But the thing is, I’m not a problem child at all. I’m just a child with a problem. Felix is struggling at school. His ADHD makes it hard for him to concentrate and his grades are slipping. Everyone keeps telling him to try harder, but no one seems to understand just how hard he finds it. When Mum suggests Felix spends time with his grandfather, Felix can’t think of anything worse. Granddad hasn’t been the same since Grandma died. Plus he’s always trying to teach Felix boring chess. But sometimes the best lessons come in the most unexpected of places, and Granddad soon shows Felix that there’s everything to play for.

    Most of them die of the quivers, or from wounds suffered when their turn-knife slips. Working, sleeping and eating in the cellar with magical stones, their skin acquires an eerie silvery sparkle. It's practically impossible to escape from their underground prison, and if they do, the phosphorescent glow of their skin shines like a beacon for all to see. That's why Tommo is running, running as fast as he can to the coast. He has been granted sanctuary for eight days and must leave the shores by then, or face the hangman's noose.

    Twenty years later, it remains a bestseller in the field and one of the best practical training manuals available.

    Each of the stories introduces a different side of the twentieth century's most ingenious detective hero.This book also features a biographical essay by Janet Hitchman, Sayers' first biographer.

    Gain invaluable insight on the art of revenge, choosing your evil name, where to find the perfect lair, and much more!

    Enter "the TV Detective" Mallory Malone, the famous and beautiful star of the investigative TV show whom Jordan has enlisted for help.Jordan is prepared for Mallory's disdain and air of superiority, but he isn't ready for the electric attraction between the two. Nor does he expect her well-hidden vulnerability to be unveiled so soon, for Mallory holds a secret that eludes even the most astute detective. And both she and Jordan are about to discover that the murderer is closer than they know.

    Gustav Uyterhoeven left the chess garden that he and his wife, Sonja, had created together in Dayton, Ohio, and journeyed to South Africa to serve as a doctor in the British concentration camps of the Boer War. Over the next ten months he sent twelve chess pieces and twelve letters back to Sonja. She set out her husband's gifts as they arrived and welcomed all the most faithful guests of the garden to come and hear what he had written - letters which told nothing of his experience of the camps but described an imagined land called the Antipodes, where all the game pieces that cluttered the sets and drawers of the garden collection came to life to guide the doctor through his fateful and wondrous last adventure. Brooks Hansen offers a tale of spiritual progress disguised in the most exotic visions of the imagination. And yet The Chess Garden encompasses a very real world, too. Alongside the doctor's visions of the Antipodes, the story of his life gradually unfolds as well. History and allegory are expertly woven until finally both lead back to the chess garden itself, a place where ideas give way to vision, reason meets faith, and fact and figment are finally reconciled.

    Not so, says Helmut Walser Smith, who, in this groundbreaking 500-year history—the first comprehensive volume to go well beyond World War II—challenges traditional perceptions of Germany’s conflicted past, revealing a nation far more thematically complicated than twentieth-century historians have imagined.Smith’s dramatic narrative begins with the earliest glimmers of a nation in the 1500s, when visionary mapmakers and adventuresome travelers struggled to delineate and define this embryonic nation. Contrary to widespread perception, the people who first described Germany were pacific in temperament, and the pernicious ideology of German nationalism would only enter into the nation’s history centuries later. Tracing the significant tension between the idea of the nation and the ideology of its nationalism, Smith shows a nation constantly reinventing itself and explains how radical nationalism ultimately turned Germany into a genocidal nation.Smith’s aim, then, is nothing less than to redefine our understanding of Germany: Is it essentially a bellicose nation that murdered over six million people? Or a pacific, twenty-first-century model of tolerant democracy? And was it inevitable that the land that produced Goethe and Schiller, Heinrich Heine and Käthe Kollwitz, would also carry out genocide on an unprecedented scale?Combining poignant prose with an historian’s rigor, Smith recreates the national euphoria that accompanied the beginning of World War I, followed by the existential despair caused by Germany’s shattering defeat. This psychic devastation would simultaneously produce both the modernist glories of the Bauhaus and the meteoric rise of the Nazi party.Nowhere is Smith’s mastery on greater display than in his chapter on the Holocaust, which looks at the killing not only through the tragedies of Western Europe but, significantly, also through the lens of the rural hamlets and ghettos of Poland and Eastern Europe, where more than 80% of all the Jews murdered originated. He thus broadens the extent of culpability well beyond the high echelons of Hitler’s circle all the way to the local level. Throughout its pages, Germany also examines the indispensable yet overlooked role played by German women throughout the nation’s history, highlighting great artists and revolutionaries, and the horrific, rarely acknowledged violence that war wrought on women.Richly illustrated, with original maps created by the author, Germany: A Nation in Its Time is a sweeping account that does nothing less than redefine our understanding of Germany for the twenty-first century.

    Crane... A compulsive liar. Her vampire stalker. Who's going to believe her? Cassie Howell was just a normal girl worried about normal things - school, homework, dealing with her parents - until one day she picked up a stalker. But no, not a normal stalker, because that'd be too easy. A vampire stalker. Now Cassie is stuck; she has a long history of lying. Faced with Byron Vesper, a vampire with a crush on her who just won't let up, Cassie has no one to turn to, no one to trust. She's in way over her head, and left with two choices: Find a way to beat Byron at his own game... ...Or die.