Troubles is a 1970 novel by the English author J.G. Farrell. It won the Lost Man Booker Prize and the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize. Troubles concerns the dilapidation of a once grand Irish hotel (the Majestic), in the midst of the political upheaval during the Irish War of Independence (1919-1921). Troubles was adapted into a made-for-television film in 1988, starring Ian Charleson and Ian Richardson.
The novel is the first installment in Farrell’s acclaimed ‘Empire Trilogy’, preceding The Siege of Krishnapur and The Singapore Grip. Although there are similar themes within the three novels (most notably that of the British Empire), they do not form a sequence of storytelling.
Farrell was one of six authors nominated for the Lost Man Booker Prize of 1970, a contest delayed by 40 years because a reshuffling of the fledgling competition’s rules. On 19 May 2010, Troubles was declared the winner.
Sing & Learn Times Tables with Don Spencer! Learning the times tables is made fun and easy. The sing-along CD helps to teach, reinforce and practice the times tables. Each time table has revision activities for extra practice and to build learning.
Do you have a hobby you wish you could indulge in all day? An obsession that keeps you up at night? Now is the perfect time to take that passion and make a living doing what you love. In Crush It! Why NOW Is the Time to Cash In on Your Passion, Gary Vaynerchuk shows you how to use the power of the Internet to turn your real interests into real businesses. Gary spent years building his family business from a local wine shop into a national industry leader. Then one day he turned on a video camera, and by using the secrets revealed here, transformed his entire life and earning potential by building his personal brand. By the end of this book, readers will have learned how to harness the power of the Internet to make their entrepreneurial dreams come true. Step by step, Crush It! is the ultimate driver’s manual for modern…
Gary Vaynerchuk
Gary Vaynerchuk
Gary Vaynerchuk is the Director of Operations at the Wine Library, located in Springfield, NJ. He has appeared on Late Night with Conan O’Brien and Ellen and has been featured in GQ, Men’s Health, and the New York Times. He was also the youngest retailer ever to receive Market Watch magazine’s prestigious Leader award in 2003, at age 28. He lives in New York City.
Drawing is simple and fun with Let’s Draw: Dinosaurs. Follow the steps in this book and learn to draw unique creatures from Triceratops to Tyrannosaurus Rex. Create a prehistoric world as big as your imagination with this handy guide to drawing everything from basic sketches to full-colour illustrations. The book is also packed with interesting facts, so you can become an expert on dinosaurs in no time!
With step-by-step instructions and easy-to-follow directions, Let’s Draw builds drawing skills and confidence while providing a solid foundation for emerging artists. Here you will find information on what materials to use, expert techniques to master, skills to practice, and loads of helpful drawing tips. Let’s Draw: Dinosaurs provides everything you need to travel back to the days when dinosaurs walked the earth.
This Kit Contains Let’s Draw
- Dinosaurs book: Travel back to the prehistoric era and discover the world of the dinosaurs! From Stegosaurus and Triceratops to Brachiosaurus and Velociraptor, your drawings will be Tyranno-riffic!
- 12 coloured pencils
- Eraser
- Sharpener
- 3 Drawing pencils
Let’s Draw: Fairies
Drawing is simple and fun with Let’s Draw: Fairies. Follow the steps and learn to draw beautiful fairies and their magical friends. Create a fantasy world as big as your imagination with this handy guide to drawing everything from basic sketches to full-colour illustrations. The book is also packed with interesting facts, so you can become and expert on fairies in no time! With step-by-step instructions and easy-to-follow directions, Let’s Draw builds drawing skills and confidence while providing a solid foundation for emerging artists. Here you will find information on what materials to use, expert techniques to master, skills to practice, and loads of helpful drawing tips.
Let’s Draw: Fairies provides everything you need to create your own enchanting fairy wonderland.
This kit contains: Let’s Draw – Fairies book: Do fairies exist? They do in Let’s Draw – Fairies! From sprites and brownies to goblins and dryads, learn to draw then all.
