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Bill Leckie

Penthouse and Pavement is not a book for glory-hunters. It is a book about pain. It's about the anguish of watching your team lose 9-2 in the very first game you ever saw, about the horrible inevitability of defeat that so many feel so often. It's about despair, dismay and black, frightening, deathly gloom. 
 
But it's also about hope. About dreams. And about dreams which sometimes, just sometimes, come true. Like the once-in-a-lifetime ecstasy of winning the Cup or a league. And as anyone who's had that moment-of-a-lifetime knows, the joy is even greater because you've known the pain. For Bill Leckie, who has followed St Mirren since 1964, it all became worthwhile when they won the Scottish Cup in 1987. This book is about these clubs and the people who love them. It's about the kind of fan who doesn't go to games expecting to win . . . or, worse, demanding it. This book is about being willing to accept a lifetime of frustration in return for one day of utter wonderment.

Penthouse and Pavement

How to Survive in Football Without Sucking Up to the Old Firm

Dave Hadfield

Along the way he met the people whose enthusiasm for the game has made it so durable - current and former internationals as well as others involved at all levels - as well as a few miserable old gits for balance. In this intimate account, Hadfield observes the way rugby league fits into the history and sociology of towns like Wigan and Castleford, with which it is synonymous. His record of the journey is in the great tradition of writers from Wordsworth to Laurie Lee, who found in long walks the perfect medium to explore and reflect upon their surroundings. Up and Over is the definitive book about the game and the local passions it engenders, as Hadfield seeks out the poignant and the humorous on a personal journey of discovery. For those who follow rugby league, it will give a unique perspective on the parts of the world they know intimately; for others it will be an introduction to a different world, seen via one of the elements that gives it its identity.

Up and Over

A Trek Through Rugby League Land

Peter Mortimer

When author Peter Mortimer was commissioned to write a play about a little-known riot between Yemeni and British seamen at Mill Dam, South Shields, in 1930, he decided to take the long trip to Yemen itself in search of inspiration. Undeterred by post-11 September government warnings against visiting this 'highly dangerous' area, Mortimer set off and found an extraordinary and surprisingly Anglophile country. 
 
Cool for Qat documents this remarkable journey, during which Mortimer pieces together how the riots of 1930 arose and considers their relevance to Western attitudes towards Muslims today. He meets many remarkable characters along the way and immerses himself in the national custom of chewing the narcotic qat leaf. 
 
After visiting the ex-British Protectorate of Aden - through which many of the seamen passed en route to Britain - Mortimer travels on to San'a and then Tai'iz. It is while visiting the isolated mountain villages surrounding this city that Mortimer finally meets men who worked in South Shields some 50 years ago. Carrying a battered book with images of Yemenis living in the North-east in the '30s from home to home, trying to jog distant memories, he realises his visit has taken on a new purpose - bringing a small part of the country's history back to where it belongs. 
 
Back in the UK, Mortimer's investigations into the 1930 riot reveal a society with many striking similarities to current times. Then, as now, Muslim immigrants were treated as scapegoats for all manner of ills, tabloid newspapers drummed up prejudice and hatred, and the powers that be often used fear and racial mistrust to disguise their own economic failings. 
 
Cool for Qat questions just how 'civilised' the Western world - and Britain in particular - is in comparison to Yemen. It is a touching, thought-provoking and at times humorous document of one man's travels through a country about which little is known in the West.

Cool for Qat

A Yemeni Journey: Two Countries, Two Times

It was the worst winter in a decade, the winter of foot-and-mouth, when island power cuts ran for up to 72 hours - and two days before Peter Mortimer's planned departure, his father died.100 DAYS ON HOLY ISLAND is a quirky and often moving account of one man's self-imposed exile to a remote island off the coast of North-east England. Eschewing the usual historical or religious portrayal, Mortimer gives a vivid, humourous and often dramatic account of a confirmed urbanite in a small, tight-knit community cut off twice daily by the tides. Throwing himself into island life, he explores the landscape, people and myths that surround this remote `cradle of Chrisianity'. All of Mortimer's experiences within this unique island community are depicted with warmth and humour. The bleak winter scenery and idiosyncrasies of the island's inhabitants are described with an insight and understanding that could only have been achieved from personal experience. He helped in the local school, worked on the land, was the first person to be voluntarily cut off in the island refuge box and spent three tides isolated on the exposed outcrop, St Cuthbert's Island. The 100 days changed him - and probably changed the island. 100 DAYS ON HOLY ISLAND is a personal homage to the island and a remarkable account of a micro-society unique in modern Britain.

