At once a biography of an extraordinary 18th century gentlewoman and a meditation on late-life creativity, it is a beautifully written tour de force from an acclaimed poet. Mary Granville Pendarves Delany (1700-1788) was the witty, beautiful and talented daughter of a minor branch of a powerful family. Married off at 16 to a 61-year-old drunken squire to improve the family fortunes, she was widowed by 25, and henceforth had a small stipend and a horror of a marriage. She spurned many suitors over the next twenty years, including the powerful Lord Baltimore and the charismatic radical John Wesley. She cultivated a wide circle of friends, including Handel and Jonathan Swift. And she painted, she stitched, she observed, as she swirled in the outskirts of the Georgian court. In mid-life she found love, and married. Upon her husband's death 23 years later, she arose from her grief, picked up a pair of scissors and, at the age of 72, created a new art form, mixed-media collage. Over the next decade, Mrs Delany created an astonishing 985 botanically correct, breathtaking cut-paper flowers, now housed in the British Museum and referred to as the Botanica Delanica.Delicately, Peacock has woven parallels in her own life around the story of Mrs Delany's and, in doing so, has made this biography into a profound and beautiful examination of the nature of creativity and art.Gorgeously designed and featuring 35 full-colour illustrations, this is a sumptuous and lively book full of fashion and friendships, gossip and politics, letters and love. It's to be devoured as voraciously as one of the court dinners it describes.

    A young, highly intelligent man named Christian Longo, on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted list for killing his entire family, has recently been captured in Mexico, where he'd taken on a new identity -- Michael Finkel of the New York Times.The next day, on page A-3 of the Times, comes another bit of troubling news: a note, written by the paper's editors, explaining that Finkel has falsified parts of an investigative article and has been fired. This unlikely confluence sets the stage for a bizarre and intense relationship. After Longo's arrest, the only journalist the accused murderer will speak with is the real Michael Finkel. And as the months until Longo's trial tick away, the two men talk for dozens of hours on the telephone, meet in the jailhouse visiting room, and exchange nearly a thousand pages of handwritten letters.With Longo insisting he can prove his innocence, Finkel strives to uncover what really happened to Longo's family, and his quest becomes less a reporting job than a psychological cat-and-mouse game -- sometimes redemptively honest, other times slyly manipulative. Finkel's pursuit pays off only at the end, when Longo, after a lifetime of deception, finally says what he wouldn't even admit in court -- the whole, true story. Or so it seems.

    Deciding that “if you don’t know the exact moment when the lights will go out, you might as well read until they do,” James moved his library to his house in Cambridge, where he would “live, read, and perhaps even write.” James is the award-winning author of dozens of works of literary criticism, poetry, and history, and this volume contains his reflections on what may well be his last reading list. A look at some of James’s old favorites as well as some of his recent discoveries, this book also offers a revealing look at the author himself, sharing his evocative musings on literature and family, and on living and dying. As thoughtful and erudite as the works of Alberto Manguel, and as moving and inspiring as Randy Pausch’s The Last Lecture and Will Schwalbe’s The End of Your Life Book Club, this valediction to James’s lifelong engagement with the written word is a captivating valentine from one of the great literary minds of our time.

    And yet, question marks have followed him around; question marks about his goalkeeping suitability after arriving on Merseyside; question marks about his integrity after match fixing allegations were laid against him. Here, Grobbelaar takes you to Africa, where nothing is at it seems; he takes you back to an era when Liverpool ruled Europe; he takes you to the benches of the Anfield dressing room, where only the strongest personalities survived. For the first time, he takes you inside the court room, detailing the draining fight to clear his name.

    The essays in How to Ruin Everything range from the absurd (how he became an international ivory smuggler) to the comical (his middle-school rap battle dominance) to the revelatory (his experiences with epilepsy), yet all are delivered with the type of linguistic dexterity and self-awareness that has won Watsky more than 765,000 YouTube subscribers. Alternately ribald and emotionally resonant, How to Ruin Everything announces a versatile writer with a promising career ahead.

    A Field Guide to Getting Lost draws on emblematic moments and relationships in Solnit's own life to explore the issues of wandering, being lost, and the uses of the unknown. The result is a distinctive, stimulating, and poignant voyage of discovery.