The Orange Prize for Fiction (known as the Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction from 2007 to 2008) is one of the United Kingdom’s most prestigious literary prizes, annually awarded to a female author of any nationality for the best original full-length novel written in English, and published in the United Kingdom in the preceding year. The prize was originally due to be launched in 1994 with the support of Mitsubishi but public controversy over the merits of the award caused the sponsorship to be withdrawn. Funding from Orange, a UK mobile network operator and Internet service provider, allowed the prize to be launched in 1996 by a committee of male and female “journalists, reviewers, agents, publishers, librarians, booksellers”, including current Honorary Director Kate Mosse. The prize was established to recognise the contributions of female writers who Mosse believed were often overlooked in other major literary awards, and in reaction to the all-male shortlist for the 1991 Man Booker Prize. The winner of the prize receives £30,000, along with a bronze sculpture called the Bessie created by artist Grizel Niven, the sister of actor and writer David Niven. Typically, a longlist of nominees is announced around March each year, followed by a shortlist in June; within days the winner is announced. The winner is selected by a board of “five leading women” each year. In 2005, judges named Andrea Levy’s Small Island as the “Orange of Oranges”, the best novel of the preceding decade.
The BBC suggests that the Orange Prize forms part of the “trinity” of UK literary prizes, along with the Man Booker Prize and the Costa Book Awards; the sales of works by the nominees of these awards are significantly boosted. Levy’s 2004 winning book sold almost one million copies (in comparison to less than 600,000 for the Man Booker Prize winner of the same year), while sales of Helen Dunmore’s A Spell of Winter quadrupled after being awarded the inaugural prize. Valerie Martin’s 2003 award saw her novel sales increase tenfold after the award, and British libraries, who often support the prize with various promotions, reported success in introducing people to new authors: “48% said that they had tried new writers as a result of the promotion, and 42% said that they would try other books by the new authors they had read.” However, the fact that the prize singles out female writers is not without controversy. After the prize’s foundation, Auberon Waugh nicknamed it the “Lemon Prize” while Germaine Greer claimed there would soon be a prize for “writers with red hair”. Winner of the 1990 Man Booker Prize A. S. Byatt has called it a “sexist prize”, claiming “such a prize was never needed.” In 1999, the chairwoman of the judges, Lola Young, claimed that British female literature fell into two categories, either “insular and parochial” or “domestic in a piddling kind of way”. Linda Grant suffered accusations of plagiarism following her award in 2000, while the following year, a panel of male critics produced their own shortlist and heavily criticised the genuine shortlist. The 2007 shortlist was decried for being derived from “… a lot of dross …” by the chair of the judging panel Muriel Gray, while former editor of The Times Simon Jenkins called it “sexist”. In 2008, writer Tim Lott called the award “a sexist con-trick” and suggested “the Orange Prize is sexist and discriminatory, and it should be shunned”.
No woman has won the award more than once but Margaret Atwood has been nominated three times without a win. Since the inaugural award to Helen Dunmore, British writers have won five times, while North American authors have secured the prize seven times.
The Orange Prize for Fiction 2010 Shortlist
(announced 20 April)
The judges for The Orange Prize for Fiction 2010 comprised rabbi and author Baroness Neuberger, author Michèle Roberts, journalist Miranda Sawyer and editor of British Vogue Alexandra Shulman.
The winner of the £30,000 prize will be announced on 9th June.
The shortlist for The Orange Prize for Fiction 2010:
The Very Thought of You by Rosie Alison (Alma Books)
The Very Thought of You
England, 31st August 1939: the world is on the brink of war. As Hitler prepares to invade Poland, thousands of children are evacuated from London to escape the impending Blitz. Torn from her mother, eight-year-old Anna Sands is relocated with other children to a large Yorkshire estate that has been opened up to evacuees by Thomas and Elizabeth Ashton, an enigmatic childless couple. Soon Anna gets drawn into their unravelling relationship, seeing things that are not meant for her eyes – and finding herself part-witness and part-accomplice to a love affair, with unforeseen consequences.
