Random House Digital
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A FREE SAMPLER OF HARUKI MURAKAMI'S NEW MASTERPIECE This sampler contains the first two chapters of Haruki Murakami's magnum opus, 1Q84, introducing the reader to the hero and heroine of the story, Tengo and Aomame.
The full ebook of Books One and Two will be available in one volume on 18th October 2011, followed by the ebook of Book Three on 25th October.
The year is 1984. Aomame sits in a taxi on the expressway in Tokyo.
Her work is not the kind which can be discussed in public but she is in a hurry to carry out an assignment and, with the traffic at a stand-still, the driver proposes a solution. She agrees, but as a result of her actions starts to feel increasingly detached from the real world. She has been on a top-secret mission, and her next job will lead her to encounter the apparently superhuman founder of a religious cult.
Meanwhile, Tengo is leading a nondescript life but wishes to become a writer. He inadvertently becomes involved in a strange affair surrounding a literary prize to which a mysterious seventeen-year-old girl has submitted her remarkable first novel. It seems to be based on her own experiences and moves readers in unusual ways. Can her story really be true?
Both Aomame and Tengo notice that the world has grown strange; both realise that they are indispensable to each other. While their stories influence one another, at times by accident and at times intentionally, the two come closer and closer to intertwining.
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From Chip and Dan Heath, the bestselling authors of Switch and Made to Stick, comes The Myth of the Garage ... and other minor surprises, a collection of the authors' best columns for Fast Company magazine. There are 16 pieces in all, plus a previously unpublished piece entitled 'The Future Fails Again'.
In Myth, the Heath brothers tackle some of the most (and least) important issues in the modern business world:
- Why you should never buy another mutual fund ('The Horror of Mutual Funds') - Why your gut may be more ethical than your brain ('In Defense of Feelings') - How to communicate with numbers in a way that changes decisions ('The Gripping Statistic') - Why the 'Next Big Thing' often isn't ('The Future Fails Again') - Why you may someday pay $300 for a pair of socks ('The Inevitability of $300 Socks') - And 12 others . . .
Punchy, entertaining, and full of unexpected insights, the collection is the perfect companion for a short flight (or a long meeting).
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Figure in a Photograph: A Short Story from 'Where Have You Been?
Joseph O'Connor
- Random house digital
- 27 September 2012
- 9781448162024
'Everyone should try childcare with a hangover. Once.' Sean Hyland's wife has left him in Dublin for the weekend, home alone with their infant daughter and teenage son. He has never felt more middle aged... Figure in a Photograph is a tender, funny and quietly poignant story that takes us to the heart of fatherhood and marriage, via skateboards, Jeremy Kyle and ectoplasms of snot.
This story is taken from Where Have You Been?, award-winning novelist Joseph O'Connor's first collection of short stories in more than twenty years.
Ranging from urgently contemporary London and Dublin to New York's Lower East Side in the nineteenth century, from dark comedy to poignancy, from the wryly provocative to the quietly beautiful, Where Have You Been? offers a gathering of dreamers and lost souls who contend with the confusions of living.
An entertaining and life-affirming read from the internationally acclaimed author of Star of the Sea, Redemption Falls and Ghost Light.
The full physical and digital editions will be available on 4th October 2012.
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Stories for Christmas: Free heart-warming festive tasters from three b
Debbie Macomber Dilly Court Katie Flynn
- Random house digital
- 13 December 2012
- 9781448166183
FREE HEART-WARMING FESTIVE TASTERS FROM THREE BESTSELLING AUTHORS. A Sixpenny Christmas by Katie FlynnTwo women struggle to bring up their children in the aftermath of World War II. Angels at the Table by Debbie MacomberA heart-warming Christmas story of love and miracles by the international bestselling Debbie Macomber.The Lady's Maid by Dilly CourtDespite the differences in their circumstances, Kate and Josie have been friends since childhood. But their past binds them together in ways they must never know.
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A free sampler of Ross Kemp's Raiders: six true stories of the most daring British operations of World War Two.
This sampler contains the story of Operation Judgement; believed to be one of the most incredible raids of World War Two.
The full ebook and hardback will be available on 25th October 2012.
Six raids that changed the course of history.