     He has played in World Cups and FA Cup finals; shared a dressing room with football greats like Roy Keane, Alan Shearer and Robbie Keane and worked under celebrated managers like Kenny Dalglish, Bobby Robson and Martin O’Neill. But Shay has had to show courage and strength of mind to get where he wanted in life. At four years old, he cruelly lost his mother to cancer at the age of just 41. Mum Agnes’s dying wish was that Dad Seamus would keep the family together. Seamus kept his word and the Given clan watched with pride as Shay forged a record-breaking career in the sport he loved. From Donegal to Saipan, Glasgow to Wembley and Tyneside to Paris, it’s been some journey. Shay has seen it all. Glorious highs and desperate lows. Dressing room wind-ups and team-bonding punch-ups. Brutal injuries and crippling self-doubt. Along the way, he has made so many friends. When one of his closest pals, Gary Speed, died suddenly in 2011, he was devastated. He played on, doing the only thing he knew to get him through the pain – pulling on a shirt and a pair of gloves. Shay loves football – for him, nothing can beat the buzz of a Saturday afternoon or the thrill of a big match night under lights. But he has never lost touch with the fans who make the game what it is. Entertaining, opinionated and inspirational, his long-awaited autobiography ANY GIVEN SATURDAY features a stellar cast of famous football names from the past 25 years. It tugs at the heart strings, bubbles with banter and lets slip secrets behind the big stories. This is a rare journey behind the scenes as told by one of our own.

    With We Are Never Meeting in Real Life., "bitches gotta eat" blogger and comedian Samantha Irby turns the serio-comic essay into an art form. Whether talking about how her difficult childhood has led to a problem in making "adult" budgets, explaining why she should be the new Bachelorette--she's "35-ish, but could easily pass for 60-something"--detailing a disastrous pilgrimage-slash-romantic-vacation to Nashville to scatter her estranged father's ashes, sharing awkward sexual encounters, or dispensing advice on how to navigate friendships with former drinking buddies who are now suburban moms--hang in there for the Costco loot--she's as deft at poking fun at the ghosts of her past self as she is at capturing powerful emotional truths.Chapter titles:My Bachelorette application --A blues for Fred --The miracle porker --Do you guys pay your fucking bills or what? --You don't have to be grateful for sex --A Christmas carol --Happy birthday --A case for remaining indoors --A total attack of the heart --A civil union --Mavis --Fuck it, bitch. Stay fat --Nashville hot chicken --I'm in love and it's boring --A bomb, probably --The real housewife of Kalamazoo --Thirteen questions to ask before getting married --Yo, I need a job --Feelings are a mistake --We are never meeting in real life

    But then her beloved cat Tibia disappeared. She and her partner, illustrator Wendy MacNaughton, mourned his loss. Yet weeks later, Tibia waltzed back into their lives. His owners were overjoyed. But they were also...jealous? Betrayed? Where had their sweet anxious cat disappeared to? Had he become a swashbuckling cat adventurer? Did he love someone else more? His owners were determined to find out.Using GPS technology, cat cameras, psychics, the web, and animal communicators, the authors of Lost Cat embarked on a quest to discover what their cat did when they weren't around. Told through writer Caroline Paul's rich and warmly poignant narrative and illustrator Wendy MacNaughton's stunning and hilarious 4-color illustrations, Lost Cat is a book for animal lovers, pet owners, and anyone who has ever done anything desperate for love.

    Iconoclast. Apostate. Drunk. Many words have been used to describe Doug Stanhope, but rarely has “hopeful” been one of them. However, heading into 2016, Stanhope peered through the apocalyptic fog and saw a forecast that was more rainbows than acid rain: His first book was set for release, his new stand-up special was in the can, and he was about to film a television pilot with his friend and confidant Johnny Depp. The sharks of Hollywood were circling, and Stanhope’s pockets were filled with chum. The only thing that could stop Doug was himself, and that’s exactly what he did.First came the booze, then came the pills, then came the stripper, and then, Doug came. A tryst aboard a cruise ship leaves him literally and figuratively adrift when his scorned wife, Bingo, reveals she is in love with another man: a jug-sippin’, guitar-pickin’ hobo. A simple, black-out fling turns out to be a pebble tossed into the lake of you-know-what named 2016, and in No Encore for the Donkey, Stanhope traces the resulting rings.Written and performed by Stanhope, his third memoir follows the veteran comedian on a quest to save his marriage, his wife, and eventually his wife’s life. Our hero's journey finds Stanhope cuddling with Johnny Depp in his Los Angeles mansion, receiving some much-needed TLC from Marilyn Manson, and - most daunting - building a new hour of comedy in the rusted-out hellscapes of post-industrial America.Equal parts love letter, road romp, and harrowing condemnation of the failures of America’s mental health care system, No Encore for the Donkey is a hilarious and heartbreaking account of a man balancing on the edge of damnation. With Bingo in a coma and Trump about to be elected, Stanhope sifts through the ruins of his own personal cataclysm in order to answer the big questions: What does it mean to love someone when you can’t love yourself? What is the point of success if you have no one to share it with? And is the end of the world BYOB?

