Bloomsbury

The shocking thing about the girls was how nearly normal they seemed when their mother let them out for the one and only date of their lives. Twenty years on, their enigmatic personalities are embalmed in the memories of the boys who worshipped them and who now recall their shared adolescence: the brassiere draped over a crucifix belonging to the...

Compliments, Charades and Horrible BlundersHow to pay and return formal 'calls'; how to refuse a proposal of marriage; who should lead off the dancing at a country-house ball; what to wear for a morning walk... Today such social niceties are largely ignored or forgotten, but they underpin all of Jane Austen's timeless novels and are...

Dangerous Customer Services provides real help for real people in the real world. This book guide managers through the realities and practicalities of great customer service. Dangerous Customer Service shows the reader how to cover the basics: what customers expect from a service and what they will take for granted and how to create the magic that...

Rat Island rises from the icy gray waters of the Bering Sea, a mass of volcanic rock covered with tundra, midway between Alaska and Siberia. Once a remote sanctuary for enormous flocks of seabirds, the island gained a new name when shipwrecked rats colonized, savaging the nesting birds by the thousands. Now, on this and hundreds of other remote...

Desmond Nethersole-Thompson has been studying his favourite bird, the greenshank Tringa nebularia, since May 1932. This book, published in 1976, owes much to the interest, almost an obsession, of the Nethersole-Thompson family. The two girls and four boys, as well as both parents, now work as a team in the wild and beautiful north-west Highlands of...

First published in Arabic in 2008, The Tobacco Keeper relates the investigation of the life of a celebrated Jewish Iraqi musician who was expelled to Israel in the 1950s. Having returned to Iraq, via Iran, the musician is thrown out as an Israeli spy. Returning for the third time under a forged passport, he is murdered in mysterious circumstances....