"Skylarks are the heralds of our countryside. Their music is the quintessential sound of spring. The spirit of English pastoralism, they inspire poets, composers and farmers alike. In the trenches of World War I they were a reminder of the chattering meadows of home. Perhaps you were up with the lark, or as happy as one. History has seen us poeticise and musicise the bird, but also capture and eat them. We watch as they climb the sky, delight in their joyful singing, and yet we harm them too. The Soaring life of the Lark explores the music and poetry; the breath-taking heights and struggle to survive of one of Britain's most iconic songbirds"--Publisher's description.

Helen Davenport, governess for a wealthy London household, spots an advertisement seeking young women to marry New Zealand's honorable bachelors and begins correspondence with a gentleman farmer. When her church offers to pay her travels under an unusual arrangement, she jumps at the opportunity. On the ship, she meets Gwyneira Silkham, traveling to meet a New Zealand baron who won her in a game of blackjack. When their new husbands turn out to be very different than expected, the women must help one another find the life they'd hoped for.

Inventors in the age of the Enlightenment created lifelike androids capable of playing music on real instruments. Music and the Forms of Life examines the link between such simulated life and music, which began in the era's scientific literature and extended into a series of famous musical works by Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven. Music invented auditory metaphors for the scientific elements of life (drive, pulse, sensibility, irritability, even metabolism), investigated the affinities and antagonisms between life and mechanism, and explored questions of whether and how mechanisms can come to life. The resulting changes in the conceptions of both life and music had wide cultural resonance at the time, and those concepts continued to evolve long after. A critical part of that evolution was a nineteenth-century shift in focus from moving androids to the projection of life in motion, culminating in the invention of cinema. Weaving together cultural and musical practices, Lawrence Kramer traces these developments through a collection of case studies ranging from classical symphonies to modernist projections of waltzing specters by Mahler and Ravel to a novel linking Bach's Goldberg Variations to the genetic code. The publisher gratefully acknowledges the generous support of the AMS 75 PAYS Fund of the American Musicological Society, supported in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

FAR FROM HOME Marko is a young Russian who was suddenly teleported to the Bureau of End Management, an organization responsible for keeping space operating smoothly. Frustrated by being forcibly selected as staff, Marko attempts to escape back to Earth where his partner awaits but fails spectacularly. As Marko decides to make the best of his new “mission,” his heart is swayed by encounters with planets and aliens beyond imagination.

"Lark recounts...the sometimes peaceful, sometimes uneasy relationship between the Maori natives and the pakeha--the colonists. And the land, which can be rocky and formidable and also breathtakingly beautiful, is as much a character as anyone else." --Historical Novel Society New Zealand, 1893: William Martyn is better educated and more cultivated than the other men breaking their backs searching for gold near Queenstown. William is the son of landed Irish nobility, and he comes to town ready to invest in the best equipment. On his search for supplies, he encounters spirited and beautiful young Elaine O'Keefe, who promptly falls in love with him. He is captivated by her charms until Kura, Elaine's half-Maori cousin, comes to visit. William succumbs at once to Kura's exotic beauty and free-spiritedness, and tension develops not only between the two cousins but also between the colonial settlers and their Maori neighbors.

AS FEATURED ON 'BBC RADIO 4 'GOOD READS'. Woodlands Awards 2019: Woodland Books of the Year 'The oak is the wooden tie between heaven and earth. It is the lynch pin of the British landscape.' The oak is our most beloved and most common tree. It has roots that stretch back to all the old European cultures but Britain has more ancient oaks than all the other European countries put together. More than half the ancient oaks in the world are in Britain. Many of our ancestors - the Angles, the Saxons, the Norse - came to the British Isles in longships made of oak. For centuries the oak touched every part of a Briton's life - from cradle to coffin It was oak that made the 'wooden walls' of Nelson's navy, and the navy that allowed Britain to rule the world. Even in the digital Apple age, the real oak has resonance - the word speaks of fortitude, antiquity, pastoralism. The Glorious Life of the Oak explores our long relationship with this iconic tree; it considers the life-cycle of the oak, the flora and fauna that depend on the oak, the oak as medicine, food and drink, where Britain's mightiest oaks can be found, and it tells of oak stories from folklore, myth and legend.

"We're so alike, you and I. It's no wonder we kept finding each other." September 11, 1973: Eleven-year-old Alejandro Penda watches from his apartment window as Santiago, Chile falls to a military coup, destroying his family and his childhood. Arriving alone in America, he’s taken in by the Larks: a prominent family in the town of Guelisten. Though burdened by unresolved grief for his disappeared parents, he becomes fiercely loyal to the Larks, eventually marrying one of their daughters, Valerie. September 11, 2001: Javier Landes watches from his apartment window as New York City falls to terrorism. As one of Manhattan’s top-paid male escorts, this professional lover has never lacked for company and is loyal only to himself. But in the wake of 9/11, Jav is named guardian for an orphaned nephew in Guelisten and must open his carefully-guarded heart to pain he's long suppressed. Alex, Valerie and Jav meet first in their twenties, with a sudden attraction each finds strange and compelling. When they meet again in their forties, they discover not only is their bond still strong, but their life experiences are strangely similar. All have been shaped by separate 9/11's, and their unfinished business from the past will change everything they know about love, loyalty and friendship. "Life has rules. You cannot come in the middle of the night and take what we agreed isn't yours." Across three decades and two continents, Suanne Laqueur's fifth novel explores the unpredictability of sexual attraction, how family ties are forged, torn and mended, and how love's downfall can turn to exaltation.

_________________ 'BRITAIN'S FINEST LIVING NATURE WRITER' - THE TIMES WINNER OF THE THWAITES WAINWRIGHT PRIZE 2015 What really goes on in the long grass? Meadowland gives an unique and intimate account of an English meadow's life from January to December, together with its biography. In exquisite prose, John Lewis-Stempel records the passage of the seasons from cowslips in spring to the hay-cutting of summer and grazing in autumn, and includes the biographies of the animals that inhabit the grass and the soil beneath: the badger clan, the fox family, the rabbit warren, the skylark brood and the curlew pair, among others. Their births, lives, and deaths are stories that thread through the book from first page to last.