that she becomes a menace and a drunk. And a playwright.Worried about the bad playwriting - though more about becoming wards of court and being sent to the infamous Crescent Home for Children - Lizzie and her sister decide to contact, by letter, suitable men in the area. In order to stave off the local social worker they urgently need to find a new Man at the Helm.

    Combining Adam's inimitable comedic voice and four-color illustrations by his friend Michael Narren, Rich Man Poor Man is a hilariously accurate look at what the people born with silver spoons in their mouths have in common with the people whose only utensils are plastic sporks stolen from a Shakey's.

    The Stories, set in Calcutta, bring to the fore the darkness lurking in the human psyche and bare the baser instincts. The stories, compactly written and marked by insightly dialogues that raise contemporary issues like man-woman relationships and its strains, moral and ethics, environmental degradation, class inequality, rapid and mass-scale unmindful urbanisation, are devoid of sentimentalisation. The result is they remained focused and move around the central character who is named Rahul in all the stories. We encounter the events that shape, mar, guide Rahul's life and also the lives of those around him, making us question the very essence of existence. Rahul symbolises modern man; he is not just one character, but all of us rolled into one. The story cycle stands out for two reasons - its brilliant narrative and the dispassionate style with which betrayal in personal relationships and resultant loneliness has been handled. The poems weave a maze of dreams, images, reflections and stories. They are written in a reflective and many a time in a narrative tenor within a poetic idiom. The poems are inseparable in a hidden way and are magically sequenced like various kinds of flowers in a garland or chapters of differing shades in a novel. Calcutta features in some of the poems like the looming backdrop of Gotham City in a Batman movie.

    To say the least. She calls Sweet Meadow, Georgia, home, where she works for her father doing auto repairs. She also drives the tow-truck, although Sweet Meadow's rather colorful denizens tend to treat Bertie more like the local, free taxi service. You know, someone has to get to a doctor's appointment or pick something up at the dry cleaners. Bertie's favorite day of the week is Friday, when she leaves the wrecker with her father for the whole weekend and joins her friends at the Dew Drop Inn for a night of dancing. Her best friend, Mary Lou, sometimes fixes her up with dubious dates, although Bertie has to remind her friend not to tease her hair too high for those occasions. Like the time when they went to Carrie Sue's open house, and a ceramic cow with angel wings hanging from a ceiling fan locked its hooves into Bertie's big hair and refused to let go. She had to wear it all night, dangling chain and all. Bertie's nearly perfect life is about to take a downhill turn, however. It starts when her landlord, Pete, currently a resident in a nearby nursing home, starts showing up at her house. In his birthday suit. A very badly wrinkled birthday suit. And then she goes to her mailbox, a rubber large mouth bass, and finds a notice from the zoning commission saying she can no longer park the wrecker in her driveway. The notice is signed by George Bigham. But when she goes to the courthouse to take care of her little problem, it is only to discover George Bigham is deceased. And Mary Lou's pregnancy test just came up positive. Can it get any worse? In a word... yes.

    Author Jesse May was seventeen years old and already hooked. By 1996, poker could be legally played in casinos in over twenty states of the union and five countries in Europe. Legalization changed the face of poker, and as the game came of age, so did May, who by 1989 had dropped out of the University of Chicago after one year due to irreconcilable differences between Tuesday- and Thursday-morning classes and Monday- and Wednesday-night poker games.Based on his experiences in the strange world of poker, May's debut novel Shut Up and Deal is the story of a nontraditional '90s slacker, a dropout with an incurable obsession and incredible stamina, who makes a career in a profession where the only goals are to stay in action and to not go broke. In Shut Up and Deal, a professional poker player takes readers along on his adventures over several years in and out of casinos and card rooms in locales such as Las Vegas, Atlantic City, and Amsterdam. Told in a catching, likeable voice, this story offers up one rip-roaring poker-table drama after another, with narrator Mickey ultimately finding himself in a spot that jeopardizes his entire bankroll and calls into question his morals, such as they are. In rhythmic, high-octane prose that is as addictive as the game it describes, Shut Up and Deal zooms in on the swirling, feverish microcosm of the contemporary poker world from its very first line and never cuts away.

