![]() It was great to hold the book in my hand without it vanishing in the air the way the songs did. One of my television songs, A SQUASH AND A SQUEEZE, was made into a book in 1993, with illustrations by the wonderful Axel Scheffler. ![]() ![]() I also continued to write “grown-up” songs and perform them in folk clubs and on the radio, and have recently released two CDs of these songs. “We want a song about throwing crumpled-up wrapping paper into the bin” was a typical request from the BBC. I became an expert at writing to order on such subjects as guinea pigs, window-cleaning and horrible smells. The busking led to a career in singing and songwriting, mainly for children’s television. I studied Drama and French at Bristol University, where I met Malcolm, a guitar-playing medic to whom I’m now married.īefore Malcolm and I had our three sons we used to go busking together and I would write special songs for each country the best one was in Italian about pasta. A wind-up gramophone wafted out Chopin waltzes. Mary and I were always creating imaginary characters and mimicking real ones, and I used to write shows and choreograph ballets for us. Mary and I would argue about which of us would marry him). ![]() I grew up in a tall Victorian London house with my parents, grandmother, aunt, uncle, younger sister Mary and cat Geoffrey (who was really a prince in disguise. ![]()
0 Comments
![]() The Polos eventually departed for Europe and reached Venice in 1295. After leaving the princess in Iran, the Polos travelled overland to Constantinople and then to Venice, arriving home in 1295. The party sailed from a southern Chinese port via Sumatra, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), southern India, and the Persian Gulf. Little is known of these years, but Marco Polo was obviously popular with the Mongol ruler and was sent on various diplomatic missions which gave him the opportunity to see many parts of China.Īround 1292, the Polos offered to accompany a Mongol princess who was to become the consort of Arghun Khan in Persia. For the next 17 years the Polos lived in the emperor's lands. In 1271, they set off again, accompanied by two missionaries and Marco, and in 1275 reached Khan's summer court. Khan asked the Polo brothers to return to Europe and persuade the pope to send scholars to explain Christianity to him. In 1260, they left Venice to travel to the Black Sea, moving onwards to central Asia and joining a diplomatic mission to the court of Kublai Khan, the Mongol ruler of China. Polo's father and uncle, Niccolò and Maffeo Polo, were jewel merchants. Marco Polo was born in around 1254 into a wealthy and cosmopolitan Venetian merchant family. ![]() © Polo was a Venetian traveller and writer who was one of the first westerners to visit China. ![]() ![]() As U-20 and the Lusitania made their way toward Liverpool, an array of forces both grand and achingly small-hubris, a chance fog, a closely guarded secret, and more-all converged to produce one of the great disasters of history. Meanwhile, an ultra-secret British intelligence unit tracked Schwieger’s U-boat, but told no one. Germany, however, was determined to change the rules of the game, and Walther Schwieger, the captain of Unterseeboot-20, was happy to oblige. But the Lusitania was one of the era’s great transatlantic “Greyhounds”-the fastest liner then in service-and her captain, William Thomas Turner, placed tremendous faith in the gentlemanly strictures of warfare that for a century had kept civilian ships safe from attack. For months, German U-boats had brought terror to the North Atlantic. ![]() ![]() ![]() The passengers were surprisingly at ease, even though Germany had declared the seas around Britain to be a war zone. On May 1, 1915, with WWI entering its tenth month, a luxury ocean liner as richly appointed as an English country house sailed out of New York, bound for Liverpool, carrying a record number of children and infants. ![]() Dead Wake The Last Crossing of the Lusitaniaįrom the #1 New York Times bestselling author and master of narrative nonfiction comes the enthralling story of the sinking of the Lusitania ![]() ![]() 'Compassionate, tender, incisive writing' Lucy Foley 'One of the most honest writers writing today' Pandora Sykes 'Keyes weaves the joy and pain of life in a unique and magical way' Cathy Rentzenbrink ![]() 'Will make you laugh and make you cry, but will also reveal the truth of who you really are' Louise O'Neill 'Keyes is in a class of her own' Daily ExpressįAMOUS FANS AND WHY THEY LOVE MARIAN KEYES 'A warm and hilarious page turner' Good Housekeeping Love the Walsh sisters? Don't miss out on the eagerly awaited sequel to Rachel's Holiday: AGAIN, RACHEL. Will she forgive and forget? Or can she find the courage to take a chance on herself, and start a life of her own? So when James gets back in touch, eager to put things right, Claire faces a choice. ![]() Juggling her sisters' drama, her parents' pity and the demands of a baby, Claire desperately misses the way things were. and runs home to Mum and Dad.