"A rescue squad saves a girl and her dog from their crashed sailboat during a storm"--

This high-action (yet toddler-friendly) beat-by-beat look at an emergency response is now available as a board book! Told almost entirely in sound words, this day-in-the-life look at a fire engine crew will appeal to the youngest vehicle enthusiasts and to parents with a penchant for exuberant read-aloud sessions. With art reminiscent of that in Donald Crews’s transportation books, Mike Austin evokes the excitement of a 911 call as we follow firefighters down the fire pole, through town, and up the ladder truck.

'The joy of these scripts is in being able to appreciate the craft and ambition involved in the sharpness of the dialogue, the cunning of the plotting, and the desire never to repeat themselves, as Pemberton and Shearsmith build each episode into a miniaturist treasure. A must for anyone who wants to write for television, or who just wants to see how the magic is done.' - NEIL GAIMAN Take a further peek behind the door marked 'number 9' as the scripts from series 1-3 are collected here for the first time. An anthology of darkly comic twisted tales by Steve Pemberton and Reece Shearsmith, read how each 30-minute self-contained story with new characters and new settings, sprang to life from the page. Each series is prefaced by a foreword from the show creators, giving readers and fans behind-the-scenes insight to this creative phenomenon. It is a beautifully written series, some stories comic, some tragic, all highly original and inventive. As well as Steve and Reece, it has featured guest appearances from a plethora well-known actors including Jack Whitehall, Peter Kay, Sheridan Smith, Gemma Arterton, Keeley Hawes, Alison Steadman, Conleth Hill, and David Morrissey. Relive the show's every enjoyable moment down to the stage directions with Inside No. 9: The Scripts: Series 1-3.

Take this, brother, may it sere you well.... As he lies, bound and hidden, on the floor of his abductors' SUV, Carroll Monks is only dimly aware of the bizarre series of high-profile murders sweeping across the nation. What he thinks about instead, a they travel for hours deep into the Northern California wilderness, is that the face of one of his abductors belongs to his own son, Glenn--long estranged and living (the last Monks knew) on the streets of Seattle. The vehicle finally stops. when Monks is untied and stpes out, he sees he's been brought to a remote off-the-grid community where paramilitary training and methamphetamine makes for combustible, uneasy bedfellows--and that Glen has fallen under the spell of a disenfranchised counter-cultural sociopath known simply as Freeboot, who claims that a revolution "of the people" is already under way. Monks is appalled by Freeboot's violent histrionics and Manson-like affinity for the hidden messages buried within Lennon and McCartney lyrics, yet acknowledges that he hears echoes of his won feelings when Freeboot speaks about the disintegration of workers' rights, the escalating differential between the haves and the have-nots, and the slap-on-the-wrist "justice" doled out in cases of billion-dollar corporate malfeasance. Could this well-armed madman actually have his finger on teh pulse of the underclass? The reason Monks has been abducted, he soon discovers, is Freeboot's own son, a four-year-old boy who is deathly ill--a conundrum for Freeboot, who's distrust of institutional America (hospitals included) borders on the psychotic. Monks, and ER physician, has been brought in to care for the boy, but he can see immediately that the boy's condition is acute and that only immediate hospitalization will save him. When Monk's pleas fall on deaf ears, he fashions a daring escape during a snowstorm, with the young boy slung across his back--and brings the wrath of a madman down on himself and his family, culminating in a diabolically crafted "revolution"--a re-creation of Hitchcock's The Birds, but with human predators, unleashed on the town of Bodega Bay, California.

Number 9 tells the story of Enjil, a boy mathematician who is challenged by a spirit to solve the riddle, What is the fixed point of the wind? As Enjil searches for the answer, he and the reader embark on a journey through myth, legend, and religion. Enjil s adventures lead readers to an appreciation of symmetry within asymmetry, classical ideas, and modern impulses. Along the way Balmond redefines arithmetic for the lay person and opens the gateway to further discoveries.

By the New York Times bestselling author of The Bone Clocks and Cloud Atlas | Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize “A novel as accomplished as anything being written.”—Newsweek Number9Dream is the international literary sensation from a writer with astonishing range and imaginative energy—an intoxicating ride through Tokyo’s dark underworlds and the even more mysterious landscapes of our collective dreams. David Mitchell follows his eerily precocious, globe-striding first novel, Ghostwritten, with a work that is in its way even more ambitious. In outward form, Number9Dream is a Dickensian coming-of-age journey: Young dreamer Eiji Miyake, from remote rural Japan, thrust out on his own by his sister’s death and his mother’s breakdown, comes to Tokyo in pursuit of the father who abandoned him. Stumbling around this strange, awesome city, he trips over and crosses—through a hidden destiny or just monstrously bad luck—a number of its secret power centers. Suddenly, the riddle of his father’s identity becomes just one of the increasingly urgent questions Eiji must answer. Why is the line between the world of his experiences and the world of his dreams so blurry? Why do so many horrible things keep happening to him? What is it about the number 9? To answer these questions, and ultimately to come to terms with his inheritance, Eiji must somehow acquire an insight into the workings of history and fate that would be rare in anyone, much less in a boy from out of town with a price on his head and less than the cost of a Beatles disc to his name. Praise for Number9Dream “Delirious—a grand blur of overwhelming sensation.”—Entertainment Weekly “To call Mitchell’s book a simple quest novel . . is like calling Don DeLillo’s Underworld the story of a missing baseball.”—The New York Times Book Review “Number9Dream, with its propulsive energy, its Joycean eruption of language and playfulness, represents further confirmation that David Mitchell should be counted among the top young novelists working today.”—San Francisco Chronicle “Mitchell’s new novel has been described as a cross between Don DeLillo and William Gibson, and although that’s a perfectly serviceable cocktail-party formula, it doesn’t do justice to this odd, fitfully compelling work.”—The New Yorker “Leaping with ease from surrealist fables to a teenage coming-of-age story and then spinning back to Yakuza gangster battles and World War II–era kamikaze diaries, Mitchell is an aerial freestyle ski-jumper of fiction. Somehow, after performing feats of literary gymnastics, he manages to stick the landing.”—The Seattle Post-Intelligencer

When David Bramwell’s girlfriend left him for someone she described as 'younger, but more mature than you', he decided he had something to learn about giving. Taking a year off, he journeyed through Europe and America seeking out extraordinary communities that could teach him how to share. He wanted answers to a few troubling questions: Is modern life rubbish? Why do so many of us feel lonely and unfulfilled despite a high standard of living? Are there communities out there who hold the key to happiness? And if so, why do so many of their inhabitants insist on dressing in tie-dye? His quest led him to an anarchist haven in the heart of Copenhagen; some hair-raising experiences in free love communities; an epiphany in a spiritual caravan park in Scotland and an apparent paradise in a Californian community dreamed up by Aldous Huxley. Most impressive of all was Damanhur, a 1000-strong science fiction- style community in the Alps with an underground temple the size of St Paul's Cathedral, a village of tree houses and a ‘fully-functioning time machine'. Inspired, he returned home with a desire to change. Not just himself but also his neighbourhood and city. Find out how he succeeded in this wry and self-deprecatingly funny spiritual journey that asks some big questions and finds the answers surprisingly simple.