100 Days On Holy Island

A Writer's Exile

Jan de Vries

MOTHER AND CHILD is the long awaited follow up to Jan's phenomenally successful Preganancy and Childbirth and the next instalment in his excellent Well Woman series. In Mother and Child Jan De Vries focuses on the first crucial years of a child's life and explores the unique relationship that develops between mother and child in these formative years. The book comprises practical advice for new mothers dealing with the stress of their first baby and gives suggestions on how to recognise and treat the many diseases to which children are prone in their early years. There is also valuable advice on child healthcare and covers everything from sleep disorders to breastfeeding. Not only is Jan De Vries a professional authority on alternative healthcare, but he is also a father of four and grandfather of ten. Jan De Vries was born in 1937 and after initially graduating in pharmacy he soon moved on to study alternative medicine. He set up his first clinic in Troon in 1970 and today has clinics in Edinburgh, London, Belfast, Dublin and Manchester. Writing extensively on the value of alternative medicine and the importance of maintaining a healthy lifestyle, he also lectures throughout the world and makes regular television and radio appearances.

Mother and Child

Shortly after the success of his autobiography A STEP AT A TIME, many readers asked Jan de Vries for more information regarding his 45 years of experience in the practice of naturopathy.In TREATING BODY, MIND AND SOUL, Jan shares with his readers the many ways in which he treats his patients and details the more extraordinary cases that he has dealt with over the years. In doing so, he provides a clear idea of how the body really works and what physical problems can occur. He also illustrates how some unusual cases have been dealt with successfully in an unorthodox way using complementary therapies. Some of the astounding cases mentioned in his autobiography are dealt with in this book more explicitly to show the way de Vries sees the body as a whole and how, with some small adjustments, he has brought many people newfound health and happiness. Treating people with mental and emotional health problems is a major aspect of Jan's work and over the years he has developed various alternative methods that compliment orthodox treatments. This book reveals intriguingly his success in treating problems of the mind using breathing exercises, homeopathic and herbal remedies as well as cranial osteopathy and acupuncture. Jan also delves into the mystery of the soul and shares his thoughts and theories on why it is entwined so fully with the body and mind. He opines on the twenty-first century diseases that are so often misunderstood and, in many cases, go unidentified and gives tips on how to deal with them.

Treating Body, Mind and Soul

Alternative Solutions for Modern Living

Gary Edwards

He made you cry with laughter with Paint It White, now the celebrated Leeds-supporting, cartoon-drawing, painting-and-decorating eccentric Gary Edwards is back. It turns out that his first book was only an undercoat and now the story of his crazy life following Leeds needs a second coat. 
 
No wonder: Edwards, you see, has seen every Leeds game - competitive and friendly anywhere in the world - since 17 January 1968*. During those 37 years, he's been there, done that and bought the T-shirt. So, after subtle prompts from his travelling companions, he's back with more tales that simply would not fit into the first volume. 
There's barely a pub in the land he can step into without some well-meaning soul coming up to him and demanding, 'Loved the book, Gary! When are you going to do another - with me in it?' So here it is - another fabulously entertaining collection of travelling tales and friends remembered. Eventually. 
 
In this follow-up instalment of high gloss and drama, Edwards recounts how he befriended a real-life Leeds-supporting Dalek, convinced Rolf Harris that the earth was flat, was accosted by firemen while trying to paint a fire engine white, appeared on the sides of buses with his face painted in Leeds colours and received letters from the Queen and the Prime Minister after he complained about David Beckham getting an OBE! 
 
Leeds United: The Second Coat is another hilarious account of the scrapes, adventures and moments of comedy that a life's passion for Leeds United has brought Gary Edwards. 
 
*OK, he missed one but he still has the match ticket, and only a strike by Spanish air traffic control stopped him getting to a one-off friendly in Toronto.

Leeds United

The Second Coat

John Beattie

In 1992, John Beattie set out to sail around the world. Joined at times by an assortment of exotic characters - including a parrot called Hamish and the former Beirut hostage Brian Keenan - the joys and travails of his journey are depicted with complete honesty. But be it a storm at sea, a single-handed Atlantic crossing, or a near shipwreck in an uncharted jungle river, his humour and fortitude shine through. 
 
