GAIN MORE TIME FOR WHAT YOU LOVE Are you constantly juggling multiple tasks and operating at 100 per cent or more? Do you feel you are permanently on the treadmill and can’t get off? If you needed extra capacity for something urgent, could you find it? In The 1-Day Refund, best-selling author and time management expert Donna McGeorge shows you how to recover an extra 15 per cent of your time—10 minutes per hour, 1 hour per day or a full day each week—to think, breathe, live and work. By creating more space, you’ll discover a new ability to focus on what’s truly important to you. In this book, you’ll also: Learn to achieve more by doing less and create more space across all areas of your life Stop being at the mercy of other people’s agendas and learn to say ‘no’ when you truly don’t have time. Develop your capacity to cope with change and unpredictability and rid yourself of that feeling of overwhelm A fantastic resource for middle managers, supervisors, and those on the frontlines of work, school, sports, and family, The 1 Day Refund is one of the best investments any busy person can make. With The 1-Day Refund, you’ll be on your way to getting back a full day, so you can take advantage of any opportunity that comes your way. The 1-Day Refund is the third book in Donna McGeorge’s It’s About Time series. With The 25-Minute Meeting, you’ll learn to give your meetings purpose and stop them wasting your time; with The First 2 Hours, you’ll find the best time of the day to do your most productive work; and with The 1-Day Refund, you’ll discover how to give yourself the extra capacity to think, breathe, live and work.

The clever peasant Arnaud du Tilh had almost persuaded the learned judges at the Parlement of Toulouse when, on a summer’s day in 1560, a man swaggered into the court on a wooden leg, denounced Arnaud, and reestablished his claim to the identity, property, and wife of Martin Guerre. The astonishing case captured the imagination of the continent. Told and retold over the centuries, the story of Martin Guerre became a legend, still remembered in the Pyrenean village where the impostor was executed more than 400 years ago. Now a noted historian, who served as consultant for a new French film on Martin Guerre, has searched archives and lawbooks to add new dimensions to a tale already abundant in mysteries: we are led to ponder how a common man could become an impostor in the sixteenth century, why Bertrande de Rols, an honorable peasant woman, would accept such a man as her husband, and why lawyers, poets, and men of letters like Montaigne became so fascinated with the episode. Natalie Zemon Davis reconstructs the lives of ordinary people, in a sparkling way that reveals the hidden attachments and sensibilities of nonliterate sixteenth-century villagers. Here we see men and women trying to fashion their identities within a world of traditional ideas about property and family and of changing ideas about religion. We learn what happens when common people get involved in the workings of the criminal courts in the ancien régime, and how judges struggle to decide who a man was in the days before fingerprints and photographs. We sense the secret affinity between the eloquent men of law and the honey-tongued village impostor, a rare identification across class lines. Deftly written to please both the general public and specialists, The Return of Martin Guerre will interest those who want to know more about ordinary families and especially women of the past, and about the creation of literary legends. It is also a remarkable psychological narrative about where self-fashioning stops and lying begins.

“One of the 50 Best Nonfiction Books of the Last 25 Years”—Slate On New Year’s Day 2013, two-time Pulitzer Prize winner Gene Weingarten asked three strangers to, literally, pluck a day, month, and year from a hat. That day—chosen completely at random—turned out to be Sunday, December 28, 1986, by any conventional measure a most ordinary day. Weingarten spent the next six years proving that there is no such thing. That Sunday between Christmas and New Year’s turned out to be filled with comedy, tragedy, implausible irony, cosmic comeuppances, kindness, cruelty, heroism, cowardice, genius, idiocy, prejudice, selflessness, coincidence, and startling moments of human connection, along with evocative foreshadowing of momentous events yet to come. Lives were lost. Lives were saved. Lives were altered in overwhelming ways. Many of these events never made it into the news; they were private dramas in the lives of private people. They were utterly compelling. One Day asks and answers the question of whether there is even such a thing as “ordinary” when we are talking about how we all lurch and stumble our way through the daily, daunting challenge of being human.

Do your most important work when you are your most resourceful Are you drowning in email? Overloaded with calendar invitations? Frustrated by wasteful meetings and an ever-growing workload? Then you know that being busy does not mean being productive. Most workers are being asked to take on more responsibilities with less support, advised to simply ‘be innovative.’ But you only have a finite amount of energy and thinking capacity available to you in a day. Most of us are wasting it on things that aren't contributing to our most important work: the activities that require problem solving, decision making and critical thinking. Developed for business professionals, The First Two Hours teaches you how to design your day, rather than be at the mercy of it. Using research on neuroscience, energy flow and the body’s natural rhythms, it divides the workday into manageable blocks and helps you determine when you are most resourceful, and therefore when you should complete your most demanding tasks. Optimize your day in blocks of two hours Take back control of your work life by creating a workflow designed for you Do your most important work at the right time of day so it gets the resources it deserves Decide when you need to be ’on’ and when you can be ’available’ so you can maximise productivity In a time of near-constant information overload, this practical handbook helps you focus on getting done what you need to get done, when you are best able to do it. By learning to invest your energy strategically, you can be in the driver’s seat every work day and achieve a level of productivity beyond what you thought possible. The First 2 Hours is the second book in Donna McGeorge’s It’s About Time series. With The 25-Minute Meeting, you’ll learn to give your meetings purpose and stop them wasting your time; with The First 2 Hours, you’ll find the best time of the day to do your most productive work; and with The 1-Day Refund, you’ll discover how to give yourself the extra capacity to think, breathe, live and work.

NOW A NETFLIX SERIES • NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • TWO PEOPLE. ONE DAY. TWENTY YEARS. • What starts as a fleeting connection between two strangers soon becomes a deep bond that spans decades. • "[An] instant classic. . . . One of the most ...emotionally riveting love stories you’ll ever encounter." —People It’s 1988 and Dexter Mayhew and Emma Morley have only just met. But after only one day together, they cannot stop thinking about one another. Over twenty years, snapshots of that relationship are revealed on the same day—July 15th—of each year. They face squabbles and fights, hopes and missed opportunities, laughter and tears. Dex and Em must come to grips with the nature of love and life itself. As the years go by, the true meaning of this one crucial day is revealed. "[A] surprisingly deep romance...so thoroughly satisfying." —Entertainment Weekly

‘’In the Western countries, first they are strangers, then they become friends, then they become more than friends, then they become strangers again’’ A Persistent Soul is a story of Sagar and Kimberly who love each other but they understand ‘love’ differently. She is 23, he is 24. She is beautiful and he is an average looking guy. She is British and he is an Indian. They both are students. He is simple, optimistic, enthusiastic and ambitious. She is hard-headed, unyielding, unforgiving and intolerant but both are heartwarming and exhilarating. Accidently they meet, become friends and fall in love. She is a right girl for him and he is a right guy for her but is the 'time' right for both of them? A middle-class Indian boy, who is new to the Western world, does not understand the Western theory of love. He falls in love with a girl and decides to spend the rest of the life with her. Kimberly is an over thinker and wants to take every step slowly. She has secrets which she doesn’t want to tell anyone and he is the one who wants to know everything. The author Manoj Patil takes us through an incredible journey of love and loss with his debut novel 'A Persistent Soul'. The story of the journey of their love is described beautifully provide vivid sketches of beautiful Newcastle town that form the milieu for their romance. Kimberly's complex character and her complicated past, Western life and culture sensitively brought out through the eyes of a middle-class Indian who persists through storms and rough seas to unite with her spirited lover.