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...

“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...

Angela is in the city of love – but romance is taking a nose-dive…Angela Clark is a British girl living the dream in fabulous New York. But she's never been to the romantic capital of the world – Paris. So when her lead singer boyfriend Alex suggests a trip there and she is asked to write insider's guide to the hip city – she jumps at the chance!Meandering along charming streets, perusing Paris's hot destinations – all in the name of research – Angela decides she could get ...

In one moment, two lives will be changed forever … and forever … and forever.The one thing that’s certain is that they met on a Cambridge street by chance and felt a connection that would last a lifetime. But as for what happened next … They fell wildly in love or went their separate ways. They kissed or they thought better of it. They married soon after or were together for a few weeks before splitting up. They grew distracted and disappointed with their daily lives together or fo...