Gold can blind, lies can bind."For ten years, I've lived in a gilded cage inside King Midas's golden castle. But one night changed everything. Now I'm here, a prisoner of Fourth Kingdom's army, and I'm not sure if I'm going to make it out of this in one piece. They're marching to battle, and I'm the bargaining chip that will either douse the fire or spark a war. At the heart of my fear, my worry, there's him - Commander Rip. Known for his brutality on the battlefield, his viciousness is unsurpassed. But I know the truth about what he is. Fae. The betrayers. The murderers. The ones ... |
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A gilded cage is still a prison."This is the story of King Midas... Or that's what we were always told. The Golden King with his palace of riches and me, his golden touched girl. I'm kept locked away. For my safety, I'm told. No one can get in. Apart from him. But when political upheaval becomes strife in our kingdom, I am sent with the royal court to be with my King. And everything I know starts to change. My love for Midas is challenged, my trust is broken. Everything I knew about him was wrong. We are told it's his tale but really, it's mine. The fae abandoned this world to us. And the ones ... |
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Willy Wonka's famous chocolate factory is opening its doors at last! For decades, no one has gone into Willy Wonka's chocolate factory... and no one has come out. Finally, after finding the much sought-after golden tickets, five lucky children from around the world will be the first to walk through its doors after all this time. Augustus Gloop, Veruca Salt, Violet Beauregarde, Mike Teavee, and our hero Charlie Bucket, are in for the ride of their lives, as the fantastic cholocate factory is not as it seems, and is wilder than any rumors they've ever heard. ... |
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Tom's family have moved into their dream home. But pretty soon he starts to notice that something is very wrong - there are strange messages written on the wall and locks on the bedroom doors. On the outside. The previous owners have moved just across the road and they seem like the perfect family. Their daughter Amy is beautiful and enigmatic but Tom is sure she's got something to hide. And he isn't going to stop until he finds the truth behind those locked doors. . . Will their dream home become a nightmare? ... |
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A Big History of Everything from the Big Bang to the first stars, to our solar system, life on Earth, dinosaurs, homo sapiens, agriculture, an ice age, empires, fossil fuels, a Moon landing and mass globalization. And what happens next... ... "I have long been a fan of David Christian. In "Origin Story", he elegantly weaves evidence and insights from many scientific and historical disciplines into a single, accessible historical narrative." Bill Gates Most historians study the smallest silver of time. But what would it look like to study the whole of history, from the Big Bang through the present day ... |
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The Bomber Mafia is a case study in how dreams go awry. When some shiny new idea drops from the heavens, it does not land softly in our laps. It lands hard, on the ground, and shatters. In the years before the Second World War, in a sleepy air force base in central Alabama, a small group of renegade pilots put forth a radical idea. What if we made bombing so accurate that wars could be fought entirely from the air? What if we could make the brutal clashes between armies on the ground a thing of the past? This book tells the story of what happened when that dream was put to the test. The Bomber Mafia follows the stories ... |
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This madcap cosmic farce relates the adventures of the hapless human Carmody, as he attempts to make his way home to Earth after winning the grand prize in the Intergalactic Sweepstake, encountering parallel worlds, incompetent bureaucrats and talking dinosaurs on the way."The greatest entertainer ever produced by science fiction... a feast of wit and intelligence." J. G. Ballard "Hilarious SF satire. Douglas Adams said it was the only thing like The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, although written ten years earlier. It's wonderful." Neil Gaiman ... |
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Making right desicions when you don't have all the facts. ... Even the best decision doesn't yield the best outcome every time. There's always an element of luck that you can't control, and there's always information hidden from view. So the key to long-term success (and avoiding worrying yourself to death) is to think in bets: How sure am I? What are the possible ways things could turn out? What decision has the highest odds of success? Did I land in the unlucky 10% on the strategy that works 90% of the time? Or is my success attributable to dumb luck rather than great decision making? Annie Duke, a ... |
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No matter what, she’ll find her. In this universe or the next. ... Ana Moon’s best friend Bea has vanished. Her house has changed. Her parents have become strangers. She has fallen into a world that is not her own. Guided by the mysterious Malik and his Pathfinders - world-jumping guardians of hidden gateways from one world to the next, including a mute girl with fighting sticks and a boy who moves like smoke - Ana must travel across seven versions of Earth to get Bea back. Lying in wait are the sinister Order, monstrous Reapers and a rogue Pathfinder bent of finding the elusive seventh world, and who will destroy ... |
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George Orwell 's dystopian masterpiece, Nineteen Eighty-Four is perhaps the most pervasively influential book of the twentieth century, making famous Big Brother, newspeak and Room 101. 'Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past' Hidden away in the Record Department of the sprawling Ministry of Truth, Winston Smith skilfully rewrites the past to suit the needs of the Party. Yet he inwardly rebels against the totalitarian world he lives in, which demands absolute obedience and controls him through the all-seeing telescreens and the watchful eye of Big Brother, ... |
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A Moonshot Guide to Changing Capitalism. Even before the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, capitalism was stuck. It had no answers to a host of problems, including disease, inequality, the digital divide and, perhaps most blatantly, the environmental crisis. Taking her inspiration from the "moonshot" programmes which successfully coordinated public and private sectors on a massive scale, Mariana Mazzucato calls for the same level of boldness and experimentation to be applied to the biggest problems of our time. We must, she argues, rethink the capacities and role of government within the economy and society, and ... |
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"In finite games, like football or chess, the players are known, the rules are fixed, and the endpoint is clear. The winners and losers are easily identified. In infinite games, like business or politics or life itself, the players come and go, the rules are changeable, and there is no defined endpoint. There are no winners or losers in an infinite game - there is only ahead and behind. The more I started to understand the difference between finite and infinite games, the more I began to see infinite games all around us. I started to see that many of the struggles that organizations face exist simply because their ... |
