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                            The Little Book of Anxiety by Kerri Sackville 03/02/2012
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                            The Little Book of Anxiety is for anyone who has experienced anxiety - which is pretty much everyone. It is a funny book about a serious subject - the ways in which anxiety can impact on your life, and the lives of those around you.

                            From relationship anxiety to professional anxiety, claustrophobia to travelling phobia, pregnancy fears, panic attacks to nail biting and more. Oh, and so much more.

                            Kerri Sackville relates episodes in which anxiety has got the better of her as only she can, some tragically humorous, and some just utterly absurd.

                            Desperate struggles with insomnia, trying meditation to learn how to fall asleep, and drinking hideous herbal potions (which were completely ineffective, and yes very expensive).

                            Kerri talks about panic attacks, and what they actually feel like. What anxiety does to us at a subconscious level. Kerri discusses therapy and the various techniques she has used to try to manage her anxiety. And the ways in which her fears affect all those around her (particularly her long suffering husband - who has, however, been known to make things worse).


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                            The Orphan Master's Son by Adam Johnson 01/02/2012
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                            _Citizens of our beloved Democratic Republic of North Korea! Imagine the life of an orphan boy from nowhere who is plucked from his orphanage by the military, to be trained as a tunnel assassin, a kidnapper, a spy.He has no father but the State, no sweetheart but Sun Moon, the greatest opera star who ever lived, whose face is tattooed on his chest.Imagine he lives in our very own country, a model of exemplary Communism. A nation that is the envy of the world, especially the Americans. Where the only human stories people need to hear are those blasting out of loudspeakers to the glory of our dear Leader, Kim Jong il.Citizens! Who is this individual? What is his story? Who will remember him?

                            Pak Jun Do is his name: wrestler of sharks, envoy to Texan barbecues, imposter extraordinaire, whose murderous biography has only come to light through the talents and stamina of our most patriotic interrogators. Dry your eyes now, comrades! This is the double-life story of a hero and martyr: the Greatest North Korean Love Story Ever Told.

                            THE ORPHAN MASTER’S SON is an iconoclastic work of fiction, part thriller, part coming-of-age story, part love story. Dark, playful and genre-defying, its searing depiction of one man’s epic journey through the surrealist brutality of North Korea shines a fierce light on the essence of the human condition.
                            Warning: Any resemblance to real people and events may not be entirely coincidental

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                            Waiting for Sunrise by William Boyd 01/02/2012
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                            A thrilling, plot-twisting new novel set in Europe during the first world war, from the bestselling author of Any Human Heart, Restless and Ordinary Thunderstorms.

                            Vienna. 1913. It is a fine day in August when Lysander Rief, a young English actor, walks through the city to his first appointment with the eminent psychiatrist, Dr. Bensimon. Sitting in the waiting room he is anxiously pondering the nature of his problem when an extraordinary woman enters. She is clearly in distress, but Lysander is immediately drawn to her strange, hazel eyes and her unusual, intense beauty.
                            Later the same day they meet again, and a more composed Hettie Bull introduces herself as an artist and sculptor, and invites Lysander to a party hosted by her lover, the famous painter Udo Hoff. Compelled to attend and unable to resist her electric charm, they begin a passionate love affair. Life in Vienna becomes tinged with the frisson of excitement for Lysander. He meets Sigmund Freud in a cafe, begins to write a journal, enjoys secret trysts with Hettie and appears to have been cured...
                            London, 1914. War is stirring, and events in Vienna have caught up with Lysander. Unable to live an ordinary life, he is plunged into the dangerous theatre of wartime intelligence - a world of sex, scandal and spies, where lines of truth and deception blur with every waking day. Lysander must now discover the key to a secret code which is threatening Britain's safety, and use all his skills to keep the murky world of suspicion and betrayal from invading every corner of his life.
                            Moving from Vienna to London's west end, the battlefields of France and hotel rooms in Geneva, Waiting for Sunrise is a feverish and mesmerising journey into the human psyche, a beautifully observed portrait of wartime Europe, and a literary tour de force from the bestselling author of Any Human Heart, Restless and Ordinary Thunderstorms.

                            About the Author

                            William Boyd is the author of ten novels, including A Good Man in Africa, winner of the Whitbread Award and the Somerset Maugham Award; An Ice-Cream War, winner of the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize and shortlisted for the Booker Prize; Brazzaville Beach, winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize; Any Human Heart, winner of the Prix Jean Monnet and adapted into a Channel 4 drama; Restless, winner of the Costa Novel of the Year, the Yorkshire Post Novel of the Year and a Richard & Judy selection, and most recently, the bestselling Ordinary Thunderstorms.


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                            Elanor & Park by Rainbow Rowell 01/02/2012
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                            A sweet, moving novel about two misfits finding love in the most unexpected of places.

                            Meet Eleanor. She's just moved to a new town, is struggling to make friends and is finding it even harder living under the same roof as her dysfunctional family. When she first meets Park, she thinks he's obnoxious.

                            Meet Park. He's liked by everyone but has never felt liked he fitted in. He loves his family but feels like they don't understand him. When he first meets Eleanor, he thinks she's weird.
                             It is hate at first sight. But as they suffer each other's company in silence on the bus rides from and to home every day, Eleanor and Park realise that first impressions can be deceiving.

                            From the author of ATTACHMENTS comes a poignant and unforgettable tale of two misfits finding love in the unlikeliest of places.

                            About the Author
                            Rainbow Rowell is a newspaper columnist in Omaha, Nebraska, where she lives with her husband and two sons.