īut it's not the sanctuary she'd been hoping for. ![]() On the day she gives birth to her first child, Claire's husband James tells her he's been having an affair, and that now's the right time to leave her.Įxhausted, tearful and a tiny bit furious, Claire doesn't know what to do. 'Reading a novel by Marian Keyes is like sitting at the kitchen table with your nicest, most confiding friend' Daily Mail ![]() 'A modern fairy tale, full of Keyes's self-deprecating wit' Sunday Mirror Click here to purchase from Rakuten Kobo Discover the riotously funny, tender and touching debut from the No. ![]() ![]() A cop crashes into a telephone pole in a deserted road in broad daylight? Over." -"With all do respect, it might have been an honest mistake. This is one of the weirdest parts of the whole ordeal. I haven't noticed anything out of the ordinary yet, but.Time will tell. ![]() Over." (Sloan disconnects and Jones waits a minute to call Kowalski.) -"Kowalski? This is Jones. ![]() Over." (At this point, Jones and Sloan went silent for a good ten seconds at least.) -"Well, I guess I'd better get in touch with Kowalski-I put him in charge of examining the wreck footage. I'll tell you though, if 013 doesn't turn up fast.I might just end up like poor ol' Officer Brown-with my brains scattered on the ceiling. How are you holding up, Sloan? Over." -"Alright, all things considering. Last thing I heard was about the footage of the wreck. Any word over on your end? Over." -"Not since the last broadcast, about forty-five minutes ago. I just got done talking to McClellan and that SOB Kowalski. Do you have any intel from HQ? Over." -" 'Fraid not. " Officer Jones? You there? Over." -"I am, who is this? Over." -"Officer Sloan, sir. And I wrote down everything as I heard it. About an hour ago, however, I did get into it. I still have access to the police radio channel, but I haven't had a good signal from it since my first attempt, and I haven't tried looking at it very much. ![]() I have, however, been reading and responding to some of your comments, and I have some new insight into what may be going on. I know a lot of you have been waiting to hear more about my current situation. ![]() ![]() ![]() It has the powerful mythical feel of traditional fairy tales, with plenty of nods to classics, and a political undercurrent that tells of the time he wrote it. I'm not quite sure why I picked this up (it's a children's book, and my "child" was 21 last week - perhaps I'm hankering for times past), but I'm glad I did. " What's the use of stories that aren't even true?" In 2007, he began a five-year term as Distinguished Writer in Residence at Emory University. In June 2007, he was appointed a Knight Bachelor for "services to literature", which "thrilled and humbled" him. Faced with death threats and a fatwa (religious edict) issued by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, then Supreme Leader of Iran, which called for him to be killed, he spent nearly a decade largely underground, appearing in public only sporadically. His fourth novel led to some violent protests from Muslims in several countries. His style is often classified as magical realism, while a dominant theme of his work is the story of the many connections, disruptions and migrations between the Eastern and Western world. ![]() Sir Ahmed Salman Rushdie, a novelist and essayist, set much of his early fiction at least partly on the Indian subcontinent. The Satanic Verses (1988), novel of Indian-born British writer Salman Rushdie led Ruholla Khomeini, the ayatollah of Iran, to demand his execution and then forced him into hiding his other works include Midnight's Children (1981), which won the Booker prize, and The Moor's Last Sigh (1995). ![]() ![]() Hype over books can be a good and a bad thing.