‘The point of this book is to explore my ideas for sartorial satisfaction, to tell the stories associated with my love of clothes and fashion, and to share the message of accidental sustainability.’ When Peta Mathias dug through the clothes she had stored away for twenty years in her shed, she realised it was full of valuable, beautiful items that were crying out to be worn again: ‘Fashion is mysterious, irresistible and alluring . . . they are not just frocks — they are beauty, art, history, emotion, memory, identity and, above all, joy.’ From this arose a new appreciation of buying well but cannily, so your clothes will not bankrupt you nor go out of fashion. Reviving her neglected wardrobe, Peta revelled in mixing fabrics, colours and patterns, considering how to make an impact and how that dull pair of shoes can be transformed into something just a little bit fabulous.

In a world of hate, let’s serve up some love . . . Peta Mathias has encountered many a lovelorn tale on her gastronomic travels around the world. Searching further, she has unearthed more stories — the heart-warming and heart-rending, the passionate and poignant, the macabre and merry — and in these retellings brings them all to life. With her characteristic wit and colour, she also dishes up many of the ingredients of love: * intriguing courtship rituals, such as bundling and the apple slice dance; * poetry penned by those with their own stories to tell; * and, of course, romantic recipes, purported aphrodisiacs and alluring delicacies. Entertaining, hilarious and informative, this book is a smorgasbord of love.

Funny, passionate, outrageous and honest, this is a memoir about travel, house renovations, food, music, men and change. ‘I’ve escaped more houses than I’ve said Hail Marys.’ Peta Mathias has been making major moves since leaving home to train as a nurse, before living in Canada, London and later France, where she set up her own restaurant. Although she returned to New Zealand, writing food books and making television series, she continued to yoyo back to Europe and started culinary tours to Spain, Italy, Morocco, India, Vietnam, and the recurring attraction: France. In this ‘memoir of sorts’, Peta looks back at the patterns of her life while she embarks on the next big stage in it: selling her beloved cottage in Auckland to buy a dilapidated old house in Uzès in the south of France and transforming the old wreck into a stylish home and cooking school. This new domesticity is set against her nomadic instincts and past history of running away from all conventional expectations of settling down. Spiced with recipes, the thrills and tribulations of reinventing yourself and her trademark humour, this book is really about never putting all your eggs in one bastard.

A fabulous, exuberant book of food, travel and humour by two of New Zealands's best-loved cooks. Peta Mathias and Julie Le Clerc are in love with food, in love with travel and in love with India. In her characteristic exuberant, evocative and hilarious style, Peta relates how they got to know this fascinating country through its cuisine: be it street food, feasts, or an everyday meal cooked on the floor of a tiny shack. They have travelled to tea plantations in the mountains, stayed in palaces and slept on a train: that 'wonderland of unmitigated, primeval swamp muck'. While Peta has led various culinary tours, Julie has established a patisserie in an upmarket New Delhi hotel. This is no superficial flirtation with the country, but a full-blown love affair. The over 60 recipes showcase distinct regional traditions, passed on from the generous people they have met. Carefully chosen and adapted to be easy for the home cook, they are all mouth-wateringly delicious. They include such delicacies as Rajasthani white lamb curry, coriander cardamom chicken, almond sweet pudding and rose-petal ice cream. Julie's fabulous photographs convey the colour of the country, and are almost good enough to eat. Shortlisted for the Gourmand World Cookbook Awards, the Best in the World for Indian Cookery (to be announced on June 9 in Yantai).

