A brave and ambitious novel set in Ireland and Africa, and a definitive comment on the Ulster struggles written by David Park, born in Belfast in 1953. The explorations of the protagonist's childhood in Donegal are moving. Haunted by the Troubles in Northern Ireland, and trapped in a land between the mountains and the sea, Naomi dreams of another life far away from the rainy sands of Donegal. When she moves to work in a refugee camp in the burning heat of Africa, she exchanges the city streets of Belfast for the arid desert. But before she leaves behind the land where she was born, escaping her past is not so easy. A powerful novel about guilt and absolution. 278pp, paperback.

'The Hidden Heroines of British Anthropology' is the sub-title of this multiple biography of five women who arrived at the University of Oxford determined to study remote communities a world away from their own. Barbara Freire-Marreco travelled to New Mexico and Arizona in 1910 and 1913. Katherine Routledge voyaged to Easter Island in 1913-16 and to French Polynesia, south of Ecuador to Mangareva 1921-23. Maria Czaplicka journeyed from Paris through Moscow and Minusinsk to Golchikha in Siberia 1914-15. Winifred Blackman travelled from London to Cairo via Venice and Corfu in 1920-39. Beatrice Blackwood took a voyage from Port Said via Columbo, Sydney and through New Caledonia to Papua New Guinea to Melanesia in 1929 and also to the Solomon Islands 1929-30 and the Mandated Territory of New Guinea 1936-38. These are the voyages as mapped in colour on the endpapers and there are 28 further illustrations in the text showing the intrepid travellers taking tea with local officials or in a family group photograph on a rare visit home, travelling in a wicker carriage through Siberia or as students on an Archaeology summer camp. In the unchartered interiors of New Guinea amid uprisings along the Nile and on remote Easter Island, they found new freedoms and bore witness to now-vanished worlds. Through their work they overturned some of the most pernicious myths that dogged their gender, and proved that women could be explorers and scientists too. Yet when they returned to England they found only loss, madness and regret waiting for them. Following the lives of her subjects through women's suffrage, two world wars and into the second half of the 20th century, Larson's masterful biography is a revelatory portrait of a pioneering quintet who went on search of nomadic reindeer-herders who had never before seen a European woman or to work in the pueblos of New Mexico and Arizona or to live in the New Guinea interior with warriors who still made their weapons from wood and stone. Their travels were sensationalised in the press. These five women were not simply adventurers, they were intellectual pioneers, professional anthropologists who set out to study human cultural diversity as part of an academic community. On her return from Siberia, Maria Czaplicka was given a lectureship at Oxford, but she lost her job when the male lecturer she had replaced came home at the end of the war. Routledge married a man who shared her intellectual interests, but when their marriage fell apart, she had no recourse when he secured a High Court order to take control of her formidable assets. Anthropology offered all five women an escape and field work a temporary relief from the strictures of English society and in new cultures an opportunity to negotiate their own identity. 337pp, illus.

Imagine your cat dressed as Elvis with a wild gleam in his eye and pulsating hips, or your prim and proper guinea pig kitted out as our dear late Queen, with a slightly disapproving stare and a bit of a twinkle. The artworks blend comic-con and the global celebrity phenomenon with our fascination with anthropomorphising pets. All your pet fantasies come true in this bewitching volume, where your pets "live their best lives" through the medium of fantasy. Michael Jackson in his trademark frogged jacket regards us mournfully in the face of an uncanny canine lookalike, while David Bowie as a Zigzaggy Starman looks out of the frame with his customary detachment. Ozzie Osbourne in purple specs and Gothic gear is perfectly captured by a jowly Labrador. From the world of film, Captain Jack Sparrow is a spiky black feline with high boots and a swagger, Miss Piggy has a personalised pink handbag and red bow, while a guinea pig as Count Dracula sports impressive prosthetic teeth - or are they actually his own? Sherlock Holmes and Poirot are easily identifiable by the deerstalker and moustache, the yellow eyes of Sally Bowles look out from beneath her trademark hat, and a white feline with spectacular false eyelashes makes a fabulous Marilyn, contrasting with the Blues Brothers glowering at the reader on a nearby page. Clint Eastwood's narrowed eyes beneath the battered brown hat convey the swashbuckling hero of dozens of westerns, Del Boy is unmistakeable under the check cap, Tommy Cooper has his fez, and we go back to our guinea pig friend for Dame Edna Everage with sparkly flyway specs, purple hair and a dress encrusted with bling. World leaders include the Pope, Churchill, Mother Teresa and Donald Trump. No page numbers, but about 80 fantastically costumed pets. 25 x 32cm. Text in English, French and German.
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This is a stand-out volume among the many photographic histories of World War I, with the effects of the conflict vividly demonstrated in archive photos showing day to day life on the home fronts of the warring nations. Young Germans living in Britain are seen crowding round the German consulate as war breaks out, almost all wearing Panama hats, while over in Germany similarly hatted young men read the mobilisation orders posted on the Rathaus (Town Hall). The Grenadier Guards, including the Prince of Wales, are seen leaving for France, where the headgear of choice is a flat cap. Further afield, the Commander-in-Chief is seen marching his Turkish troops through Jerusalem, and the first Tasmanian contingent to leave Hobart throngs the decks of a departing ship. Spy fever was running riot and Britain's east coast and railway bridges are heavily guarded by Territorials, while the Dutch frontier has a barrier of revolving spikes. High school students are now working in the fields, and a German monk is seen tending horses. Propaganda posters announce that England Expects Every Man To Do His Duty. A Brussels school is used as a hospital, and even more extraordinarily the Orangery Palace in Potsdam houses hospital beds among the grandiose pillars, while the Royal Palace in St Petersburg is also requisitioned. In Britain, there are makeshift wards in the Great Hall of Birmingham University and the cloisters of Trinity College Cambridge. Refugees on the eastern front struggle to safety without shoes, and meanwhile women work in munitions factories, sew balloons and make bandages in this fascinating cross section of wartime life. 192pp, chronology, archive photos on every page.

