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The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece: A novel

19,000.00

Part One of this story takes place in 1947. A troubled soldier, returning from the war, meets his talented five-year-old nephew, leaves an indelible impression, and then disappears for twenty-three years.

Cut to 1970: The nephew, now drawing underground comic books in Oakland, California, reconnects with his uncle and, remembering the comic book he saw when he was five, draws a new version with his uncle as a World War II fighting hero.

Cut to the present day: A commercially successful director discovers the 1970 comic book and decides to turn it into a contemporary superhero movie.

Cue the cast: We meet the film’s extremely difficult male star, his wonderful leading lady, the eccentric writer/director, the producer, the gofer production assistant, and everyone else on both sides of the camera.

Bonus material: Interspersed throughout are three comic books that are featured in the story—all created by Tom Hanks himself—including the comic book that becomes the official tie-in to this novel’s “major motion picture masterpiece.”

The Maltese Falcon

7,000.00

A special edition of this coolly glittering gem of detective fiction that has haunted three generations of readers, from one of the greatest mystery writers of all time. Featuring an introduction by James Ellroy.

A treasure worth killing for. Sam Spade, a slightly shopworn private eye with his own solitary code of ethics. A perfumed grafter named Joel Cairo, a fat man name Gutman, and Brigid O’Shaughnessy, a beautiful and treacherous woman whose loyalties shift at the drop of a dime. These are the ingredients of Dashiell Hammett’s iconic, influential, and beloved The Maltese Falcon.

The Mamba Mentality

8,500.00

In the wake of his retirement from professional basketball, Kobe “The Black Mamba” Bryant decided to share his vast knowledge and understanding of the game to take readers on an unprecedented journey to the core of the legendary “Mamba mentality.” Citing an obligation and an opportunity to teach young players, hardcore fans, and devoted students of the game how to play it “the right way,” The Mamba Mentality takes us inside the mind of one of the most intelligent, analytical, and creative basketball players ever.

In his own words, Bryant reveals his famously detailed approach and the steps he took to prepare mentally and physically to not just succeed at the game, but to excel. Readers will learn how Bryant studied an opponent, how he channeled his passion for the game, how he played through injuries. They’ll also get fascinating granular detail as he breaks down specific plays and match-ups from throughout his career.

Bryant’s detailed accounts are paired with stunning photographs by the Hall of Fame photographer Andrew D. Bernstein. Bernstein, long the Lakers and NBA official photographer, captured Bryant’s very first NBA photo in 1996 and his last in 2016―and hundreds of thousands in between, the record of a unique, twenty-year relationship between one athlete and one photographer.

The combination of Bryant’s narrative and Bernstein’s photos make The Mamba Mentality an unprecedented look behind the curtain at the career of one of the world’s most celebrated and fascinating athletes.

The Man From St.Petersburg

4,000.00

The Man From St Petersburg is a dark tale of family secrets and political consequences. Ken Follett’s masterful storytelling brings to life the danger of a world on the brink of war.

A Secret Negotiation
1914. Tensions are rising as Europe finds itself caught in a web of alliances and dangerous warmongering. To help tip the balance in their favour Britain aims to draw Russia into an alliance with them instead of Germany. Czar Nicholas’s nephew, Prince Aleksei, is sent to London for secret naval talks with Lord Walden.

A Play for Power
Walden has a personal connection to Aleksei; his wife Lydia, is Aleksei’s aunt. But they are not the only ones interested in his arrival, including Walden’s daughter Charlotte, wilful, idealistic and with an awakening social conscience, Basil Thompson, head of Special Branch, and Felix Kschessinky, a ruthless Russian anarchist.

A World at War
With the British desperately needing a signed treaty and the fate of the world hanging in the balance, the destinies of these characters become inextricably linked as the final private tragedy which threatens to shatter the Waldens’ complacency is acted out.

The Man In The Middle

6,000.00

The long-awaited autobiography of Howard Webb, the man who refereed the World Cup final.

Webb’s first game as a match official came when he was just 18 and his father’s verdict was blunt: ‘Useless – he doesn’t know his arse from his elbow.’ It wasn’t the last time his performance would come under fire. But Webb progressed through the ranks, and his natural calm authority made a good impression on players and administrators alike, and soon he was being offered the top matches and the toughest fixtures.

