My childhood socks were always white, my frocks ironed. Each day predictable, safe. I escaped. Aged 19, I was swept off my feet by a wild adventurer and married within months. Two small children later, complete with Labradors, cats, a heavy horse and hearts full of dreams, we arrived on a remote Hebridean island to begin our life on the Tapsalteerie Estate. Nothing was ever predictable again. Judy Fairbairns

This is the tale of a young girl who fell in love and was swept away by her husband, first to his Norfolk farm and then to a remote Scottish island where she raised five children, helped her husband start the first whale watching business in the UK, set up a residential recording studio, ran 7 self-catering cottages, a large guest house and a working hill farm. And then? And then?

When I read my own story I can’t believe my life has been this way. It even makes me laugh now, although it didn’t at the time and there’s the point of it. Any woman will relate to some part, and in that moment, be freed from her self doubt. ‘If she do it, so can I, and with grace and with humour.’ It’s not just a book, it’s the courage to keep going, to never give up, for on the other side of the dark is an even brighter light…

Judy tells her story in a clear and unique voice, in turns funny, unforgettable and intensely moving.　

’One of the biggest mistakes we make’, Trevor Silvester says, is to treat other people as if they are just like us. I’m a Harley Street therapist, and over nearly twenty years I’ve been helping couples improve their lives together, and one thing is clear to me: most couples don’t founder through a lack of love, but through a lack of understanding.’

In my work as a couples-therapist I’ve found it useful to divide people into eight types or ‘signs’ which I name them after birds who share aspects of their behaviour.’

LOVEBIRDS includes a multiple choice test so that readers can discover which type they -and their partners - belong to.

Then there is a description of each type - what makes them tick, their likes and dislikes, how they tend to behave, their body language, what they tend to look like, the line of work and hobbies they are likely to choose, their hopes and fears. So in this section you can read about yourself - and your partner.

The final section looks at all the different possible combinations between the types, showing how misunderstandings can arise and giving advice on how to keep love between the different types of bird going and growing.　

Eleanor knows she’s on the menu of suspects who would bury a kitchen knife between the rolling-in-dough chef’s shoulders. But so is Beth, the owner of the bookstore, who may have some deep secrets to dish. Or Benet’s personal assistant, who very well may have had it with pampering his blowhard boss… and may even have some pie-in-the-sky ambitions of his own. And then there’s the TV producer—is it true the crusty chef was bellowing about going to another network before he reached his premature expiration date?

With her freedom—and even her looking-good-for-a-minute-there love life—on the chopping block, Eleanor’s got a seriously full plate. The only way out of this mess is a pretty tall order: deliver the real killer before she finds a knife in her back.

Includes delicious pizza recipe!　

■Help your child to discover life-skills for themselves—the fun way!

■Activities are simple and framed for parents, with no specialised knowledge required

■Activities are quick and easy to prepare, simple steps are clearly illustrated with bright photographs and drawings　

Yet this hasn’t deterred us. Today we spend vast sums trying to recreate the first instants of creation in particle accelerators, out of pure desire to know. There seems now to be no question too vast or too trivial to be ruled out of bounds: Why can fleas jump so high? What is gravity? What shape are clouds? Today curiosity is no longer reviled, but celebrated.

Examining how our inquisitive impulse first became sanctioned, changing from a vice to a virtue, Curiosity begins with the age when modern science began, a time that spans the lives of Galileo and Isaac Newton. It reveals a complex story, in which the liberation - and the taming - of curiosity was linked to magic, religion, literature, travel, trade and empire.

By examining the rise of curiosity, we can ask what has become of it today: how it functions in science, how it is spun and packaged and sold, how well it is being sustained and honoured, and how the changing shape of science influences the kinds of questions it may ask.　

Crime writer and forensic and medical expert D.P. Lyle, MD, consultant to the writers of CSI: Miami, Law & Order, Monk, and House, answers these and many more intriguing questions from crime writers around the world. The informative and entertaining questions and answers provide fascinating insight into medical and forensic science as well as how a writer’s creative mind works.　

Lyle has worked with many novelists and with the writers of such popular television shows as Law & Order, CSI: Miami, Diagnosis Murder, Monk, Judging Amy, Peacemakers, Cold Case, House, Medium, Women s Murder Club, and The Glades.

He was born and raised in Huntsville, Alabama, where his childhood interests revolved around football, baseball, and building rockets in his backyard. The latter pursuit was common in Huntsville during the 1950s and ’60s due to the nearby NASA/Marshall Space Flight Center.

Toby and Elinor, brother and sister, friends and confidants, are sharers of a dark secret, carried from the summer of 1912 into the battlefields of France and wartime London in 1917.

When Toby is reported ’Missing, Believed Killed’, another secret casts a lengthening shadow over Elinor’s world: how exactly did Toby die - and why? Elinor’s fellow student Kit Neville was there in the fox-hole when Toby met his fate, but has secrets of his own to keep. Enlisting the help of former lover Paul Tarrant, Elinor determines to uncover the truth. Only then can she finally close the door to Toby’s room.

Moving from the Slade School of Art to Queen Mary’s Hospital, where surgery and art intersect in the rebuilding of the shattered faces of the wounded, Toby’s Room is a riveting drama of identity, damage, intimacy and loss from the author of The Eye in the Door and The Ghost Road . It is Pat Barker’s most powerful novel yet.　