 A compelling travelogue, a voyage of the spirit and a love story, The Breath of Angels is also a tale which might never have been told but for one chance-in-a-million encounter. Once day at dawn, a man lay dying of thirst in an open boat that had been swept out to sea - his partner had already died in his arms. In the gloom of the early morning light he sees a tiny fleck of white on the distant horizon. The Warrior Queen is homeward bound from Venezuela and the dying man has one last slender chance of life . . .

The Breath Of Angels

Thomas Myler

In Boxing's Hall of Shame, Thomas Myler tells the inside stories of the real fight game. He reveals the sport's heroes and villains, mobsters and fixers, its shame and sorrows, providing the reader with a ringside seat at boxing's greatest and most controversial contests along the way. 
 
This no-holds-barred volume includes the enraged Mike Tyson taking a chunk out of Evander Holyfield's ear; Roberto Duran's baffling retirement against Sugar Ray Leonard; the Riddick Bowe-Andrew Golota fiasco that ended in an ugly full-scale riot; Sonny Liston - whose mobster background was not unknown to boxing authorities - going down under Muhammad Ali's phantom punch; and Jake LaMotta's botched dive against Billy Fox, which turned the 'Raging Bull' into boxing's bad boy overnight. 
 
Boxing's Hall of Shame sensationally revisits the boxing scandals, the fixed fights and the powerful influence of the underworld, taking the reader behind the scenes of the glove sport to reveal the shady underbelly of boxing through the ages.

Boxing's Hall of Shame

The Fight Game's Darkest Days

Stephen Walsh

This revised and updated edition of Voices of the Old Firm tells the story of Rangers and Celtic in the words of those who can say 'I was there'. By interviewing players, managers but above all supporters of the two great clubs, Stephen Walsh has built up a unique portrait of sixty years of football in the city. 
Full of evocative social and historical detail, the book surveys all the great moments since the war - the ups and downs, the triumphs and disasters. What was it like to be in Lisbon for Celtic's epic 1967 European Cup victory, or in Barcelona for Rangers' European triumph of 1972? The different 'voices' which describe these and many other key events include some of the greatest players ever to pull on a green or a blue jersey and they have vivid tales to tell of encounters on the field. 
 
But the book also hears the voices of those who have spent their time standing on the terraces or sitting in the stands cheering on their heroes. Ordinary supporters tell of their adventures at home and abroad while following their clubs with sometimes ridiculous levels of devotion. In their own words, they tell of great games of football, but they also describe the fabric of the fan's life - the buses, the songs, the drink, the clothes, the bigotry and the passionate emotion which marks Glasgow out from almost all other footballing cities. 
 
This classic oral history has been brought fully up to date with the addition of new material reflecting the way the teams have come to dominate the Scottish football scene in the last ten years. Highlights include Celtic's pilgrimage to Seville for the UEFA Cup final and Rangers' unforgettable championship win of 2005.

Voices Of The Old Firm

Yvonne Collinson Heath

Yvonne Collinson Heath will never forget the telephone call that changed her life for ever. On 23 March 2002, her eldest son, James – a private with the Royal Logistic Corps – was found dead in mysterious circumstances at the notorious Deepcut barracks. He had a single gunshot wound to the head. It was a tragedy that to this day raises questions. 
 
A Mother’s War recounts Yvonne’s anguish at losing her son, a boy who dreamed of serving his country but died before he had even reached his 18th birthday. It is also the powerful story of an extraordinary woman who overcame adversity – including the hurt of being abandoned by her father, bullied as a child and abused by a trusted uncle – to find love and raise a son, only to see him cruelly taken from her within weeks of his joining the Army. It reveals how her decade-long quest for answers uncovered sinister secrets and a series of cover-ups that went right to the heart of Whitehall. 
 
Above all else, A Mother’s War is the story of how Yvonne’s grief triggered a search for the truth that took her to Downing Street and captured the hearts of the nation.

A Mother's War

One Woman's Fight for the Truth Behind Her Son's Death at Deepcut

Neil Jeffries

Fraser Marr

Most relationships between a fan and a favourite football team go way beyond the casual. Almost always that relationship is a torrid, steamy and passionate love affair. A love affair that rarely lives up to expectations. A love affair that seldom satisfies and, most of the time, just plain hurts. 
 
 So it is for supporters of Leeds United, a club with a big reputation secured in the late 1960s and early '70s, but tarnished in the '80s and rebuilt only partially in the '90s. Come the start of the 1996-97 season, Leeds were a Premiership club on paper, but on the pitch looked far from it. The supporters groaned and the new board acted swiftly, manager Howard Wilkinson being replaced by the once disgraced George Graham. The football world watched as the former Arsenal supreme sought to rebuild both Leeds and his own reputation. All the club had was time, hope and the love of its fans . . . 
 