Born in the US and reared in a series of provincial households in Mexico, Harrison Shepherd is mostly a liability to his social-climbing mother, Salomé; his fortunes remaining insecure as Salomé finds her rich men-friends always on the losing side of the Mexican Revolution.
Harrison aims for invisibility, observing his world and recording everything in his notebooks with a peculiar selfless irony. Life is what he learns from servants putting him to work in the kitchen, errands he runs on the streets. Then, one day, he ends up mixing plaster for famed Mexican muralist, Diego Riviera – which leads to a job in Riviera’s house, where Harrison makes himself useful to the muralist, his wife Frida Kahlo and the exiled Bolshevik leader, Lev Trotsky.
A violent upheaval sends him to the US. In Carolina, he remakes himself in America’s hopeful image and finds an extraordinary use for his talents of observation. But political winds continue to volley him between north and south, in a story that turns many times on the unspeakable breach – the lacuna – between truth and public presumption.
Black Water Rising by Attica Locke (Serpent’s Tail)
Black Water Rising
On a dark night, out on the Houston bayou to celebrate his wife’s birthday, Jay Porter hears a scream. Saving a distressed woman from drowning, he opens a Pandora’s Box.
Not the lawyer he set out to be, Jay long ago made peace with his radical youth, tucked away his darker sins and resolved to make a fresh start. His impulsive act out on the bayou is heroic, but it puts Jay in danger, ensnaring him in a murder investigation that could cost him his practice, his family and even his life. But before he can untangle the mystery that stretches to the highest reaches of corporate power, he must confront the demons of his past.
England in the 1540s is a heartbeat from disaster. If the king dies without a male heir, the country could be destroyed by civil war. Henry VIII wants to annul his marriage of twenty years, and marry Anne Boleyn. The pope and most of Europe oppose him. The quest for the petulant king’s freedom destroys his advisor, the brilliant Cardinal Wolsey, and leaves a power vacuum and a deadlock.
Into this impasse steps Thomas Cromwell. Son of a brutal blacksmith, a political genius, a briber, a bully and a charmer, Cromwell has broken all the rules of a rigid society in his rise to power, and is prepared to break some more. Rising from the ashes of personal disaster – the loss of his young family and of Wolsey, his beloved patron – he picks his way deftly through a court where ‘man is wolf to man.’ Pitting himself against parliament, the political establishment and the papacy, he is prepared to reshape England to his own and Henry’s desires.
With her government quietly gearing up for war in the Middle East, twenty-year-old Tassie Keltjin, a ‘half-Jewish’ farmer’s daughter from the plains of the Midwest, has come to the university town of Troy – a girl escaping her home to encounter the complex world of culture and politics.
When she takes a job as a part-time nanny to a couple who seem at once mysterious and glamorous, Tassie is drawn more deeply into the life of their newly-adopted child and a household that steadily reveals its complications. With her past becoming increasingly alien to her – her parents seem older when she visits; her disillusioned brother ever more fixed on joining the military – Tassie finds herself becoming the stranger she has at times imagined herself to be. As the year unfolds, love leads her to new and formative experiences, but it is then that the past and the future burst forth in dramatic and shocking ways.
The White Woman on the Green Bicycle by Monique Roffey (S&S)
The White Woman on a Green Bicycle
When George and Sabine Harwood arrive in Trinidad from England George instantly takes to their new life, but Sabine feels isolated, heat-fatigued, and ill at ease with the racial segregation and the imminent dawning of a new era. Her only solace is her growing fixation with Eric Williams, the charismatic leader of Trinidad’s new national party, to whom she pours out all her hopes and fears for the future in letters that she never brings herself to send. As the years progress, George and Sabine’s marriage endures for better or worse. When George discovers Sabine’s cache of letters, he realises just how many secrets she’s kept from him – and he from her – over the decades. And he is seized by an urgent, desperate need to prove his love for her, with tragic consequences…
The Orange Award for New Writers 2010
(announced 13 April)
The Award was launched in 2005 in partnership with Arts Council England. Renewing their commitment to the partnership with Orange, Arts Council England has committed a further £30,000 over the next three years (£10,000 per year) for bursary awards for the winners of the Orange Award for New Writers. By offering a bursary to a novelist or short story writer for her first publication, the Arts Council is able to support the professional development of a writer at a crucial stage in her career.