’Barker is a writer of crispness and clarity and an unflinching seeker of the germ of what it means to be human’ The Herald

’Barker is brilliant on the conflicts between art, love and war’ Marie Claire

’Barker writes . . . with great tenderness and insight, and a daring to forgo simple resolutions’ Independent on Sunday

Pat Barker was born in 1943. Her books include the highly acclaimed Regeneration trilogy, comprising Regeneration, which was made into a film of the same name, The Eye in the Door, which won the Guardian Fiction Prize, and The Ghost Road, which won the Booker Prize. She is also the author of the more recent novels Another World, Border Crossing, Double Vision and Life Class. She lives in Durham.

Bad Ideas? traces the fascinating history of our attempts at self-improvement but also questions their value. The dubious consequences of the development of weaponry, for example, is self-evident. But what of apparently more innocuous advances such as farming, writing and medicine? Science has produced huge good but has also had unforeseen consequences. Can science and scientists find solutions to the perils that now menace us?

We join Robert Winston on a thrilling journey from our earliest days to the present. We meet some key individuals along the way and share quirky anecdotes about their lives and brainwaves. Inspiring, unusual and at times controversial, Bad Ideas? assesses the past and looks forward to the opportunities of the future. In so doing it celebrates man’s extraordinary capacity for achievement and offers a hopeful way forward to protect humanity against what sometimes seem like bad ideas.　

Kendra Spanjer is an illustrator whose works include Artsy-Fartsy, Bogus, and Cahoots. They both live in Fort Collins, Colorado.

This biography was provided by the author or their representative.

Kendra Spanjer divides her time being “a writer who illustrates” and “an illustrator who writes”—an ambitious amalgam, indeed. She decided to cultivate her artistic side after discovering that the best part of chemistry class was entertaining her peers (and her professor) with “The Daily Chem Book” comic. Since then, her diverse body of work has appeared in a number of group and solo art shows, book covers, marketing materials, fundraising events, and public places. When she invents spare time for herself to fill, Kendra enjoys skiing, cycling, exploring, discovering new music, watching trains go by, decorating cakes with her sister, and making faces in the mirror. Check out her website at http://kendraspanjer.com.

Far removed from the known universe with only one companion, an AI named Qod, Salem Ben watches the cosmos from afar. Wearied by the endlessly repeating cycle of creation and destruction but afraid to pass beyond the veil, he relives the digitally reproduced lives of countless souls archived in the Soul Consortium by means of a neuroimmersive device known as the WOOM. His hope is to discover the answer to the ultimate question: What lies beyond?

But at the birth of the next universe, billions of years before the pattern of life repeats its design, Salem’s quest takes a disturbing turn. Unexplained aberrations appear among the digital souls. To hunt down their source and to continue his search for evidence of life after death, Salem endures four very different lives: Orson Roth, a serial killer in twentieth-century Britain; Dominique Mancini, a spiritual medium from sixteenth-century Lombardy; Plantagenet Soome, a monk sent to the far distant Castor’s World; and Queen Oluvia Wade, the creator of the Soul Consortium.

As the mystery unfolds, Salem is confronted by a malevolent entity, a being of unknown origin woven into the memories of the dead. Prepared to corrupt the laws of physics themselves in order to break free, the entity threatens the future of humanity before it can begin again—and only Salem stands in its way.　

Kendra Spanjer divides her time being “a writer who illustrates” and “an illustrator who writes”—an ambitious amalgam, indeed. She decided to cultivate her artistic side after discovering that the best part of chemistry class was entertaining her peers (and her professor) with “The Daily Chem Book” comic. Since then, her diverse body of work has appeared in a number of group and solo art shows, book covers, marketing materials, fundraising events, and public places. When she invents spare time for herself to fill, Kendra enjoys skiing, cycling, exploring, discovering new music, watching trains go by, decorating cakes with her sister, and making faces in the mirror.

Check out her website at http://kendraspanjer.com.

Tracking down clues in Addis Ababa and the monasteries of Lalibela, Sarah and Daniel uncover a codex in a subterranean library revealing a set of prophecies about Earth’s final hours written by a man hailed by Coptic mystics as Ethiopia’s tenth saint. Violently opposed by the corrupt director of antiquities at the Ethiopian Ministry of Culture and Tourism, they’re left for dead in the heart of the Simien Mountains. Surviving to journey to Paris, Sarah is given another piece of the ancient puzzle: a fourteenth-century letter describing catastrophic events leading to the planet’s demise.

Connecting the two discoveries, Sarah faces a deadly intercontinental conspiracy to keep the secret of the tenth saint buried. Risking her reputation and her life, Sarah embarks on a quest to stall the technological advances that will surely destroy the world.　

But Lily Fielding is just a Sister—a Third Sister at that, a measly trainee. When Lily and her two Sisters, Alice and Cara, are called out to their latest assignment, she figures it’s just another run-of-the-mill gig: spot the Vamplayer (part vampire, part player), identify the predictably hot, trampy girl he’s set his eyes on, and befriend her before the Vamplayer can turn her to do his bidding.

Finding the sleek and sexy Vamplayer, Tristan, and his equally beautiful and popular target, Bianca, is easy. And when Lily meets the adorably geeky Zander, she too falls under a lover’s spell. But this assignment turns out to be trickier than most when the Third Sister must battle the baddest vampire of all.