Sebastian is horrified when he is chosen by the High Priest to be the new apprentice at the Temple of Ora. The choice of Sebastian doesn't please Mr Meeno, the gangster chief, either, or his nephew Horace, who had expected to be chosen as apprentice himself. And when the High Priest goes into hiding, and Sebastian narrowly avoids several nasty accidents, it's plainly urgent that Sebastian and his pet rat Gerald find out just what is going on. Suggested level: Secondary.

President Roosevelt in 1941 sent the twenty-seven-year-old battleship Texas and her mini task force on an important mission to an American territory. Not to protect that territory, but to salvage their wealth before the Japanese can obtain that wealth and use it to build more weapons of war. Their primary goal was to avoid frightening or threating the Japanese, thus giving the Japanese an excuse to start a war. At that time the Japanese were rattling their sabers. The Americans

The untold story of the remarkable woman behind England's greatest medieval king, Edward I

The Parables chronicle the life and death of a castle society strangled into a coma by a terminal case of Bureaucratitus, hardening of the hallways. A young squire, Thomas Bucket, and his liege lord, Sir Lancelot, join the mle, joust with revolutionary zeal, but still cannot unhorse such stalwart practitioners of palatine politics as the Prince of the Piles, Lord Bellicose or the Parchment Patrollers (paper pushers of the first order). In the end, the nobles are led by the Wise Men, Smoke and Mirrors, into the sad Diaspora Bureaucrati. This book will help you avoid the same fate.

Midlands murders take center stage in a “gripping” book that “chronicles some of Mansfield’s most gruesome deaths over the past two centuries” (Mansfield Chad). A young girl waylaid and battered with a hedge stake while returning home from Mansfield on a warm summer evening. Four family members butchered in a blazing house just off Commercial Street. An old farmer repeatedly speared by a hayfork in the mire of a rural farmyard. A drunken housewife found murdered in a haystack at Worksop, a razor killing and suicide on Nottingham Road, and the mysterious woman’s skeleton discovered in the spoil of Sherwood Colliery tip. These, and other cases detailed here, show how often violent death has visited Mansfield and North Nottinghamshire in the past. Drawing on two hundred years of reported crime in Mansfield and the surrounding area, this account reveals the grim catalog of foul deeds, the variety of lethal weapons used—from a hedge stake to a mohair bootlace—and the age-old motives of greed, jealousy, forbidden desires, and thwarted love that have so often led men and women to murder.

‘Turn the page and hear the voices within ...’—Ramona Koval The Best Australian Essays 2011 offers up bliss and illumination in equal measure – from the pleasures of the flesh to the events that convulsed the world in a year of change. Paul Kelly meditates on Frank Sinatra, and Robert Manne excavates the past and thoughts of Julian Assange. Inga Clendinnen dreams on cricket memories, and Anna Krien delves into the saga of the St Kilda schoolgirl. There is Peter Robb on Italian food, Anthony Lane on News of the World, Gail Bell on rats and Richard Flanagan on photography. This is a collection with something for everyone that never wavers in its quality. Contributors include: Gillian Mears, David Malouf, Nicolas Rothwell, Robert Manne, Anthony Lane, M.J. Hyland, Craig Sherborne, Anna Krien, Inga Clendinnen, Gail Bell, Helen Elliott, Morris Lurie, Maria Tumarkin, Andrew Sant, Shakira Hussein, Lian Hearn, Amanda Lohrey, Paul Kelly, Peter Robb, Clive James, Delia Falconer, Richard Flanagan and Andrew O’Hagan.