Black Swan Daughters-in-Law Trollope Joanna

Chrissie, in the twenty-three years she'd been together with Richie, had always believed that he loved her • He loved their three daughters and their house in Highgate and their happy, lively existence. But if she really was the love of his life, why had he never given her the one thing that would have made her life perfect? • Then suddenly Richie is no longer there, and without him Chrissie's carefully constructed life is in jeopardy.The one big fact she had always tried to keep from her daughters threatens to overwhelm them all. For Richie had still been married to his first wife, the one with a son that he had abandoned in Newcastle • And now, with Richie gone and the practicalities of wills and money to be sorted out, it is finally time for the two families to face each other

One encounter and life is never the same again • The Logans were an enchanting and admirable couple. Archie had snatched Liza from her own engagement party to someone else, wooed her, swept her off to his father in Scotland, and finally married her • Now bedded firmly into country life - three children, Archie the village doctor, Liza a teacher, everything comfortable, funny, affectionate - they awaited the arrival of Archie's father, the brilliant Sir Andrew Logan, a widower for over thirty years • When his city-clean Rover stopped in the drive, Sir Andrew was not alone. Beside him was a golden lady in caramel suede, a warm, witty, desirable widow whom everyone - except Archie - adored at once • Archie saw his father's mistress as the worm in the bud of his perfect life - a life that was to be wrenched apart before he and Liza could re-create their world

Would you take a chance and set something in motion that could change everything? • The Grey House is the final piece in the jigsaw of Alice Jordan's perfect life. It seems to be the ultimate achievement of her outwardly happy marriage - a loyal, if dull husband, three children, two cars and now the house. So why does she feel as if something is missing? • As Alice and her family settle themselves into village life, the something missing becomes something huge and then breaks, scandalizing the village and opening up old wounds • But because of it, Alice begins to feel that there is hope and humour and understanding and compassion in the new life she must build for herself

Merrion Palmer has been Judge Guy Stockdale's mistress for the last seven years and his wife and two grown-up sons know absolutely nothing about her. Up until now, Guy and Merrion have enjoyed a blissfully, uncomplicated relationship in stolen moments in Merrion's flat, and to the rest of the world, Guy has played the part of model husband, father and grandfather • But now the time has come for things to change. Guy has become conscious of wasted years and he wants to share his relationship with Merrion with the world • He wants, dammit, to marry her. Yet he is quite unprepared for the storm that will follow

A family in crisis. A catalyst that threatens to change everything • The land running down to the River Dean has been farmed by the Meredith family for generations. Robin Meredith bought the farm from his father, just before he married his wife Caro and now he and his brother Joe work on the land. But now Caro has died, as much as a mystery to the family as she was when she arrived twenty years ago, and the whole family feels her loss acutely, none more so than her adopted daughter Judy • Into this unhappy family comes Zoe, Judy's London friend, an outsider with an independent spirit and a disturbing directness. Everyone underestimates Zoe's power as a catalyst for change as the realities behind the seeming idyll of a rural community become ever clearer

Two lives intertwined and seemingly harmonious. One decision that changes everything • Lizzie and Frances are twins, together forming part of a unit. Or at least that's the way Lizzie sees things. Lizzie is the twin who has everything: husband, children, a flourishing career and a beautiful house. She worries about Frances, who seems to lead a solitary life in London, ricocheting from one disastrous man to the next. Lizzie just wants Frances to have a complete and satisfying life, just like hers • Then one day Frances announces she isn't coming to Lizzie's for Christmas as usual - she's going to Spain instead • Suddenly and equally unexpectedly, Lizzie's world begins to tilt. Frances's Christmas defection seems overwhelmingly threatening to their unity