The policeman went on to take charge of some of the most important games, including the 2009 FA Cup final, the 2010 Champions League final and – the biggest of the lot – the 2010 World Cup final. Now, in this superb and frank memoir, Howard Webb reveals what it is like to be at the heart of the action in modern-day football where every decision can be unpicked by television cameras. He explains how he learned to handle some of the game’s superstars. Refereeing is a hard business, but Webb shows just why he enjoyed it so much and provides fascinating insights into how he dealt with the most challenging situations.

With his unique perspective, and the characteristic honesty and humour he has displayed as a pundit on BT Sport, Webb has written a book, updated for this edition, that reveals the game – and the man himself – in a new light.

The Man in the Rockefeller Suit

5,000.00

This shocking expose goes behind the headlines to uncover the true story of Clark Rockefeller, wealthy scion of a great American family, who kidnapped his own daughter and vanished. The police and FBI were baffled. Tips poured in, but every lead was a dead end … because “Clark Rockefeller” did not exist. In a gripping work of investigative journalism, Mark Seal reveals how German native Christian Gerhartsreiter came to the United States, where he stepped in and out of identities for decades, eventually posing as a Rockefeller for twelve years, married to a wealthy woman who had no idea who he really was. Fast-paced, hypnotic, and now updated with more stunning details, The Man in the Rockefeller Suit chillingly reveals the audacity and cunning of a shape-shifting con man.

The Man Who Could Move Clouds

15,000.00

For Ingrid Rojas Contreras, magic runs in the family. Raised amid the political violence of 1980s and ’90s Colombia, in a house bustling with her mother’s fortune-telling clients, she was a hard child to surprise. Her maternal grandfather, Nono, was a renowned curandero, a community healer gifted with what the family called “the secrets”: the power to talk to the dead, tell the future, treat the sick, and move the clouds. And as the first woman to inherit “the secrets,” Rojas Contreras’ mother was just as powerful. Mami delighted in her ability to appear in two places at once, and she could cast out even the most persistent spirits with nothing more than a glass of water.

This legacy had always felt like it belonged to her mother and grandfather, until, while living in the U.S. in her twenties, Rojas Contreras suffered a head injury that left her with amnesia. As she regained partial memory, her family was excited to tell her that this had happened before: Decades ago Mami had taken a fall that left her with amnesia, too. And when she recovered, she had gained access to “the secrets.”

In 2012, spurred by a shared dream among Mami and her sisters, and her own powerful urge to relearn her family history in the aftermath of her memory loss, Rojas Contreras joins her mother on a journey to Colombia to disinter Nono’s remains. With Mami as her unpredictable, stubborn, and often amusing guide, Rojas Contreras traces her lineage back to her Indigenous and Spanish roots, uncovering the violent and rigid colonial narrative that would eventually break her mestizo family into two camps: those who believe “the secrets” are a gift, and those who are convinced they are a curse.

Interweaving family stories more enchanting than those in any novel, resurrected Colombian history, and her own deeply personal reckonings with the bounds of reality, Rojas Contreras writes her way through the incomprehensible and into her inheritance. The result is a luminous testament to the power of storytelling as a healing art and an invitation to embrace the extraordinary.

The Man Who Died Twice

9,500.00

Elizabeth, Joyce, Ron and Ibrahim—the Thursday Murder Club—are still riding high off their recent real-life murder case and are looking forward to a bit of peace and quiet at Cooper’s Chase, their posh retirement village.

But they are out of luck.

An unexpected visitor—an old pal of Elizabeth’s (or perhaps more than just a pal?)—arrives, desperate for her help. He has been accused of stealing diamonds worth millions from the wrong men and he’s seriously on the lam.

Then, as night follows day, the first body is found. But not the last. Elizabeth, Joyce, Ron and Ibrahim are up against a ruthless murderer who wouldn’t bat an eyelid at knocking off four septuagenarians. Can our four friends catch the killer before the killer catches them? And if they find the diamonds, too? Well, wouldn’t that be a bonus? You should never put anything beyond the Thursday Murder Club.

Richard Osman is back with everyone’s favorite mystery-solving quartet, and the second installment of the Thursday Murder Club series is just as clever and warm as the first—an unputdownable, laugh-out-loud pleasure of a read.

The Man Who Knew

8,000.00

Greenspan’s life is a quintessential American success story: raised by a single mother in the Jewish émigré community of Washington Heights, he was a math prodigy who found a niche as a stats-crunching consultant. A master at explaining the economic weather to captains of industry, he translated that skill into advising Richard Nixon in his 1968 campaign. This led to a perch on the White House Council of Economic Advisers, and then to a dazzling array of business and government roles, from which the path to the Fed was relatively clear. A fire-breathing libertarian and disciple of Ayn Rand in his youth who once called the Fed’s creation a historic mistake, Mallaby shows how Greenspan reinvented himself as a pragmatist once in power. In his analysis, and in his core mission of keeping inflation in check, he was a maestro indeed, and hailed as such. At his retirement in 2006, he was lauded as the age’s necessary man, the veritable God in the machine, the global economy’s avatar. His memoirs sold for record sums to publishers around the world.

