I am sure you’ve seen at least one, if not more of the 26 films made on fictional British spy 007. You may’ve also seen TV shows like The Americans, Blindspot, Chuck, Covert Affairs, Homeland, Nikita, Quantico, The Blacklist, and/or The Night Manager. I wrote this book after I realised that the average person may not know even one-sixth of what I know about spies and spying. Almost each of the Top 50 nations (by GDP, population or military power) has a spy agency/service. Many countries have more than one ‘secret service’ or ‘intelligence agency’. USA has 16. Some countries’ spy agencies are more powerful than entire smaller nations, with annual budgets larger than their GDPs. This books attempts to tell the story of 20 of the world’s largest and most powerful spy agencies, details their important missions, reveals their darkest secrets, and gives you an inside perspective of the often quite gory but thrilling ‘world of spies’. It gives you a 360º view of those spy agencies you only read about or see in a movie or TV show. With one chapter per agency, you can read only chapters you may be interested in. The life of most spies is not as glamorous as it is made out to be. You may think it is all about high-tech and guns and car chases and ‘hot’ women, but that’s not the case. In the real spy world, the techniques boil down to the interpretation of basic human psychology. Even though a spy learns several action techniques on how to get out of a dangerous situation, including how to withstand torture, if he/she is resorting to car chases, it means they’re doing something wrong. Spies don’t get paid very well. Gambling at a casino or flying on a private jet may be part of the job, but a spy doesn’t get to spend this kind of money on personal expenses. Spies cannot disclose the nature of their work to their family and friends, to maintain secrecy. Many have to live away from home for weeks, months, even years. Married life is a mess, as the spouse starts suspecting the spy of having an affair. Who can become a spy? Do you need a law enforcement (police) or military background? Not really. Spies have degrees as diverse as law, political science, finance, economics – even professional athletes have become successful spies.

    

    She knows God handed her a life of hardship, especially when her Dad gives her away in marriage to a man she doesn't know. However, she proves to be a true mountain girl with spirit, determination, feistiness and fiery spunk. Laine's unabashed account of events, before and during the first months of her marriage, draws the reader spellbound into a story that will linger like mists shrouding distant mountains.

    Determined to keep the family together, Zetta and their toddlers join Asa and her brothers at the Golden Gate coal camp just before Christmas 1922. She is eight months pregnant. During the first week in the dismal camp, Zetta suffers fearful nightmares of cut trees and fresh dirt--Appalachian signs of trouble. Asa dismisses his wife's pleas to return to their farm, insisting their three-month stay will provide the $400 they need to give their children better lives. Disappointed, Zetta draws strength from her plump red-haired neighbor, Dosha, and the strong willed granny woman, Clarie, who will deliver her baby. And each morning, she thanks the Lord they are one more day closer to home. Or are they?

    But as more children are born, Joe's wife Tess sinks deeper into the obsession that will be her undoing. When Tess screams her belief that the area is cursed, few people heed her ravings. She is ignored, even as the Myrtle Street tragedies become more frequent and begin to feature in local gossip. It is left to Megan, the third Duffy child - the one who felt she was unworthy and unloved because she had been born a girl - to end the curse. When she becomes embroiled in a web of deceit, Megan needs all her strength, talents, and wit in order to survive. But it is her capacity to give love that ensures her family's stability, the future of the Althorpe cotton mills, and the safekeeping of the Hall i' the Vale.

    Having never cooked a day in her life, she is terrified of being found out and banished to the cotton fields as was her mother before her. But when she accidentally burns the freedom papers of Jonathan Mayfield, a handsome free man of color to whom she's attracted, her fear of the fields becomes secondary.A gifted cabinetmaker, Jonathan Mayfield's heart is set on finally becoming a respected businessman by outfitting a bedroom at the palatial Riverwood—until a beautiful new slave destroys his proof of freedom and his fragile confidence along with it. When the mistress of Riverwood orders Dinah to work alongside the sullen Mr. Mayfield, sparks fly setting the two on a collision course. Is their mutual love for God strong enough to overcome deep-seated insecurities and set the couple on a path toward self-acceptance and love for each other?

