Simon Hall went to sea in search of a way of life that he believed was glamorous, adventurous and disciplined, a life where smartly-uniformed men ran ships in a tightly organised manner. At this time the British fleet was still one of the largest in the world and the Red Ensign a common sight in most large ports. In over three years as a Deck Cadet he explored this world and although he uncovered much of the magic of the sea, he also encountered brutality, exploitation, dizzying hard work and frightening bouts of violence. From the rigidity of naval college to the heat and sweat of working as a deck-hand in the South China Sea, the book charts Simon's progress from a naïve and callow school-leaver to a strong young man. On that road he encountered a cast of people that were beyond his wildest imagination. He met the bad: sadists, bullies, madmen; and the sad: alcoholics, prostitutes, drug addicts. And sometimes people so good they diminished him. The author tells of nights so cold the water froze on his hands; of days when the sun was so hot he could hear his skin sizzle and of times when the ship steamed through wild seas that rushed over the deck like boiling foam. With a thread of humour running throughout, he writes of the shipboard camaraderie and the wild jaunts ashore in exotic places.

Hailed as "One of the best technical painters of our time" by an L.A. Times critic, 27-year-old Aubrey Johnson is finally gaining traction with her work. But as she weaves through what should be a celebration of her art, a single nagging echo of her doctor's words refuses to stay silent-there is no cure. In less than eight weeks Aubrey is going blind. Traveling on a one-way ticket around the world with childhood friend Jeff Anderson, Aubrey is in complete denial. But a blindfolded game of tasting foreign foods in China jolts her intoconfronting the reality of her situation. So begins her quest. In this adult coming-of-age story, Aubrey struggles to make sense of her crippling diagnosis. But on her journey she finds a deeper understanding of herself and her life-sometimes fragmented and complex, but always with relentless truth."

With her award-winning debut novel, Purple Hibiscus, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie was heralded by the Washington Post Book World as the “21st century daughter” of Chinua Achebe. Now, in her masterly, haunting new novel, she recreates a seminal moment in modern African history: Biafra’s impassioned struggle to establish an independent republic in Nigeria during the 1960s. With the effortless grace of a natural storyteller, Adichie weaves together the lives of five characters caught up in the extraordinary tumult of the decade. Fifteen-year-old Ugwu is houseboy to Odenigbo, a university professor who sends him to school, and in whose living room Ugwu hears voices full of revolutionary zeal. Odenigbo’s beautiful mistress, Olanna, a sociology teacher, is running away from her parents’ world of wealth and excess; Kainene, her urbane twin, is taking over their father’s business; and Kainene’s English lover, Richard, forms a bridge between their two worlds. As we follow these intertwined lives through a military coup, the Biafran secession and the subsequent war, Adichie brilliantly evokes the promise, and intimately, the devastating disappointments that marked this time and place. Epic, ambitious and triumphantly realized, Half of a Yellow Sun is a more powerful, dramatic and intensely emotional picture of modern Africa than any we have had before.

The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky is an 1898 western short story by American author Stephen Crane. Originally published in McClure's Magazine, it was written in England. The story's protagonist is a Texas marshal named Jack Potter, who is returning to the town of Yellow Sky with his eastern bride. Potter's nemesis, the gunslinger Scratchy Wilson, drunkenly plans to accost the sheriff after he disembarks the train, but he changes his mind upon seeing the unarmed man with his bride. Stephen Crane (1871-1900) was an American novelist, short-story writer, and poet who is often called the first modern American writer.

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • The Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Sixth Extinction returns to humanity’s transformative impact on the environment, now asking: After doing so much damage, can we change nature, this time to save it? RECOMMENDED BY PRESIDENT OBAMA AND BILL GATES • SHORTLISTED FOR THE WAINWRIGHT PRIZE FOR WRITING • ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The Washington Post • ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: Time, Esquire, Smithsonian Magazine, Vulture, Publishers Weekly, Kirkus Reviews, Library Journal • “Beautifully and insistently, Kolbert shows us that it is time to think radically about the ways we manage the environment.”—Helen Macdonald, The New York Times That man should have dominion “over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth” is a prophecy that has hardened into fact. So pervasive are human impacts on the planet that it’s said we live in a new geological epoch: the Anthropocene. In Under a White Sky, Elizabeth Kolbert takes a hard look at the new world we are creating. Along the way, she meets biologists who are trying to preserve the world’s rarest fish, which lives in a single tiny pool in the middle of the Mojave; engineers who are turning carbon emissions to stone in Iceland; Australian researchers who are trying to develop a “super coral” that can survive on a hotter globe; and physicists who are contemplating shooting tiny diamonds into the stratosphere to cool the earth. One way to look at human civilization, says Kolbert, is as a ten-thousand-year exercise in defying nature. In The Sixth Extinction, she explored the ways in which our capacity for destruction has reshaped the natural world. Now she examines how the very sorts of interventions that have imperiled our planet are increasingly seen as the only hope for its salvation. By turns inspiring, terrifying, and darkly comic, Under a White Sky is an utterly original examination of the challenges we face.

The people, places, and events of Nebraska are recorded in this collection of images taken during the photographer's ten thousand miles of travel throughout his home state, on an odyssey that takes him from the Wayne Chicken Show to Omaha and everywhere in between. Original.

"As a storm looms in the prairie sky, a boy rides out to find his wayward younger brother. The courageous story of one boy's exciting rescue adventure" Cf. Our choice, 2003.

** Los Angeles Times bestseller ** It's warming. It's us. We're sure. It's bad. But we can fix it. After speaking to the international public for close to fifteen years about sustainability, climate scientist Dr. Nicholas realized that concerned people were getting the wrong message about the climate crisis. Yes, companies and governments are hugely responsible for the mess we're in. But individuals CAN effect real, significant, and lasting change to solve this problem. Nicholas explores finding purpose in a warming world, combining her scientific expertise and her lived, personal experience in a way that seems fresh and deeply urgent: Agonizing over the climate costs of visiting loved ones overseas, how to find low-carbon love on Tinder, and even exploring her complicated family legacy involving supermarket turkeys. In her astonishing, bestselling book Under the Sky We Make, Nicholas does for climate science what Michael Pollan did more than a decade ago for the food on our plate: offering a hopeful, clear-eyed, and somehow also hilarious guide to effecting real change, starting in our own lives. Saving ourselves from climate apocalypse will require radical shifts within each of us, to effect real change in our society and culture. But it can be done. It requires, Dr. Nicholas argues, belief in our own agency and value, alongside a deep understanding that no one will ever hand us power--we're going to have to seize it for ourselves.

"In 1845, Sammy, a Chinese American girl, and Annamae, an African American slave girl, disguise themselves as boys and travel on the Oregon Trail to California from Missouri"--

Sometimes we want a thing so much we can't prevent ourselves from taking it. But when a girl steals her friend's beautiful yellow kite, she is swamped with turmoil. A story about desire, guilt and forgiveness.