The irresistible novel that was adapted into a major motion picture starring Leonardo DiCaprio. The Khao San Road, Bangkok -- first stop for the hordes of rootless young Westerners traveling in Southeast Asia. On Richard's first night there, in a low-budget guest house, a fellow traveler slashes his wrists, bequeathing to Richard a meticulously drawn map to "the Beach." The Beach, as Richard has come to learn, is the subject of a legend among young travelers in Asia: a lagoon hidden from the sea, with white sand and coral gardens, freshwater falls surrounded by jungle, plants untouched for a thousand years. There, it is rumored, a carefully selected international few have settled in a communal Eden. Haunted by the figure of Mr. Duck -- the name by which the Thai police have identified the dead man -- and his own obsession with Vietnam movies, Richard sets off with a young French couple to an island hidden away in an archipelago forbidden to tourists. They discover the Beach, and it is as beautiful and idyllic as it is reputed to be. Yet over time it becomes clear that Beach culture, as Richard calls it, has troubling, even deadly, undercurrents. Spellbinding and hallucinogenic, The Beach by Alex Garland -- both a national bestseller and his debut -- is a highly accomplished and suspenseful novel that fixates on a generation in their twenties, who, burdened with the legacy of the preceding generation and saturated by popular culture, long for an unruined landscape, but find it difficult to experience the world firsthand.
'Fifteen years ago, the internet felt like a special place my friends and I had built for each other; by 2020, we were standing on its ruins, wondering if we'd played a part in its destruction.' Journalist Marie Le Conte was born in 1991, the same year the World Wide Web was invented. She had her first blog at twelve, a successful music website at fifteen, a Wikipedia page at seventeen and now, at thirty, over 80,000 followers on Twitter. From MSN, Tumblr and MySpace, to chat rooms, forums and blogs; Marie is part of the millennial generation that grew up while the internet was growing up with them. Where did it go all wrong? How did the internet go from a place where you went to escape real life to where real life is shaped? A place where you could be yourself and find like-minded people to a world of filters and ads? A place we are all now desperately trying to escape from? Escape is a fascinating exploration of the rise and demise of the internet. It's a look back on the platforms, the people and the online places. It's an analysis of the lessons being online has taught us, how the internet has changed us - and a celebration of the tools it gives us to feel less alone. The online generation have forever altered the world we live in, but is the internet still a place for the people that shaped it?
From a travel TV Host (Plan Your Escape), travel columnist for the Huffington Post and experienced traveler (100 countries), turn your travel dreams into reality with this acclaimed, groundbreaking, and inspiring how-to travel book. You will learn to safely travel and see more for half the cost for all trips from a weekend getaway to longer vacations and trips with comprehensive planning tools and checklists. You deserve this popular selling book! It makes a great gift that keeps on giving. Former economics professor tells 100's of powerful cost-saving and how-to travel tips revealing proven secrets the travel industry does not want you to know! Learn to get the best deals on airfare, hotels, tours, car rentals, restaurants, cruises, and more. Both experienced and occasional travelers say Plan Your Escape, Secrets of Traveling the World for Less Than the Cost of Living at Home is an inspiring and comprehensive how-to travel book: "It gets people exploring possibilities they never thought of". It shatters common misconceptions about traveling showing you how traveling the world or living somewhere can be safer, easier, and more affordable than you think. This book gives you the practical resources, planning tools & checklists, cost-saving strategies, and tips missing in travel guidebooks.? From experienced travelers who have visited 100 countries, you will learn how to:?? Discover 100's of cost-saving and bargain-finding strategies for all trips, even a weekend getaway, so powerful the authors were able to travel for 2 years for less than $100/day for a couple, which they could never have afforded otherwise Get the best deals on airfare, hotels, cruises, tours, car rentals, restaurants, and more Choose the right destination for you and plan your trip Stay safe minimizing security risks far from home and tips and tools for maintaining a healthy lifestyle Save time and money with hidden secrets - 200 of the best Internet travel websites and apps Fall in love all over again! - how to bring you closer to a partner and how to get a reluctant partner to go travel, also great tips for solo travelers? How-to-pack with comprehensive checklists for women and men - pack light, have more, and still be prepared Reduce stress with step-by-step 5-month trip planning and preparation checklists and action steps Useful travel tips for experienced, occasional, and beginning travelers for any trip or living somewhere for 1-2 weeks or longer like several months Handle money & credit cards, Stay in touch cheaply with friends and family, Pay your bills online, Rent your home, Set up a travel blog, Take photos like a pro, and much more The Dunlaps rented their home and traveled the world for 2 years and are members of the exclusive Travelers' Century Club visiting 100 countries on 6 continents as well as 44 U.S. states. They have done home exchanges, taken 27 cruises on 13 different cruise lines on ships ranging from 10 to 3,000 passengers, and over 100 trips together taking cars, trains, buses, organized tours, and independent travel all over the world. Traveling is their passion! The Dunlaps have met scores of people along their worldwide journeys who asked hundreds of questions. They realized many people dream of taking a travel adventure but felt it would be too expensive with too many unknowns or didn't know the best way to pack or where to begin to make it actually happen. Plan Your Escape combines real-life answers with countless hours of research from travel experts. The experienced traveler will learn at lot. For occasional travelers, they show you how to start out slow, choose the right trip for you, and work up to longer trips or stays. They present ideas about how to get a reluctant partner interested in travel and how to bring you closer together even on a 24/7 basis. Plan Your Escape is the travel-planning guide Americans need.
