Fatima, a concubine in the royal court of Granada at the height of the Spanish Inquisition, and her friend Hassan, the palace mapmaker, risk their lives to escape when the latter is accused of sorcery.

Skiffle is a music genre with jazz, blues, folk, and roots influences, usually using homemade or improvised instruments. This is the first book to explore this phenomenon in depth ? a meticulously researched and joyous account that explains how skiffle sparked a revolution that shaped pop music as we have come to know it. It’s a story of jazz pilgrims and blues blowers, Teddy Boys and beatnik girls, coffee-bar bohemians and refugees from the McCarthyite witch-hunts. Billy traces how the guitar came to the forefront of music in the UK and led directly to the British Invasion of the US charts in the 1960s. Emerging from the trad-jazz clubs of the early ’50s, skiffle was adopted by kids who growing up during the dreary, post-war rationing years. Then, the pop culture was dominated by crooners and mediated by a stuffy BBC. Lonnie Donegan hit the charts in 1956 with a version of ?Rock Island Line’ and soon sales of guitars rocketed from 5,000 to 250,000 a year. Like punk rock that would flourish two decades later, skiffle was a do-it-yourself music. All you needed were three guitar chords and you could form a group, with mates playing tea-chest bass and washboard as a rhythm section.

The practical art of making more with less--in the kitchen! Melissa Coleman, the creator of the popular design and lifestyle blog The Faux Martha, shares her refreshingly simple approach to cooking that delivers beautiful and satisfying meals using familiar ingredients and minimal kitchen tools. The Minimalist Kitchen includes 100 wholesome recipes that use Melissa's efficient cooking techniques, and the results are anything but ordinary. You'll find Biscuits with Bourbon-Blueberry Quick Jam, Pesto Garden Pasta with an easy homemade pesto, Humble Chuck Roast that's simple to prepare and so versatile, Roasted Autumn Sweet Potato Salad, Stovetop Mac and Cheese, and Two-Bowl Carrot Cupcakes. While The Minimalist Kitchen helps tackle one of the home's biggest problem areas —the kitchen—this book goes beyond the basics of clearing out and cleaning up, it also gives readers practical tips to maintain this simplified way of life. Melissa shows you how to shop, stock your pantry, meal plan without losing your mind, and most importantly, that delicious food doesn’t take tons of ingredients or gadgets to prepare. This streamlined way of cooking is a breath of fresh air in modern lives where clutter and distraction can so easily take over.

An Air Force loadmaster in the Vietnam War is shot out of the sky, then saved by falling into a banyan. An artist inherits a hundred years of photographic portraits, all of the same doomed American chestnut. A hard-partying undergraduate in the late 1980s electrocutes herself, dies, and is sent back into life by creatures of air and light. A hearing- and speech-impaired scientist discovers that trees are communicating with one another. These four, and five other strangers

A dramatic story of WWII espionage, betrayal, and loyalty, by the #1 bestselling author of Life After Life In 1940, eighteen-year old Juliet Armstrong is reluctantly recruited into the world of espionage. Sent to an obscure department of MI5 tasked with monitoring the comings and goings of British Fascist sympathizers, she discovers the work to be by turns both tedious and terrifying. But after the war has ended, she presumes the events of those years have been relegated to the past forever. Ten years later, now a radio producer at the BBC, Juliet is unexpectedly confronted by figures from her past. A different war is being fought now, on a different battleground, but Juliet finds herself once more under threat. A bill of reckoning is due, and she finally begins to realize that there is no action without consequence. Transcription is a work of rare depth and texture, a bravura modern novel of extraordinary power, wit and empathy. It is a triumphant work of fiction from one of the best writers of our time.

A young house cleaner in New Mexico balances a bad, junkie boyfriend with a bad, unstable boyfriend who happens to be married to one of her clients as she embarks on an eccentric journey of self-discovery and redemption.