RESULTS IN BOOKS FOR ADULTS

The diversity of contemporary London is extraordinary, and begs to be better understood. Never before have so many people from such diverse backgrounds been free to mix and not to mix in close proximity to each other. But increasingly people′s lives take place behind the closed doors of private houses. How can we gain an insight into what those lives are like today? Not television characters, not celebrities, but real people. How could one ever come to know perfect strangers?
Danny Miller attempts to achieve this goal in this brilliant exposé of a street in modern London. He leads us behind closed doors to 30 people who live there, showing their intimate lives, their aspirations and frustrations, their tragedies and accomplishments. He places the focus upon the things that really matter to the people he meets, which quite often turn out to be material things, the house, the dog, the music, the Christmas decorations. He creates a gallery of portraits, some comic, some tragic, some cubist, some impressionist, some bleak and some exuberant.
We find that a random street in modern London contains the most extraordinary stories. Mass murderers and saints, the most charmed Christmas since Fanny and Alexander and the story of how a CD collection helped someone overcome heroin. Through this sensitive reading of the ordinary lives of ordinary people, Miller uncovers the orders and forms through which people make sense of their lives today.

The Soviet Union has disappeared along with people's nationality, currency, jobs, salaries, pensions, politics. Oligarchs pillage the nation's wealth. It looks as if Russia might become a liberal democracy. It also looks as if it might plunge into chaos. These are fascinating times and John Mole wants to be part of this New Russia. But what can he do? An MBA, 15 years in international banking and a few novels, have left him with few useful skills. Inspiration strikes - British fast food! Nobody is doing baked potatoes and the secret is in the packaging. He gets to work with technical advice from Jackets of Brixton, money from the British taxpayer, and a partnership with the Russian Farmers' Union. And then, just as it takes off - the summons. Breakfast with the mafia... The potato business becomes a journey under the skin of the New Russia. Hired as a rabotnik, a worker, entitled to a week in a sanatorium every year, he tries to corner the market in business names and pizza cheese. He is taken for a corpse's son, a Red Square demonstrator and a vampire's victim. He tries to merge into his surroundings, too literally sometimes, but nothing that a hose-down and a change of clothes doesn't put right. While he is trying to sell British fast food to Russians, Russians try to sell things to him. Fireworks, seashells, tungsten, the scrapings of baby reindeer horn. And advanced biotechnology, using bacteria to purify the air in submarines. Spuds end in fiasco. Bugs come to the rescue.

After being seriously injured in a hit and run, Piers Moore Ede went to work and recuperate on an organic farm in Italy. There he met a beekeeper, Gunter, who showed him, for the first time, the wonders and magic of the beehive. Battling depression and afraid to face the future, Piers finds a renewed sense of purpose through his work with the bees. Back in England Piers, still only in his mid 20s, decides upon a quest to seek the most wondrous honeys in the world. From the terracotta bee jars of the Lebanon to the clay cylinders of Syria, slowly his personal tribulations dwindle into perspective against the backdrop of the fast-shrinking traditions of the honey-farmers. Hunting wild honey from cliffs with Gurung tribesman in Nepal, and in vast jungle trees with Veddah tribesmen in Sri Lanka, Piers draws close to the very origins of life. Honey and Dust is about the world's oldest and purest food. But it also a personal quest of healing, an attempt to regain a sense of place in the world.

Poland was once the largest country in Europe - and one of the most powerful. The opulence of the Orient lived alongside the melancholy of the Romantic north creating a nation of passionate extremes and paradoxical psychology, but a country that valued honour and freedom above all. Devastated by waves of brutal invaders, Tatars, Swedes, Germans and Russians, Poland as the bulwark of Christendom was virtually eclipsed in the eighteenth century, an all but forgotten magnificence. A Country in the Moon is the result of Michael Moran's fascination with this remarkable land over nearly two decades. Honouring a deathbed pledge to his uncle, an eccentric concert pianist obsessed with the music of Chopin, he gives an insider's view of a country embarked on wrenching change after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the present confrontation of ghosts from the wartime and communist past. In this uproarious personal memoir and meticulously researched cultural journey we keep company with a gallery of fantastic characters; Tatars and Teutonic Knights, Napoleon's mistress and daredevil Spitfire pilots, robbers and Rolls-Royce mechanics, heroic defenders of freedom alongside an ill-assorted group of modern Britons and Poles. In chronicling the resurrection of the nation from war and the Holocaust, he paints a portrait of cities lost and cities gained, monumental castles, primeval forests and picturesque landscape gardens among the finest yet least-known in Europe. This captivating journey into the heart of Poland is a timely and brilliant celebration of the return to the European fold of a valiant and richly cultured people.