Operation Judgement: one of the most spectacular efforts of World War Two, where obsolete British biplanes attacked the Italian fleet in Taranto.
Operation Archery: the first true combined operation carried out by all three British forces. THis successful raid persuaded Hitler that the Allies were planning a full scale invasion.
Operation Biting: a cross-Channel raid into France that was the first major attack by the British Airborne Division and its first battle honour.
Operation Gunnerside: a dramatic demolition assault on Hitler's atomic bomb plant in Norway.
Operation Chariot: 'the greatest raid of all': the British amphibious attack on the Normandie dry dock at St Nazaire in German-occupied France.
Operation Deadstick: the story of the first Allies into the fray on D-Day, tasked with seizing and holding two bridges to prevent an armoured German counter-attack.
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Kitchen Rhythm: A Year in a Parisian Pâtisserie
Frances Leech
- Random house digital
- 4 March 2013
- 9781448181636
At 5.37 a.m. my alarm goes off for the first time. By 6.09 a.m. I will be waiting on the metro platform. By 6.27 a.m. I pull open the swing door and duck under the pink curtain of the pâtisserie. I am probably last. In our tiny bakery on the other side of Paris, our cakes are made in the early morning, to preserve that freshness and crunch.
Following in the footsteps of Rachel Khoo, Frances Leech has been lured to the city of love by puff pastry. For the past year she has worked in a small little French-Japanese pâtisserie where margins are small and the pressure is on. On any given day this small bakery uses 100 passionfruit and coconut mousses, 18 kg of chestnut and rum paste for Mont-Blanc tarts alone.
Frances trains alongside her Japanese colleagues perfecting meringues, passionfruit mousse, millefeuille and sticky caramel as well as a working knowledge of idiomatic Japanese. She feels incompetent, clumsy, tall and gets burned a lot. But her colleagues are patient and kind and she learns to love the art of pastry, despite the early mornings.
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Raghu Karnad's "Everybody's Friend" is a poignant pilgrimage to the military grave of a great-uncle, fallen defending the obsolescent Raj against the oncoming army of imperial Japan. The most brutal fighting unfolded on the unforgiving northeast Indian border with Burma, and Karnad takes himself and the reader deep into Nagaland to find the war graves of Imphal. There he broods without heavy reproach but with stoical sorrow on the marginalisation of memory offered to Indian troops who, in the authorised epic of Indian independence, fought on the "wrong" side for their imperial masters while the much thinner ranks of the Indian National Army, Subhash Chandra Bose's fighters, have been accorded the rites and respects of freedom fighters
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Available exclusively as an ebook, a Cedar Cove short story from international bestseller Debbie Macomber, author of The Inn at Rose Harbor and Rose Harbor in Bloom.
From the moment Jo Marie sits next to Paul inside the Seattle Seahawks' stadium, she feels a spark. Paul's striking blue eyes and kind smile tell her that he's someone special - different from any man she's met before. When they strike up a conversation, Jo Marie and Paul realize how much they have in common, yet there's one thing keeping them from a fairy-tale ending: Paul is in the military and will ship out of Seattle within the next six weeks. As Jo Marie wonders if she should once again open her heart, she decides that, no matter the stakes, she can't forgo her chance at true love.
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Provocative and chillingly insightful, this short story examines the acceptable face of racism.
'This Is The Educated Classes Talking' is taken from Joseph Smith's forthcoming collection, Finally My Ambulance.
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Jimmy Rabbitte hates jazz, always has. But his wife Aiofe loves it, and Jimmy loves Aiofe. So when, in attempt to convert him, she buys him two tickets for a Keith Jarrett concert he decides to take Outspan, former member of Jimmy's band The Commitments, who has come back into his life after a chance meeting in the cancer clinic. Jarrett is famous for being intolerant of any noise at all - a cough, a sneeze, a wheeze - from the audience, stopping playing and shaming the perpetrator. And Outspan's diagnosis is lung cancer, it's pretty bad, and he needs an oxygen cylinder to breathe properly.
Will Outspan create havoc? Will Jimmy learn to love jazz at last?
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A closely fought race, treachery in a back alley, a visit to the shrine of an Egyptian Goddess. A Roman centurion discovers that Fate will always hold him in her power.
