'This is an urgent and compelling account of great bravery and passion. Delphine Minoui has crafted a book that champions books and the individuals who risk everything to preserve them.' Susan Orlean, author of The Library Book In 2012 the rebel suburb of Daraya in Damascus was brutally besieged by Syrian government forces. Four years of suffering ensued, punctuated by shelling, barrel bombs and chemical gas attacks. People's homes were destroyed and their food supplies cut off; disease was rife. Yet in this man-made hell, forty young Syrian revolutionaries embarked on an extraordinary project, rescuing all the books they could find in the bombed-out ruins of their home town. They used them to create a secret library, in a safe place, deep underground. It became their school, their university, their refuge. It was a place to learn, to exchange ideas, to dream and to hope. Based on lengthy interviews with these young men, conducted over Skype by the award-winning French journalist Delphine Minoui, The Book Collectors of Daraya is a powerful testament to freedom, tolerance and the power of literature. Translated from the French by Lara Vergnaud.

Daughter. Wife. Mother. Mystic. Discover the life of this fifteenth century merchant's wife from King's Lynn who despite being unable to read or write created the first autobiography in English. Explore Margery's world of visions, pilgrimages and the constant threat of being burned for heresy.

A searing account of corruption, racism and mismanagement inside Britain's most famous police force Barely a week goes by without the Metropolitan Police Service being plunged into a new crisis. Demoralised and depleted in numbers, Scotland Yard is a shadow of its former self. Spanning the three decades from the infamous Stephen Lawrence case to the shocking murder of Sarah Everard, Broken Yard charts the Met's fall from a position of unparalleled power to the troubled and discredited organisation we see today, barely trusted by its Westminster masters and struggling to perform its most basic function: the protection of the public. The result is a devastating picture of a world-famous police force riven with corruption, misogyny and rank incompetence. As a top investigative reporter at the Sunday Times and The Independent, Tom Harper covered Scotland Yard for fifteen years, beginning not long after the fatal shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes, an innocent Brazilian killed by Met Police officers after being mistaken for a terror suspect in 2005. Since then, reporting on Scotland Yard has been akin to witnessing a slow-motion car crash. Using thousands of intelligence files, witness statements and court transcripts provided by police sources, as well as first-hand testimony, Harper explains how London's world-famous police force got itself into this sorry mess - and how it might get itself out of it.

a RA ALISER UN RA VE A 75 ANSa Ca est le rA (c)cit da une aventure extraordinaire, la rA (c)ussite da un circuit de la Suisse A pied, A vA (c)lo et en kayak, en suivant au plus prAs la ligne frontiAre. Une distance totale de prAs de 2a 500 km et 120a 000 m de dA (c)nivelA (c) (environ 13 fois la hauteur de la Everest!) parcourue en 115 jours en 2015 et 2016, dans des conditions parfois dangereuses, hors des sentiers battus. Au cours de cette pA (c)riode, la auteur a escaladA (c) un peu plus da une centaine de sommets et un nombre A (c)quivalent de cols sur la frontiAre, y compris des sommets mythiques comme le Mont Rose et le Cervin; il a fait de la randonnA (c)e dans le Jura, le Tessin et les Grisons et du kayak sur le lac LA (c)man et le Rhin. Ca A (c)tait aussi un exploit, A 75 ans! Le livre comprend des sections sur la contrebande et des exemples de retrait des glaciers, ainsi qua une trentaine da A"histoires de frontiAreA", qui constituent une source da informations prA (c)cieuse sur la histoire et la gA (c)ographie de la frontiAre suisse.

The true story of a young lady's escape to better things. Of love, marriage and children. A tale of death and despair in a foreign land. Of fate taking a hand and joining two people in a deep and lasting love. The author has used letters and anecdotal evidence from family members who are the lead players in this story. He hopes he has done justice to the tale of their lives.

Maud West ran her detective agency in London for more than thirty years, having starting sleuthing on behalf of society’s finest in 1905. Her exploits grabbed headlines throughout the world but, beneath the public persona, she was forced to hide vital aspects of her own identity in order to thrive in a class-obsessed and male-dominated world. And – as Susannah Stapleton reveals – she was a most unreliable witness to her own life.

Who was Maud? And what was the reality of being a female private detective in the Golden Age of Crime?

Interweaving tales from Maud West’s own ‘casebook’ with social history and extensive original research, Stapleton investigates the stories Maud West told about herself in a quest to uncover the truth.

With walk-on parts by Dr Crippen and Dorothy L. Sayers, Parisian gangsters and Continental blackmailers, The Adventures of Maud West, Lady Detective is a portrait of a woman ahead of her time and a deliciously salacious glimpse into the underbelly of ‘good society’ during the first half of the twentieth century.

In September 2005 one of South Africa's most eminent mining magnates and businessmen Brett Kebble was killed on a quiet suburban street in Johannesburg. The investigation into the case was a tipping point for democratic South Africa. The top-level investigation that followed exposed the corrupt relationship between the country's Chief of Police and Interpol President Jackie Selebi and suave Mafioso Glenn Agliotti. A lawless Johannesburg underbelly was exposed - dominated by drug lords, steroid-reliant bouncers, an international smuggling syndicate, a shady security unit moonlighting for the police and sinister self-serving sleuths abusing state agencies.