Authors who have written their first work of fiction can be entered for both the Orange Prize for Fiction and the Award for New Writers.
The shortlist for The Orange Award for New Writers 2010:
The Book of Fires by Jane Borodale (Harper Press)
The Book of Fires
1752. As winter approaches, two guilty secrets drive seventeen-year-old Agnes Trussel to run away from her home in rural Sussex. Pregnant with an unwanted child and carrying stolen coins, she is shocked by the squalor and poverty of London.
Making cupcakes has never been more fun. These recipes are all very easy to make and so allow you to spend more time with friends and family rather than hiding away in the kitchen. Not only will the diversity of cupcakes take you by surprise, the fantastic taste of these sweet treats will leave you wanting more.
Before you begin your cupcake cake, put down a foil-lined cake board or at least a sheet of stiff cardboard wrapped in aluminum foil. Cakes are hard enough to move, but when you have a cake with a wobbly base such as is the case with a cupcake cake, it’s even more important to have stability and transfer the goods as little as possible.
It may help to “map” out a template or layout first, using paper circles, so you know exactly where to place your cupcakes before you start (You wouldn’t want to get them all down and then realize they don’t fit on your base.)
It’s often a good idea to leave the cupcakes in their paper liners. It keeps them stable and even, and also it’s easier to stick them to the cake board. Once you’ve decided on the shape you’d like your cupcake cake to be, place the cupcakes close to one another, and then lift each one up and put a little big of icing on the bottoms of the cupcakes (or their liners) to adhere them to the base.
There are several ways to frost a cupcake cake, and it depends on the “look” you’re going for. Some cupcake cakes are obviously made from cupcakes, and it’s intended to be noticed right away, such as with a line of cupcakes forming a caterpillar. However, other cupcake cakes are more subtle, and at first glance they look like a regular cake. If you want yours to look like a regular cake, visualize and treat the grouped cupcakes as a single unit. As you frost the cupcakes, sweep your knife or spatula over the cupcakes in one motion. Use thicker frosting rather than thin (from a can is fine) to be sure it will clear the “gaps” between the cupcakes OK. If you’re using a decorating bag, draw it all the way across the cake or perimeter in smooth motions.
Cupcake cakes are fun to make and a great twist that will be a hit at any party. You’ll have an original look as well as automatic portion control!
(Tips by Devanie M. Angel)
Easy Cupcakes is currently available at MPH Online. Get more tips in detail for only RM29.90! (While stocks last)
iriver Story is a portable e-book reader that utilizes the E-ink film display technology. It is designed to provide the same experience as reading on printed paper. You can read your favorite books and various contents as much as you like.
iriver Story supports e-Pub as well as Adobe PDF. It is especially useful for businessmen who travel frequently as it also supports Microsoft Office files.
You can read up to 30 books (3-4 hours day for a week) as special E-ink display consumes power only when pages are turned.
Also you can listen to music for 24 hours and record voice for 5 hours.
*The battery life may vary according on file size.
iriver Story features MP3 playback and allows you to listen to music as well as audio books. You can also use it as a voice recorder.
If you are a comic book fan, you no longer have to carry comic books in your bag. iriver Story features an SD card slot for additional storage up to 32GB SDHC allowing users to store as much contents as they like.
iriver Story features a simple design with its display bezel in the shape of a dish. This design extends users’ emotional attachment and provides a natural grip as well as a sleek look.
Click here for more information about the iriver Story e-Reader.
215 square feed (20 square meters) can conquer space. This book, proves it. Small Interiors is a reflection of the small living spaces inhabited by most people in today’s society. In fact, winning the war of the square foot has become one of the greatest concerns of the new century, and the lack of housing with adequate space has caused a realignment of the demographic maps of cities: the young and old stay in the city centers while families flee to the suburbs in search of more amenities.
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