'Bah! Humbug!' Mr Scrooge is a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, miserable old man. Nobody stops him in the street to say a cheery hello; nobody would dare ask him for a favour. But one cold Christmas Eve, Scrooge receives some unusual visitors who show him just how very mistaken he's been...
Ebenezer Scrooge is unimpressed by Christmas. He has no time for festivities or goodwill toward his fellow men and is only interested in money. Then, on the night of Christmas Eve, his life is changed by a series of ghostly visitations that show him some bitter truths about his choices.
In November 1929, the author - determined to become a 'permanent foreigner' - packed a rucksack and two suitcases and left England on a one-way ticket for Berlin. In this book, he recalls the decadence of Berlin's night scene and his route to sexual liberation.
Cider with Rosie is a wonderfully vivid memoir of childhood in a remote Cotswold village, a village before electricity or cars, a timeless place on the verge of change. Growing up amongst the fields and woods and characters of the place, Laurie Lee depicts a world that is both immediate and real and belongs to a now-distant past.
'She looked like a girl who was evening, and an evening that had become a girl...' In the kitchen, in her rags, Cinderella, longs to go to the ball. Cinderella's transformation turns out to be much less about ballgowns, glass slippers and carriages, and much more about finding her truest self.
William Harvey's theory of circulation was as controversial in its day as Copernicus' idea that the earth revolved around the sun. This title charts the rise of the yeoman's son who demolished beliefs held by anatomists since Roman times, going on to become arguably the greatest Englishman in the history of science after Darwin & Newton.
The once-great city of Bohane on the west coast of Ireland is on its knees, infested by vice and split along tribal lines. There are still some posh parts of town, but it is in the slums and backstreets of Smoketown, the tower blocks of the Northside Rises and the eerie bogs of Big Nothin' that the city really lives.
Midnight, New Year's Eve, 1976. Nine lives are about to be changed forever. Regan and William Hamilton-Sweeney, heirs to one of New York's greatest fortunes; Keith and Mercer, the men who, for better or worse, love them; Charlie and Samantha, two suburban teenagers seduced by the punk scene; and a magazine reporter and his idealistic neighbour.