īut why oh WHY didn’t I pick up Shatter Me sooner?! It’s a brilliant dystopian written from the perspective of Juliette, a person with the power to kill just by her touch which has resulted in her being locked up in an asylum. ![]() It’s been on my TBR list for ages but I just never got round to reading it! Plus, whenever something is really hyped up, it sort of puts me off sometimes because I think I might go into the story expecting too much from the book and if it doesn’t deliver, it’s always a bit disappointing. I had such an experience with the Shatter Me trilogy. ![]() We all have some book series on our TBRs, a series you’ve heard amazing things about and you keep telling yourself that you need to read it, but of course the time just never comes for some reason and before you know it, it’s months and maybe years later until you finally pick it up. ![]() ![]() ![]() She has been the subject of numerous books and references to her, and her works are common in Brazilian literature and music. Injured in an accident in 1966, she spent the last decade of her life in frequent pain, steadily writing and publishing novels and stories until her premature death in 1977. (A Paixão Segundo G.H.), and the novel many consider to be her masterpiece, Água Viva. Upon return to Rio de Janeiro in 1959, she began producing her most famous works, including the stories of Family Ties (Laços de Família), the great mystic novel The Passion According to G.H. She left Brazil in 1944, following her marriage to a Brazilian diplomat, and spent the next decade and a half in Europe and the United States. While in law school in Rio she began publishing her first journalistic work and short stories, catapulting to fame at age 23 with the publication of her first novel, 'Near to the Wild Heart' (Perto do Coração Selvagem), written as an interior monologue in a style and language that was considered revolutionary in Brazil. The family moved to Rio de Janeiro when she was in her teens. She grew up in northeastern Brazil, where her mother died when she was nine. Born to a Jewish family in Podolia in Western Ukraine, she was brought to Brazil as an infant, amidst the disasters engulfing her native land following the First World War. ![]() Acclaimed internationally for her innovative novels and short stories, she was also a journalist. Clarice Lispector was a Brazilian writer. ![]() ![]() ![]() “Suspenseful… a harsher, suburban, sex-filled variation on The Mousetrap. ![]() “Adapted from the hit thriller novel by Paula Hawkins, which told three women’s narratives as they became embroiled in a missing person case… the play strips out the other two narratives and focusses only on Rachel, a hopeless middle-class boozer.” – London Theatre She tangles her way into the heart of the puzzle.” – Mary-Catherine Harvey, The Up Coming “Peppered with questions… when a neighbour mysteriously goes missing, Rachel’s memory, which is punctured by alcohol-stained blackouts and missing fragments, is all she has to work with. “The stage adaptation is a nicely-balanced vodka martini: sharp, invigorating and definitely not sugary-sweet… fast-moving, beautifully-structured narrative… As the drama speeds along to denouement, layer upon layer upon layer of intrigue and tension by turn obscure and reveal foreboding harbingers of a calamitous climax.” – The Bath Magazine That's what I've taken from the therapy sessions: the holes in your life are permanent. I'm starting to believe that there isn't anything you can do to fix it. Onstage, The Girl on the Train carries that same heart-thumping humanity with all the juddering twists and intermittent periods of darkness – adapted for wider appeal by Rachel Wagstaff and Duncan Abel… Don’t miss the hurtling ride of The Girl on the Train.” – London Theatre Direct The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins 2,724,258 ratings, 3.95 average rating, 121,680 reviews Open Preview The Girl on the Train Quotes Showing 1-30 of 699 Hollowness: that I understand. ![]() “Paula Hawkins’ international best-seller 20 million copies worldwide. Don’t miss the hurtling ride of The Girl on the Train.” – London Theatre Direct ![]() ![]() ![]() Another Larkin progeny, Liam's son Rory, is acclaimed as a war hero after fighting with the British at Gallipoli, while Rory's brother Dary takes Catholic clerical vows, only to have a powerful love drive him to question both celibacy and his calling. Uris begins by tracing the Larkin legacy from patriarch Liam's exile to New Zealand, where he becomes squire of a sheep farm his brother, Conor, becomes a legendary Irish revolutionary. ![]() The conflict between two of the three dominant families of Trinity, the tempestuous Larkins and their staid British counterparts, the Hubbles, is the focus here. ![]() Nearly 20 years after Trinity, his bestselling chronicle of the Irish struggle against British rule during the latter half of the 19th century, Uris returns to the Emerald Isle with a story set during the WWI years. ![]() |