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER In this poignant novel of longing and salvation, a hopeful widow and a resilient war hero discover the promise of love’s magic and new beginnings. After surviving the Napoleonic Wars, Sir Benedict Harper is struggling to move on, his body and spirit in need of a healing touch. Never does Ben imagine that hope will come in the form of a beautiful woman who has seen her own share of suffering. After the lingering death of her husband, Samantha McKay is at the mercy of her oppressive in-laws—until she plots an escape to distant Wales to claim a house she has inherited. Being a gentleman, Ben insists that he escort her on the fateful journey. Ben wants Samantha as much as she wants him, but he is cautious. What can a wounded soul offer any woman? Samantha is ready to go where fate takes her, to leave behind polite society and even propriety in her desire for this handsome, honorable soldier. But dare she offer her bruised heart as well as her body? The answers to both their questions may be found in an unlikely place: in each other’s arms. Includes Mary Balogh’s charming short story, “The Suitor.” Praise for The Escape “Bestseller [Mary] Balogh delivers an outstanding third installment of her Survivors’ Club series. . . . This exquisitely written Regency will appeal to Balogh’s legions of fans.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review) “A heroine who has never felt valued and a hero in search of a new purpose learn to take life as it comes and live each moment to the fullest. This tender, deeply insightful, and beautifully plotted romance shimmers with hope, possibility, and love.”—Library Journal (starred review) “Regency romance star Balogh continues her poignant Survivors’ Club series with a quietly intense love story that speaks to open-heartedness, courage and faith in new beginnings.”—Kirkus Reviews “A beautifully rendered love story of two wounded and lost souls who find each other and together discover strength and love. Tender, touching and mature, Balogh’s story slowly unfolds, reaching deep into the characters’ emotions demonstrating how love empowers, heals and redeems. Everything about this story is lovely and near perfect.”—RT Book Reviews (4-1/2 stars, Top Pick) “The Escape is such an apt title—two people escape from unhappy pasts, finding love in their mutual journey. Their capacity for happiness astonishes and delights them and the reader, as they both so deserve their hard-won happily-ever-after.”—Heroes and Heartbreakers “The Escape is full of excitement, adventure, and enchanting romance. The main characters are so well-developed, and Mary Balogh does such a wonderful job giving the reader a window into their thoughts, that by the end of the book you feel as though you know them intimately.”—Fresh Fiction
A ten year old and his family embark on a heroic escape from the former East Bloc Communist country of Czechoslovakia to seek a new life in the West free of oppression. Faced with unforeseen perils, heavily armored borders, three separate cultural changes, and never knowing what the next day brings, a family of four leave their entire lives behind and thrust themselves into situations with potentially devastating outcomes. Join the Rehacek family as they struggle during a journey across multiple border crossings between Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Yugoslavia, Austria, and Germany as they seek freedom and prosperity. Just imagine yourself standing in front of an open field covered with tall barbed wire fences, machinegun operated control towers, heavily armored guards with dogs, and hidden mine fields and you must somehow cross to the other side with a wife, a ten year old, and a six year old. Once you manage to cross from the Communist ruled Iron Curtain to the West alive and uninjured you have to live in a country that has a different culture, different customs, and everyone speaks a different language. As you struggle along the political channels of immigration you wonder if the next day you and your family will have a bed to sleep upon and enough food to eat.
