When things start to look bleak for Ollie, Isabelle and Violet enters into his life. These two elderly sisters were on a crusade to stop their nephew from swindling the family fortune, and Ollie starts on a journey with them. The odyssey Ollie shares with these sisters and the special connection he has with Isabelle soon changes his life. Faced with the responsibility of his two elderly charges, Ollie confronts his demons. He realises that he's been using his mental illness as an excuse for not facing up to the world. He accepts a job promotion and his life starts to change. He soon finds himself improving his compulsive nature and turns his life around.
Charlie Spedding describes himself as ‘not particularly talented' – at least, compared to the group of people he had chosen to find himself among. These were the athletes in the Olympic marathon. So how did he end up with a bronze medal? How did he win the London Marathon? And why does he still hold the English record for the distance? In this remarkable autobiography he explains how – how someone who was almost bottom of the class when he first went to school, and even worse at sport, eventually turned himself into a genuinely world-class athlete, competing in top marathons all over the world, and genuinely going from last to first. As well as the enthralling life story of one of our finest distance runners, this book is a wonderfully clear and inspiring piece of life coaching for anyone who wants to make the most of their talents. But more than this, as Spedding says at the start, ‘I believe that on occasions you can create the circumstances in which you can perform at a higher level than your talent says you can'. Spedding's own story, and his chronicle of the big races he excelled in, proves it's true. 

For anyone aspiring to run a marathon, or indeed anyone who wants to set themselves a goal they think beyond their reach – and achieve it – this is an essential book.
The astonishing story of James Hardy Vaux, writer of Australia's first dictionary and first true-crime memoir If you wear 'togs', tell a 'yarn', call someone 'sly', or refuse to 'snitch' on a friend then you are talking like a convict. These words, and hundreds of others, once left colonial magistrates baffled and police confused. So comprehensible to us today, the flash language of criminals and convicts had marine officer Watkin Tench complaining about the need for an interpreter in the colonial court. Luckily, by 1811, that man was at hand. James Hardy Vaux - conman, pickpocket, absconder and thief, born into comfortable circumstances in England - was so drawn to a life of crime he was transported to Australia ... not once, but three times! Vaux's talents, glibness and audacity were extraordinary, and perceiving an opportunity to ingratiate himself with authorities during his second sentence, he set about writing a dictionary of the criminal slang of the colony, which was recognised for its uniqueness and taken back to England to be published. Kel Richards tells Vaux's story brilliantly, with the help of Vaux's own extraordinarily candid memoir of misdeeds - one of the first true-crime memoirs ever published. Kel's book combines two of his favourite subjects: the inventiveness, humour and origins of Australian English, and our history of fabulous, disreputable characters. With echoes of The Surgeon of Crowthorne as well as Oliver Twist, Flash Jim is a ripping read - especially for those who appreciate the power of words and the convict contribution to our idiom. PRAISE 'James Hardy Vaux was a con-man with a talent for words who wrote the first dictionary of Australian English. Kel Richards is a word-man with a talent for telling a stirring story about the con-man. In Flash Jim Kel Richards brings James Hardy Vaux to life as we haven't seen him before' - Emeritus Professor Roland Sussex, School of Languages and Comparative Cultural Studies, University of Queensland 'An engaging tale from a great student of our language about one of the conmen who gave Australia its character - and its distinctive slang' - Andrew Bolt, broadcaster and columnist 'One of the strongest bonds binding the people of Australia together is the Australian language. We speak a dialect of English richer and more colourful than most. When we call someone a "hoon" or invite a friend to a "barbie" we know immediately what we're talking about - but we have to translate for overseas visitors. This powerful cultural bond was, as Kel explains, built on four foundations. And the most colourful of those four was convict slang. The role that it played, and still plays, in the Australian language, and the story of the man who first recorded it is - as we used to say - a "ripping yarn". It makes a page-turning story' - Alan Jones, broadcaster and columnist 'There's never been a more important time to truly understand our Australian history and this book is a great introduction to the richness of our language and a wonderful window onto the real life of colonial Australia from my favourite wordsmith, Kel Richards' - Peta Credlin, broadcaster and columnist
THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER "Henry Fraser is one of the most remarkable people I've ever met" J.K. Rowling "What a story of transformation, inner power and inspiration" Jonny Wilkinson The memoir of the year by Henry Fraser, motivational speaker and mouth artist with a foreword by J.K. Rowling. Being challenged in life is inevitable, but being defeated is optional... Henry Fraser was 17 years old when a tragic accident severely crushed his spinal cord. Paralysed from the shoulders down, he has conquered unimaginable difficulty to embrace life and a new way of living. Through challenging adversity, he has found the opportunity to grow and inspire others. This book combines his wisdom and insight into finding the gifts in life's challenges, and will resonate with anyone facing an obstacle, no matter how big or small. It includes Henry's thoughts on how to look at the right things and avoid the wrong, finding progress in whatever you do, and acknowledging and accepting the darkness when it comes. Right at the heart of Henry's inspiring philosophy is his belief that every day is a good day.