Jan Morris (then James) first visited Trieste as a soldier at the end of World War II. Since then, the city has come to represent her own life, with all its hopes, disillusionments, loves and memories. This book records her thoughts on a host of subjects inspired by the presence of Trieste.

While bicycling hundreds of miles through beautiful yet tragically depopulated regions, Dervla Murphy stayed with families whose lives had been devastated by murder, pillage and forcible uprooting. Many conversations reveal the grief and confusion of ordinary people, some of whom have shown extraordinary courage and resilience during the 'decade of decay'. Throughout Serbia, a few months of NATO bombing had inflicted immense suffering on the whole population - apart from Slobodan Milosevic's coterie - yet remarkably traditional Balkan hospitality had survived. Friends made in one place passed Dervla to friends elsewhere - from town to town and city to city. In the spring of 2000 she found the uneasy new states of Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina struggling to cope with their different problems. Tiny Montenegro - dramatically beautiful - was politically and economically in chaos. Kosovo, being ruled by the UN/Nato/OSCE triumvirate, was constitutionally in a state of suspended animation. A detour into individualistic Albania led to Dervla being attacked and robbed three times. Throughout her travels, Dervla tries to make sense of the confusing history and politics of this area. The acceptance of Yugoslavia's disintegration by so many Western commentators exasperates her. She contends that had the 'Great Powers' behaved otherwise, Yugoslavia would have survived. She sees at first hand the results of war crimes committed by various Balkan forces in Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo, and she also forcibly indicts the Nato air war.The Yugoslav essayist, Dubravka Ugresic, wrote in 1996, 'Over the last five years, numerous books have been published about Yugoslavia. In this heap of spoken and written words, few have mentioned the ordinary people'. This book aims to focus on these ordinary people.

While walking in South-west France, cook and journalist Orlando Murrin dreamed up the adventure of a lifetime: why not wave goodbye to the rat race and come to live in this rural paradise, where the only traffic is the boulangerie van delivering baguettes? His book tells the story of how he set up a boutique B&B and includes 100 amazing recipes. The story of the Manoir de Raynaudes begins on New Year's Eve 2001 when Orlando and his partner first glimpse the ruined manoir at dusk. Set in 13 acres of lush meadow, woodland, lakes and garden, they set about transforming the dignified old manor house into a phenomenally successful boutique b&b with its own magnificent kitchen garden. A Table in the Tarn charts the discovery, acquisition and renovation of the property. Along the way, we learn about the local food scene, with its astonishingly rich heritage of ingredients and dishes, about working in France and coping with the famous French bureaucracy, and about the unforeseen delight of working with the locals.

Sets out to answer the question - what do terms like "liberation", "revolution", "African socialism" actually mean to the people who define and use them? The author tells of his journey to Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda and Mozambique.

Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions among the Converted Peoples should be read as a sequel to Among the Believers, as it relates the story of Naipaul's five-month journey to the countries he visited, and often the people he interviewed, nearly 20 years earlier. Beyond Belief is a fascinating, unrelenting story of Naipaul's travels through countries which have been subject to what Naipaul calls Islamic "conversion", and the people he encounters and their complex, problematic relations with their faith.

A passionate and vivid recreation of the history of Trinidad The Loss of El Dorado exposes the barbaric cruelties of slavery and torture and their consequences on all strata of society - from the idealist to the reactionary - in a moving account which penetrates aspects of a complex society more often overlooked by professional historians. It is made up of two forgotten stories - the first being Walter Ralegh's raid on Trinidad and South America in 1595 and ends with his return in 1617, paroled from Tower of London. The second story occurs nearly two hundred years later - the story of the British-sponsored attempt from the newly captured island of Trinidad to set going a revolution in the Spanish Empire. The author looks at what Ralegh left behind in the Caribbean. A brilliantly written narrative history of scandals, betrayal, colonization and forgotten lands - ideal for readers of general history and travel writing.