This Halloween, four cousins are about to get a trick they never saw coming. At midnight, their aunt's antique duck toy mysteriously starts to speak, showing signs of magic and mystery. They think it's all fun and games, but when siblings Maggie and Jerry let their tempers get out of control, they realize some things are better left unsaid.

LAMBDA LITERARY AWARD FINALIST'Essential reading' - THE INDEPENDENT'Vital and insightful' - OWL FISHERWhat does it mean to be non-binary in the 21st Century?Our gender identity is impacted by our personal histories; the cultures, communities and countries we are born into; and the places we go and the people we meet. But the representation of contemporary non-binary identities has been limit...

Originally published in 1987, this book is based on research concerned primarily with the Central Industrial Region. It uses archival and published sources, focusing on a category of immigrants which is comparatively well documented in official records - those who enlisted formally in the urban burgher classes. The book follows two key lines of enquiry. The first seeks clarification of the legal provisions governing such enlistment, and the second introduces a large amount of data on this ...

Spanning the divide between Europe and Asia, Russia is a multi-ethnic empire with a huge territory, strategically placed and abundantly provided with natural resources. But Russia's territory has a harsh climate, is cut off from most maritime contact with the outside world, and has open and vulnerable land frontiers. It has therefore had to devote much of its wealth to the armed forces, and the sheer size of the empire has made it difficult to mobilise resources and to governeffectively, e...

Robert Service's The Penguin History of Modern Russia: From Tsarism to the Twenty-first Century provides a superb panorama of Russia in the modern age.Russia's recent past has encompassed revolution, civil war, mass terror and two world wars, and the country is still undergoing huge change.In his acclaimed history, now revised and updated with a new introduction and final chapter, Robert Service explores the complex, changing interaction between ru...

Here is a pioneering account of everyday life under Stalin, written by one of our foremost authorities on modern Russian history. Focusing on urban areas in the 1930s, Sheila Fitzpatrick shows that with the adoption of collectivization and the first Five-Year Plan, everyday life was utterly transformed. With the abolition of the market, shortages of food, clothing, and all kinds of consumer goods became endemic. As peasants fled the collectivized villages, major cities were soon in the gri...

Accessible to students, tourists and general readers alike, this book provides a broad overview of Russian history since the ninth century. Paul Bushkovitch emphasizes the enormous changes in the understanding of Russian history resulting from the end of the Soviet Union in 1991. Since then, new material has come to light on the history of the Soviet era, providing new conceptions of Russia's pre-revolutionary past. The book traces not only the political history of Russia, but also develop...

First published in 1996, A History of Ukraine quickly became the authoritative account of the evolution of Europe's second largest country. In this fully revised and expanded second edition, Paul Robert Magocsi examines recent developments in the country's history and uses new scholarship in order to expand our conception of the Ukrainian historical narrative.New chapters deal with the Crimean Khanate in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and new research on the pre-...

‘It is unlikely that a clearer, more stimulating account of the Russians’ extraordinary period of imperial history will be written.’ Philip Marsden, SpectatorGeoffrey Hosking’s landmark book provides us with a new prism through which to view Russian history by posing the apparently simple question: what is Russia’s national identity?Hosking answers this with brilliant originality: his thesis is that the needs of Russia’s empire prevented the creation of a Russian nation. Th...

From the formation of the Russian state in the 14th century to the political power struggles of the 1990s and the uncertainties of the new millennium, this new history offers a fresh and systematic account of Russian history across six tumultuous centuries. With greater access to previously unobtainable material, and with the gradual depoliticization of what was once an intellectual Cold War battleground, historians are now able to tell the story of Russia more dispassionately and with gre...

In 1988, the first edition of Orest Subtelny's Ukraine was published to international acclaim, as the definitive history of what was at that time a republic in the USSR. In the years since, the world has seen the dismantling of the Soviet bloc and the restoration of Ukraine's independence - an event celebrated by Ukrainians around the world but which also heralded a time of tumultuous change for those in the homeland.While previous updates brought readers up to the year 20...

Spanning a period of 2000 years from the Roman conquest of Dacia to the present day, A Concise History of Romania traces the development of a unique nation situated on the border between East and West. In this illuminating new history, Keith Hitchins explores Romania's struggle to find its place amidst two diverse societies: one governed by Eastern orthodox tradition, spirituality and agriculture and the other by Western rationalism, experimentation and capitalism. The book charts Romania'...