Going Gently

An inspiring and approachable tip-filled guide to changing your habits, living more sustainably, and taking action, by Greenpeace ambassador Bonnie Wright (Ginny Weasley in the Harry Potter movies) Go Gently is a guide for sustainability at home that offers simple, tangible steps toward reducing our environmental impact by looking at what we consume and the waste we create, as well as how to take action for environmental change. The title reflects Bonnie Wright’s belief that the best way to change our planet and ourselves is through a gentle approach, rather than a judgmental one. This is a book of do’s rather than don’ts. It’s also an invitation to Wright’s followers to join her on this journey to sustainability. Going through every room in her home, Wright helps us assess which products are sustainable, and alternatives for those that are not. She shares recipes to avoid waste, homemade self-care products to avoid packaging, small space-friendly gardening ideas, and a template for creating your own compost system. Finally, to sustain yourself, there are exercises and meditation prompts to keep you energized, plus info on how to get involved in community and organizations.

Kate Thomas was beautiful, intelligent, witty, passionate and sexy. Now, at the ripe old age of ninety-nine, she is trapped in a hospital ward of sad, mad and bad old women. She escapes by playing to herself the video of her life. What a life it has been. Her six marriages have ended in suicide, a husband's adultery, another husband's deportation as a dangerous alien, a union dispute, a murder, and a natural death. But Kate's journey through the twentieth century is also a search for the truth - about life, death, and which of her three sons murdered her fifth husband. This is a novel rich in memorable characters, from Kate's narrow but loving Welsh family to the wild members of an artists' colony in Cornwall; from Midland piston manufacturers to an investigative journalist whose own life cannot bear investigation.

This wide-ranging study looks at how the ageing process has alternately been figured in and excluded from twentieth-century French literature, philosophy and psychoanalysis. It espouses a critical interdisciplinarity and calls into question the assumptions underlying much research into ageing in the social sciences, work in which the negative aspects of growing older are almost invariably suppressed. It offers a major reappraisal of Simone de Beauvoir's great but neglected late treatise, La Vieillesse, and presents the first substantial discussion of a lost documentary film about old age in which Beauvoir appears and which she helped to write, PROMENADE AU PAYS DE LA VIEILLESSE. Questioning Beauvoir's own rather reductive reading of Gide's work on old age, this study analyses the way in which his Journal and Ainsi soit-il experiment with a range of representational models for the senescent subject. The encounter between psychoanalysis and ageing is framed by a reading of Violette Leduc's autobiographical trilogy, in which she suggests that psychoanalysis, to its detriment, simply cannot allow ageing to signify. This claim is tested in a critical survey of recent theoretical and clinical work by psychoanalysts interested in ageing in France, the UK and the US. Lastly, Hervé Guibert's recently republished photo-novel about his elderly great-aunts, Suzanne et Louise, is examined as a work of intergenerational empathy and is found, in addition, to be an important statement of his photographic aesthetic. Navigating between the extremes of fury ('age rage') and serene acceptance ('going gently'), this study aims throughout to examine the role which ageing plays in formal, as well as thematic, terms in writing the life of the subject.

John Barwick made some questionable decisions in his life which might have caused him to miss the chances that would eventually allow him to live the life he was destined for. He was born in Yorkshire, England and was sent away to boarding school at an early age by his father to make something of himself. And he did. He studied medicine and became a general practitioner. He met Alice when she was a student nurse and loved her from afar for many years but she flew away to Australia, like a common sandpiper, and he missed his chance with her. When their paths crossed many years later, John had already become a father with a son that he didn’t meet until he was a teenager. He had also been to the Vietnam War and he came home changed. He had been married, and divorced, with a second son who was profoundly deaf, when he finally found love and contentment in his world. In his retirement he took up Alice’s legacy and vowed to assist his patients die a good death in the manner of their choosing. He was a good man, who eventually had a good life, and his fictional story is both touching and insightful.

God meant for two soulmates, Bill and Linda, to meet, marry, and spend over fifty-seven years together before God's plan for Linda on earth was at its end, and she went to join Him and Jesus in Heaven. The evening of December 20, 2018, Linda was called to Heaven after losing a three-and-a-half-year battle with Idiopathic Pulmonary Fibrosis (IPF). The day after Linda passed, Bill's daughter, Julie, and grandkids were visiting. Julie happened to notice two books by Sarah Young sitting on a shelf under the coffee table. The books had been placed there by Linda. One of the books was Jesus Calling, a book of "Devotions for Every Day of the Year." A ribbon, used as a bookmark, was placed in the book for the date Friday, December 21, the day after Linda died. There was no explanation for the ribbon's being there since Linda had not read from that book for some time, perhaps as much as a year. Bill believed that the ribbon was placed by Linda sometime in the past for him to find on that very day, the day after she died. The devotion for that day, December 21, starts out with the words, "MY PLAN FOR YOUR LIFE is unfolding before you." Bill believed that he was to find that book, Jesus Calling, marked with a ribbon on that page, and that God was reminding him that He had a plan for his life. Almost immediately, Bill said, "I am going to write a book." He believed he received an inspiration from God through Linda to follow a new path for him. This book is about Bill and Linda's life together, how they met, fell in love, and became soulmates, and the many coincidences in their life before and after Linda was to "Go Gently into the Night." They came to call those coincidences, "God Winks."

Book 10 in the Chief Inspector George Gently case files finds Gently dodging bullets when he investigates the murder of a trucker who died in a hail of gunfire. Murdered in a lonely lay-by in the heart of the countryside, the trucker is identified as a Polish immigrant. Was this a revenge killing, a quarrel over money, an underworld execution or something even more sinister?

From Douglas Adams, the legendary author of one of the most beloved science fiction novels of all time, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, comes a wildly inventive novel—in trade paperback for the first time—of ghosts, time travel, and one detective's mission to save humanity from extinction. Quirky and bumbling private investigator Dirk Gently stumbles upon a ghost, millions of years old, wandering the earth and disturbing its people. Dirk soon discovers this phantom yearns for more than a good haunting: it is desperately trying to go back in time to prevent its own death. But this ghost was no ordinary person, and helping it save itself just might change the modern world as we know it. And not in a good way… Endlessly entertaining, Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency proves that, indeed, “few writers have had such an infectious prose style as Adams” (The Observer). As Dirk Gently tries to solve the mysteries of the universe and the human soul, readers will have their own mystery to solve: Where did the time go?

The poetry of Dylan Thomas has long been heralded as amongst the greatest of the Modern period, and along with his play, Under Milk Wood, his books are amongst the best-loved works in the literary canon. This new selection of his poetry contains all of his best-loved verse - including 'I See the Boys of Summer', 'And Death Shall Have No Dominion', 'The Hand that Signed the Paper' and, of course, 'Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night' - as well as some of his lesser-known lyrical pieces, and aims to show the great poet in a new light. '[Then] the greatest living poet in the English language.' (Observer) 'He is unique, for he distils an exquisite mysterious moving quality which defies analysis.' (Sunday Times)