The German frontier, spring 6 BC. When Lucius Cominius Tullus, a recently promoted centurion, gambles on a foot race between rival legionaries, he has no idea that his wager will endanger his very life, and that the streets of an Empire border town can be as deadly as the bloodiest battlefield.
A prequel to Ben Kane's dramatic new trilogy, Eagles at War, The Shrine also includes a sample chapter from the first book in the series.
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A short prequel to Dorothy Koomson's new bestselling novel That Girl From Nowhere In That Girl From Nowhere, Clemency Smittson leaves behind her old life in Leeds to move to Brighton in search of answers to her past, and to escape from the sadness of her present. Clemency's mother, Heather Smittson, loves her with a fierce protectiveness that means she'll follow her daughter to the ends of the Earth. . . From There to Here is the story of their journey from the north of England to the south.
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Over the centuries eiderdown has been coveted by the Vikings, Russian tsars and medieval tax collectors who accepted it as revenue. The plumage of a fat sea duck, eiderdown - treasured for its extraordinary lightness and insulation - now joins cocaine as an instrument of globalisation and commodity of the super-rich.In this revelatory essay, Edward Posnett travels to the Westfjords region of Iceland to explore the fragile relationship between Icelanders and the duck. Eiderdown harvesting began with the arrival of Norse settlers in the 9th century, and it is now stuffed into pillows, duvets and clothing which sell for thousands of pounds in Japan, China, Germany and Russia. What might at first appear an idyllic pastime becomes a story of compromise and exploitation. Posnett's finely spun prose and his fascinating encounters open up this seldom seen trade, one which hangs in the balance.
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It isn't nice but you're an animal, so you can do it, dressed in green and brown and black waiting to be attacked and smiling because you had bullets for teeth. Adnan Sarwar, a Pakistani boy from Burnley, joined the British Army - the White Man's Army. Why did he do it? To prove he was as white as his friends? For Queen and Country? Or to work out who he was - British, Muslim or a Soldier? Perhaps he could be all three. 'British Muslim Soldier' is Adnan's journey through the battlegrounds of war, race and identity, facing up to the often brutal realities of these fraught warzones. There is racism, family ties, tedious routine, enemies and torture. But what Adnan's story really comes down to is love - love for his family, for his fellow squaddies - and a deep-rooted sense of identity and belonging. ...when did these clothes fit so well? When did Corporal become an older brother and when did the army become a mother? When did I become a British soldier?
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Helter Skelter: Part One of the Shocking Manson Murders
Bugliosi Vincent
- Random house digital
- 15 January 2015
- 9781473519787
Part One: The Shocking Story of the Manson Murders. On August 9th 1969, seven people were found shot, stabbed and bludgeoned to death in Los Angeles at two different locations.
Among them was Sharon Tate Polanski: Roman Polanski's heavily pregnant wife who was found with multiple wounds of the chest and back having been stabbed sixteen times. Before she was stabbed to death, Sharon was hanged from one of the rafters in the living room.
Jay Sebring: a popular figure in Hollywood circles, Jay was found with a bloody towel covering his face, a rope around his neck slung over rafters and tied to Sharon Tate on the other side. He was stabbed and shot. Cause of death: Exsanguination, the victim bled to death.
Abigail Anne Folger: A coffee heiress, a civil rights devotee, volunteer and friend of the Polanski's, Anne was stabbed twenty-eight times.
'Woytek' Frykowski: a close friend of Roman Polanski, and an aspiring novelist, Woytek was shot twice, struck over the head thirteen times and stabbed fifty-one times. Part One gives a detailed account of the crime scene, the victims and the long wait to list the suspects. This was the crime that shook Hollywood and the world. -
'Mushroom Season' is a ramble through magic mushrooms, mountains and metaphysics. After heavy sanctions relegated their use to a spell in the stoner wilderness, are psilocybin mushrooms about to help reframe important social and philosophical debates about our minds, and ourselves?Where do they grow? What do they do to our brains? And why are they eschewed by the bourgois? Nina Lyon introduces us to Liberty Caps and Fly Agarics, the characters she encountered as a student tripper and the differences between home-grown hallucinogens and Mexican export. Among the anecdotes and observations are chemical facts, etymological revelations and philosophical speculation. Why are mushrooms subject to social stigma? What are the good effects they might have on us? And how does illegalisation damage a culture of free-thinking and experiment? Taking apart the teenage clichés and middle-class prejudice associated with the drug, Nina Lyon provides a wonderfully entertaining history of the magic mushroom.