    After abandoning his new home as a lost cause, he's caught up in the poker craze and moves to Atlantic City with a new dream of "playing poker for a living", but soon finds himself stuck in a dizzying spell of bad luck at the card tables. Or maybe he just sucks at poker, like everybody else. His money all gone, and finding that it's actually difficult to drink oneself to death at 1am, he's suddenly offered a chance to make his money back, and then some, by running an underground poker game in New York City. Once in New York, Tim finds himself on the road to recovery and making real money for the first time—but at what cost? We Run Bad offers an authentic and darkly comic look at underground poker culture, while serving up an indictment of post-recession America. Here, every game is rigged, and the only way to come out ahead is to be the one doing the rigging.

    But at the same time many perennial social problems also grew manifolds, remained inattentive and giving birth to exponential intensification to grievances. The volcanoes of grievances led to Genesis of MIЯЯЯO … MIЯЯЯO’s unpredictable fearless Modus-Operandi breaks all the Laws and leads to the out-of-the-box solutions as Weird Way Ward, to rejuvenate the Eco-Systems of today’s hypocritical SYSTEMS…it’s up to the discretion of the PEOPLE, to allow or not! The Story indicates India’s perennial problems through the eyes of the Protagonist, who always dreamt for the solutions as his own personal aspirations, but, couldn’t succeed meeting even single one, out of his own personal flaws. Time compels him taking help of someone, whom he never believed cordially. Out of gist of many, only 3 problems are selfishly picked-up by the Protagonist, which hurt him most personally. MIЯЯЯO weirdly solves those 3 problems with the essence of absolute cleansing as permanent solutions… Will INDIA wish to have such weird, but, permanent solutions to all other problems? Let TIME tell…

    While on a book promotion tour, he is injured and agrees to call a masseuse. Little did he know that the masseuse would turn out to be someone with a secret!Arun sees a story in her, and in digging deeper, is amazed to discover her strength of character. Even though Lalita is a young survivor of human trafficking, she has unmatched determination.A single encounter with her makes Arun take decisions that he had never even thought of. He is willing to risk everything for her, his own life too.But the more he tries to help her, the deeper he drowns in the swamp.Will two broken people be able to heal each other? Will society ever accept a girl from the forbidden alleys of the city?The Girl in the Red Lipstick is a charming story of friendship, life and finding love where we least expect to.

    He’s had a bad year. Sarah, his wife of nearly twenty five years, has walked out on him to move in with Colin. Perhaps they simply grew apart, perhaps the magic was no longer there, or perhaps, as his friend Jerry suggests, Rick has become boring. This nagging thought, together with too much beer on New Year’s Eve and shock at the sudden death of his college friend Alex, leads Rick to a New Year’s resolution… To make the most of the time he has left, and show himself and his old friend Jerry that he is not boring, he will undertake a peculiar challenge: for a whole year he will accept every invitation that comes his way. Any invitation. No excuses. No regrets.

    Every year she escapes for a few weeks to beautiful Greek islands, losing herself in photography and wreck diving.When the junk room of her clifftop cottage is cleared to accommodate a carer for her father, Summer stumbles across the belongings of her great-grandmother, Gertie Smith. She finds a WWI nurse's uniform, a soldier's blanket, and a recording of Gertie's memoirs. As Summer listens to it, she learns about her great-grandmother's secret life, and might just find the strength to let go of her own tragic past.1916When eighteen-year-old nurse Gertie Smith signs up for the war effort, she is thrilled to learn that her destination will be Greece. With a head full of blue skies and handsome men, she boards the Titanic's sister ship, the hospital ship Britannic. Unprepared for the horrors of war, she heads for the Greek island of Lemnos on a mission to rescue three thousand wounded British soldiers.The Britannic never reaches its destination. Gertie, who disobeyed her orders, blames herself.She is sent to the Greek island of Kea, where she meets and falls in love with a Greek fisherman, Manno - but she finds herself torn between him and her duty to an English soldier, and all too soon her past catches up with her.

    She's also about six stone overweight. When she realises she can't cross her legs, has trouble bending over to tie her shoelaces without wheezing like an elderly chain-smoker, and discovers that even her hands and feet look fat, it's time to take action. But what action? She's tried every diet under the sun. This is the hysterical story of what happens when Mary joins 'Fat Club' where she meets a cast of funny characters and one particular man who catches her eye. The story is laugh-out-loud funny and will resonate with anyone who has dieted, tried to keep up with any sort of exercise programme or spent 10 minutes in a changing room trying to extricate herself from a way too-small garment that she ambitiously tried on and is now completely stuck in. Bernice Bloom is the big, new name in comedy writing...this is the first full-length novel after her series of laugh-out-loud mini books.