Bloomsbury Publishing strana 69 z 87

Meet LONG JOHN McRON, SHIP'S COOK... and the most unusual babysitter you've ever seen. Long John has a whole crew of wild pirates in tow, and - for two intrepid children - he's about to transform a perfectly ordinary evening into a riotous adventure beneath a pirate moon. It's time to make some PIRATE STEW. Marvellously silly and gloriously entertaining, this tale of pirates, flying ships, donut feasts and some rather magical stew is perfect for all pirates, both young and old. With a deliciously rhyming text from master storyteller Neil Gaiman, and spellbinding illustrations by the supremely talented Chris Riddell, three-times-winner of the Kate Greenaway Medal, this is the picture book of the year! Joyful, quirky and action-packed, it makes a spectacular and magical gift.

Childhood best friends decide to marry in order to keep their sexuality a secret. A young heiress embarks on a secret affair, ending in devastation but not for the party who was braced for it. A glum divorcee reaches out to his American neighbour. A radicalised student's preparations for his sister's wedding in Lahore involve beating up the groom. An actress from a sheltered background in Karachi is forced to grow up fast on the set of her first major TV show where the real intrigue takes place off-screen. From one of Pakistan's most exciting young writers comes an exhilarating, audacious debut story collection; upending traditional notions of identity, scrutinising the relationship between power and desire, and fizzing with energy and wit.

Magic comes from within ... Uprooted by her single mum along with her troublesome older brother, eleven-year-old Prune Robinson is trying to settle in a new town. She figures she can't burden her hard-working mother with the fact she's being bullied. Or the fact that her drawings have started coming to life. But with her brother soon in danger, Prune comes to realise that she can't hide her power forever; in fact, it might just be the one thing that brings her family back together and saves them all. Planned as the start of a series about remarkable children from the same neighbourhood, The Wondrous Prune is poignant and surprising with wonderful wish fulfilment and accessible storytelling.

A biography of venture capitalist and entrepreneur Peter Thiel, the enigmatic, controversial and hugely influential power broker who sits at the dynamic intersection of tech, business and politics Since the days of the dot-com bubble in the late 1990s, no industry has made a greater global impact than Silicon Valley. And few individuals have done more to shape Silicon Valley than billionaire venture capitalist and entrepreneur Peter Thiel. From the technologies we use every day to the delicate power balance between Silicon Valley, Wall Street and Washington, Thiel has been a behind-the-scenes operator influencing countless aspects of contemporary life. But despite his power and the ubiquity of his projects, no public figure is quite so mysterious. In the first major biography of Thiel, Max Chafkin traces the trajectory of the innovator's singular life and worldview, from his upbringing as the child of immigrant parents and years at Stanford as a burgeoning conservative thought leader to his founding of PayPal and Palantir, early investment in Facebook and SpaceX, and relationships with fellow tech titans Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk and Eric Schmidt. The Contrarian illuminates the extent to which Thiel has sought to export his values to the corridors of power beyond Silicon Valley, such as funding the lawsuit that bankrupted the blog Gawker to strenuously backing far-right political candidates, including Donald Trump for president. Eye-opening and deeply reported, The Contrarian is a revelatory biography of a one-of-a-kind leader and an incisive portrait of a tech industry whose explosive growth and power is both thrilling and fraught with controversy.

From the New York Times-bestselling, Booker Prize-winning author of Lincoln in the Bardo and Tenth of December comes a literary master class on what makes great stories work and what they can tell us about ourselves - and our world today. For the last twenty years, George Saunders has been teaching a class on the Russian short story to his MFA students at Syracuse University. In A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, he shares a version of that class with us, offering some of what he and his students have discovered together over the years. Paired with iconic short stories by Chekhov, Turgenev, Tolstoy, and Gogol, the seven essays in this book are intended for anyone interested in how fiction works and why it's more relevant than ever in these turbulent times. In his introduction, Saunders writes, “We're going to enter seven fastidiously constructed scale models of the world, made for a specific purpose that our time maybe doesn't fully endorse but that these writers accepted implicitly as the aim of art-namely, to ask the big questions, questions like, How are we supposed to be living down here? What were we put here to accomplish? What should we value? What is truth, anyway, and how might we recognize it?” He approaches the stories technically yet accessibly, and through them explains how narrative functions; why we stay immersed in a story and why we resist it; and the bedrock virtues a writer must foster. The process of writing, Saunders reminds us, is a technical craft, but also a way of training oneself to see the world with new openness and curiosity. A Swim in a Pond in the Rain is a deep exploration not just of how great writing works but of how the mind itself works while reading, and of how the reading and writing of stories make genuine connection possible.

Seventeen-year-old Savannah is cursed. It's a sinister family heirloom; passed down through the bloodline for hundreds of years, with one woman in every generation destined to die young. The family call them Hella's girls, named for their ancestor Hella; the enslaved woman with whom it all began. Hella's girls are always angry, especially in the months before they die. The anger is bursting from Savannah - at the men who cat-call her in the street, at her mother's disingenuous fiance, even at her own loving family. Each fit of rage is bringing her closer to the edge and now Savannah has to act to save herself. Or die trying. Because the key to survival lies in the underbelly of Cape Town, where the sinister veilwitches are waiting for just such a girl. Blood to Poison is a furious and mesmerising story about discovering magic, historical rage and love in all its guises.

