Hungry Eyes
£16.99What happens at your kitchen table can become the blueprint for everything you are. Did you sit alone or with people you loved? Was it fun or tense? Was someone working hard to stop you noticing someone else's mood?
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What happens at your kitchen table can become the blueprint for everything you are. Did you sit alone or with people you loved? Was it fun or tense? Was someone working hard to stop you noticing someone else's mood?

‘Ghost Stories’ is Siri Hustvedt’s most personal work yet, a searing and intimate meditation on grief, memory, and enduring love, written in the aftermath of the death of her husband, writer, poet and filmmaker Paul Auster. It is a patchwork-quilt book that stitches together memories from over 40 years of love and life together: journal entries Siri wrote between early November 2023, when Paul first became ill, and 3 May 2024, the day of his funeral; e-mails Siri sent to friends during Paul’s cancer treatment; notes Paul sent her over the course of their relationship; and three love letters Siri wrote to him in 1981, when he left her for a period of nine or ten days to return to his former life with his first wife and son. The book also contains Paul Auster’s last ever piece of writing – the first 35 pages of what he hoped would be a small book of letters to Siri’s and his grandson, Miles Auster Hustvedt Ostrander, born on 1 January 202

In the late 1970s, three men declared war on the casino. They arrived in Las Vegas just as the personal computer was beginning its boom. If the power of computers could be applied to gambling, they reasoned, a player could make a mint. There was only one problem: How do you smuggle a computer, typically, the size of a suitcase, onto a casino floor without getting noticed? Using cutting-edge strategies and gloriously DIY tech that was decades ahead of its time, they solved this and many other problems. They became pioneers of what’s known as advantage playing, applying their intellects and creativity to everything from poker and blackjack to horseracing and roulette. For more than 30 years they faced down angry pit bosses, violent Mafiosos, bankruptcies, nights in foreign jails, lawsuits, and personal betrayals. They learned that the only thing harder than reaching the pinnacle of gambling achievement was staying there.

Antonia Senior has done that rare thing, written an account of the Cambridge Five with an historian’s fidelity to fact and a novelist’s eye for character. Her meticulous research and elegant writing bring to life the story of class-conscious Englishmen whose youthful embrace of Communism led to the 20th century’s most audacious spy network. It’s a spellbinding tale of espionage, friendship, and betrayal.

People have been drawing lines on maps for as long as there have been maps to draw on. Sometimes rooted in physical geography, sometimes entirely arbitrary, these lines might often have looked very different if a war or treaty or the decisions of a handful of tired Europeans had gone a different way. By telling the stories of these borders, we can learn a lot about how political identities are shaped, why the world looks the way it does – and about human folly. From the Roman attempts to define the boundaries of civilisation, to the secret British-French agreement to carve up the Ottoman Empire during the First World War, to the reason why landlocked Bolivia still maintains a navy, this is a fascinating, witty and surprising look at the history of the world told through its borders.

‘Döstädning’, or the art of death cleaning, is a Swedish phenomenon by which the elderly and their families set their affairs in order. Whether it’s sorting the family heirlooms from the junk, downsizing to a smaller place, or setting up a system to help you stop misplacing your keys, death cleaning gives us the chance to make the later years of our lives as comfortable and stress-free as possible. Whatever your age, Swedish death cleaning can be used to help you de-clutter your life, and take stock of what’s important. Radical and joyous, this book can help you or someone you love immeasurably, and offers the chance to celebrate and reflect on all the tiny joys that make up a long life along the way.

This tale of greed and ambition is set in an obsessed, enclosed world. Michael Lewis progresses through the dealing rooms of Salomon Brothers in New York and London during the mid-1980s when they were probably the most powerful merchant bank.
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