Musaicum Books presents to you this unique collection of sea adventure novels and true stories of the most notorious pirates. History of Pirates of the Caribbean: Contents: The King of Pirates: Of Captain Avery, And his Crew Captain Martel Captain Teach, alias Blackbeard Edward England Charles Vane Rackam Mary Read Anne Bonny John Bowen The Trial of the Pirates at Providence The Pirate Gow The Pirates of Panama… Novels & Stories: Treasure Island (Robert Louis Stevenson) The Pirate (Walter Scott) Blackbeard: Buccaneer (Ralph D. Paine) Pieces of Eight (Richard Le Gallienne) The Gold-Bug (Edgar Allan Poe) Jack London: Hearts of Three Tales of the Fish Patrol Daniel Defoe: Robinson Crusoe Captain Singleton Jules Verne: The Mysterious Island Facing the Flag The Dark Frigate (Charles Boardman Hawes) Peter Pan and Wendy (J. M. Barrie) The Dealings of Captain Sharkey (Arthur Conan Doyle) The Pirate (Frederick Marryat) The Madman and the Pirate (R. M. Ballantyne) The Pirate City (R. M. Ballantyne) Gascoyne, the Sandal-Wood Trader (R. M. Ballantyne) Captain Boldheart& the Latin-Grammar Master (Charles Dickens) The Master Key (L. Frank Baum) A Man to His Mate (J. Allan Dunn) The Isle of Pirate's Doom (Robert E. Howard) Queen of the Black Coast (Robert E. Howard) James Fenimore Cooper: Afloat and Ashore Homeward Bound The Red Rover The Rose of Paradise (Howard Pyle) The Count of Monte Cristo (Alexandre Dumas) The Ghost Pirates (William Hope Hodgson) The Offshore Pirate (F. Scott Fitzgerald) Harry Collingwood: A Pirate of the Caribbees The Pirate Island Among Malay Pirates (G. A. Henty) Great Pirate Stories (Joseph L. French) Fanny Campbell, the Female Pirate Captain (Maturin Murray Ballou) The Dark Frigate (Charles B. Hawes) Kidd the Pirate (Washington Irving) The Death Ship (William Clark Russell) The Iron Pirate (Max Pemberton)…
In this instant New York Times bestseller and “multigenerational narrative that’s nothing short of brilliant” (People), two sisters’ lives from the 1950s to the present are explored as they struggle to find their places—and be true to themselves—in a rapidly evolving world from #1 New York Times bestselling author Jennifer Weiner. Jo and Bethie Kaufman were born into a world full of promise. Growing up in 1950s Detroit, they live in a perfect “Dick and Jane” house, where their roles in the family are clearly defined. Jo is the tomboy, the bookish rebel with a passion to make the world more fair; Bethie is the pretty, feminine good girl, a would-be star who enjoys the power her beauty confers and dreams of a traditional life. But the truth ends up looking different from what the girls imagined. Jo and Bethie survive traumas and tragedies. As their lives unfold against the background of free love and Vietnam, Woodstock and women’s lib, Bethie becomes an adventure-loving wild child who dives headlong into the counterculture and is up for anything (except settling down). Meanwhile, Jo becomes a proper young mother in Connecticut, a witness to the changing world instead of a participant. Neither woman inhabits the world she dreams of, nor has a life that feels authentic or brings her joy. Is it too late for the women to finally stake a claim on happily ever after? In “her most sprawling and intensely personal novel to date” (Entertainment Weekly), Jennifer Weiner tells a “simply unputdownable” (Good Housekeeping) story of two sisters who, with their different dreams and different paths, offer answers to the question: How should a woman be in the world?
Holly Robinson has no idea when she purchases an abandoned waterfront resort in Florida that her life is going to change forever. She becomes the victim of bad juju when she finds a lifeless body lying on a kitchen floor and another victim left for dead in one of her cottages, and Holly begins to wonder what could possibly happen next. Now some of Holly's lingerie is missing, her beloved Aunt Tess and another guest have disappeared, and hurricane warnings have just been issued. Resolved to bring her aunt and guest home safely, Holly enlists the services of her ex-boyfriend, charter captain and official scum-of-the-earth, Quint Chambers. Along with the island cops, Holly and Quint stumble across the bloodied vehicle the women were last seen in, submerged in the murky mangroves of the intercoastal waterway. As the storm spirals out of control and takes aim for the resort, the number of missing people continues to mount and the list of suspects holds few names. But even though Quint is still carrying a torch for Holly, he fears his past has come back to haunt him, putting those he loves in grave danger. In this romantic tale of suspense, it is up to Holly and Quint to solve a complex mystery dangling over their little piece of paradise before a killer strikes again.
NOTHING IS SAFE ON EARTH; YOU NEED A BACKUP PLANET. YOU CAN NEVER FIND A PLANET LIKE EARTH; YOU CAN’T SEARCH FOREVER. THERE IS NOTHING LIKE A PERFECT PLANET. Earth was once a beautiful planet with abundant natural resources. After making the planet uninhabitable, the humans escaped to Mars and to exoplanets in nearby galaxies. But, did they feel comfortable and safe on the new planets? After living happily on Mars for two millennia, who ever expected that Earth would haunt the human settlers on Mars once again? Halik, a young officer on planet Sulok in Triangulum, took the mantle of saving Mars from Earth. Before he could think about saving Mars, he had to learn a lot about Earth – why the humans left the planet, how they travelled across galaxies, how they made Mars and exoplanets liveable and the new species they encountered.
A relaxing vacation to the Caribbean island of St. Martin becomes the adventure of a lifetime. Seeking a restful getaway, Ben's plans are for lazing on the beach with a good book. However, upon arrival at a new resort on Orient Beach, Ben is introduced to much more. Encounters with beautiful women, shady businessmen and life-threatening events stretch Ben's resourcefulness while filling his days and nights. Explore St. Martin and its alluring beaches for uninhibited fun. A cast of zany new friends adds to the celebration of life in the Caribbean. Escape from the mundane, then the powerful enemies in the islands, to party another day.