The 90 recipes in this book are all about beautiful, natural flavours from quality ingredients like fruits and spices. Dee Rettali is an artisan baker who, over a lifetime of baking, has honed her recipes to bring out intense flavour using forgotten craftsmanship. Dee's cakes, created for her bakery - Fortitude Bakehouse in London - are a world away from generic cakes loaded with sugar or artificial flavours. Her most groundbreaking technique is to use a sourdough-like starter in her baking, another flavour-building process she has developed is to ferment the batter itself before baking. Both these exciting and simple approaches bring a unique depth of flavour to Dee's recipes, as do other slow-paced artisanal methods like steeping fruit and making herb infusions. This is a cutting-edge way of baking and at the same time it has antecedents in Dee's past. She grew up in rural Ireland where seasonal and no-waste baking was simply a way of life. This book brings this back to life in a thoroughly modern way. 'I love Dee Rettali's baking - she is obsessed with flavour. A bold and beautiful book' Diana Henry

This delicious, vibrant Caribbean-influenced cookbook from the bestselling duo behind Original Flava includes over 100 easy recipes. Craig and Shaun McAnuff are all about maximum flava, and these are recipes that are filling and flava-ful, and just happen to be vegan too. Think Potato and chickpea curry with roti, Jerk cauliflower wings, Coconut, black-eyed pea and sweet potato stew, and Plantain cookies. Caribbean food makes for brilliant vegan dishes because it relies on fresh and vibrant fruit and veg from plantain to pineapple. Jamaican food also has an authentic vegan history with the Rastifarian Ital diet. Ital is a natural, unprocessed, plant-based diet used to promote wellness. Natural Flava brings together Ital inspiration, punchy Caribbean flava and quick and easy recipes in this feel-good cookbook..

Nahr has been confined to the Cube: nine square metres of glossy grey cinderblock, devoid of time, its patterns of light and dark nothing to do with day and night. Journalists visit her, but get nowhere; because Nahr is not going to share her story with them. The world outside calls Nahr a terrorist, and a whore; some might call her a revolutionary, or a hero. But the truth is, Nahr has always been many things, and had many names. She was named for the river her pregnant mother crossed when she fled from Palestine, but her feckless father called her Yaqoot, Ruby. For a time when she came of age she was Almas, Diamond, a girl who went to hidden parties in Kuwait with powerful men, who sold off parts of herself to keep her family together. She was a girl who learned, early and painfully, that when you are a second class citizen love is a kind of desperation; she learned, above all else, to survive. She was a girl who went to Palestine in the wrong shoes, and without looking for it found what she had always lacked in the basement of a battered beauty parlour: purpose, politics, friends. She found a dark-eyed man called Bilal, who taught her to resist; who tried to save her when it was already too late. Nahr sits in the Cube, and tells her story to Bilal. Bilal, who isn't there; Bilal, who may not even be alive, but who is her only reason to get out.

A wife compulsively digs in her garden. Two brothers, long estranged, reunite for a terse, heady summer. A woman flies to Krakow to see her adult son. At dusk, a teenage girl pushes her dying mother out into the sea. A small boy sits on his own in the cinema, entranced by the cowboys who light up the screen. With these short stories, Tim Pears illuminates a series of blazing moments in quiet lives - the tragic, strange, funny and beautiful fragments that make and unmake us - and shines a light into the gulfs that lie between us and those who should know us best.

The Digital Republic is the definitive guide to the great political question of our time: how can freedom and democracy survive in a world of powerful digital technologies? Not long ago, the tech industry was widely admired and the internet was regarded as a tonic for freedom and democracy. Not anymore. Every day, the headlines blaze with reports of racist algorithms, data leaks, and social media platforms festering with falsehood and hate. In The Digital Republic, acclaimed author Jamie Susskind argues that these problems are not the fault of a few bad apples at the top of the industry. They are the result of our failure to govern technology properly, a failure derived from decades of muddled ideas and wishful thinking. The Digital Republic charts a new course, with new legal standards, new public bodies and institutions, new duties on platforms, new rights and regulators, and new codes of conduct for people in the tech industry. Inspired by the great political essays of the past, and steeped in the traditions of republican thought, it offers a vision of a different type of society: a digital republic in which human and technological flourishing go hand in hand.

A deeply moving, gorgeously illustrated short work of fiction for people of all ages from the international bestselling author of The Kite Runner, brought to life by Dan Williams's beautiful illustrationsOn a moonlit beach a father cradles his sleeping son as they wait for dawn to break and a boat to arrive. He speaks to his boy of the long summers of his childhood, recalling his grandfather's house in Syria, the stirring of olive trees in the breeze, the bleating of his grandmother's goat, the clanking of her cooking pots. And he remembers, too, the bustling city of Homs with its crowded lanes, its mosque and grand souk, in the days before the sky spat bombs and they had to flee. When the sun rises they and those around them will gather their possessions and embark on a perilous sea journey in search of a new home.

Aimee and Alan have unusual pasts and secrets they prefer to keep hidden. Aimee's deceased mother struggled with mental illness and hallucinations, and Aimee thinks it could be hereditary. After all, she sees a shadowy river man where there isn't one. And then there was that time she and her best friend Courtney tried to conjure a spirit with a Ouija board ...Alan is Courtney's cousin. His family moved to Maine when Courtney's father went missing. It's not just Alan's dark good looks that make him attractive. He is also totally in touch with a kind of spiritual mysticism from his Native American heritage. And it's not long before Aimee has broken up with her boyfriend ...But it's not Aimee or Alan who is truly haunted - it's Courtney. In a desperate plea to find her father, Courtney invites a demonic presence into her life. Together, Aimee and Alan must exorcise the ghost, before it devours Courtney - and everything around her.

Jess and Fred are finally an 'item'. They have spent the remainder of their summer holidays just as they planned to, creating some fabulous comedy routines together. Until one fateful morning in the park just before term starts when Fred casually mentions