Novelist Graeme Lay re-imagines the peerless navigator James Cook's life up to, and including, his first circumnavigation of the world. A fictionalised account of the famous navigator's early life, The Secret Life of James Cook Cook's youthful ambitions, his early naval career, his marriage to Elizabeth and their family life. Drawing on his personal knowledge of the South Pacific and Australasia, novelist Graeme Lay recreates the peerless navigator's life up to, and including, his first circumnavigation of the world. In particular, Graeme examines the relationship between James and his equally remarkable wife, Elizabeth, the woman he married when he was 34 and she 21, and by whom he had six children, all born while he was away at sea. The Secret Life of James Cook also depicts the often-stormy relationship between the self-made English naval commander and the dashing, privileged naturalist Joseph Banks, who accompanied Cook on his first world voyage.

Words are essential to our everyday lives. An average person spends his or her day enveloped in conversations, e-mails, phone calls, text messages, directions, headlines, and more. But how often do we stop to think about the origins of the words we use? Have you ever thought about which words in English have been borrowed from Arabic, Dutch, or Portuguese? Try admiral, landscape, and marmalade, just for starters. The Secret Life of Words is a wide-ranging account not only of the history of English language and vocabulary, but also of how words witness history, reflect social change, and remind us of our past. Henry Hitchings delves into the insatiable, ever-changing English language and reveals how and why it has absorbed words from more than 350 other languages—many originating from the most unlikely of places, such as shampoo from Hindi and kiosk from Turkish. From the Norman Conquest to the present day, Hitchings narrates the story of English as a living archive of our human experience. He uncovers the secrets behind everyday words and explores the surprising origins of our most commonplace expressions. The Secret Life of Words is a rich, lively celebration of the language and vocabulary that we too often take for granted.

In one of those rare books that allows us to see the world not as we've never seen it before, but as we see it daily without knowing, Victoria Nelson illuminates the deep but hidden attraction the supernatural still holds for a secular mainstream culture that forced the transcendental underground and firmly displaced wonder and awe with the forces of reason, materialism, and science. In a backward look at an era now drawing to a close, The Secret Life of Puppets describes a curious reversal in the roles of art and religion: where art and literature once took their content from religion, we came increasingly to seek religion, covertly, through art and entertainment. In a tour of Western culture that is at once exhilarating and alarming, Nelson shows us the distorted forms in which the spiritual resurfaced in high art but also, strikingly, in the mass culture of puppets, horror-fantasy literature, and cyborgs: from the works of Kleist, Poe, Musil, and Lovecraft to Philip K. Dick and virtual reality simulations. At the end of the millennium, discarding a convention of the demonized grotesque that endured three hundred years, a Demiurgic consciousness shaped in Late Antiquity is emerging anew to re-divinize the human as artists like Lars von Trier and Will Self reinvent Expressionism in forms familiar to our pre-Reformation ancestors. Here as never before, we see how pervasively but unwittingly, consuming art forms of the fantastic, we allow ourselves to believe.

Two hundred and fifty years ago Captain James Cook, during his extraordinary voyages of navigation and maritime exploration, searched for Antarctica – the Unknown Southern Continent. During parts of his three voyages in the southern Pacific and Southern Oceans, Cook ‘narrowed the options’ for the location of Antarctica. Over three summers, he completed a circumnavigation of portions of the Southern Continent, encountering impenetrable barriers of ice, and he suggested the continent existed, a frozen land not populated by a living soul. Yet his Antarctic voyages are perhaps the least studied of all his remarkable travels. That is why James Hamilton’s gripping and scholarly study, which brings together the stories of Cook’s Antarctic journeys into a single volume, is such an original and timely addition to the literature on Cook and eighteenth-century exploration. Using Cook's journals and the log books of officers who sailed with him, the book sets his Antarctic explorations within the context of his historic voyages. The main focus is on the Second Voyage (1772-1775), but brief episodes in the First Voyage (during 1769) and the Third Voyage (1776) are part of the story. Throughout the narrative Cook’s exceptional seamanship and navigational skills, and that of his crew, are displayed during often-difficult passages in foul weather across uncharted and inhospitable seas. Captain James Cook and the Search for Antarctica offers the reader a fascinating insight into Cook the seaman and explorer, and it will be essential reading for anyone who has a particular interest the history of the Southern Continent.

Brave, inquisitive, entrepreneurial: Joseph Banks personified the spirit of late 18th century Enlightenment Europe. Banks’ fascination with the plant and animal kingdom began when he was a boy in rural Lincolnshire. A privileged upbringing saw him schooled at the famous institutions Harrow, Eton and Oxford. As a well-connected, independently wealthy adult, Banks developed a particular friendship with Montagu, fourth Earl of Sandwich, who introduced Banks to the pleasures of angling, and the debaucheries of the London club scene. In 1768, 25-year-old Joseph joined a round-the-world voyage led by the great English navigator, James Cook. This introduced Banks to the freedoms of traditional Polynesian society. He became an ardent lover of indigenous women and an assiduous collector of exotic flora and fauna. Following his return to England, Banks became a figure of renown, lionised by English society. But his dreams of a second world voyage with Cook ended before they began. How did this happen? How did Banks’ vision become a chimera? This novel tells all.

Whitley Award winner for Best Popular Zoology Book. With his usual brilliance James Woodford explores the wombat's bizarre evolutionary history and perilous future. This is popular science writing at its best: an irresistible subject in the hands of an irrepressible author.