But then came 2008. Mallaby’s story lands with both feet on the great crash which did so much to damage Alan Greenspan’s reputation. Mallaby argues that the conventional wisdom is off base: Greenspan wasn’t a naïve ideologue who believed greater regulation was unnecessary. He had pressed for greater regulation of some key areas of finance over the years, and had gotten nowhere. To argue that he didn’t know the risks in irrational markets is to miss the point. He knew more than almost anyone; the question is why he didn’t act, and whether anyone else could or would have. A close reading of Greenspan’s life provides fascinating answers to these questions, answers whose lessons we would do well to heed. Because perhaps Mallaby’s greatest lesson is that economic statesmanship, like political statesmanship, is the art of the possible. The Man Who Knew is a searching reckoning with what exactly comprised the art, and the possible, in the career of Alan Greenspan.

The Man Who Ran Washington

12,000.00

From two of America’s most revered political journalists comes the definitive biography of legendary White House chief of staff and secretary of state James A. Baker III: the man who ran Washington when Washington ran the world.

For a quarter-century, from the end of Watergate to the aftermath of the Cold War, no Republican won the presidency without his help or ran the White House without his advice. James Addison Baker III was the indispensable man for four presidents because he understood better than anyone how to make Washington work at a time when America was shaping events around the world. The Man Who Ran Washington is a page-turning portrait of a power broker who influenced America’s destiny for generations.

A scion of Texas aristocracy who became George H. W. Bush’s best friend on the tennis courts of the Houston Country Club, Baker had never even worked in Washington until a devastating family tragedy struck when he was thirty-nine. Within a few years, he was leading Gerald Ford’s campaign and would go on to manage a total of five presidential races and win a sixth for George W. Bush in a Florida recount. He ran Ronald Reagan’s White House and became the most consequential secretary of state since Henry Kissinger. He negotiated with Democrats at home and Soviets abroad, rewrote the tax code, assembled the coalition that won the Gulf War, brokered the reunification of Germany and helped bring a decades-long nuclear superpower standoff to an end. Ruthlessly partisan during campaign season, Baker governed as the avatar of pragmatism over purity and deal-making over division, a lost art in today’s fractured nation.

His story is a case study in the acquisition, exercise, and preservation of power in late twentieth-century America and the story of Washington and the world in the modern era–how it once worked and how it has transformed into an era of gridlock and polarization. This masterly biography by two brilliant observers of the American political scene is destined to become a classic.

The Many Fortunes Of Maya

7,000.00

Maya J. Jenkins is bursting with questions: Will she get the MVP award at this year’s soccer banquet? Who will win the big grill off between Daddy and Uncle J? When will she pass the swim test and get a green bracelet?

For answers and a dose of good luck, 12-year-old Maya turns to her Wheel of Fortunes, a cardboard circle covered with the small slips of wisdom she’s collected from fortune cookies.

But can the fortunes answer her deep-down questions? The ones she’s too scared to ask out loud? Like, where did Mama’s smile go, the real one that lit up everything around her? When will Daddy move back home? And most of all, does she have enough courage to truly listen to the voice in her heart?

The Many Lives of Michael Bloomberg

6,000.00

The authoritative biography of Michael Bloomberg: business genius, inventor, innovator, publisher, philanthropist, activist, and presidential candidate. With unprecedented access, a veteran New York Times reporter and editorial writer who covered New York City and state politics offers a revealing portrait of one of the richest and famously private/public figures in the country.

Michael Bloomberg’s life sounds like an exaggerated version of The American Story, except his adventures are real.

From modest Jewish middle class (and Eagle Scout) to Harvard MBA to Salomon Brothers hot shot (where he gets “sent upstairs” and later fired) to creator of the machine that would change Wall Street and the rest of the world and make him a billionaire (a description by the author makes the invention clear to non-engineers).

Randolph’s account of Bloomberg’s life and time reads almost like a novel, a quintessentially American story. She explains the “machine” he invented that gave and continues to give instant access to an infinite amount of information to bankers and investors on how, what, and where to invest, and how it changed the financial universe.

Randolph recounts one day not long ago when the Bloomberg machine briefly blipped and the whole world’s financial marketplace came to a halt.

