The Crossover Year

Meet Sri Anuprabha, aka Anu, a twenty-nine year-old banker who is terrified of entering her thirties. She dreams of quitting her job at the bank, sporting yoga pants and traipsing around the world. Her world turns upside down when things go awry and she is faced with the prospect of spending her days watching Tamil serials. She comes up with a five-point plan for reclaiming her life back before she hits the big 30. But things are never as simple as drawing up a flowchart in real life, are they? Especially with a ghastly recession rearing its ugly head. 

Anu bumbles through the corridors of domesticity and travels on a fun-filled roller coaster ride in a bid to discover her passion in life. Along the way, she meets new people, experiences crazy things and learns some hard lessons in marriage, friendship, parenting and life. 

The Crossover Year is a funny, yet heartwarming story of a woman in search of her identity, and a chronicle of her hilarious quest for discovering her inner mojo. Bring out a platter of cookies and a steaming mug of chai, and join Anu on the ride of her lifetime.

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A Spy Among Friends: Kim Philby and the Great Betrayal

Kim Philby was the greatest spy in history, a brilliant and charming man who rose to head Britain’s counterintelligence against the Soviet Union during the height of the Cold War—while he was secretly working for the enemy. And nobody thought he knew Philby like Nicholas Elliott, Philby’s best friend and fellow officer in MI6. The two men had gone to the same schools, belonged to the same exclusive clubs, grown close through the crucible of wartime intelligence work and long nights of drink and revelry. It was madness for one to think the other might be a communist spy, bent on subverting Western values and the power of the free world.

But Philby was secretly betraying his friend. Every word Elliott breathed to Philby was transmitted back to Moscow—and not just Elliott’s words, for in America, Philby had made another powerful friend: James Jesus Angleton, the crafty, paranoid head of CIA counterintelligence. Angleton's and Elliott’s unwitting disclosures helped Philby sink almost every important Anglo-American spy operation for twenty years, leading countless operatives to their doom. Even as the web of suspicion closed around him, and Philby was driven to greater lies to protect his cover, his two friends never abandoned him—until it was too late. The stunning truth of his betrayal would have devastating consequences on the two men who thought they knew him best, and on the intelligence services he left crippled in his wake.
 
Told with heart-pounding suspense and keen psychological insight, and based on personal papers and never-before-seen British intelligence files, A Spy Among Friends is Ben Macintyre’s best book yet, a high-water mark in Cold War history telling.

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Twelve Years a Slave

12 Years a Slave is a riveting true account of a free man captured and sold into slavery in the pre–Civil War South. Solomon Northup’s narrative explores one of the darkest times in American history and captures in vivid detail the unimaginable realities of slavery.

In 1841, the educated musician Solomon Northup, a free man living in New York who is cruelly deceived by the promise of a job in Washington, is drugged, kidnapped, and sold into slavery. Once Solomon arrives in New Orleans, he is given a slave name and soon realizes that any mention of his rights as a free man is sure to bring cruel punishment or death. Denied his freedom and ripped away from his family, he spends twelve emotionally and physically gruelling years on a Louisiana cotton plantation enduring the hardships and brutalities of life as a slave. When Solomon eventually finds a sympathizing friend, a daring rescue is attempted that could either end in Solomon’s death or restore his freedom and reunite him with his family.

When Solomon Northup published this harrowing account of slavery in 1853, it immediately stirred up controversy in the national debate over slavery, helping to sway public opinion in favour of abolition. His book 12 Years a Slave remains one of the most insightful, detailed, and eloquent depictions of slavery in America. It demonstrates the extraordinary resilience of one man’s spirit in the face of extreme suffering and his incredible will to survive.

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The Promise of a Pencil: How an Ordinary Person Can Create Extraordinary Change

The riveting story of how a young man turned $25 into more than 200 schools around the world and the guiding steps anyone can take to lead a successful and significant life.

Adam Braun began working summers at hedge funds when he was just sixteen years old, sprinting down the path to a successful Wall Street career. But while traveling he met a young boy begging on the streets of India, who after being asked what he wanted most in the world, simply answered, “A pencil.” This small request led to a staggering series of events that took Braun backpacking through dozens of countries before eventually leaving one of the world’s most prestigious jobs to found Pencils of Promise, the organization he started with just $25 that has since built more than 200 schools around the world.

The Promise of a Pencil chronicles Braun’s journey to find his calling, as each chapter explains one clear step that every person can take to turn your biggest ambitions into reality, even if you start with as little as $25. His story takes readers behind the scenes with business moguls and village chiefs, world-famous celebrities and hometown heroes. Driven by compelling stories and shareable insights, this is a vivid and inspiring book that will give you the tools to make your own life a story worth telling.

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What If?: Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions

From the creator of the wildly popular webcomic xkcd, hilarious and informative answers to important questions you probably never thought to ask.

Millions of people visit xkcd.com each week to read Randall Munroe’s iconic webcomic. His stick-figure drawings about science, technology, language, and love have a large and passionate following.

