There's a lot going on from Charlotte to Miami to San Francisco -- almost none of it favorable to Tommy 'Fatboy' Dupree. While one man is sleeping around with Tommy's live-in girlfriend, another urges a psychopath to rob him for multiple kilos. These men are...his friends...which means the worst is yet to come. Alicia Anderson's beauty is off the scales. The physically fit college student has a father who is a real estate mogul, so she could care less about a 'fat boy' named Tommy who deals drugs. However, this new woman challenges him to give up the illicit profession and invest everything in a California real estate venture. Their serious love affair is overshadowed by his inability to hustle up enough money to walk away from the game. And although Fatboy has a few tricks in store for all his backstabbing friends, the DEA has plans to throw a nasty twist in his story. But Fatboy has even saved one last trick for the feds. This URBAN SUSPENSE threatens to brind the underground to the surface.

The central character, Hamer Shawcross, starts as a studious boy in an aspirational working-class family in Ancoats, Manchester; he becomes a socialist activist and soon a career politician, who eventually is absorbed by the upper classes he had begun by combating. The author's sympathies obviously lie with Shawcross's friends and associates who remain faithful to the cause; however, many of the middle class and aristocratic characters are portrayed fairly sympathetically, and one character whose career parallels that of Shawcross in his rise from poverty to eminence is a market-boy who becomes a major capitalist. The book also gives a fair impression of the growth particularly of the Labour Party; historical characters, such as Keir Hardie, occasionally appear, and part of the book is taken up with the hardships of life for coal mining communities in South Wales at the turn of the 20th century. The treatment of the militant women's suffrage movement is especially detailed--there are graphic descriptions of imprisonment and forcible feeding of hunger strikers. Fame is the Spur covers the rise of the socialist labour movement in Britain from the mid 19th century to the 1930s.

Ever since she was young, she had disguised herself as a man, and at the age of ten, she was repudiated by the heavens and earth. At the age of fourteen, she was bestowed with the name of a king, and was given the name of the king. Accept his fate? Accept your fate! Why not? You all regard yourself as the fiend of a country who lost. You all agreed to the words of heaven's will and were defeated by you all! The people of the world viewed him as a bloodthirsty demon, and thus, he had conformed to the will of the world and slaughtered him for the people of the world to see! So what if he was a monster? In this world of extreme flames, it was called the Burning Fire Cave. She grew up in the Burning Fire Cave, and after going through countless hardships, she created a peerless martial art called the Raging Flames Soul. The coldest place in the world was called the Valley of Ice. He grew up in the Valley of Ice, and after experiencing countless hardships, he created a peerless martial art called the Breaking Ice Soul. Wishing? This King never makes a wish! Only those who are incompetent will have a wish. Everything This King asks for, will be given to you! For example ... It commanded the whole world to be in chaos, to prostrate themselves within the Six Paths. He was the complete opposite of her, yet so similar! Ice and fire mutually restrained each other. Were those two fated to fall in love and kill each other as well? He had come from the nine heavens to descend into the mortal world. He was originally an unintentional person without desire or desire, and that person named Cang Qu had overturned the very essence of his life. Before I met you, I was unreal, but now, you are my unreal self! Bloody saffron, the love of this life, how could she let him? He was a man of martial arts, a man of great stature. He was the world's greatest tyrant ... Join Collection

_______________ 'A triumph of scholarship and sympathy... one of the great post-war biographies' - Independent 'A landmark in scholarly criticism... Knowlson is the world's largest Beckett scholar. His life is right up there with George Painter's Proust and Richard Ellmann's Joyce in sensitivity and fascination' - Daily Telegraph 'It is hard to imagine a fuller portrait of the man who gave our age some of the myths by which it lives' - Evening Standard _______________ SHORTLISTED FOR THE WHITBREAD PRIZE _______________ Samuel Beckett's long-standing friend, James Knowlson, recreates Beckett's youth in Ireland, his studies at Trinity College, Dublin in the early 1920s and from there to the Continent, where he plunged into the multicultural literary society of late-1920s Paris. The biography throws new light on Beckett's stormy relationship with his mother, the psychotherapy he received after the death of his father and his crucial relationship with James Joyce. There is also material on Beckett's six-month visit to Germany as the Nazi's tightened their grip. The book includes unpublished material on Beckett's personal life after he chose to live in France, including his own account of his work for a Resistance cell during the war, his escape from the Gestapo and his retreat into hiding. Obsessively private, Beckett was wholly committed to the work which eventually brought his public fame, beginning with the controversial success of "Waiting for Godot" in 1953, and culminating in the award of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1969.