This book uses ethnographic research to examine the role of dance in the construction of identity in the distinctly British electronic dance music club culture of drum ’n’ bass. Dancing is revealed as the central way in which drum ’n’ bass clubbers construct and perform their identities, which are informed, although not defined, by the club culture’s histories. The intertextual and intercultural development of drum ’n’ bass musical and clubbing culture is shown to be represented in the dan...

Craig Taylor, an acclaimed journalist, playwright and writer, spent five years exploring the city and listening to its residents to create this amazingly rich portrait of London.Here are the voices of London - rich and poor, native and immigrant, women and men. From the woman whose voice announces the stations on the London Underground to the man who plants the trees along Oxford Street; from a Pakistani currency trader to a Guardsman at Buckingham Palace - together, these voices p...

Two best friends. One extreme adventure. Too many secrets . . .Carlota and Bethany are best friends. Bethany is the sensible one with a long-term boyfriend; Carlota is the crazy one with a wild past. All is fine in their world - apart from Carlota hating her stepdad and longing for an old flame. And apart from Bethany thinking her boyfriend is about to dump her and that her period is late... Will a girls-only wild day out, with only their favourite magazine to guide them help the g...

Bestselling author Tony Parsons has been appointed Heathrow’s writer-in-residence. The result is Departures – seven stories of high drama, offbeat humour and raw emotionHere is Heathrow as it has never been seen before – a secret city populated by the 75 million travellers who pass through every year, a place where journeys and dreams end – and begin.From the brilliant twenty-something kids who control the skies up in Air Traffic Control to the softly-spoken man who cares f...

Do you know why……a mortgage is literally a death pledge? …why guns have girls’ names? …why salt is related to soldier?You’re about to find out…The Etymologicon (e-t?-‘mä-lä-ji-kän) is:*Witty (wi-te\): Full of clever humor*Erudite (er-?-dit): Showing knowledge*Ribald (ri-b?ld): Crude, offensiveThe Etymologicon is a completely unauthorized guide to the strange underpinnings of the English language. It explains: how you get from “gruntled” ...

Brought to you by Penguin.Read the seminal bestselling novel that changed the face of British fiction and inspired Danny Boyle's film.'The best book ever written by man or woman... Deserves to sell more copies than the Bible' Rebel IncChoose us. Choose life. Choose mortgage payments; choose washing machines; choose cars; choose sitting oan a couch watching mind-numbing and spirit-crushing g...

Irish novelist Anne Enright won the coveted Man Booker Prize for her eloquent novel The Gathering. In The Forgotten Waltz, Enright crafts a stunning tale about a Dublin woman's affair and its heartrending consequences. Gina Moynihan is already married when she meets SeAn Vallely. But longing and desire soon overtake them-and their lives begin to crumble shortly after. "A breathtaking work that will surprise you; highly recommended."-Library Journal

“Your heart will break…then soar” (Redbook) when, far from the neon lights of the Vegas strip, three lives collide in a split-second mistake and a child’s fate hangs in the balance.Avis thought her marriage had hit a temporary rut. But with a single confession in the middle of the night, her carefully constructed life comes undone. After escaping a tumultuous childhood and raising a son, she now faces a future without the security of the home and family sh...

From the Man Booker Prize–winning author of The Line of Beauty: a magnificent, century-spanning saga about a love triangle that spawns a myth, and a family mystery, across generations.In the late summer of 1913, George Sawle brings his Cambridge schoolmate—a handsome, aristocratic young poet named Cecil Valance—to his family’s modest home outside London for the weekend. George is enthralled by Cecil, and soon his sixteen-year-old sister, Daphne, is equally besotted by him ...

A new novel from Zadie Smith, set in Northwest LondonSomewhere in Northwest London stands Caldwell housing estate, relic of 70s urban planning. Five identical blocks, deliberately named: Hobbes, Smith, Bentham, Locke, and Russell. If you grew up here, the plan was to get out and get on, to something bigger, better. Thirty years later ex-Caldwell kids Leah, Natalie, Felix, and Nathan have all made it out, with varying degrees of succes—whatever that means. Living only stree...

On June 8, 2010, while on a book tour for his bestselling memoir, Hitch-22, Christopher Hitchens was stricken in his New York hotel room with excruciating pain in his chest and thorax. As he would later write in the first of a series of award-winning columns for Vanity Fair, he suddenly found himself being deported "from the country of the well across the stark frontier that marks off the land of malady." Over the next eighteen months, until his death in Houston on December 15, 20...

The year is 1587. One of Queen Elizabeth's cousins is found murdered, her flesh marked with profane symbols. A plot to assassinate Sir Francis Drake, England's most famous sea warrior, is discovered. One man is charged with the desperate task of solving both cases: John Shakespeare.Shadowed by his rival, the Queen's chief torturer, Shakespeare travels through an underworld of spies, sorcerers, whores, and theater people—including his younger brother, the struggling playwright Will—...