Foul!: The Secret World ...

Andrew Jennings, an award-winning investigative sports reporter, spent four years delving into the dark side of ‘the beautiful game’. The result is this explosive and damning expose of the officials that run football’s world governing body, FIFA, now fully updated with the political fallout from World Cup 2006. No individual has managed to penetrate the sanctified domain of FIFA and probed successfully into its often criticised yet unproven corruption of the world game. Author Andrew Jennings argues how FIFA President Sepp Blatter and his associates have misappropriated their position at the head of the world game in their desire for power, control, and a lucrative pay-off. Foul! is the explosive story. Jennings has undertaken unprecedented research in Asia, Africa, Europe and the Americas, interviewing hundreds of officials and amassing an extraordinary library of damning documents. He brings the story up to date with new disclosures about how Germany won the contest to stage the 2006 World Cup and the inside story on the dirty battle to host 2010.

The Saffron Kitchen

On an autumn day in London, the dark secrets and troubled past of Maryam Mazar surface violently with tragic consequences for her pregnant daughter, Sara, and her newly orphaned nephew, Saeed. Racked with guilt, Maryam is compelled to leave the safe comfort of her suburban home and mild English husband to return to Mazareh, the remote village on Iran’s north-eastern border where her story began. There she must face her past and the memories of a life she was forced to leave behind. In her quest to piece the family back together, Sara follows her mother to Iran, to discover the roots of her unhappiness and to try to bring her home. Sara finally learns about the terrible price Maryam once had to pay for her freedom, and about the love of the man who still waits for her.

How Proust Can Change ...

What a marvellous book this is ...de Botton dissects what (Proust) had to say about friendship, reading, looking carefully, paying attention taking your time, being alive and adds his own delicious commentary. The result is an intoxicating as it is wise, amusing as well as stimulating, and presented in so fresh a fashion as to be unique ...I could not stop, and now much start all over again.” — Brian Masters, Mail on Sunday. “De Botton not only has a complete understanding of Proust’s life ...but what is particularly charming about this small, readable book is its tongue-in-cheek benignity, its lightly held erudition and its generous way of lending itself to what is not only the greatest book of the century but also the darkest and the most eccentric” — Edmund White, Observer. “It contains more human interest and play of fancy than most fiction ...de Botton, in emphasising Proust’s healing, advisory aspects, does us the service of rereading him on our behalf, providing of that vast sacred lake a sweet and lucid distillation.”— John Updike, New Yorker.

The Revenge of Gaia ...

For millennia, humankind has exploited the Earth without counting the cost. Now, as the world warms and weather patterns dramatically change, the Earth is beginning to fight back. James Lovelock, one of the giants of environmental thinking, argues passionately and poetically that, although global warming is now inevitable, we are not yet too late to save at least part of human civilisation. This short book, written at the age of 86 after a lifetime engaged in the science of the earth, is his testament.

Fooled by Randomness ...

Everyone wants to succeed in life. But what causes some of us to be more successful than others? Is it really down to skill and strategy — or something altogether more unpredictable? This book is the word-of-mouth sensation that will change the way you think about business and the world. It is all about luck, more precisely, how we perceive luck in our personal and professional experiences. Nowhere is this more obvious than

in the markets — we hear an entrepreneur has ‘vision’ or a trader is ‘talented’, but all too often their performance is down to chance rather than skill. It is only because we fail to understand probability that we continue to believe events are non-random, finding reasons where none exist. This irreverent bestseller has shattered the illusions of people around the world by teaching them how to recognise randomness.