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                            The Tiny Book of Tiny Stories 01/02/2012
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                            _HitRECord’s collaborative coalition of artists and writers are making history with The Tiny Book of Tiny Stories: Volume 1, a collection of innovative crowd-sourced creative projects that pushes the limits of originality, cooperation, imagination, and inspiration. HitRECord, a grassroots creative collective founded by actor Joseph Gordon-Levitt, known worldwide for his performances in (500) Days of Summer and Inception, is a forum where thousands of artists worldwide share work and contribute to their peers’ projects in writing, music, videos, illustration, and beyond. Alongside Dean Haspiel’s ACT-I-VATE, a groundbreaking comics collective, and the photographer JR’s Inside Out Project, hitRECord is a haven for budding creatives. Now, the collective has edited together its most promising stories and illustrations to serve as its face in introducing the world to a new generation of talent, in The Tiny Book of Tiny Stories.

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                            The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach 01/02/2012
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                            _In The Art of Fielding, we see sport played in its purest form: by young men who know that their four years on the baseball diamond at Westish College, "a little school in the crook of the thumb of the baseball glove that is Wisconsin," are all they have left. Only their preternaturally gifted fielder, Henry Skrimshander, seems to have the chance to keep his dream - and theirs, vicariously - alive, until a routine throw goes astray. Five lives brought together at Westish - three players; the college′s president and his prodigal daughter - are forever changed by Henry′s single error. The novel that unfolds thereafter is many things: a masterpiece of what James Wood would call "free indirect style," but what a lover of fiction would simply recognize as great storytelling; a campus novel as good as any to spring from that well-tilled soil; and a beautiful and trenchant and veracious depiction of sport. It′s a warm-hearted, expansive book, one whose intelligence runs as deep as its emotion, and very rarely does one encounter characters that one cares about as much as Henry Skrimshander, Owen Glass, Mike Schwartz, and Guert and Pella Affenlight.

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                            The Fault In Our Stars by John Green 22/01/2012
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                            _Despite the tumour-shrinking medical miracle that has bought her a few years, Hazel has never been anything but terminal, her final chapter inscribed upon diagnosis. But when a gorgeous plot twist named Augustus Waters suddenly appears at Cancer Kid Support Group, Hazel's story is about to be completely rewritten.

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                            Handmade Houses: A Free-Spirited Century of Earth-Friendly Home Design by Richard Olsen 22/01/2012
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                            Showcasing one hundred years of innovation and environmental sensitivity, Handmade Houses celebrates some of the world’s most idiosyncratic homes from Big Sur to Sardinia.

                            Author Richard Olsen  unveils the components used for their construction, including driftwood, boulders, and even old wine vats.

                            The first study of the handmade-homes phenomenon since its inception in the late 1960s, Handmade Houses revisits the subject’s roots and history, exploring how these homes and their owners paved the way for the architectural-salvage business and the reclaimed, industrial look ever-popular today.

                            As fascinating as the structures are themselves, their owners, professionals and amateurs who personally designed and built each residence offer their inspirations and stories behind the convention-defying homes.

                            Design lessons are gleaned from each home, some examples of environmentally aware construction with applicable tips for use in more mainstream scenarios.

                            Handmade Houses is an important and relevant volume to be appreciated by anyone interested in environmentally friendly design, craft, and the expression of personal style in the home. 


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                            Rupert Murdoch: An Investigation of Political Power by David McKnight 22/01/2012
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                            Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation is the most powerful media organisation in the world. Murdoch's commercial success is obvious, but less well understood is his successful pursuit of political goals, using News Corp as his vehicle.David McKnight uncovers Murdoch's crusade for his unique brand of conservatism over three decades.

                            Drawing on extensive original research, McKnight tracks NewsCorp's pursuit of conservative ideas, from Reagan and Thatcher to the Tea Party and its war on Barack Obama. He shows how Murdoch's political connections underpinned the scandal of phone hacking in Britain and thwarted investigation. He examines the secretive corporate culture of News Corporation: its private political seminars for editors, its sponsorship of think tanks and its recurring editorial campaigns around the world. Its success is reflected in the fact that the campaigns are familiar to us all: small government and market deregulation, skepticism on climate change, support for neo-conservative adventures such as Iraq and relentless criticism of all things 'liberal'.

                            For all its power and influence, News Corporation is now in a profound crisis. The mobile phone hacking scandal has irreparably tarnished its reputation. Its ability to use its news media to bully politicians may be fatally weakened.

                            In the longer term its confident free market ideology is no longer the orthodoxy since the arrival of Obama and the global financial crisis. His unwavering support for the invasion of Iraq has backfired and his flip-flopping on climate change has discredited him. News Corporation faces an uncertain future as digital technology eats into his newspaper empire which has been the basis of Murdoch's political power.


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                            Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare? by James Shapiro 22/01/2012
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                            For two hundred years after Shakespeare's death, no one thought to argue that somebody else had written his plays. Since then dozens of rival candidates - including Sir Francis Bacon and the Earl of Oxford - have been proposed as their true author.

                            Contested Will unravels the mystery of when and why so many people began to question whether Shakespeare wrote the plays (among them such leading writers and artists as Sigmund Freud, Henry James, Mark Twain, Helen Keller, Orson Welles, and Sir Derek Jacobi).

                            Shakespeare scholar James Shapiro's fascinating search for the source of this controversy retraces a path strewn with fabricated documents, calls for trials, false claimants, concealed identity, bald-faced deception and a failure to grasp what could not be imagined.

                            If Contested Will does not end the authorship question once and for all, it will nonetheless irrevocably change the nature of the debate by confronting what's really contested: are the plays and poems of Shakespeare autobiographical, and if so, do they hold the key to the question of who wrote them?


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