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Welcome to My Fabulous Sh*tshow
Welcome to My Fabulous Sh*tshow embraces the power of being yourself and yielding your sword of soul to conquer the battlefield that is life as a woman and a mother.
It pays tribute to the amazing super troopers in your life who not only love and support you but are in the trenches just in case you call for backup. They will catch you, prop you up and send you back out to battle in your gorgeous stilettos!
Armed with eyelash and hair extensions plus a splash of impatience that only a single woman can have whilst juggling kids and a career, this book takes delight in showcasing how being in your mid-40s can also mean that you are in your prime time and life is only just beginning.
Learn how self-discovery is a journey for the brave or for those who like to cringe. Was it through trying to work out a brand after being described as Bridget Jones meets Carrie Bradshaw?
Is it from becoming a newly appointed student of the universe (with Google as a professor) or testing the philosophies of drama and love or even seeking answers about parallel universes?
Perhaps it was trying to find answers from undertaking a sexual energy cleanse, rebuilding an ‘empire’ after having a squashed heart or is it the struggle to date men of the same age.
This fabulous sh*tshow takes a humorous and curious look at living beyond your expectations and at how things in life just happen as they are supposed to.
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When East Met West
The path from a refugee’s child to a chairman of the board of a large company leads the author to a variety of people and unforgettable experiences. Hansjuergen Nelde experiences multiple political systems: born in national socialism, he grows up in socialism and is imprinted by the later GDR. To live and work in socialism for 40 years means adaptation to avoid being left behind. The author experiences the German unification as a managing director of a large pharmaceutical company. With that began in the now re-united Germany a much stricter capitalism than the FRG had ever seen before the fall of the wall. Thanks to his competency, Nelde manages to become the chairman of the board of his entrusted company that had transformed from a people’s-owned company (VEB) to a publicly listed company (AG). He meets many important politicians and actively shapes the new Germany. His memories come together in short stories and anecdotes behind the political background.
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When the Knives Rattle in the Drawer
Ryan Tanner is an average family man battling alcohol and the demons from his childhood, while struggling as a husband and a father. Drowning in a life that often makes no sense, he turns to an insightful, no-nonsense psychologist as a last resort to try and save his volatile, but altogether beautiful marriage with his beloved wife Tess. Surrounded by Ryan’s drinking, memories of their traumatic childhoods and the gut-wrenching lows of married life, When the Knives Rattle in the Drawer is a cathartic recount about understanding the damage that life can cause and searching for the strength to be the best partner and parent possible.
Set in two different worlds, the story evolves between the couple’s small-town family life and wild, alcohol fuelled nights in the inner suburbs of Sydney. After meeting at 17 years old, they have been married for 23 years and play a simple game: 20 questions, ask anything you want. They explore every aspect of trust, love, fidelity and desire before they go to the club. A club where they enter a world of primal sexual energy, a world where wild things happen.
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When ‘Will’ is More Than ‘Won’t’ - Your Journey Begins
I’ve always been a dreamer, wanting more from life than it was giving me, whilst still making the best of what it did.
I never thought in my darkest moments, or wildest dreams, that one day I would, with my partner of ten years David, find myself in a Land Rover we called Lizzybus driving around the world.
If I had imagined this, it would have been nothing like the reality of it, of blistering hot desserts, snow-covered mountains, civil wars, and uprisings, with our life depending on each other and Lizzybus.
From the very first moment I stepped foot on African soil, I wrote about the reality of living two feet from your other half 24 hours a day. The intimacy, hygiene, isolation, and loneliness, so far removed from my life to this point. But slowly, without even realizing it, it became part of me, and me it, seeing only the wonder, the joy, and the privilege.
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White Is Black
A patient’s journey in intensive care always starts like a tennis ball landing on top of the net, at the tipping point. Not only for the one in the bed.
Doctor Apfelstein, a specialist in the field, recounts his rise and fall; from flamboyance to custody; from the sleaziest north-east suburb of Paris where he may have killed some of his guests, to the jungle of Harley Street, and finally the flatlands of Norfolk.
