Too Clever By Half

A Booksellers' Best Award Finalist! Locked in a competition that could change their lives...or break their hearts. Mr. James Alcott has carved out his place in the world with an esteemed position at Harrow School. But when the school changes direction, he’s set adrift. He can redeem himself by founding a scholarship program if he wins the annual Duke’s Trust competition for seed money. A seemingly simple task. Until a beautiful and mysterious competitor arouses his curiosity and leaves him speaking in iambic pentameter. Lady Tessa Harmsworth was denied a formal education by her father. Now she has fabricated the reclusive Mr. Pettibone as the champion of her scholarship fund to further the education of other women and girls. The deception is the only way a woman can enter the Duke’s Trust competition, let alone win it. And Tessa intends to win. Until her annoyingly clever, poetry-spouting opponent sets out to uncover her ruse. As Tessa and James match wits, their spirited rivalry turns into a passionate affair. With the coveted prize hanging in the balance, will they choose their lifelong dreams or follow their reckless hearts? The Harrow's Finest Five Series books are stand-alone novels with no cliffhangers, and can be read in any order.

Volume 1 of a two-volume work. This classic reference contains most of the more common words used in everyday English conversation, plus slang, archaic words and phrases, coined words and foreign words common in English. Roots are identified, cross-references to words with similar roots are listed and colloquial usages and alternate spellings are given. "Notable for its readable historical discussions, apt citations and jargonless clarity"--Saturday Review.

Illustrated with case studies of highly able children currently in British schools, this book demonstrates the range of difficulties they can face, and how inadequate provision can lead to underachievement and disaffection.

A witty, heartfelt novel that brilliantly evokes the confusions of adolescence and marks the arrival of an extraordinary young talent. Isidore Mazal is eleven years old, the youngest of six siblings living in a small French town. He doesn't quite fit in. Berenice, Aurore, and Leonard are on track to have doctorates by age twenty-four. Jeremie performs with a symphony, and Simone, older than Isidore by eighteen months, expects a great career as a novelist—she's already put Isidore to work on her biography. The only time they leave their rooms is to gather on the old, stained couch and dissect prime-time television dramas in light of Aristotle's Poetics. Isidore has never skipped a grade or written a dissertation. But he notices things the others don't, and asks questions they fear to ask. So when tragedy strikes the Mazal family, Isidore is the only one to recognize how everyone is struggling with their grief, and perhaps the only one who can help them—if he doesn't run away from home first. Isidore’s unstinting empathy, combined with his simmering anger, makes for a complex character study, in which the elegiac and comedic build toward a heartbreaking conclusion. With How to Behave in a Crowd, Camille Bordas immerses readers in the interior life of a boy puzzled by adulthood and beginning to realize that the adults around him are just as lost.

By the New York Times bestselling author of The Bone Clocks | Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize A postmodern visionary and one of the leading voices in twenty-first-century fiction, David Mitchell combines flat-out adventure, a Nabokovian love of puzzles, a keen eye for character, and a taste for mind-bending, philosophical and scientific speculation in the tradition of Umberto Eco, Haruki Murakami, and Philip K. Dick. The result is brilliantly original fiction as profound as it is playful. In this groundbreaking novel, an influential favorite among a new generation of writers, Mitchell explores with daring artistry fundamental questions of reality and identity. Cloud Atlas begins in 1850 with Adam Ewing, an American notary voyaging from the Chatham Isles to his home in California. Along the way, Ewing is befriended by a physician, Dr. Goose, who begins to treat him for a rare species of brain parasite. . . . Abruptly, the action jumps to Belgium in 1931, where Robert Frobisher, a disinherited bisexual composer, contrives his way into the household of an infirm maestro who has a beguiling wife and a nubile daughter. . . . From there we jump to the West Coast in the 1970s and a troubled reporter named Luisa Rey, who stumbles upon a web of corporate greed and murder that threatens to claim her life. . . . And onward, with dazzling virtuosity, to an inglorious present-day England; to a Korean superstate of the near future where neocapitalism has run amok; and, finally, to a postapocalyptic Iron Age Hawaii in the last days of history. But the story doesn’t end even there. The narrative then boomerangs back through centuries and space, returning by the same route, in reverse, to its starting point. Along the way, Mitchell reveals how his disparate characters connect, how their fates intertwine, and how their souls drift across time like clouds across the sky. As wild as a videogame, as mysterious as a Zen koan, Cloud Atlas is an unforgettable tour de force that, like its incomparable author, has transcended its cult classic status to become a worldwide phenomenon.