Over twenty years in the writing, the three books in The Legend of The Secret Saga series evolved to be an fascinating magical story unlike any other, as they poetically weave together a strange epic tale. THE AUTHOR, Estee Shoesmyth, is a tangible figment of her own unbridled paradoxical imagination and the fantasy fiction pseudonym of eclectic American artist, Suzanne T. Dietz. The Legend Of The Secret Saga is the complete epic trilogy in one colorful volume. There is no other story like it in The Real World! The fantastical epic tale opens in Book One, which is When Begin Began. Celestial Scribe, Angel Daria pens the following words: "To Whom It May Concern: When this immense historical accounting commenced, I surely did not anticipate that the nature of this story would ever veer off the straight and narrow path. Instead, it proceeded to travel along the strangest winding ways. And so, I followed it most dutifully — with my pen in hand. Once upon a time, an anonymous philosopher on The Ultimate Earth aptly intellectualized, 'There are always three sides to every story: your side, the other side, and the truth.' The story presented to you here may seem like nothing more than a collection of my own fantastical delusions. Surely, it could not be that which I, myself, have ever witnessed! In that case, it would certainly not make it to be truth. However, it is ... by my best accounting ... the strange but true enough telling of a deliberately long-lost story from somewhere far out on the other side of Who-Knows-Where." That's just the beginning! In Book Two, The Murky Middle, the story dims to very, very dark with the introduction of a terribly wicked magician's sorcery. Through magic, he enters into a spirit world and adamantly decided to stay there. From that secret domain he meets another and the two, in cahoots, do some deliberately evil damage that stretches out from that invisible place right into the unsuspecting folks who live day to day in The Real World. Those folks do not stand a chance to escape being affected by the magician's insidious determination to capture them all. Eventually, Adam and Eve are reincarnated into The Real World on a specific mission, years beyond the peak of that magician's vicious reign. By then, the worse had evidently devolved into the worst that ultimately leads through to Book Three, The End Of The End. This story is utterly fascinating. Its twisting and turning through that which may be somewhat recognizable is more tangled up into the fantastical that is addictive to read onward to find out what happens next. All throughout there is mystery, magic, love, hate, obsessiveness, rejection, maliciousness, brilliance, stupidity, sickness, healing, forgiveness, revenge, romance, weirdness, wonderment, heavy heartedness, humor, life, death, and reincarnation. All along, there is that concept of eternity being a time lasting for Forever. Which, according to all reports in The Real World, Forever is a long, long time. The Legend Of The Secret Saga is the complete epic trilogy in one colorful volume. There is no other story like it in The Real World. Not from When Begin Began, throughout The Murky Middle, and all the way to The End Of The End. It is a story that is a Fairytale and a Fantasy. Magical and Mythical. Poetic and Artistic. The Legend Of The Secret Saga is fantastical and not as expected it might be!

Frank Boyd found the hazy but bright Atlantic morning most invigorating as he stepped upon the deck. Unbeknownst to him, not far away on this same immigrant ship travelled his future English bride. Frank and Estelle Tompkins decided to marry and undertake this new challenge of life in America together. They travelled the expanse of a great new land, taking their first-born with them. Their new perspective could not have been better, nor more promising, in sunny California. With the arrival of their angelic and blue-eyed, golden-haired Mary, it seemed that life was nearly at optimum for the Boyds - but then the crash of '29 altered their lives forever. It was onward to Oregon where an unkindly fate awaited the young Scotsman. Devastated and shattered, Estelle and her children came to know and love the mysterious Sam Jennings and his Indian friends, as well as the young cowboy Bob Clemm. In addition, an all-new arena opened to Mary Boyd when Demon entered her world and she became a renowned rodeo trick rider with no peers. "Well, you chose to be a rodeo star," Bob uttered as she rose to disengage him. And so Mary risked losing her first love to cousin Jennifer Tompkins. However, the war came and changed many lives: Cowboy Clemm, now turned marine, had to depart from those women he loved so well; and Mary's new course with the rodeo circuit had its own betrayal and pitfalls. The road back to Oregon was tiring and chancy for Mary who must now rid herself of the effects of forced passion, an unwanted child, even at the risk of her own life. In the heart and warm eyes of Jim Warren, Mary found the refuge that she so sorely needed at the nadir of her life. But her respite would be all too brief as the cold Nebraska winter spent its course. Mary, to her sorrow, learned of her brother's grim sacrifice, but now with her and Bob's love rekindled Mary must keep the faith as she reassembled her life once again in Oregon. With her brother torn from her life, a new miracle arrived in the form of Billy's unmarried Filipino "wife". Along with the beautiful Rosa Santos came Billy's son, and another obligation that only Mary's husband, Bob Clemm, could fulfill. As Mary basked in the warmth of her adventurous memories, she awaited the arrival of her first son, knowing that she had been to the greatest heights and the darkest depths, and yet emerged a star and a winner in so many ways.

