Profile Books A Spot of Folly. Ten Tales of Murder and Mayhem Rendell Ruth

"Do you have a list of your books, or do I just have to stare at them?" • Shaun Bythell is the owner of The Bookshop in Wigtown, Scotland. With more than a mile of shelving, real log fires in the shop and the sea lapping nearby, the shop should be an idyll for bookworms • Unfortunately, Shaun also has to contend with bizarre requests from people who don't understand what a shop is, home invasions during the Wigtown Book Festival and Granny, his neurotic Italian assistant who likes digging for river mud to make poultices

A young army captain who risked execution to swim from free-market Taiwan to Communist China • A barber who made $150 million in the gambling dens of Macau • The richest woman in China, a recycling tycoon known as the ‘Wastepaper Queen’ • Age of Ambition describes some of the billion individual lives that make up China’s story – one that unfolds on remote farms, in glittering mansions, and in the halls of power of the world’s largest authoritarian regime. Together they describe the defining clash taking place today: between the individual and the Communist Party’s struggle to retain control • Here is a China infused with a sense of boundless possibility and teeming romance. Yet it is also riven by contradictions. It is the world’s largest buyer of Rolls Royces and Ferraris yet the word ‘luxury’ is banned from billboards

Who's scored the most goals in the history of football? (and, no, it's not Pele) • Who is the dirtiest player in Champions League history? • What do Harry Kane and North Korea have in common? • And which creature is the most common Premier League mascot? • The Match of the Day magazine Footy Facts & Stats book is bursting with thousands - literally thousands - of brilliant facts and amazing stats from the world of football • It contains everything you need to know about the game's biggest legends, the most iconic moments and the greatest tournaments • Get ready for a trivia overload from the Premier League, Champions League, Football League, the biggest and best leagues from around the world, the WSL, the FA Cup, World Cup, European Championships and much, much more

When the publishers of the Pickwick Papers, Chapman & Hall, brought out the anonymous ‘Sketches of Young Ladies’ in 1837, their resounding success prompted the twenty-six-year old Dickens to write, the following year, a companion piece, the ‘Sketches of Young Gentlemen’, followed two years later – to coincide with the engagement of Princess Victoria and Prince Albert – by the ‘Sketches of Young Couples’ • First published in a single volume in 1843, and including the iconic original engravings by Phiz, these satirical portraits not only reveal the dazzling brilliance of young Dickens’s genius, but also offer a humorous glimpse into Victorian mores and attitudes

Murder is best served ... ice cold • It's only the afternoon, but dusk is already falling and a log fire burning in the grate. Outside, frost coats the tree branches and snow sparkles on the ground. And somewhere in the darkness, a murderer is making plans • Here are ten classic crime stories for the winter months, from the greatest minds of the mystery genre. So bundle up, grab a glass of mulled wine, and get ready to be puzzled, astonished and entertained by these festive stories of murder and mayhem

Murder never takes a holiday • A rock pool with a deadly secret. A bank holiday heatwave dominated by the murder of an unknown man • A sun-drenched picnic that ends in a sinister locked-room mystery. And an Adriatic holiday interrupted by a beautiful couple ... who aren't quite who they seem to be • All these, and many more, can be found in these classic stories of summertime murder and mayhem, featuring masters of the genre from Dorothy L. Sayers to Arthur Conan Doyle. From St Mark's Square in Venice to the English seaside, their tales will puzzle, entertain and prove that - no matter how far you travel - there's no rest for the wicked

Murder never takes a break • As the days get longer, escape your troubles and take a trip to the desperately hot towns where nightfall lingers and a sun-drenched picnic can end in panic. No matter how murderously high the temperatures rise, these stories will chill you to the bone. So grab a cool drink and step into the shade ... if you dare • Featuring terrifying tales of summertime murder and mayhem from Dorothy L. Sayers, Arthur Conan Doyle, Carter Dickson, Michael Innes, Baroness Orczy, Margery Allingham, Ian Rankin, Julian Symons, Ethel Lina White and Rex Stout

A rich collection of classic Christmas mysteries • Christmas is a season of overindulgence. For most of us, that means an extra mince pie, a second helping of turkey, or perhaps a third glass of mulled wine. But for some, the festive season is a time to settle old scores, dispatch new enemies and indulge ... in murder • Here, ten masters of the genre serve up mystery and mayhem aplenty. From a dowager's missing jewels to a festive dinner gone horribly wrong, these classic crime stories will delight, puzzle and satisfy long after the last strands of tinsel have been cleared away

However far you travel, trouble has a way of finding you out • The summer holidays are a chance to escape from it all, to shrug off the troubles and cares of everyday life, and lounge on warm sands or sip a cool drink in the shade of a city square. But, as the characters in this murderously good collection of classic crime stories discover to their cost ... sometimes it's not that easy to escape your fate • An impossible murder on a Cornish beach. A honeymoon in the Italian lakes that becomes a desperate search for the truth. An African safari that ends with the tables being turned. Even in a heatwave, these tales of murder and malice will chill you like a shadow sliding across the sun

Love, Nina meets Black Books: a wry and hilarious account of life in Scotlands biggest second-hand bookshop and the band of eccentrics and book-obsessives who work there The Diary Of A Bookseller is warm (unlike Bythells freezing-cold shop) and funny, and deserves to become one of those bestsellers that irritate him so much. (Mail on Sunday) Utterly compelling and Bythell has a Bennett-like eye for the amusing eccentricities of ordinary people ... I urge you to buy this book and please, even at the risk of being insulted or moaned at, buy it from a real live bookseller. (Charlotte Heathcote Sunday Express)Shaun Bythell owns The Bookshop, Wigtown - Scotlands largest second-hand bookshop. It contains 100,000 books, spread over a mile of shelving, with twisting corridors and roaring fires, and all set in a beautiful, rural town by the edge of the sea

A quirky language-lovers tour of the twenty most-spoken languages in the world - what puts them a cut above the other six thousand? • If you were to master the twenty languages discussed in Babel, you could talk with three quarters of the world's population. But what makes these languages stand out amid the world's estimated 6,500 tongues? • Gaston Dorren delves deep into the linguistic oddities and extraordinary stories of these diverse lingua francas, tracing their origins and their sometimes bloody rise to greatness. He deciphers their bewildering array of scripts, presents the gems and gaps in their vocabularies and charts their coinages and loans. He even explains how their grammars order their speakers' worldview • Combining linguistics and cultural history, Babel takes us on an intriguing tour of the world, addressing such questions as how tiny Portugal spawned a major world language and Holland didn't, why Japanese women talk differently from men, what it means for Russian to be 'related' to English, and how non-alphabetic scripts, such as those of India and China, do the same job as our 26 letters

Robert Greene is a master guide for millions of readers, distilling ancient wisdom and philosophy into essential texts for seekers of power, understanding and mastery. Now he turns to the most important subject of all - understanding people's drives and motivations, even when they are unconscious of them themselves • We are social animals. Our very lives depend on our relationships with people. Knowing why people do what they do is the most important tool we can possess, without which our other talents can only take us so far. Drawing from the ideas and examples of Pericles, Queen Elizabeth I, Martin Luther King Jr, and many others, Greene teaches us how to detach ourselves from our own emotions and master self-control, how to develop the empathy that leads to insight, how to look behind people's masks, and how to resist conformity to develop your singular sense of purpose