Randolph recounts Mayor Bloomberg’s vigorous approach to New York city’s care—including his attempts at education reform, contract control, anti-smoking and anti-obesity campaigns, green climate control, and his political adventures with both aides and opponents.

After a surprising third term as Mayor, Bloomberg returned to his business and doubles its already tremendous worth. The chapter that describes this is one of the most revealing of his temperament and energy and vision as well as how he spends his “private” time—private but convivial.

Bloomberg’s philanthropies are education, anti-NRA, and supporting a cleaner environment. He is a moderate liberal in a time when that quality holds the future of the Democratic Party and the country to account.

The Map Of Stories

10,000.00

Tilly and Oskar embark on an impromptu trip to the Library of Congress in Washington, DC, in search of an elusive group of bookwanderers called the Archivists, who they believe are the key to restoring the balance and saving the British Underlibrary.

Along the way, the friends realize that something strange is happening in the world of bookwandering: books are disappearing, people are forgetting their favorite stories, and stories are trying to drag Tilly into them.

With a mysterious set of clues and some surprising new faces, Tilly and Oskar will need the help of some of their dearest fictional friends to be able to solve the mystery . . . and save bookwandering forever.

The Marriage Class

6,000.00

One Class. Ten Couples. Ten Decisions.

Abi and Raymond are engaged to be married and have started marriage class. It’s an exciting step in their journey to the altar…if you discount Abi’s cold feet, and the resurfacing of her ex fiancé, her ex fiancé who is now married to someone else. Abi’s heart is torn in two very different directions; the calm and steadfast love she has with Raymond, and the chaotic yet exciting passion she had with Lucas. And they are not the only couple struggling.

In their fast-tracked marriage class, the nine other couples include a billionaire playboy reluctant to get married a third time, a couple engaged after a whirlwind romance and now struggling with the reality of getting to really know each other, a couple engaged after an almost two-decade long relationship, a couple engaged after a surprise and not-exactly-desired pregnancy, a couple who met on social media but who now differ about just how much of their relationship should be for the ‘gram and how much should be private, a groom fifteen years younger than his bride, and a bride marrying a man she has never met.

By the end of the marriage class, all ten couples find themselves at a crossroads, their relationships tethered by one very key question.

Will they…or won’t they?

The Marriage Clock

4,000.00

To Leila Abid’s traditional Indian parents, finding a husband is as easy as match, meet, marry. Yes, she wants to marry, but after 26 years of singledom, even Leila is starting to get nervous. And to make matters worse, her parents are panicking, the neighbors are talking, and she’s wondering, are her expectations just too high?

But for Leila, a marriage of arrangement clashes with her lifelong dreams of a Bollywood romance, where real love happens before marriage, not the other way around. So she decides it’s time to stop dreaming and start dating.

It’s an impossible mission of satisfying her parents’ expectations, while also fulfilling her own western ideals of love. But after a series of speed dates, blind dates, online dates and even ambush dates, the sparks just don’t fly! Now, with the marriage clock ticking, and her 3-month deadline looming in the horizon, Leila must face the consequences of what might happen if she doesn’t find “the one…”

The Marriage Portrait

12,000.00

Florence, the 1550s. Lucrezia, third daughter of the grand duke, is comfortable with her obscure place in the palazzo: free to wonder at its treasures, observe its clandestine workings, and devote herself to her own artistic pursuits. But when her older sister dies on the eve of her wedding to the ruler of Ferrara, Modena and Reggio, Lucrezia is thrust unwittingly into the limelight: the duke is quick to request her hand in marriage, and her father just as quick to accept on her behalf.

Having barely left girlhood behind, Lucrezia must now enter an unfamiliar court whose customs are opaque and where her arrival is not universally welcomed. Perhaps most mystifying of all is her new husband himself, Alfonso. Is he the playful sophisticate he appeared to be before their wedding, the aesthete happiest in the company of artists and musicians, or the ruthless politician before whom even his formidable sisters seem to tremble?

As Lucrezia sits in constricting finery for a painting intended to preserve her image for centuries to come, one thing becomes worryingly clear. In the court’s eyes, she has one duty: to provide the heir who will shore up the future of the Ferranese dynasty. Until then, for all of her rank and nobility, the new duchess’s future hangs entirely in the balance.

Full of the beauty and emotion with which she illuminated the Shakespearean canvas of Hamnet, Maggie O’Farrell turns her talents to Renaissance Italy in an extraordinary portrait of a resilient young woman’s battle for her very survival.

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