First published under the sub-title in 1917 in New York, Albert Rhys Williams (1883-1962) was an American journalist, author and labour organiser who studied on a fellowship at Cambridge University. In 1914 he found work as a journalist with the magazine Outlook as a special war correspondent, with the duty of reporting the events of the Great War. He was arrested in Belgium and detained by Germans who suspected him of being a British spy. In the early days of the conflict, Williams had the misfortune to fall into the hands of the Imperial German Army and, arrested in Belgium, they marched him into captivity. On his return to the USA, he published 'In the Claws of the German Eagle' in 1917. He then joined the New York Post and was sent to Petrograd to report on the conflict that was taking place in Russia following the overthrow of Tsar Nicholas II, and he remained an ardent supporter of Russia until the end of his life. 'The horrible and incomprehensible hates and brutalities of the European War! Unspeakable atrocities! Men blood-lusting like a lot of tigers! Horrible they are indeed. But my experiences in the war zone render them no longer incomprehensible... Two weeks later I fell under the spell of the self-same Germans. That long gray column swinging on through Liege so mesmerised me that my natural revulsion against slaughter was changed to actual admiration. Had an officer right them thrust a musket into my hand, I could have mechanically fallen into step and fared forth to the killing of the French...' 142 pages.

'Language, Power, and Alexander Graham Bell's Quest to End Deafness' is the sub-title of this revelatory and revisionist biography of the renowned inventor of the telephone, and powerful enemy of the deaf community. 'Deaf people who couldn't speak were often referred to as monkeys, or prehuman. I didn't know that the chief person behind the campaign to keep deaf children from learning ASL (American Sign Language) was the man who most people thought of differently, pleasantly, as the inventor of the telephone. Or that the movement he led would change forever what was expected of the deaf.' When Alexander Graham Bell first unveiled his telephone to the world, it was considered miraculous, but few people know that it was inspired by another supposed miracle - his work teaching deaf people to speak. He was the son of one deaf woman and husband to another, motivated by a desire to empower deaf people by integrating them into the hearing world. But he ended up becoming their most powerful enemy, waging a war against sign language and deaf culture that still rages today. The book tells the dual stories of Bell's remarkable, world-changing invention and his dangerous ethnocide of deaf culture and language. It also charts the rise of deaf activism and tells the triumphant tale of a community reclaiming a once-forbidden language. In 1863 at the age of 16, Bell first started work on his speaking machine, with a mechanical body like an organ with keys to depress different portions and exhale full words. His father Alexander Melville Bell was an elocutionist who was designing a universal phonetic alphabet, one that would be able to document any sound in any language. Melville called his alphabet Visible Speech, because it acted as an instructional guide on how to shape the mouth into different sounds. Each symbol was part of a code of where to put the tongue in the mouth, how to breath, how open the lips should be. Well researched, it is a timely reminder of the flawed humanity that lies behind so much of our technological innovation. 402pp.

