General

When Mary Pinny dies from a snakebite, she leaves her young daughter, Comity, and husband Herbert in the Middle of Nowhere. As Stationmaster of the Kinkindele Repeater Station, Herbert Pinny takes great pride in his job; receiving morse messages and passing them down the Wire to the rest of Austr...

Who invented beds? When did we start cleaning our teeth? How old are wine and beer? Which came first: the toilet seat or toilet paper? What was the first clock? Every day, from the moment our alarm clock wakes us in the morning until our head hits our pillow at night, we all take part in rituals ...

One of Britian's best loved writers chooses her best short stories from her career at the forefront of contemporary fiction.

When a sick cub arrives at the bear farm, no one expects it to survive. But twelve-year-old Tam refuses to give up hope - he nurses the bear back to health and they form an unbreakable bond. Tam swears to return his bear to the wild - but in a world torn apart by indifference and greed, will Tam ...

Drawn from a lifetime's search for the weird and the wonderful, 'The Most Interesting Book in the World' is a miscellany of things too strange to be true, yet somehow are.

Chloe sees Mr Stink every day, but she's never spoken to him. Which isn't surprising, because he's a tramp, and he stinks. But there's more to Mr Stink than meets the eye (or nose) and before she knows it, Chloe has an unusual new friend hiding in her garden shed.

This novel is a rich, intense, and generous-hearted story about two friends, Elena and Lila. Ferrante's inimitable style lends itself perfectly to a meticulous portrait of these two women that is also the story of a nation and a touching meditation on the nature of friendship.

For the last 100,000 years, humans have accumulated enormous power. But despite all our discoveries, inventions and conquests, we now find ourselves in an existential crisis. The world is on the verge of ecological collapse. Misinformation abounds. And we are rushing headlong into the age of AI -...

Like his namesake, the great Aztec king, Montezuma is a survivor. Everyone knows that cats have nine lives, but this ginger tom proves that the old saying is true as his adventures taken him into the world beyond his farmyard.