The Metro Dogs Of Moscow

JR (short for Jack Russell) is an embassy dog. His human, George, is a diplomat who has to travel for work. A lot. Now George is working at the Canadian Embassy in Moscow. And while he fancies himself an adventurous globetrotter, he doesn't see why JR needs any more excitement than hanging out at the park with the other embassy dogs. JR, however, has had quite enough of leashes and perfectly manicured parks—not to mention the boring embassy dogs. He decides to explore Moscow himself, and soon meets some wily Russian strays. JR is convinced that this is the life he’s been looking for. Amazing city smells! Mouthwatering stuffed potatoes! And best of all, the freedom to travel on the Moscow metro! Meanwhile, George has found himself a new girlfriend: the ravishingly beautiful Katerina, who JR suspects is too good to be true. And if that weren’t trouble enough, JR's new friends are starting to mysteriously disappear. When an embassy dog goes missing as well, JR knows he must use everything he’s learned about his new home to solve the mystery of Moscow’s missing dogs.

JR and his embassy friends Robert, Pie, and Beatrix are on their way to Prague! Having solved the mystery of the missing dogs in Moscow, JR is ready for a vacatio with his human, George, and George’s Russian girlfriend, Nadya. And where better to distract themselves than in Prague, taking in the sights and meeting Nadya’s brother, a circus performer. But something is amiss at the circus—the animals are unhappy. The boxing kangaroo doesn’t want to box, the dancing chimpanzee doesn’t want to dance. Not only that, but a fancy new circus is coming to town, threatening to put everyone out of a job. It’s up to JR and the embassy dogs to save the show, with the help of some unlikely accomplices.

A wannabe journalist and reluctant astrologer turns out to be clairvoyant in this charming middle-grade coming-of-age novel; for fans of Rebecca Stead's novels. Clara can't believe her no-nonsense grandmother has just up and moved to Florida, leaving Clara and her mother on their own for the first time. This means her mother can finally "follow her bliss," which involves moving to a tiny apartment in Kensington Market, working at a herbal remedy shop and trying to develop her so-called mystical powers. Clara tries to make the best of a bad situation by joining the newspaper staff at her new middle school, where she can sharpen her investigative journalistic skills and tell the kind of hard-news stories her grandmother appreciated. But the editor relegates her to boring news stories and worse . . . the horoscopes. Worse yet, her horoscopes come true, and soon everyone at school is talking about Clara Voyant, the talented fortune-teller. Clara is horrified -- horoscopes and clairvoyance aren't real, she insists, just like her grandmother always told her. But when a mystery unfolds at school, she finds herself in a strange situation: having an opportunity to prove herself as an investigative journalist . . . with the help of her own mystical powers.

The year is 2033. The world has been reduced to rubble. Humanity is nearly extinct. The half-destroyed cities have become uninhabitable through radiation. Beyond their boundaries, they say, lie endless burned-out deserts and the remains of splintered forests. Survivors still remember the past greatness of humankind. But the last remains of civilisation have already become a distant memory, the stuff of myth and legend. More than 20 years have passed since the last plane took off from the earth. Rusted railways lead into emptiness. The ether is void and the airwaves echo to a soulless howling where previously the frequencies were full of news from Tokyo, New York, Buenos Aires. Man has handed over stewardship of the earth to new life-forms. Mutated by radiation, they are better adapted to the new world. Man's time is over. A few score thousand survivors live on, not knowing whether they are the only ones left on earth. They live in the Moscow Metro - the biggest air-raid shelter ever built. It is humanity's last refuge. Stations have become mini-statelets, their people uniting around ideas, religions, water-filters - or the simple need to repulse an enemy incursion. It is a world without a tomorrow, with no room for dreams, plans, hopes. Feelings have given way to instinct - the most important of which is survival. Survival at any price. VDNKh is the northernmost inhabited station on its line. It was one of the Metro's best stations and still remains secure. But now a new and terrible threat has appeared. Artyom, a young man living in VDNKh, is given the task of penetrating to the heart of the Metro, to the legendary Polis, to alert everyone to the awful danger and to get help. He holds the future of his native station in his hands, the whole Metro - and maybe the whole of humanity.

When Alice agreed to appear in a reality cooking show with her father, she had no idea she'd find herself in the middle of a mystery! Will Alice and her new friends be able to save the show? A light-hearted and funny middle grade novel for fans of Rebecca Stead and Lynda Mullaly Hunt. Alice Fleck's father is a culinary historian, and for as long as she can remember, she's been helping him recreate meals from the past -- a hobby she prefers to keep secret from kids her age. But when her father's new girlfriend enters them into a cooking competition at a Victorian festival, Alice finds herself and her hobby thrust into the spotlight. And that's just the first of many surprises awaiting her. On arriving at the festival, Alice learns that she and her father are actually contestants on Culinary Combat, a new reality TV show hosted by Tom Truffleman, the most famous and fierce judge on TV! And to make matters worse, she begins to suspect that someone is at work behind the scenes, sabotaging the competition. It's up to Alice, with the help of a few new friends, to find the saboteur before the entire competition is ruined, all the while tackling some of the hardest cooking challenges of her life . . . for the whole world to see.

This is the story of the vagabond canines that hopped on railroads across the United States, often becoming celebrities and national heroes. Chapters introduce canines like Owney, guardian of the railway mail service; Fala, FDR's beloved dog and train-companion; Annie, the Colorado railway ambassador; the K9 patrols who watch over the tracks; and many more. As railroads were changing America, these raildogs were changing the people who lived and worked in rail communities. For the dogs of the railways, home became the hearts of the people of the railroad. More than the dogs themselves, this book is about the human-animal relationship between a dog and a community and moments in history where that relationship symbolized the quest for home and belonging, a search that humans often share with our canine travelers.

'In exploring what it might be like to be a dog from a human perspective, Dog Boy sheds much light on what it is like to be human. Utterly compelling and believable' Yann Martel, author of Life of Pi 'A involving, careful book, marked out by a rare sympathy for the natural world ... It offers, also, a frightening and edifying insight into the barbaric systems of contemporary Russia' Telegraph Four-year-old Romochka is left alone in a dark, empty Moscow apartment. After a few days, hunger drives him outside, where he sees a large, yellow dog loping past and follows her to her lair on the outskirts of the city. During the seasons that follow, Romochka changes from a boy into something far wilder. He learns to see in the dark, attack enemies with tooth and claw, and understand the strict pack code. But when he begins to hunt in the city, the world of human beings, it is only a matter of time before the authorities take an interest...