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Jing Tsu

What does it take to reinvent the world's oldest living language? 
 
China today is one of the world's most powerful nations, yet just a century ago it was a crumbling empire with literacy reserved for the elite few, left behind in the wake of Western technology. In Kingdom of Characters, Jing Tsu shows that China's most daunting challenge was a linguistic one: to make the formidable Chinese language - a 2,200-year-old writing system that was daunting to natives and foreigners alike - accessible to a globalized, digital world. 
 
Kingdom of Characters follows the bold innovators who adapted the Chinese script - and the value-system it represents - to the technological advances that would shape the twentieth century and beyond, from the telegram to the typewriter to the smartphone. From the exiled reformer who risked death to advocate for Mandarin as a national language to the imprisoned computer engineer who devised input codes for Chinese characters on the lid of a teacup, generations of scholars, missionaries, librarians, politicians, inventors, nationalists and revolutionaries alike understood the urgency of their task and its world-shaping consequences. 
 
With larger-than-life characters and a thrilling narrative, Kingdom of Characters offers an astonishingly original perspective on one of the twentieth century's most dramatic transformations.

Kingdom of Characters

A Tale of Language, Obsession, and Genius in Modern China

Mark Owen

Kevin Maurer

No Easy Day puts readers inside the elite, handpicked twenty-four-man team known as SEAL Team Six as they train for the most important mission of their lives: going after bin Laden. 
 
From the crash of the Black Hawk helicopter that threatened the mission with disaster to the radio call confirming their target was dead, the SEAL team raid on bin Laden's secret HQ is recounted in nail-biting second-by-second detail. 
 
SEAL team leader Mark Owen takes readers behind enemy lines with one of the world's most astonishing fighting forces, in the only insider's account of their most spectacular mission.

No Easy Day

The Only First-hand Account of the Navy Seal Mission that Killed Osama bin Laden

Ian Johnson

In Wild Grass, Pulitzer Prize-winning Ian Johnson describes a China caught between the desire for change percolating up from below and the ossified political structure above. He recounts the stories of three ordinary people who find themselves finding oppression and government corruption, risking imprisonment and even death. A young architecture student, a bereaved daughter, and a peasant legal clerk are the unlikely heroes of these stories, private citizens cast by unexpected circumstances into surprising roles.

Wild Grass

China's Revolution from Below

Paul French

Peking, 1937. The teenage daughter of a British consul is brutally slaughtered. The police investigation is botched as war looms; British and Chinese authorities close ranks. A grieving father vows to uncover the truth - alone. 
 
Seventy-five years later, historian Paul French uncovers a stash of forgotten documents revealing the killer's identity . . .

Midnight in Peking

The Murder That Haunted the Last Days of Old China

R F Foster

Each of Foster's books has generated vigorous discussion, but in THE IRISH STORY he breaks fresh ground even by his own standards. Driven by his sense of the seriousness of history and a fascination with those who distort it, THE IRISH STORY examines how key facets of Ireland's past have been tampered with to serve a multiplicity of purposes. 
 
THE IRISH STORY is endlessly varied, surprising and funny. It is also a rallying cry for those anxious that contemporary Ireland may be in danger ofturning itself into a meretricious historical theme-park.

The Irish Story

Telling Tales and Making it Up in Ireland

Patrick Hennessey

KANDAK, from Patrick Hennessey, author of the TV Book Club pick, The Junior Officers' Reading Club, is 'a rich depiction of life and death, love and sorrow ... read this brilliant book' Evening Standard 
 
When Patrick Hennessey returned home from Afghanistan, he left behind him the surreal intensity and exhilaration of battle. He also left behind lasting bonds of friendship formed with his Afghan comrades Qiam, Syed and Majhib. Kandak is the story of how, in the heat of the moment between living and dying, unlikely alliances can be forged. Patrick Hennessey tells of their awkward first meetings, mutual suspicion and incomprehension, and how this eventually turned into brotherhood. 
 
'A passionate tribute to the Afghan soldiers he fought alongside in Helmand ... excellent' Sunday Times 
 
'This beautifully-written sequel to his first book tells us much about the bonds forged by combat in the dust and heat and danger, when there was no "them and us"' Mail on Sunday 
 
'His prose is lean and muscular, characterised by dry wit and acute intelligence. He also has a novelist's eye for the vivid image and the telling detail' Daily Mail 
 
'An erudite account ... this topical book, beautifully written, gives important insights at a crucial time in Afghanistan's transition' Daily Telegraph 
 
Patrick Hennessey was born in 1982 and educated at Berkhamsted School and Balliol College, Oxford, where he read English. He joined the Army and served from 2004 to 2009 as an officer in The Grenadier Guards. In between guarding towers, castles and palaces he worked in the Balkans, Africa, South East Asia, the Falkland Islands and deployed on operational tours of Iraq and Afghanistan. On leaving the Army he wrote his first book The Junior Officers' Reading Club. He is now a barrister.

KANDAK

Fighting with Afghans

David Gilmour

The British in this book lived in India from shortly after the reign of Elizabeth I until well into the reign of Elizabeth II. They were soldiers, officials, businessmen, doctors and missionaries of both sexes, planters, engineers and many others, together with children, wives and sisters. This book describes their lives, their work and their extraordinarily varied interactions with the native populations; it also records the very diverse roles they played in the three centuries of British-Indian history. Gilmour writes of people who have never been written about before, men and women who are presented here with humanity and often with humour. The result is a magnificent tapestry of life, an exceptional work of scholarly recovery which reads like a great nineteenth-century novel. It makes a highly original and engaging contribution to a long an important period of British and Indian history.

The British in India

Three Centuries of Ambition and Experience

Michael Asher

'The best life of Lawrence yet published' - The Express 
 
Lawrence was a brilliant propagandist, rhetorician and manipulator, who deliberately turned his life into a conundrum. But who was the real man behind the masks? Lawrence began the GreatWar as a map-clerk and ended it as one of the greatest military heroes of the 20th century. He altered the face of the Middle East, helped to lead the Arabs to freedom and formulated modern guerilla warfare. Yet he refused any honours and spent therest of his life in near obscurity. Desert explorer and Arabist, Michael Asher, set out to solve this riddle and discovers a hero whose greatness owed as much to his weaknesses as to his strengths.

Lawrence

The Uncrowned King of Arabia

Elliot Ackerman

In a refugee camp in southern Turkey, Elliot Ackerman sits across the table from Abu Hassar, who fought for Al Qaeda in Iraq and has murky connections to the Islamic State. At first, Ackerman pretends to have been a journalist during the Iraq War, but after he establishes a rapport with Abu Hassar, he reveals that he was a Marine. The two men then compare their fighting experiences in the Middle East, discovering they had shadowed each other for some time: a realisation that brings them to a strange kind of intimacy. 
 
 Elliot Ackerman's extraordinary memoir explores the events that led him to come to this refugee camp, and what he hoped to find there. Moving between his recent time on the ground as a journalist in Syria and his Marine deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan, he creates a work of astonishing atmospheric pressure, one which blends the American experience with the perspectives and stories of the Arab world. 
 
 At once an intensely personal book about the terrible lure of combat and a brilliant meditation on the meaning of the past two decades of strife for the region and the world, Places and Names bids to take its place among our greatest books about modern war.

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