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Tom Cruise

Tom Cruise is undoubtedly one of Hollywood's biggest stars and of the most powerful actors of his generation. He became a star in his first film, "Risky Business," before he was 21. His later career has seen a stellar rise to fame, through films such as "Top Gun," "Rain Man," "Jerry Maguire," and "Mission Impossible. "But he is equally well known for his rocky personal life and most lately, his controversial attachment to Scientology. And it has lately seemed, with his highly-publicized on- and off-screen romances, that the divide between screen and real life has become increasingly narrow. In this book, acclaimed film critic Iain Johnstone tells the story of both the man and his work. This is the inside story of the making of Tom Cruise the Hollywood legend, his extraordinary achievements and how Tom's onscreen life is formed by his personal experiences--or is it the other way around? This is a pacey, entertaining, and insightful biography of one of the most iconic stars of our day.

Hitchhiking To Heaven

Lionel Blue is one of those paradoxes: Britain's most famous Rabbi and a household name, his Jewish wit and quirky spirituality never fail to entertain. Yet he has lived a life on the fringes. A Rabbi who has remained true to his tradition, he has also found a home in Christianity. A man who has struggled with his sexuality, he has learnt slowly and painfully that spirituality and sexuality are inextricably entwined. Lionel Blue has never tried to escape the contradictions of a life lived honestly, and he has remained open to exploration and challenge. This all makes for an autobiography of immense richness. (to expand)

Fire Sale

A favour to an old friend means a return to the streets of South Chicago for V.I. Warshawski.....But the neighbourhood where she grew up is now a dangerous, depressed place that reeks of bad memories. And the high school basketball team she has come to coach is a group of gang-bangers, fundamentalists and teenage moms....The mother of one of the girls asks V.I. to look into claims of sabotage at the flag-making factory where she works. If it closes, the only other employer is By-Smart, a behemoth superstore that discounts its wages as heavily as its wares. But V.I. has barely agreed to help when the factory blows up...As V.I. invetsigates, she finds herself confronting the powerful family who own By-Smart. Founder William 'Buffalo Bill' Bysen is a difficult old man, at odds with both V.I. and his sons. And when his favoured grandson, Billy, runs away with one of her basketball players, V.I. is squeezed between the needs of two very different families in her attempts to find the errant teenagers and track down a particularly cruel murderer...."

The Tenth Circle

Fourteen-year-old Trixie Stone has felt like a ghost for fourteen days, seven hours and thirty-six minutes. Her overprotective father tried to shield her from life's perils - but even he had never imagined what could happen to her.Raised as the only white boy in an Eskimo village, teased mercilessly for being different, comic book artist Daniel Stone thought he had put the pain and violence of his past behind him when he reinvented himself as a family man.Could the boy who once made his daughter's face fill with light have drugged and raped her? Trixie says he did, and that is all it takes to make her father consider taking matters into his own hands. He would go to hell and back for his daughter's sake ...Praise for Jodi Picoult'Picoult has become a master - almost a clairvoyant - at targeting hot issues and writing highly readable page-turners about them ... It is impossible not to be held spell bound by the way she forces us to think, hard, about right and wrong' - Washington Post

Mortal Coil

There is a London you might not know. A London of dingy, pubs and brutal alleyway encounters; a seedy, seething metropolis populated by weasel-faced burglars, psychotic doormen, and professional killers with cold hearts and cruel intentions. It's a place Matthew Moriarty knows only too well. Jobless, hopeless, and half-crippled following a beating that teaches him not to insult local gangsters and then screw their wives, Moriarty is at rock bottom, left with only an ever-dwindling supply of prescription painkillers for company. And when he takes up a lucrative offer to track down a missing friend, things start to get a whole lot worse. As the search leads Moriarty into mortal danger, to the corrupt heart of the music business, one thing becomes clear: mess with this city, and it messes with you.

Double Cross Blind

It is seven days before the Japanese attack Pearl Harbor. Days that are numbered for Sondegger, a Nazi spy captured in London while on a mission to take down the Twenty Committee, a German network of spies the British have turned.For American Tom Wall, the days have run together as he awakens to find himself locked in a British military asylum. Wounded and shell-shocked, all he knows is that his brother, Earl, betrayed his unit in Crete, causing one of the bloodiest massacres of the war. MI5 releases Tom by way of a bargain. Pretend to be Earl and convince Sondegger to reveal how and where he has arranged to transmit his intelligence to Germany. Fail, and spend the rest of the war in jail. Succeed, and Tom, though still considered a danger to himself, will be allowed to leave the hospital to find Earl--who may well be a Nazi informant. But Sondegger proves himself to be a formidable opponent. Even as he surrendered himself to the British, he knew the Japanese fleet had sailed for Pearl Harbor. The question is: Who will gain more if the Allies prevent the attack? Sondegger, MI5, the OSS, Tom, and Earl's wife, Harriet, all have different answers. Unable to trust anyone, Tom attempts to save the Twenty Committee and stop the attack on Pearl Harbor as the clock counts down. In his electrifying debut, Joel Ross combines political insights with the high stakes and fast pace of classic espionage fiction, and he delivers what others have not in more than a decade--a Nazi spy novel that you cannot put down.

