The PERFECT GIFT for that superhero, saint, figure of worship or, if none of those apply, your plain dear old dad. 'Shawn has set up his own firework display in the garden. "Those big displays are rubbish," he tells his son. "You can't see a thing." When Shawn's son has seen the firework, they will go back indoors. Fireworks are more expensive than Shawn expected.' _______ '"What does a hippopotamus eat, dad?' asks Philip 'Children who ask for stuff in the gift shop,' says his dad. Being a dad is brilliant.'" _______ This delightful book is the latest in the series of Ladybird books which have been specially planned to help grown-ups with the world about them. The large clear script, the careful choice of words, the frequent repetition and the thoughtful matching of text with pictures all enable grown-ups to think they have taught themselves to cope. Featuring original Ladybird artwork alongside brilliantly funny, brand new text. 'Hilarious' STYLIST

Bird-Bent Grass chronicles an extraordinary mother-daughter relationship that spans distance, time, and, eventually, debilitating illness. Personal, familial, and political narratives unfold through the letters that Geeske Venema-de Jong and her daughter Kathleen exchanged during the late 1980s and through their weekly conversations, which started after Geeske was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease twenty years later. In 1986, Kathleen accepted a three-year teaching assignment in Uganda, after a devastating civil war, and Geeske promised to be her daughter's most faithful correspondent. The two women exchanged more than two hundred letters that reflected their lively interest in literature, theology, and politics, and explored ideas about identity, belonging, and home in the context of cross-cultural challenges. Two decades later, with Geeske increasingly beset by Alzheimer's disease, Kathleen returned to the letters, where she rediscovered the evocative image of a tiny, bright meadow bird perched precariously on a blade of elephant grass. That image - of simultaneous tension, fragility, power, and resilience - sustained her over the years that she used the letters as memory prompts in a larger strategy to keep her intellectually gifted mother alive. Deftly woven of excerpts from their correspondence, conversations, journal entries, and email updates, Bird-Bent Grass is a complex and moving exploration of memory, illness, and immigration; friendship, conflict, resilience, and forgiveness; cross-cultural communication, the ethics of international development, and letter-writing as a technology of intimacy. Throughout, it reflects on the imperative and fleeting business of being alive and loving others while they're ours to hold.

My mother-in-law Annie lived with us for 17 years and was picture-book perfect.

It took a while before the family realised that Annie was increasingly (as she would put it) 'Mutt and Jeff'. So Phyllida began to write out the day's gossip at the kitchen table, putting her notes by Annie's bed before going to hers. One night as her husband wandered off to bed he muttered darkly that she spent so much time each evening writing to Annie she could have written a book. 'And illustrated it ' Here it is.

It is a book full of the delights of a warm and loving household. Of Boot the Cat being sick after over-indulging in spiders; the hunt for cleaning products from the dawn of time; persistently and mysteriously malfunctioning hearing aids; an unusual and potentially hilarious use for a clove of garlic; and the sad disappearance of coconut logs from the local sweetshop.

It's about the special place at the heart of a home held by a woman born in another age. Who polished the brass when it was 'looking red at her'. Who still bore a scar from being hit by her employer when, as a young woman, she was in service. Who could turn the heel of a sock and the collar of a shirt, and make rock-cakes, bread pudding and breast of lamb with barley."

Austerity Baby might best be described as an 'oblique memoir'. Janet Wolff's fascinating volume is a family history - but one that is digressive and consistently surprising. The central underlying and repeated themes of the book are exile and displacement; lives (and deaths) during the Third Reich; mother-daughter and sibling relationships; the generational transmission of trauma and experience; transatlantic reflections; and the struggle for creative expression. Stories mobilised, and people encountered, in the course of the narrative include: the internment of aliens in Britain during the Second World War; cultural life in Rochester, New York, in the 1920s; the social and personal meanings of colour(s); the industrialist and philanthropist, Henry Simon of Manchester, including his relationship with the Norwegian explorer, Fridtjof Nansen; the liberal British campaigner and MP of the 1940s, Eleanor Rathbone; reflections on the lives and images of spinsters. The text is supplemented and interrupted throughout by images (photographs, paintings, facsimile documents), some of which serve to illustrate the story, others engaging indirectly with the written word. -- .

INCLUDES INTERVIEWS WITH BERTIE AHERN, MARY KENNEDY, SEAN O'ROUKE, MARY COUGHLAN AND MANY OTHERS. What was life like for Ireland's grandparents when they were young? What has changed for the better? What values do they wish to hand down? In these pages, grandmother and chronicler of times past Valerie Cox talks to fellow grandparents, creating an unforgettable trip down memory lane. Through schooldays, dating, jiving, child-rearing, working life, holidays, fashion and more, memories are shared of a pre-digital age when the world seemed smaller and community life was central. They also describe the magic of the grandparent-grandchild relationship, and their hopes for the upcoming generation. Full of tender or surprising reminiscences from across Ireland, along with revelations on what truly matters in life, When I Was Your Age includes contributions from some of Ireland's best known grandparents - a beautiful gift and a time capsule for the future.