LITMIR.BIZ

It’s late on Friday night when Casey’s mobile starts to ring. She is expecting it to be her daughter Riley. But it isn’t Riley. It’s a woman from the Emergency Duty Team. So begins Casey and Mike’s latest fostering challenge – a fifteen-year-old girl called Keeley who’s run away from her long-term foster home 25 miles away.The Jonathan Ross Show has just started when Casey gets the call. She thinks it will be Riley – telling her that her favourite actor is going to be on TV. But it’s something far more urgent: a fifteen-year-old girl who has run away from her foster family and accused her foster father of sexual abuse. The family deny in vehemently, but such an allegation can never be taken lightly, so a new home must be found for Keeley.Keeley is polite, but she’s sharp, and she has all the hallmarks of a child who has been in the system a long time, and knows how to play it. Whether the allegation is true or not, Casey knows there will be no winners here. If it is true, then a young girl’s life has been torn asunder. If not, then the heartache for the family will only be surpassed by the bleak outlook for Keeley.In the short term, it’s a case of providing a safe, supportive home for a vulnerable child. But with the dangerous world of the internet at her disposal, it seems this strong-minded youngster has her own ideas of where that safe place should be…

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From the bestselling author of Eats, Shoots and Leaves, a hilarious new book from Lynne Truss about her strange journey through the world of sport and sports journalism.Get Her Off the Pitch! is the story of one woman's foray into the very masculine and rather baffling world of sport. Lynne Truss, author of Eats, Shoots and Leaves, spent four years as an unlikely sports writer for The Times. It was a job that took her around the world (via the most difficult journeys and least glamorous hotels) and introduced her to some of the greatest living sportsmen (and many argumentative men with clipboards).During her time at the newspaper she faced disdain from fellow sports writers; undertook last-minute, pre-fight research into 'The Rumble in the Jungle' (Muhammad Ali won, surprisingly); tried unsuccessfully to interpret bizarre commentary and memorize results statistics; wept at football matches and discovered a lasting love for golf. She was even nominated for Sports Writer of the Year.Get Her Off the Pitch! is the hilarious, perceptive and at times moving account of those four strange years. It is perfect for those for whom sport is a matter of life and death, for those who have no idea what all the fuss is about – and for everyone in between.

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A biography of Borges, by his translator.Jorge Luis Borges, known as Georgie to his friends, married Elsa Astete Millán in 1967. Borges was sixty-eight years old at the time of the wedding; Elsa, a widow,with a son in his twenties, was eleven years younger.It proved to be a tempestuous and eventful marriage that would leave an indelible mark on the remainder of Borges’ life, but their relationship has been largely glossed over by previous biographers. This is because the one person who knew all the details has refused to speak about it.Until now.Norman Thomas di Giovanni worked with Borges in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and in Buenos Aires from late 1967 to 1972 and thereafter sporadically until Borges’s death in 1986. During their first period together di Giovanni spent more time with the couple than did almost anyone else. He was privy to the private side of their relationship and to its sudden decline. It was di Giovanni who helped the demoralized Borges by organizing and arranging his divorce and at the same time rescuing his library and smuggling him out of Buenos Aires to avoid the wrath of Elsa and her lawyers.The book is based on the author’s extensive collection of original material in the form of diaries, notebooks, letters, manuscripts, and photographs, most of which has never before been seen. It provides a unique insight into one of the few true geniuses of literature.

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Few modern British sportsmen have fascinated the public more than Geoff Boycott. In this first comprehensive and balanced account of Boycott’s life – fully updated to include his battle against cancer – award-winning author Leo McKinstry lifts the lid on one of cricket’s great enigmatic characters.A record-breaking Test cricketer and acerbic commentator, Geoff Boycott has never been far away from controversy during his long career in the game.Based on meticulous research and interviews with a host of players, Test captains, officials, broadcasters, friends and enemies, this definitive biography cuts through the Boycott myth to expose the truth about this charismatic, single-minded and often exasperating personality.What was Boycott like as a schoolboy? How did his England cricket colleagues such as Graham Gooch, Dennis Amiss and Brian Close feel about him as a person? Why was he so unpopular in his early career for Yorkshire? And what is the real truth about the relationships that soured his private world?From his upbringing as a miner’s son in a Yorkshire village, through highlights like his hundredth century at Headingley against Australia, to the low points such as the damaging court case in France, this warts-and-all account of his life makes for captivating reading.

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Silver boots, perma-tanned skin, shaven legs and gravity-defying red spikes in his hair – Gavin Henson is Wales’s hottest new celeb and rugby’s golden boy. This is his story of a momentous year in rugby, starting with an epic Six Nations Grand Slam for Wales, followed by the toughest of all tours, the British Lions in New Zealand.After kicking the 50-yard goal that sent England to shock defeat in the 2005 Six Nations, the 23-year-old Gavin Henson demonstrated that here, at last, was a Welsh sportsman who was ready to put his proud rugby nation back on the world map.Wales’s Grand Slam triumph – their first since 1978 – was done the hard way, with dramatic victories against the world champions followed by France in Paris, and climaxing in the Millennium stadium against Ireland, amid a crescendo of noise and passion-fuelled expectation.The flamboyant Henson relives those special moments on and off the field: the build-up to the games and the stories from within the inner sanctum of the Welsh dressing room; the pressure of suddenly becoming favourites to win the trophy; the nail-biting victories over England and France; and the moment when Henson knew that life would never be the same again.Fast forward to summer 2005. Wales’s No 12, the inside-centre whose clever running, booming kicks and crunching tackling make him a genuine all-rounder, is the favourite to play alongside captain and Irish phenomenon Brian O’Driscoll in the Lions team against the All Blacks in this most eagerly awaited clash of the Northern and Southern hemispheres.Henson’s insight into this defining tour, his views on coach Clive Woodward and his home nation colleagues (including a fit-again Jonny Wilkinson), and the eye-opening stories away from the rugby – plus all the other highlights of an unprecedented season for Wales’s new generation of talent – will make this book essential reading for the autumn.