Liverpool, 1934. Hester Lowe agrees to act as governess to spoilt, self-willed, little Lonnie Hetherington-Smith when they leave India to live with Lonnie's elderly aunt in Shaw Street, Liverpool. Hester speedily realises that her new employer dislikes her niece and means to make life uncomfortable for both of them. Things improve a little when they meet the poor, but happy, Bailey family who live in a court off Heyworth Street. Hester likes Dick Bailey very much, but her employer does not permit 'followers', whilst Lonnie and young Ben Bailey are deadly enemies. Then, the regime in Shaw Street changes and Hester is forced to leave the comforts of a middle-class household to make her own way in what is, to her, a strange country... Poor Little Rich Girl is sure to please the huge and growing fanbase of one of the most popular saga authors in the country, with more than two million books sold nationwide.

A bestselling classic of humorous and nostalgic Americana and the basis of the movie A Christmas Story. “Mr. Shepherd has the true satirist’s grip on his pen: he is humorous, sympathetic,and ironic all at once.”—Boston Globe Before Garrison Keillor and Spalding Gray there was Jean Shepherd: a master monologist and writer who spun the materials of his all-American childhood into immensely resonant—and utterly hilarious—works of comic art. Wanda Hickey’s Night of Golden Memories represents one of the peaks of his achievement, a compound of irony, affection, and perfect detail that speaks across generations. Wanda Hickey’s Night of Golden Memories is a universal (and achingly funny) orchestration of Midwestern puberty rites. From the gut-wrenching playground antics of one Delbert Bumpus and the almighty sacrifice of the Easter ham, to taffy-apple binges at the state fair and the supernatural glow surrounding unapproachable high school beauty Daphne Bigelow, to the memorable disaster that was Shepherd’s (and everyone else’s) junior prom—these are some of the archetypal legends of childhood that Shepherd evokes from his nostalgic Indiana muse. A timeless and enduring classic, Wanda Hickey’s Night of Golden Memories captures the sweet cacophonous roar of youth tempered with the wit and honesty of a grown boy

The novel 'Libertalia' is a steampunk pirate fantasy fiction with historical elements. An extensive, in-depth study of PYRACY shows the quintessential nature of being human and reveals at its core a well faceted, most fluent, all encompassing, un-compromised view of world history, as untainted by any one cultural belief, value, dogma, and design as none other. All pirate myths, legends and folklore; romantic or realistic lead but one direction, in a search for freedom and equality. The pirate's code of a democratic-socialst utopia based on egalitarian, collectivist, agrarian ideals are more than a place, but a mind set on a quest for Libertalia. Join Black Captain Randy and crew on ship Leviathan as they set out in search of El Dorado, find Atlantis, drink from the Fountain of Youth and create their own pirate utopia, Libertalia.This edition is complete with 24 full color digital image plates.

This book contributes to the debate over the culpability of the Trans-Atlantic Slave from various disciplinary perspectives. The general thesis that undergirds the book is that by knowing who was predisposed to benefit the most from the trade and why, prompting them to initiate it, appropriate culpability can be assigned. This approach also allowed for a more in-depth analysis of the issue from many disciplines, making it the first of its kind. For the sake of cohesion and coherence, some of the major questions addressed by every chapter are quite similar, albeit authors were encouraged to fine-tune and add to these questions to meet their disciplinary requirements. By emphasizing the why in some of the questions, a qualitative explanatory case study approach was utilized. Both primary and secondary data sources were also used for each chapter to offer a cogent analysis and new information on the topic.