Fans of xkcd ask Munroe a lot of strange questions. What if you tried to hit a baseball pitched at 90 percent the speed of light? How fast can you hit a speed bump while driving and live? If there was a robot apocalypse, how long would humanity last?

In pursuit of answers, Munroe runs computer simulations, pores over stacks of declassified military research memos, solves differential equations, and consults with nuclear reactor operators. His responses are masterpieces of clarity and hilarity, complemented by signature xkcd comics. They often predict the complete annihilation of humankind, or at least a really big explosion.

The book features new and never-before-answered questions, along with updated and expanded versions of the most popular answers from the xkcd website. What If? will be required reading for xkcd fans and anyone who loves to ponder the hypothetical.

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Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt

Flash Boys is about a small group of Wall Street guys who figure out that the U.S. stock market has been rigged for the benefit of insiders and that, post–financial crisis, the markets have become not more free but less, and more controlled by the big Wall Street banks. Working at different firms, they come to this realization separately; but after they discover one another, the flash boys band together and set out to reform the financial markets. This they do by creating an exchange in which high-frequency trading—source of the most intractable problems—will have no advantage whatsoever.

The characters in Flash Boys are fabulous, each completely different from what you think of when you think “Wall Street guy.” Several have walked away from jobs in the financial sector that paid them millions of dollars a year. From their new vantage point they investigate the big banks, the world’s stock exchanges, and high-frequency trading firms as they have never been investigated, and expose the many strange new ways that Wall Street generates profits.

Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt

The light that Lewis shines into the darkest corners of the financial world may not be good for your blood pressure, because if you have any contact with the market, even a retirement account, this story is happening to you. But in the end, Flash Boys is an uplifting read. Here are people who have somehow preserved a moral sense in an environment where you don’t get paid for that; they have perceived an institutionalized injustice and are willing to go to war to fix it.

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How To Write Your Own Book: Anyone can become a successful writer!

Yоu knоw уоu саn wrіtе. Mауbе уоu'rе еvеn mаkіng money writing. But аrе уоu making еnоugh mоnеу wrіtіng? Or іѕ іt juѕt a hоbbу, соѕtіng уоu mоrе іn computers, роѕtаgе аnd рареr thаn you're earning? Aссоrdіng tо wrіtеrѕ' оrgаnіzаtіоnѕ, 95 реr сеnt оf writers nеvеr mаkе еnоugh mоnеу tо quit thеіr dау job. 

Whаt аbоut the tор fіvе per сеnt of wrіtеrѕ --- thеу'rе mаkіng bіg mоnеу, right? A ѕmаll рrороrtіоn of the tор fіvе реr cent ѕurе are. Thеу'rе thе headliners --- brand nаmе wrіtеrѕ like Stephen Kіng аnd Dеаn Koontz. Jоurnеуmеn (аnd wоmеn) wrіtеrѕ are dоіng OK tоо. Thеу'rе thе gеnrе wrіtеrѕ, wrіtіng rоmаnсе, mуѕtеrу аnd ѕuѕреnѕе, аnd non-fiction. Writers in thіѕ grоuр work with a proven method and you can do that too! - How To Write Your Own Book: Anyone can become a successful writer!

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Take a Breath

A young woman vanishes into the cold Glaswegian night. Nine years later, one man is forced on a journey into his buried past to reveal the truth behind her mysterious disappearance.

Take a Breath is set in gangster-ridden Glasgow. With razor-sharp pace and authentic urban grit, it charts the relationship of Paul and Lena, mining the darker side of love, as time and again they engage in a grim, obsessive dance. From their first tumultuous meeting, following their reconnections over several years, each encounter is more intense than the last. However, Lena is not the only one entangled with Paul. He has fallen in with notorious crimelord Manny Munroe, a name synonymous with drugs, prostitution and a ruthless lust for violence.

As the stakes rise ever higher, Take a Breath offers a chilling look at the organized crime realm of Glasgow, where everyone is connected and no one leaves unscathed. With searing narrative, complex characters, and the seamy backdrop of Glasgow's mean streets, this arresting work of fiction will leave you hanging on every tautly written page.

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Street Food around the World: An Encyclopedia of Food and Culture

Street foods run deep throughout human history and show the movements of peoples and their foods across the globe. For example, mandoo, manti, momo, and bāozi: all of these types of dumplings originated in Central Asia and spread across the Old World beginning in the 12th century. This encyclopedia surveys common street foods in about 100 countries and regions of the world, clearly depicting how "fast foods of the common people" fit into a country or a region's environments, cultural history, and economy. The entries provide engaging information about specific foods as well as coverage of vendor and food stall culture and issues. An appendix of recipes allows for hands-on learning and provides opportunities for readers to taste international street foods at home.

"This book should be of interest to anyone traveling internationally or wanting to experience how the natives obtain a great portion of their food."

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Indie Author Insider: Denise Grover Swank

Denise Grover Swank, author of the Rose Gardner Mystery series and Twenty-Eight and a Half Wishes, talks about her path to independent publishing and how she fulfilled her dream of becoming a full-time writer while raising six children.

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