Clare Peake, daughter of the celebrated writer and artist Mervyn Peake, tells the story of her parents' romance and her own happy and bohemian childhood.Mervyn Peake was born in China, the son of medical missionaries, and the juxtaposition of his exotic surroundings and the very English manners at home had a lasting effect on him. Reading Treasure Island until he could recite it by heart and waiting for comics to arrive from England had him living a childhood bursting with imagery.He returned to England to study at the Royal Academy School and was then offered a teaching post at Westminster School of Art. There his charismatic and un-worldly presence made a huge impact: none more so than on Maeve Gilmore, a seventeen-year-old sculpture student.The couple fell passionately in love but Maeve's parents were determined their daughter would not marry a penniless artist and sent her away to forget him. She didn't and, refusing to be parted ever again, they married when Maeve was nineteen and Mervyn twenty-six.Mervyn Peake developed Parkinson's disease aged forty-five.His decline was rapid and he spent time in and out of mental hospitals until his death at fifty-seven, the diagnosis never fully understood. Clare Peake writes movingly of the impact on the family and her mother's determination to continue giving her children the happiness she felt all children deserved.

It is 1834. The Eastern Cape frontier is burning. Rauch Beukes, a young Boer of 17, returns to the family homestead to find it razed, the livestock gone and his mother and sisters slaughtered by the marauding Xhosa from across the Great Fish River. So begins a tale of violence and warfare and love and lust across racial divides, painted against the

Simon Hall went to sea in search of a way of life that he believed was glamorous, adventurous and disciplined, a life where smartly-uniformed men ran ships in a tightly organised manner. At this time the British fleet was still one of the largest in the world and the Red Ensign a common sight in most large ports. In over three years as a Deck Cadet he explored this world and although he uncovered much of the magic of the sea, he also encountered brutality, exploitation, dizzying hard work and frightening bouts of violence. From the rigidity of naval college to the heat and sweat of working as a deck-hand in the South China Sea, the book charts Simon's progress from a naïve and callow school-leaver to a strong young man. On that road he encountered a cast of people that were beyond his wildest imagination. He met the bad: sadists, bullies, madmen; and the sad: alcoholics, prostitutes, drug addicts. And sometimes people so good they diminished him. The author tells of nights so cold the water froze on his hands; of days when the sun was so hot he could hear his skin sizzle and of times when the ship steamed through wild seas that rushed over the deck like boiling foam. With a thread of humour running throughout, he writes of the shipboard camaraderie and the wild jaunts ashore in exotic places.

"In 1845, Sammy, a Chinese American girl, and Annamae, an African American slave girl, disguise themselves as boys and travel on the Oregon Trail to California from Missouri"--

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • The Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Sixth Extinction returns to humanity’s transformative impact on the environment, now asking: After doing so much damage, can we change nature, this time to save it? RECOMMENDED BY PRESIDENT OBAMA AND BILL GATES • SHORTLISTED FOR THE WAINWRIGHT PRIZE FOR WRITING • ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The Washington Post • ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: Time, Esquire, Smithsonian Magazine, Vulture, Publishers Weekly, Kirkus Reviews, Library Journal • “Beautifully and insistently, Kolbert shows us that it is time to think radically about the ways we manage the environment.”—Helen Macdonald, The New York Times That man should have dominion “over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth” is a prophecy that has hardened into fact. So pervasive are human impacts on the planet that it’s said we live in a new geological epoch: the Anthropocene. In Under a White Sky, Elizabeth Kolbert takes a hard look at the new world we are creating. Along the way, she meets biologists who are trying to preserve the world’s rarest fish, which lives in a single tiny pool in the middle of the Mojave; engineers who are turning carbon emissions to stone in Iceland; Australian researchers who are trying to develop a “super coral” that can survive on a hotter globe; and physicists who are contemplating shooting tiny diamonds into the stratosphere to cool the earth. One way to look at human civilization, says Kolbert, is as a ten-thousand-year exercise in defying nature. In The Sixth Extinction, she explored the ways in which our capacity for destruction has reshaped the natural world. Now she examines how the very sorts of interventions that have imperiled our planet are increasingly seen as the only hope for its salvation. By turns inspiring, terrifying, and darkly comic, Under a White Sky is an utterly original examination of the challenges we face.

It had been just fireside talk from the beginning, born in the frustrated minds of snow-bound Nebraska landowners as they warmed around the pot-bellied stove in the general store. But, as sometimes happens to frustrated talk, the words took legs. All that was left to do was a lot of work, a long summer ahead and maybe a harder winter, but no one was ready to back out. Like a snowball on a hill, there comes a time that the weight of it is too great to stop. FROM GUNSHOT TO HOMESTEAD is book one of an eight book series, DEEP FORK RIVER, OKLAHOMA TERRITORY. This series took place in a unique period of history when new land was deeded on the basis of a gunshot and a footrace. The central nugget of land in the Oklahoma Territory was advertised for settlement, quarter sections were marked out and on the 22 of April, l889 the local Cavalry and other officials started the race at the shot of a gun. On foot... on horses in wagons and in buggies, they struggled for a place to put down roots. Each of these books brings a different family, person, or in one incident, a whole town to settle in the new land. The small town fictional town of Prosper was settled by these immigrants and others. It is generally thought that this incident was the only one of its kind in history. Book one. FROM GUNSHOT TO HOMKESTEAD. A 22 year old young lady and her father make a night flight to protect a small girl from kidnap. Book two. UNDER THE REDBUDS. An idea born in a Nebraska storm gives birth to a snowball of activity for half a town. Book three. TREK THROUGH THE WILDERNESS. A young Kentucky preacher follows a strange guide with the help of a strong young lady. Book four. OF BOOMERS AND SOONERS. Free land was passed out, but some of it was already occupied. A man does what he had to do. Book five. IN OCTOBER SUNSHINE. The lady, no longer young, realized she permitted herself to be a follower all her life. It was not her time to lead. Book six. BEHIND EVERY CLOUD. Young victim of circumstances feels she finally deserves a silver lining, if she can just turn that cloud around. Book seven. TO THE PROMISED LAND. Young Camille experiences what no girl should experience, but some things happen in the best families. Book eight. WITH A SONG IN THE NIGHT. Two young girls who have never met are thrown together in desperate circumstances.

A teenage boy in 1940s Italy becomes part of an underground railroad that helps Jews escape through the Alps, but when he is recruited to be the personal driver for a powerful Third Reich commander, he begins to spy for the Allies.