Our world is full of patterns. If you pour milk into your tea and give it a stir, you'll see a swirl, a spiral of two fluids, before the two liquids mix completely. The same pattern is found elsewhere too. Look down on the Earth from space, and you'll find similar swirls in the clouds, made where warm air and cold air waltz • In Storm in a Teacup, Helen Czerski links the little things we see every day with the big world we live in. Each chapter begins with something small - popcorn, coffee stains and refrigerator magnets - and uses it to explain some of the most important science and technology of our time • This is physics as the toolbox of science - a toolbox we need in order to make sense of what is around us and arrive at decisions about the future, from medical advances to solving our future energy needs

Билл Брайсон отказывается от путешествий по автострадам и проселочным дорогам Средней Америки ради быстрой, волнующей поездки по маршруту американского языка и популярной культуры • В книге "Сделано в Америке. Неофициальная история американского английского" Брайсон рассказывает историю о том, как американский возник из английского языка, и попутно демифологизирует свою родную землю - объясняет, как пыльная деревушка в пустыне, где нет ни лесов, ни остролиста, стала Голливудом, как Дикий Запад не был завоеван, о том, как они ели нездоровую пищу задолго до того, как появилось само слово, а также раскрывает истинное происхождение слов "стринги", "блокбастер", "покер" и "неразбериха" • Книга на английском языке • Bill Bryson turns away from travelling the highways and byways of middle America, so hilariously depicted in his bestselling The Lost Continent, The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid and Notes from a Big Country, for a fast, exhilarating ride along the Route 66 of American language and popular culture

In 1954, in the cookhouse of a logging and sawmill settlement in northern New Hampshire, a twelve-year-old boy mistakes the local constable's girlfriend for a bear. Both the twelve-year-old and his father become fugitives, pursued by the constable. Their lone protector is a fiercely libertarian logger, once a river driver, who befriends them • In a story spanning five decades, Last Night in Twisted River - John Irving's twelfth novel - depicts the recent half-century in the United States as a world 'where lethal hatreds were generally permitted to run their course.' • From the novel's taut opening sentence to its elegiac final chapter, what distinguishes Last Night in Twisted River is the author's unmistakable voice, the inimitable voice of an accomplished storyteller

In house in a wood, Ada and her father live peacefully, tending to their garden and the wildlife in it. They are not human though. Ada was made by her father from the Ground, a unique patch of earth with birthing and healing properties. Though perhaps he didn’t get her quite right. They spend their days healing the local human folk – named Cures - who visit them, suspiciously, with their ailments • When Ada embarks on a relationship with a local Cure named Samson, and is forced to choose between her old life with her father, and a new one with her human lover. Her decision will uproot the town – and the Ground itself – for ever • A poised and simmering tour-de-force, Follow Me To Ground is a sinister vision of desire and freewill, voiced in earthy prose and eviscerating detail by an astoundingly original new writer

In the company of his friend Stephen Katz (last seen in the bestselling Neither Here nor There), Bill Bryson set off to hike the Appalachian Trail, the longest continuous footpath in the world • Ahead lay almost 2,200 miles of remote mountain wilderness filled with bears, moose, bobcats, rattlesnakes, poisonous plants, disease-bearing tics, the occasional chuckling murderer and - perhaps most alarming of all - people whose favourite pastime is discussing the relative merits of the external-frame backpack • Facing savage weather, merciless insects, unreliable maps and a fickle companion whose profoundest wish was to go to a motel and watch The X-Files, Bryson gamely struggled through the wilderness to achieve a lifetime's ambition - not to die outdoors

In At Home, Bill Bryson applies the same irrepressible curiosity, irresistible wit, stylish prose and masterful storytelling that made A Short History of Nearly Everything one of the most lauded books of the last decade, and delivers one of the most entertaining and illuminating books ever written about the history of the way we live • Bill Bryson was struck one day by the thought that we devote a lot more time to studying the battles and wars of history than to considering what history really consists of: centuries of people quietly going about their daily business - eating, sleeping and merely endeavouring to get more comfortable. And that most of the key discoveries for humankind can be found in the very fabric of the houses in which we live