He portrays the darkest recesses of his trade, the fleeting nature of life and love, and the blessings of all sorts of music: the soothing drug he needs.
When his own tennis ball lands on top of the net that separates oblivion from memories, at the tipping point, he has chosen his side. Memories. His way.
Translated from French by Brigid Purcell, PhD in European Literature, assisted by Philippe Grunstein, Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians (London), Associate Professor of Medicine, for specific vocabulary of Respiratory Medicine and Intensive care.
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White Light
Meet Andy Kent.
Husband, dad, businessman and survivor of death.
This is the story of a person’s life – the story of a life fully lived, a life touched by many others and a life that has made a difference. It hasn’t been plain sailing, and many lessons have been hard-learned along the way. From a cerebral haemorrhage he should not have survived to an impossible fund-raising walk spanning the length of the country, discover the incredible true story of a man whose mission it is to help others, whatever the cost.
Love, loss, and life combine in this inspiring account of a man who has always refused to give up, and whose determination has helped so many people.
This is Andy Kent’s story so far…
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Who Do You Think You Are?
This is at once a personal memoir and the story of what it is like to grow up and live alienated from the values of the society into which one was born. In the deeply fissured modern world, many now find themselves similarly in places where rival ideologies and interests are tearing their worlds apart. This is an account of how awareness of such a world reveals itself. In South Africa apartheid succeeded in enshrining its own particular values in law. But the roots of what had brought its monstrosity into being have never been confined to South Africa. They remain plain to see in the world today: intolerance, bigotry, fanaticism – xenophobia, racism, nationalism.
In this memoir, Hitler’s installation as German Chancellor and the rise of Nazism leads directly to the author’s early sense of not belonging: a growth in awareness of the reasons for the feeling and acute sensibility to the rifts and fractures lying beneath the surface of a comfortable domestic life. It clarifies how personal beliefs may become diametrically opposed to those of the society to which one belongs by birth. So the question of identity quickly arises: ‘Where do I fit in? Who am I?’ It was this that many Whites asked themselves in apartheid South Africa, but it is also one that increasingly must be asked by many today.
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Wild Colonial Boy
This autobiographical novel narrates the journey of Dan Docherty, a young Glasgow law graduate and karate black belt, who left his traditional Catholic family in 1975 to serve in the notoriously corrupt Royal Hong Kong Police.
In Hong Kong, he learned Chinese language intensively, then drill, musketry and law. A famous Tai Chi master accepted him as a disciple and trained him to become an international full contact champion.
In this book we’ll have a few beers with colourful characters like Big Don and Mountie Dave. We’ll visit exotic locales—Manila, Macao, Singapore… We’ll witness Dan in full contact competition and in street fight action. As they say in the Hong Kong Police, “If you can’t take a joke, you shouldn’t have joined.”
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Witness To History
For almost fifty years, Mohinder Dhillon was one of Africa’s foremost news cameramen and documentary filmmakers. This book is both a personal memoir and a photographic record of the many remarkable events he covered over the course of an extraordinary career – events that were to change the course of history.
This book is much more than a collection of photographs. It offers fascinating insights into the behaviour of contemporary African leaders: Emperor Haile Selassie, Jomo Kenyatta, William Tubman, Julius Nyerere, Milton Obote, Idi Amin, Col. Gamel Nasser, Léopold Senghor, Kwame Nkrumah, Muammar Gaddafi and Robert Mugabe among them. Mohinder’s encounters with these and other leading figures of the day took place against the backdrop of the Cold War proxy conflicts that were then tearing Africa apart.
While primarily a vivid eye-witness account of the many turbulent events that shaped Africa during and immediately after the colonial era, this wide-ranging memoir also documents events that Mohinder filmed in South Yemen, Vietnam and elsewhere in the world.