    That's what the locals are saying about Llandegwen, deep in the Welsh valleys. The village choir, once a source of pride for the small mining community, has been forced to disband; the elderly choirmaster heartbroken by the empty seats belonging to those who'll never return from the battlefields. The arrival of a young war widow from the East End with her little boy sets tongues wagging, not least when rumours abound that she's looking to revive the choir. Can the community set aside their grief and lift their voices, and the village's hopes, once more?

     Chandigarh based Khushwant Singh, itinerant writer, columnist and TV show host, pays tribute to the City Beautiful by setting his latest book–a work of fiction–amidst its broad, tree-lined boulevards. And its trappings: snazzy SUVs, glitzy homes and fast-paced lifestyles. Maharaja In Denims, a tale of love, intrigue and passion rallies around a teenaged protagonist, Hari Singh Sandhu, present-day resident of one of Chandigarh’s tony sectors, and Suzanne his girlfriend.Very early into their relationship Hari begins to get flashes of a past life that includes Maharaja Ranjit Singh, founder of the Sikh Empire. Clearly suggesting to a much-surprised teenager the very real possibility of him being Ranjit Singh’s incarnate! Alarmed at these happenings in his hitherto unencumbered and happily aimless existence, he needs little persuasion when Suzanne requests him to undergo a past life regression. Coughing up an incredible number of surprises, not least that of other, more horrific past lives.The author deftly interweaves the youthful love story with vignettes of Ranjit Singh’s life, loves, valour and conquests. With past life after past life unravelling before them, Hari and Suzanne, stumble upon people and incidents that link the present-day to the turbulent and disturbing history of Punjab. The story continues to England and then on to Mumbai before ending in an astonishing twist set in the future. Maharaja In Denims is indeed a modern tale told in a bold, moving and racy narrative.The author’s earlier works include Sikhs Unlimited, a well-received chronicle of the Sikh Diaspora in both the UK and USA, and Turbaned Tornado–an inspiring biography of the iconic 100 year-old Fauja Singh, marathon runner.

    Presidential candidate. Murderer. Unpunished is a tale of murder, ambition, corruption, and the redemptive power of love. Leonard Pilcher, a scion of entitlement and privilege, is a congressman, presidential candidate...and a murderer. As an American pilot interned in Sweden during WWII, he kills one of his own crewmen and gets away with it, without suspicion. Two people have witnessed the murder--American airman Joe Gelardi and his secret Swedish lover, Pola Nilsson-MacLeish--but they cannot speak out without paying a devastating price. Tormented by their guilt and separated by a vast ocean after the war, Joe and Pola maintain the silence that haunts them both...until 1960, when Congressman Pilcher's campaign for his party's nomination for president gains momentum. As he dons the guise of war hero, one female reporter, anxious to break into the "boy's club" of TV news, fights to uncover the truth against the far-reaching power of the Pilcher family's wealth, power that can do any wrong it chooses--even kill--and remain unpunished. Just as the nomination seems within Pilcher's grasp, Pola reappears to enlist Joe's help in finally exposing Pilcher for the criminal he really is. As the passion of their wartime romance rekindles, they must struggle to bring Pilcher down before becoming his next victims.

