When Dakota Pink decides to find out the truth about Medusa's baby monster it is the beginning of a quest that will lead Dakota and her best friend, Treacle, away from the White Flats to Dog Island and the Fortress. Will they manage to excape the mutant killer eels to discover what lies behind the barbed wire of the Fortress and who the mysterious Lassitter Peach is?
A very funny school story with weird and wonderful characters by the award-winning author, Philip Ridley. Ruskin Splinter is small and thin, with knock-knees, thick glasses and a squeaky voice, and the idea of him taming a dragon makes the whole class laugh. Big, strong Elvis is stupid but he looks like a hero. So who is more likely to get the big part in the school play? But when the mysterious beast, Krindlekrax, threatens Lizard Street and everyone who lives there, it is Ruskin who saves the day and proves he is the stuff that heroes are made of after all.
The Dakota is arguably the best-known residential address in the world, home to dozens of New York City's most famous artists, performers, and successful executives. The rare sale of an apartment there, usually at jaw-dropping prices, is newsworthy, as is the financial and architectural health of the building itself, a landmark in every sense of the word. The first true luxury apartment house built in New York City, more than 130 years ago, the Dakota is still the gold standard against which all other apartment buildings are weighed. Historian Andrew Alpern tells the fascinating story of how the Dakota came to be, how Singer sewing magnate Edward Clark dared to build an apartment building luxurious enough to coax the city's wealthy from their mansions downtown for ultra-modern living on what was then the swamplands of the Upper West Side. Redrawn plans of the entire building, published here for the first time, show how Clark created apartments glamorous enough that they made living under a shared roof as acceptable in Manhattan as it already was in Europe's grand capitals, forever revolutionizing apartment life in New York City. This internationally renowned building is now accessible to us all—at least in print, if not in its ultraprivate and well-guarded reality.
What happens when an entire community is moved? Dakota Crescent was one of Singapore's oldest public housing estates and a rental flat neighbourhood for low-income households. In 2016, its residents—many of whom are elderly—were relocated to Cassia Crescent to make way for redevelopment. To help them resettle, a group of volunteers came together and formed the Cassia Resettlement Team. They Told Us to Move tells the story of the relocation through interviews with the residents from the Dakota community and reflections by the volunteers. Accompanying these are essays by various academics on urban planning; gender and family; ageing, poverty, and social services; civil society and citizenship; and architectural heritage and place-making. Through this three-part conversation, the book explores human stories of devotion, expectation, and remembrance. It asks what we can achieve through voluntary action and how we can balance self-reliance and public services. This book is for people who want to understand the kind of society we are, and question what kind of society we want to be.
In the beginning, Shadow Point was the tallest, most magnificent tower block anyone had ever seen. But soon the shining concrete began to crack and the gleaming windows became grimy and dull. Into this colourless decay comes Mercedes Ice, Crown Prince of Shadow Point, with an impossible demand: colour.
Filly and Fergal's parents argued more than any other parents. When they have the biggest argument of all time, they finally bring the house down. Trapped under the rubble, Filly and Fergal escape with the help of the magical meteorite spoon to a fantasy island - Honeymoonia.
INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER! “If you liked Where the Crawdads Sing, you’ll love This Tender Land...This story is as big-hearted as they come.” —Parade The unforgettable story of four orphans who travel the Mississippi River on a life-changing odyssey during the Great Depression. In the summer of 1932, on the banks of Minnesota’s Gilead River, Odie O’Banion is an orphan confined to the Lincoln Indian Training School, a pitiless place where his lively nature earns him the superintendent’s wrath. Forced to flee after committing a terrible crime, he and his brother, Albert, their best friend, Mose, and a brokenhearted little girl named Emmy steal away in a canoe, heading for the mighty Mississippi and a place to call their own. Over the course of one summer, these four orphans journey into the unknown and cross paths with others who are adrift, from struggling farmers and traveling faith healers to displaced families and lost souls of all kinds. With the feel of a modern classic, This Tender Land is an enthralling, big-hearted epic that shows how the magnificent American landscape connects us all, haunts our dreams, and makes us whole.
First published in New Zealand in 1957, Owls Do Cry, was Janet Frame's second book and the first of her thirteen novels. Now approaching its 60th anniversary, it is securely a landmark in Frame's catalog and indeed a landmark of modernist literature. The novel spans twenty years in the Withers family, tracing Daphne's coming of age into a post–war New Zealand too narrow to know what to make of her. She is deemed mad, institutionalized, and made to undergo a risky lobotomy. Margaret Drabble calls Owls Do Cry "a song of survival"—it is Daphne's song of survival but also the author's: Frame was herself misdiagnosed with schizophrenia and scheduled for brain surgery. She was famously saved only when she won New Zealand's premier fiction prize. Frame was among the first major writers of the twentieth century to confront life in mental institutions and Owls Do Cry is important for this perspective. But it is equally valuable for its poetry, its incisive satire, and its acute social observations. A sensitively rendered portrait of childhood and adolescence and a testament to the power of imagination, this early novel is a first–rate example of Frame's powerful, lyric, and original prose.
Bailey's new neighbourhood was ultra - mega - boring concrete until Scribbleboy covered it with eye - scorching colours. Ziggy, Ma Glamrock, Levi and Tiffany Spangle show Bailey how to create the best shape of all: a circle of friends.