A sweeping work of historical fiction which winds through the nascent days of cinema in Paris and Fort Lee, New Jersey, America's first movie town, and the battlefields of Belgium during World War One. It tells the story of the rise and fall of a prodigious film studio and one man's doomed obsession with all that passes in front of the viewfinder. For nearly half a century, Claude Ballard has been living at the Hollywood Knickerbocker Hotel. A French pioneer of silent films who started out as a concession agent for the Lumière brothers, the inventors of cinema, Claude now spends his days taking photographs of Sunset Boulevard. But when a film-history student comes to interview him about 'The Electric Hotel', the lost masterpiece that bankrupted him and ended his career of his muse, Sabine Montrose, the past comes surging back. In his run-down hotel suite, the ravages of the past are waiting to be excavated - celluloid fragments and reels in desperate need of restoration, and Claude's memories of the woman who inspired and beguiled him. The novel is a portrait of a man entranced by the magic of movie-making, a luminous romance, and a whirlwind trip through the heady, endlessly inventive days of early cinema. 449pp, paperback.

A heavyweight quality Könemann multilingual edition by the well regarded art historian. The cycles of Water Lilies are a highlight in Claude Monet's work and found in collections around the world. They have become the most beloved pieces and never before has such a focus been paid as in this splendid showcase. Monet brought in the interplay of colour and light, the atmospheric water and air, and the beauty of nature and impressions together with such harmony. This enchanting collection is reproduced in close up detail on glossy white heavy paper stock and in the introductory pages also features such images as the Japanese Bridge, Charing Cross Bridge London before looking in detail at the pinks and greens and yellows and blues of Monet's garden at Giverny. There are reflections of the weeping willows, sunsets and the Water Lily Cycle as shown at the Musée de l'Orangerie, Paris, in a beautiful sweeping arc around the room, skylights above flooding the panorama in natural daylight and creating a synthesis of majestic royal purples and lilacs, light and space, painting and architecture, art and nature. 29cm x 27cm, 200pp, colour.
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A Greenhill book first published in 1997, we are delighted to have the 2016 reprint in a large format Pen and Sword softback. It is from the G.I. Series, an illustrated history of the American soldier, his uniform and his equipment and ends in the early 90s and therefore should be seen as a collection of rare photographs with extended captions beginning with an image of General Norman Schwarzkopf and Collin Powell listening to a briefing during the Persian Gulf War. There is a close up of a tank driver for the 24th Infantry Division based at Fort McPherson Georgia wearing a DH-132 armoured crewman's helmet with sun, wind and dust goggles. There are troops pictured during a 'Reforger' exercise in 1985, 'Forward deployed' in Europe, prepared to halt an invasion of Western Europe by Warsaw Pact forces. A G.I. takes aim with his M16A2 rifle and is wearing the daytime desert camouflage BDUs known by G.I.s as 'chocolate chips'. Here are parades and drills, an SGT taking a break to smoke his pipe during Operation Desert Storm, the Drill Instructors, Military Policewomen, Kitchen Police, students honing their physical skills or taking a breather in desert operations, Eskimo Scouts, army snipers, an AH-15 Cobra Attack helicopter carrying eight TOW missiles, 750 rounds of 20mm canon ammunition and 76 2.75" rockets, a formidable array of weaponry. It was replaced by the Apache helicopter. And the Navy and Military Policeman and jungle training all make their way into this collection of 100 rare and unusual images as the U.S. Army has become a smaller and more technologically advanced force. 80 page large paperback.

The frank and forthright wine critic is a renowned expert on organic and biodynamic techniques. Monty Waldin knows what he likes to drink, and knows how he likes it to be made, yet as his 40th birthday loomed, he found himself increasingly satisfied with just writing about wine. It was time he realised to put his money where his mouth is and produce bottles of his very own. Renting a vineyard in the foothills of the French Pyrenees, Monty has just 12 months to put his beliefs into practice and make a decent tasting organic wine. It could have ended in career suicide, and Monty faced that possibility with only a four-legged companion at his side, his ever-faithful dog, Harry. There in the notoriously unpredictable weather of the Pyrenees, as well as how equally unpredictable locals will react to having an English wine novice hanging around, Monty with his second-hand van purchased for just one euro which had only one gear and an aversion to roads began his adventure. It begins with a car crash which left Monty with a sort of back injury that his doctors ordered him to stay in bed with, just when he should begin digging. Published to accompany the major Channel Four TV series, whether you have dreamt of owning your own vineyard or just enjoy a glass or two of decent red, Monty is a wonderfully warm and witty companion who has clearly made lots of friends and learned all about chickens and geese and irrigation canals and has a lot to be proud of. With many sections of both colour and black and white photographs, 298pp.