RESULTS IN BOOKS FOR ADULTS

Following the success of The French Kitchen, Joanne Harris and Fran Warde have collaborated once more to write a French cookbook with a difference. This time they have taken their inspiration from the rural markets of Gascony. Tomatoes as nature intended them to be - large, misshapen and bursting with taste - sun-ripened melons, locally produced foie gras, air-dried goat's cheeses rolled in herbs, organic honey, persimmons and floc (a uniquely addictive combination of freshly pressed grape juice and aged Armagnac), all form the basis of a deliciously simple collection of recipes that recapture all the sensations and flavours of summertime. Traditional dishes like cassoulet, beef bourguignon and creme caramel, as well as creative reinterpretations of old favourites - chilli duck with orange salad and wild mushroom tartlets - all combine to make The French Market a recipe for success.

Aiming to track down a small oasis town deep in the Sahara, some of whose generous inhabitants came to her rescue on a black day in her adolescence, Annie Hawes leaves her home in the olive groves of Italy and sets off along the south coast of the Mediterranean. Travelling through Morocco and Algeria she eats pigeon pie with a family of cannabis farmers, and learns about the habits of djinns; she encounters citizens whose protest against the tyrannical King Hassan takes the form of attaching colanders to their television aerials - a practice he soon outlaws - and comes across a stone-age method of making olive-oil, still going strong. She allows a ten-year-old to lead her into the fundamentalist strongholds of the suburbs of Algiers - where she makes a good friend. Plunging southwards, regardless, into the desert, she at last shares a lunch of salt-cured Saharan haggis with her old friends, in a green and pleasant palm grove perfumed by flowering henna: once, it seems, the favourite scent of the Prophet Mohammed. She discovers at journey's end that life in a date-farming oasis, haunting though its songs may be, is not so simple and uncomplicated as she has imagined.

Pasta, cappuccino, olive oil - Italian food culture is a prominent feature of Western society in our cafes, restaurants and homes. But what is the history of Italian cuisine? And where do we get our notions about Italian food? Garlic and Oil is a comprehensive history of food habits in modern Italy. Chronicling the period from the mid-19th century to the present day, the author argues that politics dramatically affected the nature of Italian cuisine and food habits. Contrary to popular belief, the Italian diet was inadequate and unchanging for many decades. Drawing on the writings of scientific professionals, domestic economists, government officials, and consumers, the author shows how the miserable diet of so many Italians became the subject of political debate and eventually, the target of government intervention. As successive regimes - liberal, fascist, democratic - struggled with the question of how to improve people's eating habits, their actions purposefully and inadvertently affected what and how much Italians ate, shaping not only the foundations of Italian cuisine, but also the nature of Italian identity.Garlic and Oil is a popular national food history that offers a new perspective on the history of consumerism and food studies by examining how political change affects food consumption habits.

This is the story of several generations of a Scottish West Coast fishing community - taking us from the times when fishermen went off to sea in rowing boats through to the 21st century, where fishing vessels are electronic masterpieces. Echo sounders have now taken over from instinct, but the old traditions and superstitions still apply, and family links are still strong, the same fishermens' names appearing generation after generation. Also, women still play their part, but no longer follow the boats from harbour to harbour to gut the fish; instead they stay at home, listening to the weather forecast on the radio, anxious about the terrors of crowded shipping lanes and the dangers of iced-up fishing gear.

Skiing in the Alps; Cruising in the Caribbean; Backpacking in Thailand; Lying on a beach in Kerala. Sounds like bliss, doesn't it? But what cost are our two weeks in the sun having on the destinations we fantasise all year about visiting? None of us are going to stop holidaying, and at the heart of The Final Call is an emphatic attempt to impassion readers, not turn them off tourism. By offering solutions, Leo hopes to guide readers towards making informed decisions in their holiday choices.

Charlotte Hobson spent a year between school and university as a student in Voronezh, in deepest provincial Russia. Her arrival coincided with the collapse of this society and an initial optimism about the fall of communism which eventually gave way to disillusionment and uncertainy. These feelings are mirrored in the doomed love affair she has with the vodka-swilling Mitya.

Produced in association with the Royal Geographical Society, London, the State Library of New South Wales, Sydney, and the Scott Polar Research Institute, Cambridge, this beautifully designed book contains the complete collection of surviving photographs from the Endurance expedition to Antarctica (1914-17), including remarkable early colour images. Capturing both the ordinary and the extraordinary, the portfolio section includes all of Hurley's most famous photographs and many others first published in the hardback edition of this book. From the Endurance trapped in the ice to the launching of the James Caird and the final rescue, every image is exquisitely reproduced. The book also contains a biography of Frank Hurley by Gael Newton, Senior Curator of Photography at the National Gallery of Australia, an account of the Endurance expedition by Shane Murphy and a critical appraisal of Hurley's place in the history of photography by Michael Gray, Director of the Fox Talbot Museum of Photography.

There is hardly a city in the world with richer historical and cultural associations than London. It is a place where history has been made for thousands of years, and where it is still being made today. It is not a city frozen in time, preserved in its ancient medieval pomp but a place that has been at or near the centre of national life for 1000 years and at the forefront of international political, cultural and economic history for each of the past five centuries. Here Stephen Inwood, bestselling author of A History of London, and a lifelong student of the city's rich and vibrant history, offers an explorer's guide to London's past. As you walk the streets of the capital, whether you live in the city or are just visiting it, Inwood will show you London's history all around you: stretches of Roman wall; medieval churches and Tudor houses that survived the Great Fire; monastic buildings that survived the Reformation; street markets first established centuries ago that survive today; Georgian streets and squares that were spared the wreckers' ball; Wren churches; Victorian terraces; and, Inns of Court that survived the Blitz. He takes you to the London of Chaucer and Shakespeare, Samuels Pepys and Johnson; Dickens and Darwin, T.S Eliot and George Orwell. It is the perfect book to have in your pocket or your bag as you go about your business in this most fascinating of cities.

A chance conversation with a Provencal vigneron leads to the most unlikely of quests - a hunt to find France's palest rose. Extremely Pale Rose is an entertaining and informative account of the travels of Jamie, his wife Tanya and their ebullient friend Peter Swift, as they take up this challenge. Giving up their lives in London, they quickly discover an unfortunate truth - the French won't treat rose or their quest seriously. Rose is seen as a poor cousin to red and white wine, drunk largely as an aperitif or to wash away the taste of spicy food. And although for many Brits pale rose has come to epitomize the south of France, French wine connoisseurs view it as flavourless water fit only for tourists. In bars, boulangeries and boucheries from Bordeaux to Bandol, Jamie, Tanya and Peter are recommended diverse vineyards to visit and as they travel they encounter the beginnings of a rose revolution - French attitudes to pale pink wine appear to be changing, but is it too little too late to help them succeed in their quest?

Why is Italy still riven with internal conflict? Why does one man - Silvio Berlusconi - appear to own everything from Padre Nostro to Cosa Nostra? Tobias Jones sets out to answer these and many other questions during his three-year voyage across the Italian peninsula. What emerges is not a book about the tourist concerns of climate, cuisine and art, but one about the much livelier and stranger side of the 'Bel Paese': the language, football, Catholicism, cinema, television and terrorism - and the grip exercised by Berlusconi through his vast media empire and Presidency of the Ministerial Council. The Italy Tobias Jones discovers is a country which is proudly 'visual' rather than 'verbal', and where crime is hardly ever followed by punishment. It is a place of incredible illusionism, where it is impossible to distinguish fantasy from reality, fact from fiction.