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'I laughed so hard I nearly fell in my cauldron. A masterpiece' JULIE BINDEL 'A bracingly sharp satire on the sleep of reason and the tyranny of twaddle' FRANCIS WHEEN Mel Winterbourne's modest map-making charity, the Orange Peel Foundation, has achieved all its aims and she's ready to shut it down. But glamorous tech billionaire Joey Talavera has other ideas. He hijacks the foundation for his own purpose: to convince the world that the earth is flat. Using the dark arts of social media at his new master's behest, Mel's ruthless young successor, Shane Foxley, turns science on its head. He persuades gullible online zealots that old-style 'globularism' is hateful. Teachers and airline pilots face ruin if they reject the new 'True Earth' orthodoxy. Can Mel and her fellow heretics – vilified as 'True-Earth Rejecting Globularists' (Tergs) – thwart Orange Peel before insanity takes over? Might the solution to the problem lie in the 15th century? Using his trademark mix of history and satire to poke fun at modern foibles, Simon Edge is at his razor-sharp best in a caper that may be more relevant than you think.
Tim Cleverley inherits a failing pub in Wales, which he plans to rescue by enlisting an American pulp novelist to concoct an entirely fabricated "mystery" about Gerald Manley Hopkins, who composed "The Wreck of the Deutschland" nearby. Blending the real stories of Hopkins and the shipwrecked nuns he wrote about with a contemporary love story, while casting a wry eye on the Dan Brown industry, The Hopkins Conundrum is a highly original mix of commercial fiction, literary biography, and satirical commentary.
'The best kind of thriller - step by all-too-plausible step we're sucked into frantic, breathless action ... Perfect." LEE CHILD You never know where danger may come from... 6.45am. A sweltering London rush hour. And in the last 27 minutes, seven people have been murdered. In a series of coordinated attacks, seven men and women across London have been targeted. For journalist Famie Madden, the horror unfolds as she arrives for the morning shift. The victims have one thing in common: they make up the investigations team at the news agency where Famie works. The question everyone’s asking: what were they working on that could prompt such brutal devastation? As Famie starts to receive mysterious messages, she must find out whether she is being warned of the next attack, or being told that she will be the next victim...
Under tennis courts at a ruined Suffolk abbey, archaeologists make a thrilling find: the remains of St Edmund, king and martyr. He was venerated for centuries as England's patron saint, but his body has been lost since the closure of the monasteries. Culture Secretary Marina Spencer, adored by those who don't know her, jumps on the bandwagon. Egged on by her downtrodden adviser Mark Price, she promotes St Edmund as a new patron saint for the United Kingdom, playing up his Scottish, Welsh, and Irish credentials. Unfortunately these credentials are a fiction, invented by Mark in a moment of panic. As crisis looms, the one person who can see through the whole deception is Mark's cousin Hannah, a dig volunteer. Will she blow the whistle or help him out? And what of St Edmund himself, watching through the baffling prism of a very different age? Splicing ancient and modern as he did in The Hopkins Conundrum and A Right Royal Face-Off, Simon Edge pokes fun at Westminster culture and celebrates the cult of a medieval saint in this beguiling and utterly original comedy.
It is 1777, and England's second-greatest portrait artist, Thomas Gainsborough, has a thriving practice a stone's throw from London's royal palaces. Meanwhile, the press talks up his rivalry with Sir Joshua Reynolds, the pedantic theoretician who is the top dog of British portraiture. Gainsborough loathes pandering to grand sitters, but he changes his tune when he is commissioned to paint King George III and his large family. In their final, most bitter competition, who will be chosen as court painter, Tom or Sir Joshua? Two and a half centuries later, a badly damaged painting turns up on a downmarket TV antiques show being filmed in Suffolk. Could the monstrosity really be, as its eccentric owner claims, a Gainsborough? If so, who is the sitter? And why does he have donkey's ears? Mixing ancient and modern as he did in his acclaimed debut The Hopkins Conundrum, Simon Edge takes aim at fakery and pretension in this highly original celebration of one of our greatest artists. 'A glorious comedy of painting and pretension' Ryan O'Neill
Caggie's life of privilege in Manhattan appears near-perfect but blaming herself for her younger sister's death and being acclaimed for saving a classmate from suicide cause her to withdraw from friends and family until Astor arrives at school, hiding a past at least as dark as her own.
** THE NEW YORK TIMES-BESTSELLING CULT CLASSIC NOVEL ** ** In a new edition introduced by Stephen Fry ** ‘I don’t think you can even call this a drug. This is just a response to the conditions we live in.’ Suzanne Vale, formerly acclaimed actress, is in rehab, feeling like ‘something on the bottom of someone’s shoe, and not even someone interesting’. Immersed in the sometimes harrowing, often hilarious goings-on of the drug hospital and wondering how she’ll cope – and find work – back on the outside, she meets new patient Alex. Ambitious, good-looking in a Heathcliffish way and in the grip of a monumental addiction, he makes Suzanne realize that, however eccentric her life ...
World climbing :images from the edge is a visual celebration of modern technical climbing by one of the sport's foremost photographers, Simon Carter. Without Hollywood tricks or special effects, Carter gives us a good, hard honest look at modern technical climbing at its finest. This extensive work features over ninety different climbers and twenty-nine climbing areas from twelve countries. It covers climbing from its easiest to its hardest but above all its best.
Thin places ... Where worlds crash against each other, rippling soft spots through reality. Ancient portals through which the darkest nightmares seep, spreading uncertainty and doubt. These places haunt us, and from them shadows edge ... A figure from the past, lying in a field ... The unlikely three, bound by their quest ... A high-rise apartment, where creatures crawl ... The drive in the storm, through blurring edges ... The brother, hiding from his sins ... 15 tales of numinous horror from some of the genre's most exciting voices ... A major new anthology, edited by Simon Strantzas.
The international bestselling author of The Professor and the Madman and Krakatoa vividly brings to life the 1906San Francisco Earthquake that leveled a city symbolic of America's relentless western expansion. Simon Winchester has also fashioned an enthralling and informative informative look at the tumultuous subterranean world that produces earthquakes, the planet's most sudden and destructive force. In the early morning hours of April 18, 1906, San Francisco and a string of towns to its north-northwest and the south-southeast were overcome by an enormous shaking that was compounded by the violent shocks of an earthquake, registering 8.25 on the Richter scale. The quake resulted from a rup...