Bilbo Baggins enjoys a quiet and contented life, with no desire to travel far from the comforts of home; then one day the wizard Gandalf and a band of dwarves arrive unexpectedly and enlist his services - as a burglar - on a dangerous expedition to raid the treasure-hoard of Smaug the dragon. Bilbo’s life is never to be the same again. "The Hobbit" became an instant success when it was first published in 1937, and 75 years later Tolkien's epic tale of elves, dwarves, trolls, goblins, myth, magic and adventure, with its reluctant hero Bilbo Baggins, has lost none of its appeal. Now, for the first time, the ... |
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Complete and unabridged with an afterword by Marcus Clapham. A pocket sized book - 10 x 15.5 cm. ... Separated from his human parents, Mowgli is raised by wolves, mentored by the cunning panther Bagheera, and taught the Law of the Jungle by Baloo, the strict but kindly bear. But the Indian jungle is full of dangers and he must fight to survive; the tiger, Shere Khan, has sworn to kill him, the sinister monkey residents of the Cold Lairs wish to kidnap him, and his home is threatened by the Cobra and the Red Dog. "All the Mowgli Stories" is a collection of all nine of Rudyard Kipling's stories about the ... |
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Fire is like a rumour. You might think you've extinguished it but one creeping, red tendril, one single wisp of smoke is enough to let it leap back into life again. Especially if someone is watching, waiting to fan the flames ... New school. Tick. New town. Tick. New surname. Tick. Social media profiles? Erased. There's nothing to trace Anna back to her old life. Nothing to link her to the "incident". At least that's what she thinks ... until the whispers start up again. As time begins to run out on her secrets, Anna finds herself irresistibly drawn to the tale of Maggie, a local girl accused of ... |
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Complete and unabridged with colour illustrations. A pocket sized book - 10 x 15.5 cm. ... It's a warm summer's afternoon when young Alice first tumbles down the rabbit hole and into the adventures in Wonderland that have kept readers spellbound for more than 150 years. Collected here are Lewis Carroll's two classics - "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" and "Through the Looking-Glass" - in which Alice encounters the laconic Cheshire Cat, the anxious White Rabbit and the terrifying Red Queen, as well as a host of other outlandish and charming characters. Brought to life by Sir John ... |
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An unlikely friendship forms between a sixteen-year-old boy and a seventy-two-year-old woman as they rally the community to save their local library. Tom is invisible. He happily blends into the background of life. But Farah Shah changes everything. Farah makes Tom want to stand up and be seen - at least by her. So Tom quickly decides the best way to learn about women is to delve into romance novels, and he finds himself at the village library where he befriends 72-year-old Maggie. Maggie has been happily alone for ten years, at least this is what she tells herself. When Tom comes to her rescue after a library meeting, ... |
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If you knew the date of your death, how would you live your life? ... It;s 1969, and holed up in a grimy tenement building in New York's Lower East Side is a travelling psychic who claims to be able to tell anyone the date they will die. The four Gold children, too young for what they're about to hear, sneak out to learn their fortunes. Such prophecies could be dismissed as trickery and nonsense, yet the Golds bury theirs deep. Over the years that follow they might attempt to ignore, embrace, cheat or defy the "knowledge" given to them that day - but it will shape the course of their lives forever. & ... |
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No matter what, she’ll find her. In this universe or the next. ... Ana Moon’s best friend Bea has vanished. Her house has changed. Her parents have become strangers. She has fallen into a world that is not her own. Guided by the mysterious Malik and his Pathfinders - world-jumping guardians of hidden gateways from one world to the next, including a mute girl with fighting sticks and a boy who moves like smoke - Ana must travel across seven versions of Earth to get Bea back. Lying in wait are the sinister Order, monstrous Reapers and a rogue Pathfinder bent of finding the elusive seventh world, and who will destroy ... |
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Complete and unabridged with an afterword by John Grant. A pocket sized book - 10 x 15.5 cm. ... Rejected by fifteenth-century Parisian society, the hideously deformed bell-ringer Quasimodo believes he is safe under the watchful eye of his master, the Archdeacon Claude Frollo. But after Quasimodo saves the beautiful Romani girl Esmeralda from the gallows and brings her to sanctuary in the cathedral, he and Frollo's mutual desire for her puts them increasingly at odds, before compassion and cruelty clash with tragic results. An emotionally stirring story, Victor Hugo's "The Hunchback of Notre-Dame" is ... |
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Jonathan Swift's classic satirical narrative was first published in 1726, seven years after Defoe's Robinson Crusoe (one of its few rivals in fame and breadth of appeal). As a parody travel-memoir it reports on extraordinary lands and societies, whose names have entered the English language: notably the minute inhabitants of Lilliput, the giants of Brobdingnag, and the Yahoos in Houyhnhnmland, where talking horses are the dominant species. It spares no vested interest from its irreverent wit, and its attack on political and financial corruption, as well as abuses in science, continue to resonate in our own ... |
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Complete and unabridged. A pocket sized book - 10 x 15.5 cm. ... Set in the South of France in the decade after the First World War, "Tender is the Night" explores the new world of moneyed leisure found by the first generation of idle-rich Americans to take refuge in the French Riviera, bracketed between the horrors of the Great War and the Great Depression to come. It is the story of a brilliant and magnetic psychiatrist named Dick Diver; the bewitching, wealthy, and dangerously unstable mental patient, Nicole, who becomes his wife; and the beautiful, harrowing ten-year pas de deux they act out along the ... |
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Complete and unabridged. A pocket sized book - 10 x 15.5 cm. ... Dorian Gray is young, arrogant, and devastatingly handsome. Confronted by his beauty in the form of a portrait, and struck by the terrible realization that he will age, Dorian wishes to retain his charms forever and finds his desire granted. He abandons himself to a life of hedonism, vice and murder, yet his face remains unmarked by his evil. But, hidden in his attic, the painting ages and corrupts, and one day Dorian must stand face to face with the man he has become. A perfect depiction of fin-de-siècle decadence, Oscar Wilde's only novel ... |
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A young woman finds her way in a world at war. ... On 3rd September 1939, Amy Browning decided to start writing a diary. It was a momentous day for so many reasons. It was Amy's 18th birthday; her sister had just given birth to a baby boy; and on the radio it was announced that Great Britain was now at war with Germany. For a while, life didn't change very much for Amy. Living with her family in Opal Street, Liverpool, Amy and her friend both got jobs at a factory, and spent their free time looking round the shops, or watching the ships being loaded at the docks. But as the months went by, things began to change. ... |
