Life isn’t perfect, but dogs certainly make it better Meet the incredible dogs in this inspiring collection of true stories, championing the often underestimated role of man’s best friend Daisy, the tiny Dachshund who put her life on the line to save her humans from a bear. Charco, the veteran sniffer dog who has saved countless human lives, and yet still keeps his tail wagging. Delta, the dog who died trying to protect her young owner from a volcano – after already having saved his life three times. It’s a truth universally acknowledged that dogs are pretty great. But when it comes to facing peril, these loyal creatures always seem willing to step up to the mark and become true doggy heroes. Whether they’re saving humans from dangerous people or situations, helping the sick, fighting crime or just following their animal instincts to do good, the true stories featured in this expanded and updated collection prove that dogs aren’t just man’s best friend – they’re also inspirational, courageous and selfless companions to us all.

A stunning new novel from the two-time Man Booker shortlisted author of The Secret Scripture. Sebastian Barry's latest novel, A Thousand Moons, is now available. Irishman Jack McNulty is a “temporary gentleman”—an Irishman whose commission in the British army in World War II was never permanent. Sitting in his lodgings in Accra, Ghana, in 1957, he’s writing the story of his life with desperate urgency. He cannot take one step further without examining all the extraordinary events that he has seen. A lifetime of war and world travel—as a soldier in World War II, an engineer, a UN observer—has brought him to this point. But the memory that weighs heaviest on his heart is that of the beautiful Mai Kirwan, and their tempestuous, heartbreaking marriage. Mai was once the great beauty of Sligo, a magnetic yet unstable woman who, after sharing a life with Jack, gradually slipped from his grasp. Award-winning author Sebastian Barry’s The Temporary Gentleman is the sixth book in his cycle of separate yet interconnected novels that brilliantly reimagine characters from Barry’s own family.

A young British -Brazilian woman from South London navigates growing up between two cultures and into a fuller understanding of her body, relying on signposts such as history, family conversation, and the eyes of the women who have shaped her: mother, grandmother, and aunt. During her trips to Brazil, sometimes alone, often with family, our narrator accesses a different side of herself that is as much of who she is as anything else. -- adapted from back cover

Mushikiwabo is a Rwandan working as a translator in Washington when she learns that most of her family back home has been killed in a conspiracy meticulously planned by the state. First comes shock, then aftershock, three months of it, during which her worst fears are confirmed: The same state apparatus has duped millions of Rwandans into butchering nearly a million of their neighbors. Years earlier, her brother Lando wrote her a letter she never got until now. Urged on by it, she rummages into their farm childhood, and into family corners alternately dark, loving, and humorous. She searches for stray mementos of the lost, then for their roots. What she finds is that and more---hints, roots, of the 1994 crime that killed her family. Her narrative takes the reader on a journey from the days the world and Rwanda discovered each other back to colonial period when pseudoscientific ideas about race put the nation on a highway bound for the 1994 genocide. Seven years of full-time collaboration by two writers---and the faith of family and friends---went into this emotionally charged work. Rwanda Means the Universe is at once a celebration of the lives of the lost and homage to their past, but it's no comfortable tribute. It's an expression of dogged hope in the face of modern evil.