Christina Nobel's story is one of bravery and resilience in the face of deprivation and abuse on a scale most would find unimaginable. Her childhood in the Dublin slums barely merits the name: after the early death of her mother the family is split apart, their alcoholic father unable to care for them. Christina is sexually abused and later escapes from an orphanage only to become a destitute on the streets of Dublin. At sixteen she is pulled into a car by four men and raped repeatedly. Later, driven to near insanity by overwork and a violent husband, she finds in a dream the will to fight back. Yet this is no vision of luxury and self-indulgence; instead Christina's hope lies in a determination to work among the street children of Vietnam. And here the most extraordinary part of her story begins. To these needy children 'Mama Tina' became, and remains to this day, an irrepressible, unorthodox and staunch champion.

A blonde Irish woman sits in an ice-cream parlour on Le Loi Street singing, a crowd of Vietnamese street children around her, their eyes riveted on her smiling face... Christina Noble knows the pain and loneliness of being left outside the door - of having no door of one's own to walk through, for she was once a street-child herself, alone on the streets of Dublin. When she told the story of her early life in her bestselling autobiography Bridge Across My Sorrows she had no idea that it would prove a catalyst for so many others who had suffered childhood pain and rejection, or that it would inspire them to take the first courageous steps towards self-acceptance and their own self-healing. In 1989, driven by a dream and by the memory of her own past, she travelled 6,000 miles to Vietnam, a country of great beauty where war has left a terrible legacy. Against extraordinary odds she opened the Christina Noble Children's Foundation, a haven of food, beds, medical aid and schooling where the street children of Saigon can find safety and new beginnings under the protection of 'Mama Tina'. In this vivid and moving book Christina's compelling story continues with the amazing tale of what she and her Foundation have achieved. She takes us from the streets of Saigon to the Children's Prisons of Mongolia. A staunch campaigner for children's rights, for her there are no frontiers, only a world filled with children reaching out. Finally she returns to Dublin, where the former street orphan is officially and proudly greeted by the President of Ireland herself.

Birds Without Wings traces the fortunes of one small community in southwest Turkey (Anatolia) in the early part of the last century—a quirky community in which Christian and Muslim lives and traditions have co-existed peacefully over the centuries and where friendship, even love, has transcended religious differences. But with the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire and the onset of the Great War, the sweep of history has a cataclysmic effect on this peaceful place: The great love of Philothei, a Christian girl of legendary beauty, and Ibrahim, a Muslim shepherd who courts her from near infancy, culminates in tragedy and madness; Two inseparable childhood friends who grow up playing in the hills above the town suddenly find themselves on opposite sides of the bloody struggle; and Rustem Bey, a wealthy landlord, who has an enchanting mistress who is not what she seems. Far away from these small lives, a man of destiny who will come to be known as Mustafa Kemal Atatürk is emerging to create a country from the ruins of an empire. Victory at Gallipoli fails to save the Ottomans from ultimate defeat and, as a new conflict arises, Muslims and Christians struggle to survive, let alone understand, their part in the great tragedy that will reshape the whole region forever.

From the international bestselling author of The Architecture of Happiness and How Proust Can Change Your Life comes this lyrical, erudite look at our world of work. We spend most of our time at work, but what we do there rarely gets discussed in the sort of lyrical and descriptive prose our efforts surely deserve. Determined to correct this lapse, armed with a poetic perspective and his trademark philosophical sharpness, Alain de Botton heads out into the world of offices and factories, ready to take in the beauty, interest, and sheer strangeness of the modern workplace. De Botton spends time in and around some less familiar work environments, including warehouses, container ports, rocket launch pads, and power stations, and follows scientists, landscape painters, accountants, cookie manufacturers, therapists, entrepreneurs, and aircraft salesmen as they do their jobs. Along the way, de Botton tries to answer some of the most urgent questions we can pose about work: Why do we do it? What makes it pleasurable? What is its meaning? To what end do we daily exhaust not only ourselves but also our planet? Equally intrigued by work’s pleasures and its pains, Alain de Botton offers a characteristically lucid and witty tour of the working day and night, in a book sure to inspire a range of life-changing and wise thoughts.

An intimate narrative history of World War I told through the stories of twenty men and women from around the globe--a powerful, illuminating, heart-rending picture of what the war was really like. In this masterful book, renowned historian Peter Englund describes this epoch-defining event by weaving together accounts of the average man or woman who experienced it. Drawing on the diaries, journals, and letters of twenty individuals from Belgium, Denmark, France, Great Britain, Germany, Austria, Hungary, Italy, Australia, New Zealand, Russia, Venezuela, and the United States, Englund’s collection of these varied perspectives describes not a course of events but "a world of feeling." Composed in short chapters that move between the home front and the front lines, The Beauty and Sorrow brings to life these twenty particular people and lets them speak for all who were shaped in some way by the War, but whose voices have remained unheard.