With The Wind At His Back

‘He had taken, these last few weeks, to sitting in the faded leather chair in the sitting room, next to the wood burner. It was only February, and he regularly pushed logs into the fire, stoking it into a continual roar….he didn’t want to die. The words of Dylan Thomas raged in his head as he stared down the garden for hours from his chair. He wanted to weep every time he saw a daffodil push through the grass, or a single bud hesitantly form on the Magnolia tree.’ The Wind on his Back is a beautifully-written collection of six short stories that explore different aspects of love. From a furious divorced man who refuses to forgive his errant wife, to the wife faced with losing her husband of 30 years to a sudden terminal illness, to the motley group of relatives who come together to celebrate Christmas Eve, each story has love – and its offspring, pain and loss – at its core. Each story can be read independently of each other, although they are united by a common theme of love. The Wind on his Back will have you feeling a range of emotions as you share in the highs and lows in the relationship in each story, and will appeal to fans of female novelists such as Barbara Pym, Donna Tartt and Kate Atkinson, all of which the author enjoys herself. The Wind on his Back is a heartfelt collection that is ideal for those who are looking to dip in and out of a love story.

New York Times bestselling author Rainbow Rowell's epic fantasy, the Simon Snow trilogy, concludes with Any Way the Wind Blows. In Carry On, Simon Snow and his friends realized that everything they thought they understood about the world might be wrong. And in Wayward Son, they wondered whether everything they understood about themselves might be wrong. Now, Simon and Baz and Penelope and Agatha must decide how to move forward. For Simon, that means choosing whether he still wants to be part of the World of Mages — and if he doesn't, what does that mean for his relationship with Baz? Meanwhile Baz is bouncing between two family crises and not finding any time to talk to anyone about his newfound vampire knowledge. Penelope would love to help, but she's smuggled an American Normal into London, and now she isn't sure what to do with him. And Agatha? Well, Agatha Wellbelove has had enough. Any Way the Wind Blows takes the gang back to England, back to Watford, and back to their families for their longest and most emotionally wrenching adventure yet. This book is a finale. It tells secrets and answers questions and lays ghosts to rest. The Simon Snow Trilogy was conceived as a book about Chosen One stories; Any Way the Wind Blows is an ending about endings—about catharsis and closure, and how we choose to move on from the traumas and triumphs that try to define us.

In this deeply personal and lyrical exploration of what it means to ride a bicycle, Paul Maunder explores how our memories have a dialogue with landscape and how cycling and creativity are connected. Taking a journey through the places that have shaped him, we ride across wild moorland, through suburbia and city streets, into quintessentially English pastoral scenes. We see too some of the darker parts of the British countryside, sites of great secrecy that intrigue the imagination. This is a book about how landscape can sustain us, and how even an hour's escape can inspire our creative sides. The bicycle allows us to explore and dream, and return in time for dinner.

The wind in his fists Jonathan hunter searches through loss and war for his sister and his faith, and is surprised by love. There was a real Jonathan. Since all except the basic story of his life has been obscured by time, this is a novel and not a biography.

The unique blend of fairy tale atmosphere and social realism in this novel laid the groundwork for modern fantasy literature. In the novel, Little Diamond, a kind and precocious boy living in poverty, is befriended by the mysterious North Wind, who takes him on her nightly adventures. Written in intensely poetic language, At the Back of the North Wind transcends the genres of children’s book or fairy tale. Appendices include essays on childhood by contemporaries such as John Ruskin and Charles Dickens, as well as contextualizing selections from Victorian fantasy and fairy tales.

“Nature, rightly questioned, never lies.” —A Manual of Scientific Enquiry, Third Edition, 1859 Scott Huler was working as a copy editor for a small publisher when he stumbled across the Beaufort Wind Scale in his Merriam Webster Collegiate Dictionary. It was one of those moments of discovery that writers live for. Written centuries ago, its 110 words launched Huler on a remarkable journey over land and sea into a fascinating world of explorers, mariners, scientists, and writers. After falling in love with what he decided was “the best, clearest, and most vigorous piece of descriptive writing I had ever seen,” Huler went in search of Admiral Francis Beaufort himself: hydrographer to the British Admiralty, man of science, and author—Huler assumed—of the Beaufort Wind Scale. But what Huler discovered is that the scale that carries Beaufort’s name has a long and complex evolution, and to properly understand it he had to keep reaching farther back in history, into the lives and works of figures from Daniel Defoe and Charles Darwin to Captains Bligh, of the Bounty, and Cook, of the Endeavor. As hydrographer to the British Admiralty it was Beaufort’s job to track the information that ships relied on: where to lay anchor, descriptions of ports, information about fortification, religion, and trade. But what came to fascinate Huler most about Beaufort was his obsession for observing things and communicating to others what the world looked like. Huler’s research landed him in one of the most fascinating and rich periods of history, because all around the world in the mid-eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, in a grand, expansive period, modern science was being invented every day. These scientific advancements encompassed not only vast leaps in understanding but also how scientific innovation was expressed and even organized, including such enduring developments as the scale Anders Celsius created to simplify how Gabriel Fahrenheit measured temperature; the French-designed metric system; and the Gregorian calendar adopted by France and Great Britain. To Huler, Beaufort came to embody that passion for scientific observation and categorization; indeed Beaufort became the great scientific networker of his time. It was he, for example, who was tapped to lead the search for a naturalist in the 1830s to accompany the crew of the Beagle; he recommended a young naturalist named Charles Darwin. Defining the Wind is a wonderfully readable, often humorous, and always rich story that is ultimately about how we observe the forces of nature and the world around us.

After decades of attacking Royal Navy ships the world’s most ruthless pirate Alfred Mudd finally dies, bringing his reign of terror to an end, but Captain Mudd’s lifetime of success leaves a deadly legacy, and a treasure haul large enough to finance a war for control of Europe. So begins a race for the treasure between the British and French navies, a race that will see Admiral Saunders lead a squadron of ships across the Atlantic, around the dreaded Cape Horn and through the most dangerous seas on earth on the most important mission in the Royal Navy’s history.