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David Lovelace, along with his brother and both his parents, is bipolar. This is his extraordinary and vivid memoir of life within his memorable, maddening, loving and unique family.Full Blown is Lovelace's poignant, humorous, and vivid account of growing up and coming to terms with the highs and lows of manic depression.David's father was a Princeton-trained theology professor deemed too eccentric for the ministry and his mother battled depression all her life. Manic episodes were part of family life – they called them the 'whim-whams'. David was a teenager when his first serious depression hit, and at college when he first became manic. He ran to escape it – to Mexico, South America and then New York, to drugs and alcohol – before he realised the futility of running.A father himself, a son and a brother, David's matter-of-fact approach to growing up surrounded by the unique creativity often sparked by manic depression is compelling. In the vein of Stuart, A Life Backwards and Augusten Burroughs’ Running with Scissors , David’s poetic ability to detail the unique highs and harrowing lows makes a remarkable and gripping read.

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‘Nominally a history of the hot air balloon, Falling Upwards is really a history of hope and fantasy—and the quixotic characters who disobeyed that most fundamental laws of physics and gave humans flight.’ —The New Republic, Best Books of 2013CHOSEN AS BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR IN ** Guardian ** New Statesman ** Daily Telegraph ** New Republic ****TIME Magazine 10 Top Nonfiction Books of 2013** **The New Republic Best Books of 2013** **Kirkus Best Books of the Year (2013)*From ambitious scientists rising above the clouds to test the air, to brave generals floating over enemy lines to watch troop movements, this wonderful book offers a seamless fusion of history, art, science, biography and the metaphysics of flight. It is a masterly portrait of human endeavour, recklessness, vision and hope.In this heart-lifting book, Richard Holmes, author of the best-selling The Age of Wonder, follows the daring and enigmatic men and women who risked their lives to take to the air (or fall into the sky). Why they did it, what their contemporaries thought of them, and how their flights revealed the secrets of our planet is a compelling adventure that only Holmes could tell.It is not a conventional history of ballooning. In a sense it is not really about balloons at all. It is about what balloons gave rise to. It is about the spirit of discovery itself and the extraordinary human drama it produces.From the dramatic and exhilarating early Anglo-French balloon rivalries, the crazy firework flights of the beautiful Sophie Blanchard, the long-distance voyages of the American entrepreneur John Wise and French photographer Felix Nadar to the balloons used to observe the horrors of modern battle during the Civil War (including a flight taken by George Armstrong Custer); the legendary tale of at least sixty-seven manned balloons that escaped from Paris (the first successful civilian airlift in history) during the Prussian siege of 1870-71; the high-altitude exploits of James Glaisher who rose seven miles above the earth without oxygen, helping to establish the new science of meteorology; and how Mary Shelley, Edgar Allan Poe, and Jules Verne felt the imaginative impact of flight and allowed it to soar in their work.

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‘The small translucent bottle of shampoo outlived him. It was the kind you take home from hotels in distant places. For over a year it had sat on the shower shelf where he had left it. I looked at it every day.’After the death of her partner of thirty-two years, Lisa Appignanesi was thrust into a state striated by rage and superstition in which sanity felt elusive. The dead of prior generations loomed large and haunting. Then, too, the cultural and political moment seemed to collude with her condition: everywhere people were dislocated and angry.In this electrifying and brave examination of an ordinary enough death and its aftermath, Appignanesi uses all her evocative and analytic powers to scrutinize her own and our society’s experience of grieving, the effects of loss and the potent, mythical space it occupies in our lives.With searing honesty, lashed by humour, she navigates us onto the terrain of childhood, the way it forms our feelings of love and hate, and steers us towards a less tumultuous version of the everyday.This book may be short, but life, death, madness, love, and grandchildren, are all there – seen through the eyes of a writer who is ever aware of the historical and current vagaries of woman’s condition.

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For over 30 years Sherard Cowper-Coles was on the diplomatic front line in a distinguished Foreign Office career that took him from the corridors of power in Whitehall to a string of high-profile posts across the globe.Entering the Foreign Office fresh from Oxford in 1977, he enjoyed a meteoric rise with postings in Beirut, Alexandria and Cairo, Washington, and Paris, and working on Hong Kong, punctuated with spells in London, where the young diplomat had a baptism of fire writing foreign affairs speeches for Geoffrey Howe and Margaret Thatcher.In 1999, he was made Principal Private Secretary to the irascible Foreign Secretary Robin Cook, providing the book with some of its most hilarious sequences, and his glittering career culminated in a succession of ambassadorial posts as Our Man in Israel, Saudi Arabia and finally Afghanistan.‘Ever the Diplomat’ is his revealing, passionate and witty account of half a lifetime in diplomacy, which is set to become a classic of the genre.

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As Lance Armstrong’s precipitous fall from grace continues, New York Times sports reporter Juliet Macur takes the reader behind the scenes to bring you the astonishing twists and turns of an outrage that has rocked the world of cycling.With unprecedented access to the key players in the drama – from Armstrong’s fellow cyclists and top cycling officials to doctors, trainers and wives – ‘Cycle of Lies’ reveals how Armstrong built a fortress of people around him to protect his image and upend the lives of anybody who stood in his way.As America’s fallen idol faces potential perjury charges, ‘Cycle of Lies’ widens the focus to expose corruption at all levels of the sport in a thrilling, page-turning work of contemporary narrative history.

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