Martin is a talented high school history teacher in his early forties. While enduring a loveless marriage and dealing with his mother's decline into dementia, he is involved in a bizarre motorway incident which threatens to completely turn his life upside down. The reader is transported a few years into the future on a perilous journey through a flawed criminal justice system. The protagonist faces professional, reputational and financial ruin. An idealistic defence lawyer prepared to take...

In a dystopian near future, the Greenways are a close-knit but impoverished middle-class family living in a northern town. The story is of their struggle with the economic and environmental effects of climate breakdown and their response to an increasingly intrusive authoritarian government.Every year, they are legally obliged to find new ways of reducing their carbon footprint. In order to make ends meet, they take advantage of a government scheme to open up their rear garden as a...

15 to 20 years into the future, taxes are kept to a bare minimum by political consensus. Thirty-something Mathew is recruited via an online algorithmic ad by a government agency. Its goal: to encourage well-to-do altruistic citizens to donate surplus income or wealth to the public purse. The agency selects potential donors using sophisticated algorithms. Mathew's curiosity and suspicions are soon awakened around the agency's true nature and purpose. With Emily's help, another new recruit, ...

This little book contains over 50 limericks along the lines suggested by the title. The all-important word, is 'pseudo' as there is no real intention to offend people's religious sensibilities. I suggest that anyone with fundamentalist religious leanings or lacking an earthy sense of humour should read no further. Each limerick is accompanied on the opposite page by a commentary. In some cases, this is largely a linguistic analysis of the poetic techniques attempted. In others, an effort i...

Tristan und Isolde centres around two lovers who dream of romantic love and yearn for oblivion. No composer had written such a work before. Turning his back on traditional tonality, Wagner changed the course of Western music with Tristan und Isolde. But there’s also fact behind the fiction: while he wrote his opera Wagner was in love with another’s man’s wife, Mathilde Wesendonk. So Tristan and Isolde are also Richard and Mathilde. Christopher Cook explores the making of a masterpiece, the...

A path from trauma to transformation that doesn’t rely on willpower, but rather on the daily power of the Holy Spirit—from pastor and leadership coach Christopher Cook“Razor-sharp focus . . . a clear-cut path to find healing.”—New York Times bestselling author and pastor Mark BattersonThe pain that happened to you is real . . . and it matters immensely.The notion of healing what you can’t erase is not about ignorin...

When AnyStreet launched in 2008, conservative activism was comparatively limited. There were some independent local groups, of course, and many committed conservative activists. But outside of the structure of the Republican Party, conservative ground-game activism was not very common. Now, of course, all that has changed. The tea party movement exploded onto the scene in early 2009. By September, conservatives had staged the largest peaceful protest in American history in Washington, D.C....

A path from trauma to transformation that doesn’t rely on willpower, but rather on the daily power of the Holy Spirit—from pastor and leadership coach Christopher Cook“Razor-sharp focus . . . a clear-cut path to find healing.”—New York Times bestselling author and pastor Mark BattersonThe pain that happened to you is real . . . and it matters immensely.The notion of healing what you can’t erase is not about ignorin...

No one could have invented John Beames, whose vibrant and original memoirs were discovered by chance in an attic almost a century after they were penned. He arrived in Indian in 1858, and worked there as a civil servant for the next forty-five years, defending powerless peasants against rapacious planters, improvising fifteen-gun salutes for visiting dignitaries and presiding over the blissful coast of Orissa. His acquaintances spanned from lofty Rajas to dissolute Englishmen. Vivid, candi...

In today's fast-paced environment, the speed at which communication travels and the resounding calls for police accountability demonstrate a need for purposeful communications embedded in a strategic mindset. When done right, strategic communication can increase transparency, build trust, and encourage active community participation. Chief Cook has distilled over thirty years of experience into timely lessons filled with practical solutions you can begin implementing right away.

Did you know that shortly after winning the Revolutionary War, the United States almost violently fractured over the creation of a completely illegal, unrecognized fourteenth state? Hidden deep in the Appalachian Mountains, the brief, chaotic existence of the State of Franklin is one of the most bizarre geopolitical anomalies of early American history. Following the war, North Carolina abruptly ceded its western, mountainous territories to the federal government to pay off war debts. Feeli...

Peter and June and Me is the story of my search for my parent's first and second-born children, about whom I knew nothing until later in my life. There were references to them, but no direct discussion about them with either parent. The story is wrapped inside the murder of my girlfriend by an unrequited lover, and within my search for the brass ring, during which, by virtue of being raised in a house in which there was an icy silence and in which my parents lived in quiet desperation, I did ...