Poverty sucks. Dad's timing the family's showers and refusing to turn on the heating. Mum has arranged for Lou to get lifts to school with Drippy Dermot and his eccentric mother in the Van of Doom. And lentils seem to feature in every single meal. Lou is still coming down from her brief moment of TV super-stardom and getting to grips with the fact that - hold the news - she has a boyfriend, but with both parents out of work, life isn't all plain sailing. Throw in Hannah's obsession with the school prom, Dads strange shed activity and Lav s brief flirtation with a modelling career, and suddenly training a dance troupe to swim underwater seems like a walk in the park.

The uproarius companion to "The Schwa was Here" and "Antsy Does Time" In honor of Old Man Crawley’s eightieth birthday, the Bonano family has been invited to celebrate with a weeklong cruise to the Caribbean aboard the world’s largest, grandest ship. But whether on land or at sea, Antsy can’t manage to stay out of trouble: He quickly finds himself the accomplice of stowaway and thief Tilde, whose self-made mission it is to smuggle onto the ship and across the U.S. border illegal immigrants from her native Mexico. When Antsy steps in to take the fall for Tilde, he becomes the focus of a major international incident and the poster child for questionable decisions. Equal parts clever and riotous, Ship Out of Luck brings back the beloved cast of characters from Neal Shusterman’s acclaimed The Schwa Was Here and Antsy Does Time.

Retired Texas Ranger Captain Hank Tomlinson intends to spend the rest of his days raising cattle on his Broken Arrow Ranch, and nurturing his frontier town of Luck, Texas. But when the brutal murder and scalping of a mysterious drifter leads to a clash between cavalry soldiers and a band of Comanche Indians suspected of the killing, a full-scale Indian uprising seems likely. Worse yet, the murder of the drifter bears a disturbing resemblance to a string of killings Hank remembers from his distant and violent past as a Texas Ranger. Meanwhile, Hank's twenty-year-old son, Jay Blue, and his adoptive brother, Skeeter, find themselves on the trail of a valuable Kentucky mare who vanished under their watch. The trail leads them into the dangerous haunts of outlaws and vengeful Comanche warriors. Now Hank must attempt to keep his sons safe while trying to catch a murderer who he knows will soon strike again. His ace-in-the-hole is beautiful Flora Barlow, the tavern owner with a knack for detective work. Though rival lawman, Matt Kenyon, and competing rancher, Jack Brennan, complicate Hank's investigation, he and Flora slowly begin to uncover a crooked web of crime, deception, and murder. Dark secrets emerge, and everyone must choose sides as lawmen, outlaws, soldiers, and Indian warriors converge for a final, bloody confrontation.

'The distribution of wealth is far more equal. To begin with, there is no poor class in the colonies. Comfortable incomes are in the majority, millionaires few and far between.' This opinion, voiced a century ago by a British journalist on a tour of the colonies, sums up the widely-held and long-lived view that Australia was a working man's paradise, an egalitarian society free of the poverty afflicting other countries. Such a view could only persist if the poor were ignored or treated as objects of charity, targets of condemnation, or merely useful allies in political campaigns. For the realities of Australia's social structure as it developed were always very different from the claims of the proponents of the 'Australian way of life'. Out of Luck uncovers the history of the many who have always had to struggle hard to survive in this 'lucky' country and who have seldom shared in the rewards of a well endowed society. In telling the story of the poor, Stephen Garton draws on the findings of social history, welfare history and women's history and the writings of many others to present a lively account of an important feature of Australia's history - and present, and future.

After years of battle, Kelsey Bandar and Jared Mertz are finally ready to face the master AI enslaving the Terran Empire. With just a bit of luck, this nightmare will finally be over.Only luck can run out just when you need it the most.Outnumbered and outgunned, they must salvage victory from certain defeat. Failure means extermination, invasion, and the loss of everyone they love. Can they beat the odds just one more time?If you love military science fiction and grand adventure on a galaxy-spanning scale, grab "When Luck Runs Out" and the rest of The Empire of Bones Saga today!

They say his clothes blend into the background, no matter where he stands. They say a lot of things about the Schwa, but one thing’s for sure: no one ever noticed him. Except me. My name is Antsy Bonano, and I was the one who realized the Schwa was “functionally invisible” and used him to make some big bucks. But I was also the one who caused him more grief than a friend should. So if you all just shut up and listen, I’ll tell you everything there is to know about the Schwa, from how he got his name, to what really happened with his mom. I’ll spill everything. Unless, of course, “the Schwa Effect” wipes him out of my brain before I’m done….

Few countries have been as dramatically transformed in recent years as Ireland. Once a culturally repressed land shadowed by terrorism and on the brink of economic collapse, Ireland finally emerged in the late 1990s as the fastest-growing country in Europe, with the typical citizen enjoying a higher standard of living than the average Brit. Just a few years after celebrating their newly-won status among the world's richest societies, the Irish are now saddled with a wounded, shrinking economy, soaring unemployment, and ruined public finances. After so many centuries of impoverishment, how did the Irish finally get rich, and how did they then fritter away so much so quickly? Veteran journalist David J. Lynch offers an insightful, character-driven narrative of how the Irish boom came to be and how it went bust. He opens our eyes to a nation's downfall through the lived experience of individual citizens: the people responsible for the current crisis as well as the ordinary men and women enduring it.