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What is it like to have someone die in your arms? Can we return from the dead? And why has nobody heard of therapeutic hypothermia? Forced to come to terms with doctors pronouncing her husband 'clinically dead', Alexandra Zelman-Doring embarks on an exploration of what death means to us and how we might face it. Initally she is overwhelmed by the difficulty of accepting the loss of a loved one, and the anger, sadness and sense of isolation that it brings. But her suffering pushes her towards a life-store of reading, and here she finds words with which to contemplate death; from Turgenev on death as an 'unanswerable reproach' to Norbert Elias on the extraordinary collective will to endure it.Equally inspiring are the true stories of unlikely survivors: from a species of frog whose organs stop, frozen, throughout the winter, only to stir back to life in the spring, to Anna Bagenholm whose iced brain and body held out against all odds after a fatal accident. These incidents inform a development in medical science where cardiac arrest is treated with 'therapeutic hypothermia', in some cases allowing the body to last without oxygen just long enough for doctors to return the near-dead to life.
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Little Girl Lost: A Nightingales Christmas Story
Donna Douglas
- Random house digital
- 1 October 2015
- 9781473536869
A Christmas short story, available only in ebook, from the author of The Nightingale Girls, Nightingales On Call and Nightingales at WarIt's Christmas time at The Nightingale Hospital and the children on Parry Ward are waiting eagerly for Father Christmas to arrive. But an unexpected arrival beats him to it and, as one discovery leads to another, the past comes back to confront the present.
But will Staff Nurse Rose Chambers be able to forgive and forget? It is Christmas after all... -
An exclusive straight-to-digital short story from bestselling author, Cathy Woodman.Nicci has finally achieved her dream of qualifying for one of the most prestigious horse trials, with her horse, Dark Star.But it seems that nothing ever comes easy. Star is struggling with the intense training regime Nicci has put together, and even Nicci isn't feeling quite herself. Is the moment she has worked so hard for going to be ruined before it's even begun?Luckily, Nicci's husband, Matt, is by her side to support her. As well as being able to use his knowledge as a vet to look after Star, he might just be able to make Nicci see what is really important . . .
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With this e-short you can immerse yourself in a week of 'recipes to restore and revive'. With a wholesome recipe for every day of the week, this is a reboot for your body and your mind (minus faddy dieting) which will leave you feel amazing.This free eshort is released to celebrate Georgina Hayden's sumptuous forthcoming cookbook Stirring Slowly: Recipes to Restore and Revive ('A new modern classic - a simply stunning cookbook' Jamie Oliver).The recipes range from quick and simple to slow and hearty, and from breakfast to baking - and every one will nourish you inside and out. Delicious, healthy, filling and nutritious; they are designed by Georgina with one goal in mind: to make cooking and eating feel truly worth it. As Georgina says: 'for me the food I eat, and the very act of getting that food on the table, is hugely meaningful. Whether I have had a brilliant day or a not so good one, I want food that will be a highlight.' For the next 7 days, make food a highlight with A Week of Stirring Slowly.The full volume of Stirring Slowly: Recipes to Restore and Revive is available to buy in hardback from 9 June 2016. Preorder today.'A new modern classic - a simply stunning cookbook' Jamie Oliver
'A truly beautiful book full of warmth, stories and genuinely original recipes from a real lover of food. I want to cook it all' Anna Jones
'A masterpiece of approachable delicious recipes that you will want to cook time and time again' April Bloomfield -
RUNNER-UP OF THE 2017 BODLEY HEAD & FINANCIAL TIMES ESSAY PRIZECuba is on the brink of seismic change - but in the age of post-Fidel, post-Obama and post-truth, the country's future hangs in the balance as it finds itself facing a decisive endgame moment with the new US president. In this lucid reflection on Cuba's decades-long stalemate with the US, Rey maps out the playing field and shows how Trump and Castro's next moves will reverberate globally.