    Or so he kept telling himself. But, no matter how busy or tired he was, something kept niggling at him. Books. Books he'd always wanted to read. Books he'd said he'd read that he actually hadn't. Books that whispered the promise of escape from the daily grind. And so, with the turn of a page, Andy began a year of reading that was to transform his life completely.This book is Andy's inspirational and very funny account of his expedition through literature: classic, cult, and everything in between. Beginning with a copy of Bulgakov's Master and Margarita that he happens to find one day in a bookstore, he embarks on a literary odyssey. From Middlemarch to Anna Karenina to A Confederacy of Dunces, this is a heartfelt, humorous, and honest examination of what it means to be a reader, and a witty and insightful journey of discovery and soul-searching that celebrates the abiding miracle of the book and the power of reading.

    airspace on September 11, the population of this small town on Newfoundland Island swelled from 10,300 to nearly 17,000. The citizens of Gander met the stranded passengers with an overwhelming display of friendship and goodwill. As the passengers stepped from the airplanes, exhausted, hungry and distraught after being held on board for nearly 24 hours while security checked all of the baggage, they were greeted with a feast prepared by the townspeople. Local bus drivers who had been on strike came off the picket lines to transport the passengers to the various shelters set up in local schools and churches. Linens and toiletries were bought and donated. A middle school provided showers, as well as access to computers, email, and televisions, allowing the passengers to stay in touch with family and follow the news.Over the course of those four days, many of the passengers developed friendships with Gander residents that they expect to last a lifetime. As a show of thanks, scholarship funds for the children of Gander have been formed and donations have been made to provide new computers for the schools. This book recounts the inspiring story of the residents of Gander, Canada, whose acts of kindness have touched the lives of thousands of people and been an example of humanity and goodwill.

    Whether your heart has been broken, your dream put on hold, or your character placed under pressure, Desiree Hartsock Siegfried's story will give you courage to stay strong in your own journey.Desiree's debut on the world stage meant facing the critics, experiencing viewers judging her every word and action, and dealing with the devastation of a very public breakup. But what the world didn't know until now was the comeback journey that followed. By telling her experience of starring on The Bachelor and The Bachelorette and later becoming an entrepreneur and bridal designer, Desiree shares her lessons on:Fully trusting God with your future even when you don't understand the purpose of the painSeeing who you really are with faith, confidence, and self-loveAlways failing forward and trusting that despite the external pressures, God's love enduresStaying open to love and trust even through the ache of heartbreak, loneliness, and criticismThis rivetingly honest book shows how Desiree found her resilience and love after all--and you can too.

    With twenty-five tales of intriguing, shocking and incredible Christmas incidents, the British public will finally appreciate the sacrifices made and the challenges faced by the unsung heroes of the NHS.Twas The Nightshift Before Christmas will be fully illustrated (as tastefully as possible) and will delight all of Adam’s fans throughout the festive period of Christmas 2019 and for many years to come.

    Andy Seed's memoir is sure to charm fans of Jack Sheffield and Gervase Phinn's nostalgic style. 'Heart-warming and hilarious' - Daily Mail Dear Mr Seed, I am sorry that are Jack was not at school yesterday. He put on such a groth spurt in the night that nun of his clowthes fitted im next morning so I had to take him to the shops. Mrs R.Twenty-five years ago, newly qualified teacher Andy Seed moved to a remote village in the Yorkshire Dales with his wife Barbara, anticipating breath-taking views and the gentle simplicity of the countryside.The picturesque scenery did not disappoint. But life as a primary school teacher was anything but simple. With a classroom full of colourful characters whose capacity for misunderstanding was exceeded only by their enthusiasm and their ability to leave him incredulous, Andy fell in love with teaching and with village life.All Teachers Great and Small tells the true story of Andy's first year at Cragthwaite Primary School - how he bravely negotiated the vagaries of the local dialect, made disastrous bids to provide a family home, naively and hilariously tried out new-fangled ideas in a school stuck in a 1950s time warp, and ultimately discovered a little part of England he was proud to call home.What readers are saying about All Teachers Great and Small:'I howled with laughter on many occasions reading this book - it's a treasure!''Andy Seed brings the Dales to life with his memorable stories about rural school life in the 1980s. I loved this book''This book spoke to me on so many levels. It really is a jolly good read, and written with love and enthusiasm'