Take a scrawny French student and a hunky housekeeper; put them in a swanky summer villa; add a pink car named Sean and a ruggedly handsome delivery man—and voilà a sunny-funny summer romance.Twenty-year-old Trevor is overjoyed. An Australian millionaire offers him the summer job of his dreams: to catalog the library of his summer house in Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat—one of the ritziest and most exclusive spots on the Côte d’Azur.What unnerves him, howev...

Young Brit Simon Dale has just obtained his master’s degree in political science and moved to his mother’s hometown Paris to look for a job. Unexpectedly, he is hired by an international agency he has never heard of before—the UNBUA or United Nations Bureau of Uncommon Affairs.His new boss, Undersecretary Rodelio de Montferrat, turns out to be devastatingly handsome, reckless, and more than just a bit odd. Only an hour after Simon’s job interview, they are both on a plane headed to ...

You know you’re in deep water when you can’t tell cop from criminalRene Beckman is a dishonoured ex-cop with only two things on his mind: his new boat, the Triggerfish, and his hot date, an environmentalist named Vicki. When the two unknowingly dock the boat in the same secluded cove as a Mexican cartel’s drug submarine, the date ends with a bang.With the cartel’s coke-for-guns deal with local bikers torched by Beckman, he’s forced to go on the run...

What would a sustainable economy look like? What would it take to live within our environmental means? Legacy answers these and other questions, setting out the key features of the sustainable economy. It explains what it would take to properly maintain different types of capital, why polluters would have to pay, why the current generation would have to fund the necessary maintenance of our natural assets, and why we would have to save to invest. The message is a tough one: we are way off ...

Neuss, today. At seventy, Dieter Winter stakes everything he has left on an honest espresso machine from China and names his little brand after a soft, singing word he takes for a greeting to his mother: omaneo. Neuss, 1954. A young man from Naples brings an espresso machine and color into a grey café on the market square. In his song he calls Hanna, the innkeeper's daughter, omaneo and vanishes before spring comes. Seventy years, two people, the same truth: The world is cold enough. What ...

Neuss, 2032 to 2040. In his retirement, the Neuss merchant Dieter Winter stakes everything on an honest espresso machine and the small brand omaneo. But sales pressure, investors, and his own impatience drive him to sell what he built. The brand is ruined, the name becomes a commodity, the coffee grows cold. A quiet, elegiac crime novel about greed, betrayal, and whether the real thing survives when everything is sold, and about the spark that lives on. The third volume of the omaneo Saga....

Five hundred years, three families, one bean. In 1583 a merchant's son from Neuss sets out for Arabia to fetch the real thing, and brings back more than he sought. In 1954 a Neapolitan carries the craft to the same grey river, and a word he takes for his own invention. In 2032 it becomes a brand that is sold. The three novels The Coffee Journey, Omaneo and The Cold Cup, for the first time as one book: continuously numbered, with the bridges between the epochs, in the order in which they ha...

Neuss on the Rhine, 1583. The cities of the north do not yet know coffee. Cornelius von Rheydt, a patrician son with too much longing and too little patience, sets out south with his Neapolitan companion Giacomo Fontana, to where a black, forbidden bean is brewed into a wakeful, singing drink. In the alleys of Mokka he finds more than he sought: the secret of coffee and his love for Zaida. A historical novel about longing, distant shores, and the first cup of coffee.

Simon Dale has just been sacked from his exciting if short-lived job at the UNBUA, the United Nations Bureau of Uncommon Affairs. He has returned to his father’s house in rural Oxfordshire, where he has spent the last four weeks sulking. He has also been learning more about the fascinating world of uncommons. From a book. That’s probably the main reason he’s in such a depressed mood—he would have preferred to study these things at his handsome ex-boss’s side.One day, he has had eno...

Train like the World Champions! Over the past few years, a new trend has become ever more prominent in the soccer world: passing often and fast, and including all players in the game. Combining this with their own personal style, we have seen teams reach new heights of success from FC Barcelona to Bayern Munich and Borussia Dortmund and, most recently, the German National Team at the 2014 World Cup in Brazil. But what does it take to learn this 'art' of passing? What are the methodological...

A nice guy meets a tortured rock star—what are the odds they end up together? Close to nil, right? But sometimes an open heart and mind can work miracles.Karim successfully helped Trevor and Chao get their love story on the right tracks. He even moved to Paris on their suggestion. Now he’s jobless and all alone in the big city because Trevor and Chao are off on an important quest and Dirk has joined his aunt Karin in Sweden.Karim’s only spark of hope is an ...

The turn of the 19th to the 20th century. The balance of power in Europe is beginning to falter. Two boys, worlds apart, come of age in this unsettled time: David Rosendahl, son of one of Berlin's most modern meat producers; and Martin, a foundling raised by monks, later subjected to suffering under the tyranny of his adoptive father, Franz Kreidler. Neither yet foresees how their paths—and their destinies—will converge upon the battlefields of the First World War. But that primal catastro...