To the fore throughout is Mohinder’s deep and abiding sense of compassion, both in his approach to photojournalism and as a committed humanitarian.£9.50 -
You Know You Love It
This is the true story of one aspiring band’s out-of-control, flat spin and predictable nosedive into rock ‘n’ roll obscurity. It’s a torrid, tragic yet hilarious tale that will surely strike a chord with many a band out there. Because these guys weren’t going to go down quietly, they would go kicking and screaming with a defiant, united swagger, and a firmly-raised middle finger directed at the tide of indifference, musical and cultural, of the prejudices of their times.
Share their journey as all their hopes, dreams and ambitions crash and burn, then apparently sink without trace, buried for all eternity... until now. For just like a fully preserved fossil, uncovered after nigh on a quarter of a century, their real story can at last now be retold in all its salacious detail. The filth and the fury, the divisions and the dirt, exposed and relayed just as ye gods of rock would have decreed. It’s a very personal, honest, warts an’ all account drawn from the diary entries of the band’s frontman and lead vocalist, Matt Fielder.
Through all the ups and downs, tears, beers and occasional cheers of life in an outmoded, but still gigging heavy rock band in the 1990s. From its humble beginnings to its ill-fated ‘Storm over London’ tour and inevitable demise, It’s raw, it’s raucous, it’s rock ‘n’ fucking roll… and you know you are going to love It!
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Nadine Gordimer's Fiction
Nadine Gordimer’s Fiction is a major study of the life and writings of Nadine Gordimer, a towering figure in the literary and cultural life of South Africa in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, recognised for her fiction through several prizes, most notably the 1991 Nobel Prize for Literature. It has the makings of a guide, taking the reader through the complexities in Gordimer’s life, literature, and society, backed by academic research (doctoral and postdoctoral) and informed by Dr. Mazhar’s study visit to South Africa, including a face-to-face interview with Gordimer. The reader gets a rich picture mediated by the author’s own intellectual journey from Pakistan – the country of her birth – and the United Kingdom. Dr. Mazhar maps the complexities of colonialism in South Africa and beyond in different forms, most notably in the legislated discrimination based on race/ethnicity, Apartheid (1948–1994). Covering the literary writings and political activism of Gordimer both during and after Apartheid, the book provides the reader with a detailed account of individual works of fiction, and vistas of critical thought and action that serve as their source and backdrop.Dr. Mazhar draws on the cultural theories of Homi Bhabha, especially on the notion of The Third Space, a fictional space/borderland between social and political polarisations, which allows for reflection, refinement, and re-action that is transformational and psychologically uplifting. She demonstrates that Gordimer takes her characters through such spaces, which allow for a transformational experience that leads to perspectives/realisations that were missing as a result of constraints that were externally imposed by law and tradition and interiorised as a survival mode. Dr. Mazhar concludes that Gordimer gracefully articulates her vision for a world free of complexities, which one must strive for.Although the book presents the academic analysis of Gordimer‘s fiction and the memoir as separate parts, there are organic connections between the two, which link the social ethos, political struggles, varied ideological perspectives, and ethnic and trans-ethnic identities from which Gordimer draws her subjects and their lives and depicts them through appropriate narrative techniques.Nadine Gordimer’s Fiction is a welcome addition to books on author studies, literary criticism, and South African culture and society. It offers excellent material for both academic and non-academic readers. The style of writing used in the book is clear and simple, yet powerful. This can help the reader to appreciate the enormous achievement of Gordimer, which has established her as a major literary figure in South Africa and beyond.Dr. Balasubramanyam Chandramohan PhD (Shef), FHEA, Senior Research Fellow, Institute of Commonwealth Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London
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A Traveller in Fujian Province, China
It is said that travel broadens the mind. This is true, but it does not happen automatically. One must make the effort to observe and appreciate. One must allow oneself to be affected and changed. During his four and a half years living in Fuzhou, Fujian Province, China, Greg McEnnally endeavoured to do just that, helped enormously by the people he met – and hence this book is dedicated to them. He also read as much as he could, and this also helped him come to a greater understanding and appreciation.This book describes places: cities and towns, mountains and rivers, islands and countryside, but it also endeavours to present the people and their customs. The author found the whole experience exhilarating, informative and always interesting. It is hoped that the reader will share in this.
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