Young Eilis Lacey dreams of life beyond the confines of her tiny Irish village, but unlike her beautiful sister, Rose, Eilis gifts are of a more practical nature: she has a head for numbers, and is a loving and dutiful daughter.

Yet her ambition cannot be hidden and soon is noted by the Parish Priest, Father Flood. Via a church contact, he arranges for Eilis to travel to America where a job opportunity has arisen in New York with a reputable "merchant of Italian origin".

Eilis finds lodgings in an eccentric boarding house and ekes out an existence in the cosmopolitan melting pot that is 1950s Brooklyn, impressing her employer, outwitting her landlady, and even falling in love. It seems her dream is truly becoming a reality.

But then fate intervenes: a family crisis back home forces Eilis to make a choice between the past and the future, the old world and the new.

The star pieces from fashion designer Yves Saint Laurent's art collection including works by Cezanne, Picasso, Mondrian and Matisse have been unveiled in the Grand Palais, Paris, ahead of what auctioneers have dubbed the art sale of the century. Yves Saint Laurent and Pierre Berge amassed the collection together before the designers death in June 2008. The works, which had adorned the pairs Paris flats, the Chateau Gabriel in Normandy and their home in Morocco, include antiquities, Old Master and 19th-century paintings and drawings, Art Deco pieces and European furniture and art. Now Pierre Berge has decided to sell the entire collection. Its the end of an era and the sale has already excited enormous interest and speculation. This book shows, for the first time, the collection in situ in the pairs homes. Although some pieces have been photographed separately in the past, they have never been photographed together, making this beautifully produced book the ultimate record of one of the 20th century's great collections.

  Sir Charles Kingsford Smith is one of Australia′s most loved heroes.

In an action-packed life, the indomitable ′Smithy′ went from fighting as a soldier among the carnage of Gallipoli and the Western Front, to taking to the skies against the likes of the Red Baron - for which he won the Military Cross for gallantry - before becoming the greatest peacetime aviator of his generation.

Along with Charles Ulm, he was the first man to conquer the Pacific by air, the first to fly across the Tasman Sea, the fastest man to fly from England to Australia, and the first pilot to circumnavigate the globe by crossing the equator.

With typical flair, FitzSimons also tells the story of the several breakthroughs, some of which were discovered in Australia, which laid the foundation for the Wright brothers′ success in 1903; the first flight across the Channel in 1908; Germany′s Red Baron terrorising the Allies in 1917-18, before being shot down by an Australian; Ross and Keith Smith′s breakthrough first flight from England to Australia in 1919; the formation of Qantas in 1921; Lindbergh′s stunning vault between America and Europe in 1927; the Great Centenary Air Race, the loss of the Southern Cloud; the saga of Bert Hinkler and much, much, more . . .

  On a winter's day in 1916, Charlie Chaplin is spotted in over 800 places simultaneously - an extraordinary mass delusion in an America desperate for distraction from the oncoming war. From there, SUNNYSIDE follows the overlapping fortunes of Leland Wheeler, son of the world's last (and worst) Wild West star, as he heads to the battlefields of France; snobbish Hugo Black, drafted to fight under the British General Ironside in Siberia in the Allies' doomed attack on the Bolsheviks; and Chaplin himself, facing a tightening net of complications - studio moguls, questions about his patriotism, his wayward heart, and most menacing of all, his mother - that stand in the way of his finally making a movie to match his talents. With a cast of characters both historical and fictional, SUNNYSIDE is a thrilling and darkly comic novel that captures the moment when American capitalism, a world at war, and the emerging phenomenon of Hollywood combined to create an enduring culture of celebrity.

How often can you peek behind the curtains of one of the most secretive governments in the world? Prisoner of the State is the first book to give readers a front row seat to the secret inner workings of China’s government. It is the story of Premier Zhao Ziyang, the man who brought liberal change to that nation and who, at the height of the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989, tried to stop the massacre and was dethroned for his efforts.

When China’s army moved in, killing hundreds of students and other demonstrators, Zhao was placed under house arrest at his home on a quiet alley in Beijing. China’s most promising change agent had been disgraced, along with the policies he stood for. The premier spent the last sixteen years of his life, up until his death in 2005, in seclusion. An occasional detail about his life would slip out: reports of a golf excursion, a photo of his aging visage, a leaked letter to China’s leaders. But China scholars often lamented that Zhao never had his final say.

As it turns out, Zhao did produce a memoir in complete secrecy. He methodically recorded his thoughts and recollections on what had happened behind the scenes during many of modern China’s most critical moments. The tapes he produced were smuggled out of the country and form the basis for Prisoner of the State. In this audio journal, Zhao provides intimate details about the Tiananmen crackdown; he describes the ploys and double crosses China's top leaders use to gain advantage over one another; and he talks of the necessity for China to adopt democracy in order to achieve long-term stability.

The China that Zhao portrays is not some long-lost dynasty. It is today’s China, where the nation’s leaders accept economic freedom but continue to resist political change.

If Zhao had survived—that is, if the hard-line hadn’t prevailed during Tiananmen—he might have been able to steer China’s political system toward more openness and tolerance.

Zhao’s call to begin lifting the Party's control over China's life—to let a little freedom into the public square—is remarkable coming from a man who had once dominated that square. Although Zhao now speaks from the grave in this moving and riveting memoir, his voice has the moral power to make China sit up and listen.

  'This is an extraordinary fossil' - Sir David Attenborough. The astonishing new discovery that could change everything... Lying inside a high-security vault, deep within the heart of one of the world’s leading natural history museums, is the scientific find of a lifetime - a perfectly fossilized early primate, older than the previously most famous primate fossil, Lucy, by an astonishing forty-four million years. A secret until now, the fossil - ‘Ida’- is the most complete early primate fossil ever found. Forty-seven million years old, Ida rewrites what we’ve assumed about the earliest primate origins. Her completeness is unparalleled. With exclusive access to the first scientists to study her, the award-winning science writer Colin Tudge tells the history of Ida and her place in the world. The Link offers a wide-ranging investigation into Ida and our earliest origins - and the magnificent, cutting-edge scientific detective story that followed her discovery. At the same time it opens a stunningly evocative window into our past and changes what we know about primate evolution and, ultimately, our own.

  Set in Connecticut's tiny Gold Coast town of Highfield, Dune Road tells the story of Kit Hargrove, whose divorce has granted her a new lease on life. No longer a Wall Street widow with her requisite diamond studs and Persian rugs, Kit revels in her clapboard Cape with the sea green shutters and sprawling impatiens. Her kids are content, her ex cooperative, her fiends steadfast, and each morning she wakes up unable to believe how lucky she is to have landed the job of her dreams: assisting the blockbuster novelist Robert McClore.

A mysterious tragedy drove this famous writer into seclusion decades ago, and few besides Kit are granted access to his house at the top of Dune Road, with it's breathtaking views of Long Island Sound. But all that is about to change. At a rare appearance at the local bookstore, McClore meets Kit's new friend Tracy, whose weakness for older men rivals her powers of self-reinvention. Are the secret visits of her boss's new muse as innocent as Kit would like to believe? When a figure from her mother's past emerges with equally cryptic intentions just as the bear financial market is upending her best friend's life, Kit discovers that her blissfully constructed idyll – and the gorgeous man who has walked into it with creamy white roses – isn't as perfect as she'd thought. Ties to friends and family are further reaching than she had realised – and more crucial than ever before.