Bill Bryson
Mother Tongue

In this hymn to the mother tongue Bill Bryson examines how a language `treated for centuries as the inadequate and second-rate tongue of peasants' has now become the undisputed global language. He explains how the words shampoo, sofa, slogan, OK and rowdy got into our dictionaries and how the major dictionaries were created. He also explores the countless varieties of English - from American to Australian, from Creole to Cockney rhyming slang - and the perils of marketing brands with names like Pschitt and Super Piss. With entertaining sections on the oddities of swearing and spelling, spoonerisms and Scrabble, and a consideration of what we mean by `good English', Mother Tongue is one of the most stimulating books yet written on this endlessly engrossing subject.

Simon Garfield
We Are At War

Of all the accounts written about the Second World War, none are more compelling than the personal diaries of those who lived through it. Beginning in August 1939, and ending a year later with the Battle of Britain and the start of the Blitz, Simon Garfield has interwoven the diaries of five ordinary people as they face an uncertain future. Pam Ashford is a secretary at a shipping company who writes of daily events at her office; Christopher Tomlin, a salesman in Preston, longs for the day he will be called up; Tilly Rice moves her children to Cornwall, but returns to her home in Surrey just as the bombs start to fall; Eileen Potter, a London social worker, is shocked by the filth and infestation she discovers in the homes of evacuees; and Maggie Joy Blunt, a writer, tries to maintain a semblance of normality as the world changes around her. But the war they anticipate is not the war that unfolds.

On an ordinary morning in Fox Harbor, Wisconsin, Meg and Rex Van Dorn's lives are irrevocably changed when a drunk driver slams into Meg's car, killing the couple's precious sixyear-old son, Evan. In a town in which everyone knows everybody else, it's no surprise that Meg and the driver, Cindy Ann Kreisler, were once the best of friends. An alcoholic, Cindy was drunk at the time of the accident. Meg and Rex file a civil suit that would financially ruin the well-off Cindy Ann, but Meg has a change of heart, given the impending marriage of Meg's older brother to Cindy~Ann's sister. Unable to resume their old lives, Meg and her husband set off on a sailing trip on the Atlantic coast, where eventually rage, guilt, and bottomless anguish are converted into kindness, compassion, and forgiveness. Impassioned, insightful, and beautifully written, Blue Water is the story of people learning to face the unthinkable.

'Ansay shows with fluid and graceful prose the uncharted paths of ordinary, flawed human hearts'- Chicago Tribune