The Road to Gondwana traces the steps science took to find Gondwana, and the journey Gondwana itself took through 500 million years of Earth history. The road to Gondwana took western science many hundreds of years to travel. And like Scott's epic haul across the ice of Antarctica, it was a journey jagged with many dead ends and wasted miles. When it was finally realised, Gondwana still remained fuzzy, hard to picture. It is still that way. Gondwana is a place that no longer exists, and yet which still connects half the world, because the 3 billion people who live in Africa, South America, India, Australia, Papua New Guinea and New Zealand, and Arabia spend their lives walking around on what's left of it. But more than that, Gondwana has shaped the world we all live in. Many of the species we share the planet with evolved there. Had Gondwana never existed, the planet would be a very different place. The trees of our forests would be different. The animals we live amongst would not be the same. Had Gondwana not existed, maybe we wouldn't either. The Road to Gondwana is a story about deep time, and the challenges that face those who venture there. It's a story about the importance of imagination in science, and the reasons that the journey towards understanding is sometimes more important than the destination.

An acclaimed journalist and novelist makes history personal, painting a rich and vivid portrait of the time when America become modern by tracing the life of one man who lived through it. It all began with a black-and-white family snapshot of a distinguished elderly gentleman with a fine head of spun-sugar hair. He was wearing round, tortoise-shell glasses, a three-piece suit and an expression of delight mixed with terror, for on his right knee he was balancing a swaddled infant with a bewildered look. The baby is Bill morris, the man is his father's father, John Morris. That photo, taken in November 1952, the month the United States detonated the first hydrogen bomb, a weapon a thousand times more powerful than the atom bombs that incinerated Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Three years later, John Morris died at the age of 92. Bill has no memories of the man, but even as a boy he found himself marveling at the changes John must have witnessed and experienced in his long lifetime. He was born into a slave-owning Virginia family during the Civil War, and he died at the peak of the Cold War. At the time of his birth, the dominant technologies were the steam engine and the telegraph. He grew up in a world lit by kerosene and candles, he traveled by foot and horseback and wagon and drank water hauled from a well. He would live through Reconstruction, women's suffrage, Prohibition, the Great Depression, two world wars, the Korean War and the advent of nuclear weapons. Though he was from a slave-owning family, he changed his views as he grew into adulthood, and would unhappily witnessed the horrors of Jim Crow and work against it. Fluent in German, he would witness Hitler's rise to power, just one of the unimaginable occurrences of his time that suddenly became all-too-real. Deep in the Bible Belt, John was agnostic, perhaps even atheist, and held remarkably progressive beliefs on race relations, child rearing, women's rights and religious freedom. He married an Irish Catholic from upstate New York at a time when Catholics, Jews and Yankees were not warmly welcomed in the South. And in that traditionally bellicose region, he was a life-long pacifist. He was, in a word, a misfit, but one whose story embodies a pivotal generation in American history. An acclaimed journalist and novelist, Bill Morris makes history personal in The Age of Astonishment, painting a rich and vivid portrait of the time when America become modern by tracing the life of one man who lived through it.

Is revenge sweeter than love? Bill, the vampire slayer, finds out as he seeks to end his morbid quest to kill the world's most vicious vampire, and has fun killing every vampire he sees along the way. As a poet and laughing slayer, Bill meets a woman and her child that he must protect in order to get near his prey. And his relationship with her, a strong, unique woman who is changing the world, changes his dark and vengeful vampire world as well. Bill Morris' new novel is a fun, fast-reading literary trip through the horrible underworld of vampire daily life. Learn the humorous weapons, the mind set, and the philosophy it takes to kill the vampires that surround you daily. It may keep you safe. You have a friend in Derry's Vampire.