Why does my child seem to worry so much? Being the parent of a smart child is great—until your son or daughter starts asking whether global warming is real, if you are going to die, and what will happen if they don't get into college. Kids who are advanced intellectually often let their imaginations ruin wild and experience fears beyond their years. So what can you do to help? In Why Smart Kids Worry, Allison Edwards guides you through the mental and emotional process of where your child's fears come from and why they are so hard to move past. Edwards focuses on how to parent a child who is both smart and anxious and brings her years of experience as a therapist to give you the answers to questions such as: •How do smart kids think differently? •Should I let my child watch the nightly news on TV? •How do I answer questions about terrorists, hurricanes, and other scary subjects? Edwards's fifteen specially designed tools for helping smart kids manage their fears will help you and your child work together to help him or her to become more relaxed and worry-free.
The richer countries spend about US$165 billion yearly on overseas aid, mainly to keep human development going. These efforts are undermined by climate change, water-catchment damage, biodiversity loss, and desertification, and their interactions with social systems at all scales, which few aid designs or evaluations fully address. This must change if aid performance is to be improved. Constraints to be overcome include limited understanding of the very complex systems that aid investments affect, and of the ecology behind climate change adaptation and mitigation. Aid Performance and Climate Change targets these problems and others, by explaining how to use multiple points of view to describe each aid investment as a complex system in its own unique context. With examples throughout, it reviews cases, ideas, and options for mitigation using technology and ecology, and for adaptation by preserving resilience and diversity, while exploring related priorities, treaties, and opportunities. Combining an empirical, eye-witness approach with methodological conclusions, this book is an essential resource for those looking to improve aid design and evaluation, and will be a necessary tool in training the next generation of aid professionals to respond to the causes and consequences of climate change.
In June 1678 two young men fought a duel near Sheerness. One of them was a Navy lieutenant in the garrison there; the other worked in the adjoining royal dockyard. The lieutenant was fatally stabbed; his opponent survived, prospered, and many years later became a Navy Commissioner. He was befriended by a younger colleague who married the dead man's daughter. Nearly fifty years after the duel, the survivor - perhaps as an act of atonement - left his mansion-house to the younger man, whose "best friend" was a Regimental Agent turned Jacobite supporter heavily involved in attempts to overthrow the Hanoverian dynasty and whose activities that younger man and his brother helped to finance. The plot of a work of historical fiction? No, all true, and documented in publicly-available records to an often astonishing extent. From 1662 to 1753 four inter-related families successively owned that mansion: Hall Place, overlooking Dulwich Common, five miles south of London. The last of those owners was the Navy lieutenant's daughter, and her husband was Francis Lynn, who from 1720 until his death was Secretary to the Royal African Company, trading in ivory, gold, and slaves. Francis and his younger brother Samuel financially aided their friend Captain William Morgan, who amongst other exploits assisted Lord Bolingbroke, formerly one of Queen Anne's Chief Ministers, in his escape to France in 1715. 'Ties of Blood and Friendship' tells the story of Francis Lynn (1671-1731). Using his hitherto largely unpublished 'diary', correspondence, and many public sources, it details his relationships with his benefactor Samuel Hunter, his own brother Samuel, and Capt. Morgan. Each had his own circle of friends, relatives, acquaintances and adversaries - often the same people in different guises - to complicate the story. It takes the reader on a journey through - amongst other places - Westminster, Cambridge, Dulwich, Sheerness, Chiswick, Tidmarsh (Berkshire), Bacton and Cotton (Suffolk), Nova Scotia, Paris, Madrid, and west Africa. The book also touches on the civil service in Queen Anne's reign, the 1722 Atterbury Plot, and 17th/18th-century inheritance law, including everything you will ever need to know (and more) about 'copyhold'.
Unmotivated and dormant, Jack is drawn into the rampant whirlwind of Neil Blake, who he meets one windy night on the Holloway Road. Inspired by Jack Kerouac's famous road novel, the two young men climb aboard Jack's Figaro and embark on a similar search for freedom and meaning in modern-day Britain. Pulled along in Neil's careering path, taking them from the pubs of London's Holloway Road to the fringes of the Outer Hebrides, Jack begins to ask questions of himself, his friend and what there is in life to grasp. Spiting speed cameras and CCTV, motorway riots and island detours, will their path lead to new meaning or ultimate destruction?