The Book Of Fate

So says Wes Holloway, a young presidential aide, about the day he put Ron Boyle, the chief executive's oldest friend, into the president's limousine. By the trip's end, a crazed assassin would permanently disfigure Wes and kill Boyle. Now, eight years later, Boyle has been spotted alive. Trying to figure out what really happened takes Wes back into disturbing secrets buried in Freemason history, a decade-old presidential crossword puzzle, and a two-hundred-year-old code invented by Thomas Jefferson that conceals secrets worth dying for.

Cold In The Earth

Death is in the air. Death is on the ground. Death is everywhere for the people of Galloway. As a catastrophic virus devastates the Scottish countryside, killing cattle and destroying lives, Detective Inspector Marjory Fleming finds herself at the stormy heart of a troubled, trapped community. Pyres are built, infected animals are burnt, and farmland is dug up as burial ground. But the all-pervasive stench of death develops a horrifying, unfamiliar edge when human remains are dug up near the small market town of Kirkluce. Thousands of miles away in New York City, a woman called Laura resolves to unearth the dark secrets of her past. Determined to discover the truth behind her older sister's disappearance fifteen years ago, her journey takes her back to Galloway, to a world of suspicion, fear and menace. A dead body, a missing girl, and a mysterious family's dangerous obsession with bull running provide a sinister backdrop to DI Fleming's first murder investigation. And as the cold shadow of death looms ever larger over this quiet corner of rural Britain, one thing becomes clear: it won't be her last.

The Cold Moon

On a freezing December night, with a full moon hovering in the black skies over New York City, two people are brutally murdered their deaths marked by eerie calling-cards: moon-faced clocks ticking away the victims' last minutes on earth. It's clear that more murders are planned, and Lincoln Rhyme and his team have only hours to stop a cold, calculated killer they call the Watchmaker. An unlikely ally appears on the scene in the form of California Bureau of Investigation special agent Kathryn Dance, one of the nation's leading experts in interrogation and body language. Despite Lincoln's skepticism about witnesses, and her distrust of physical evidence, the two form a curious alliance in the heart-stopping quest to find the Watchmaker.

Making Waves

Thirteen Moons

From one of the most acclaimed writers of our time comes THIRTEEN MOONS, a brilliant novel that is at once an exciting story of adventure, a moving story of passionate love, and a portrait of America during the nineteenth century, a time of savage violence, natural beauty, and epic change. Will Cooper's search for identity and home hegins at thte age of twelve, when he is given a horse, a key and a map, and sent to the edge of the Cherokee Nation to run a trading post as a bound boy. With a Cherokee chief named Bear and the mysterious and beautiful Claire Featherstone, Will finds the passionate connections and the complications of manhood that will forge his character and shape his life. As his fate becomes interwined with destiny of the Cherokee, Will travels to Washington City to fight against the Removal of the Indians from their land and to protect Bear's people, their culture, and way of life.In a voice filled with insight, humor and regret, Will tells of a long life's journey, from the beautiful forests and mountains of the Nation across the South and up and donw the Mississippi River, and on into the twentieth century. THIRTEEN MOONS is a novel of breathtaking power and beauty, by an American master.

Shadow Man

Nightmares that haunt her every sleeping hour, nightmares that leave her shivering and alone. An agent on the FBI

On Writing

The Palace Of Heavenly Pleasure

Salem's Lot

Stephen King's second book, 'Salem's Lot--about the slow takeover of an insular hamlet called Jerusalem's Lot by a vampire patterned after Bram Stoker's Dracula--has two elements that he also uses to good effect in later novels: a small American town, usually in Maine, where people are disconnected from each other, quietly nursing their potential for evil; and a mixed bag of rational, goodhearted people, including a writer, who band together to fight that evil. Simply taken as a contemporary vampire novel, 'Salem's Lotis great fun to read, and has been very influential in the horror genre. But it's also a sly piece of social commentary. As King said in 1983, "In 'Salem's Lot, the thing that really scared me was not vampires, but the town in the daytime, the town that was empty, knowing that there were things in closets, that there were people tucked under beds, under the concrete pilings of all those trailers. And all the time I was writing that, the Watergate hearings were pouring out of the TV.... Howard Baker kept asking, 'What I want to know is, what did you know and when did you know it?' That line haunts me, it stays in my mind.... During that time I was thinking about secrets, things that have been hidden and were being dragged out into the light." Sounds quite a bit like the idea behind his 1998 novel of a Maine hamlet haunted by unsightly secrets, Bag of Bones. --Fiona Webster

Dylan On Dylan

I change during the course of a day. I wake and I'm one person, and when I go to sleep I know for certain I'm somebody else.'" Bob DylanDYLAN ON DYLANgathers together for the first timetwenty-nine of the most significant and revealing conversations with the singer, stretching over forty years from the earliest days of his career in 1962 through to 2004. Among the highlights are the seminal Rolling Stone" interviews by Jann Wenner, Jonathan Cott, Kurt Loder and Mikal Gilmore, as well as the legendary 1966 Playboy" interview.In-depthand intimate, these interviews cover the gaps left by the Chronicles: Volume 1".Dylan expert Jonathan Cott writes an introduction to this must-have collection of the artist in his own words.