    Here, historian Alexander Ivanov reveals their fears and betrayals, privilege and debauchery, conspiracies and rivalries, love and tragedy as they forged Russia into one of the world's greatest empires. No ruler in history has embodied the oppressive domination of these rulers more vividly than Alexander Ivanov's opening subject, Tsar Ivan IV, the first of all the Russian tsars, known to history as Ivan the Terrible. Although a gifted ruler who did much to unite and improve the conditions in his primitive country, Ivan was also a notorious sadist who delighted in torturing and murdering anyone who displeased him. Ivan's death in 1584 ushered in the Time of Troubles, thirty-five years of famine, plague, and war that crippled the nation. A series of rulers attempted to cope with the devastation, beginning with Ivan's successor Boris Godunov. Finally, grasping for stability, Russia's nobles begged young Michael Romanov, the great-nephew of Ivan's beloved wife Anastasia, to take the throne. Michael successfully united the war-torn and ravaged nation and founded a dynasty that would rule for 300 years. The Romanov line produced Russia's most brilliant yet most unconventional sovereign: Peter the Great, a towering figure of a man whose restless, creative mind led him on an inexorable quest to modernize and civilize the still backward nation. The reforms he enacted so enraged nobles and peasants alike that Peter had to quash a series of rebellions to keep his crown. Ruthlessly stifling dissent and massacring rebels, he ultimately cowed the Russian people into submission, achieving a legacy that nearly equaled his ambitions. It was left to a woman - and a foreigner, at that - to lead the nation further out of the darkness. German princess Sophie Friederike Auguste of Anhalt-Zerbst, known to the world as Catherine the Great, absorbed the principles of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment and applied them to a country built on the backs of millions of serfs. However ineffective some of her policies, in the end, she made Russia a major player on the European stage. Serfdom was finally abolished in the nineteenth century, but it would be decades before Russian peasants could own land of their own and learn to farm it productively. The boyars and tsars clung to power until the Bolshevik revolution of 1917. The sad fate of the last tsar, Nicholas II, and his family, marked the end of the absolute power that Ivan the Terrible had so exploited. The abuses would continue but under a new and drastically different form of government.

    It is the late 1960s and the family enjoy an idyllic life in the Vale of Kashmir, despite the area being riddled with conflict and poverty. But after a devastating earthquake wipes out her entire family, Jaya is taken into the care of relatives in Delhi, who attempt to marry her off and keep secret from her the possibility that Tahir, her younger brother, has survived the earthquake. After escaping from the arranged marriage Jaya is put through medical training in Scotland, as she had always dreamed, and where she develops feelings for her foster family’s eldest son, Alastair, who is engaged to someone else. In the meantime, Tahir has been abducted by a band of Kashmiri freedom fighters, who have made him one of their own. Jaya finally returns to her troubled homeland to find him and come to terms with the loss of her family. Alastair, who arrives in Kashmir to announce his love for Jaya, is kidnapped by the freedom fighters, forcing her to risk everything to get him back.

    It is the story of the struggles, simple joys and wisdom surrounding a young girl growing up in the 1940's in Appalachia.

    Her husband and elder son rode off to save slavery in the Confederate Cavalry. Their plantation would now be controlled by a brutish slave master and sadistic slave overseers. Would their slaves revolt? Would Yankee armies attack and destroy their way of life? The slave master already had designs on Clare Ellen Fairchild and couldn’t wait until her husband rode off to war and hopefully die for his Cause. It was April, planting season. The very long and very hot summer awaited them. Clare Ellen was told that this war would be over by September and to ‘not worry her pretty little head’ about it. Clare Ellen was told wrong. She and her children should have worried their pretty little heads.

    The runaway evacuees who give her shelter call her Nellie, the only girl in 'Toff' Hecht's gang, until, yet again, tragedy strikes, and she is forced to move on. But when Nellie meets the great music hall illusionists, Monsieur and Madame Pierre - alias Bert and Doris Beckwith - her life begins again. In the magical world of bright lights and greasepaint she finds a wonderful new family. But even as she is happily stitching costumes backstage, Nellie can't stop thinking about her old life in the bombed-out rubble - and more particularly, about the restless young Jewish boy, 'Toff' Hecht...

    When Amy visits her husband Hugh at Beckett's Park Hospital, he doesn't recognise her. Broken after serving four devastating years in the First World War, Hugh is a shadow of the man he once was. Can he ever again be the man Amy knew and loved?Barnsborough, 1912. The first time Hugh and Amy meet, the connection between them is instant and electric. While a librarian's assistant and a collier might not be the most conventional pair, the two come together over a love of books that quickly turns into more. Neither suspects their families have secrets that threaten to tear them apart...True love's path is rarely simple... but can Hugh and Amy find their way back to each other?