The Spice Route

The Spice Route is one of history's greatest anomalies: shrouded in mystery, it existed long before anyone knew of its extent or configuration. Spices came from lands unseen, possibly uninhabitable, and almost by definition unattainable; that was what made them so desirable. Yet more livelihoods depended on this pungent traffic, more nations participated in it, more wars were fought for it, and more discoveries resulted from it than from any other global exchange. Epic in scope, marvelously detailed, laced with drama, "The Spice Route spans three millennia and circles the world to chronicle the history of the spice trade. With the aid of ancient geographies, travelers' accounts, mariners' handbooks, and ships' logs, John Keay tells of ancient Egyptians who pioneered maritime trade to fetch the incense of Arabia, Graeco-Roman navigators who found their way to India for pepper and ginger, Columbus who sailed west for spices, de Gama, who sailed east for them, and Magellan, who sailed across the Pacific on the exact same quest. A veritable spice race evolved as the west vied for control of the spice-producing islands, stripping them of their innocence and the spice trade of its mystique. This enthralling saga, progressing from the voyages of the ancients to the blue-water trade that came to prevail by the seventeenth century, transports us from the dawn of history to the ends of the earth.

The Last Nazi

What if

Cell

'Civilization slipped into its second dark age on an unsurprising track of blood but with a speed that could not have been foreseen by even the most pessimistic futurist. By Halloween, every major city from New York to Moscow stank to the empty heavens and the world as it had been was a memory.' The event became known as The Pulse. The virus was carried by every cell phone operating within the entire world. Within ten hours, most people would be dead or insane. A young artist Clayton Riddell realises what is happening. And together with Tom McCourt and a teenage girl called Alice, he flees the devastation of explosive, burning Boston, desperate to reach his son before his son switches on his little red mobile phone...

Balham To Bollywood

For some actors, the idea of going to India for eight weeks to act in a Bollywood epic shot in the middle of a desert would send them scurrying back to their agent asking for some other work, any other work.| Not Chris England. He runs his own cricket team (An England XI), and since he was given the part of a cricketer in a British Army team playing against a small Indian village a hundred years ago, he wouldn t just be working. He would be representing his country at his favourite sport.| This is a cricket tour diary with a difference, as Chris England charts the progress of the film from his audition in a London park to the film s release eighteen months later. The author s ability to evoke the landscape and atmosphere of India is complemented by his skill in bringing to life the bizarre and often very funny world of film making.

Everthing's Eventual

In this eerie, enchanting compilation, the author takes readers down a road less travelled (for good reason) in the blockbuster e-book 'Riding the Bullet'. Terror becomes deja vu all over again when you get 'That Feeling, You Can Only Say What It Is in French'. 'Lt's Theory of Pets' will make you stop and think before giving a dog to a loved one. And there are eleven more stories that will keep you awake until dawn. Nothing is quite as it seems. Expect the unexpected in Everything's Eventual, a veritable treasure trove of enthralling, witty, dark tales that could only come from the imagination of the greatest storyteller of our time.

Turning Angel

Rape and murder aren't new to the Deep South, but when the body of a popular high school girl is found dumped in the local river, the whole town of Natchez, Mississippi is shocked.Penn Cage no longer practises law, but when his best friend Drew is accused of the murder and asks for help, Penn must face the hardest questions of his life: Can he defend Drew against the town, the police and overwhelming evidence? Or could it be true that his friend is a brutal killer who has deceived Penn and everyone else?

Cloud Atlas

'A remarkable book, made up of six resonating strands; the narrative reaches back into the 19th century, to colonialism and savagery in the Pacific islands, and forwards into a dark future, beyond the collapse of civilisation. It knits together science fiction, political thriller and historical pastiche with musical virtuosity and linguistic exuberance: there won't be a bigger, bolder novel this year' Justine Jordan, <I>Guardian</I>.<br> 'It is an impeccable dance of genres...played out to a suite on the great themes of colonialism, power, greed, corporate culture, and the way human civilisations evolve, morph, die and survive...an elegiac, radiant festival of prescience, meditation and entertainment.' Neel Mukherjee, <I>The Times</I>.<br> 'His wildest ride yet... a singular achievement, from an author of extraordinary ambition and skill' Matt Thorne, <I>Independent on Sunday</I>.

50 Ways to Get Along With Absolutely Anyone

Happy relationships are the key to joy in our lives. But, as most people know, this does not always seem possible.Chuck Spezzano, the master of relationship advice, offers a vital book of principles to enable you to get along with anyone and transform the problem areas of your life. These timeless principles are combined with simple and practical exercises that help you bring out the best in all of your relationships. The book can be read day-by-day or simply opened at random to discover your inspiration for the day.Chuck's kind-hearted yet challenging essays guarantee to transform your best enemies into your best friends and make your life easier and happier.