 Love Hurts tells the story of some of those fans. It is a diary of one extraordinary season, told and photographed in a uniquely personal way by two men for whom following Leeds is a labour of love requiring hours of motorway travel to matches offering variable amounts of torment and despair, of ecstasy and humour. The book pulls no punches, and points the finger whether the team wins or loses. No quarter is given and no fan of any team who reads is can fail to recognise the joy and pain it contains.

Love Hurts

Motorways, Madness and Leeds United

Robert Louis Stevenson

'For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel's sake. The great affair is to move.' - RLS 
 
In September 1878, Robert Louis Stevenson travelled by donkey through the Cevennes region of France. For personal memory - and, as it happens, for literary posterity - the young Stevenson recorded copious notes on his journey as he travelled. Some of these witty and incisive impressions were subsequently published in Travels With A Donkey. The remainder, however, didn't find its way into print until the first publication of The Cevennes Journal in 1978, one hundred years later. This travelogue, which also includes several of Stevenson's previously unpublished sketches of the region, provides both a unique socio-historical document and an important piece of literature.

The Cevennes Journal

Notes on a Journey Through the French Highlands

Ian Bell

Half a century ago a youth appeared from the American hinterland and began a cultural revolution. The world is still coming to terms with what he did. How he did it - and why - has never been fully explored. 
 
In Once Upon a Time, award-winning writer Ian Bell draws together the tangled strands of the many lives of Bob Dylan in all their contradictory brilliance. For the first time, the laureate of modern America is set in his entire context: musical, historical, literary, political and personal. 
 
In this acclaimed book, full of new insights into the legendary singer, his songs, his life and his era, the artist who invented himself in order to reinvent America is uncovered. Once Upon a Time is a biographical study of a personality that has splintered and reformed, time after time, in a country forever struggling to understand itself. Dylan has become the puzzle that illuminates. Here, in the first part of a major two-volume work, the puzzle is explained.

Once Upon a Time

The Lives of Bob Dylan

Andy Ripley

Winner of the National Sporting Club's prestigious British Rugby Book of the Year Award for 2008, Ripley's World transforms and redefines the genre of the sports autobiography. In a moving and intimate memoir, Andy Ripley, England rugby icon and victorious British Lion, television Superstar and world rowing champion, reflects on a life of sporting achievement and confronts his most powerful and dangerous challenge yet - his diagnosis with prostate cancer. Told with typical candour and courage, it is an absorbing and inspirational story.

Ripley's World

The Enthralling Story of the British Lion's Most Crucial Battle

Tommy Cairns Livingstone

Thomas Cairns Livingstone began to note his day-to-day experiences in 1913 and continued faithfully for the next 20 years. With each witty and well-observed entry, he recorded events at home and abroad through times of war and peace, joy and sadness. 
 
In this follow-up to the acclaimed Tommy's War, the focus is on the post-war years. Alongside engaging, warm-hearted recollections of everyday life with his wide circle of family, neighbours and friends, Thomas documents everything from the lingering effects of the war and post-war politics to cultural and social aspects of the era, including the rise of cinema and radio, the standard of dentists and opticians before the NHS, the partition of Ireland, the General Strike, the division of domestic labour, Clyde coastal holidays and the expansion of Glasgow. Yet, above all, Thomas affectionately chronicles family life with his hard-working wife, Agnes, and writes with pride of his clever young son, Tommy. 
 
Illustrated throughout with black-and-white sketches from Thomas' original diaries and various other artefacts from the period, Tommy's Peace is a tremendous document of a bygone era that vividly evokes family life in Glasgow between the wars.

Tommy's Peace

A Family Diary 1919-33

J Hennessey

When Alex Higgins' first manager, John McLaughlin, bestowed the nickname 'Hurricane Higgins' on the young, feisty snooker player he had no idea just how apt it was to prove over the next thirty years. Eye of the Hurricane details a sad but uplifting story of a man who had everything to play for but now has to play hard for anything he can get. It describes Higgins, sitting fitfully on snooker's sidelines, still has a story to tell, another controversy to spark. Author John Hennessey promises a 'wart and all' account of Alex Higgin's life and that is precisely what he delivers in this thoroughly absorbing book. . . well-told but cautionary tale of how narr ow the line is between genius and insanity 'This first proper account of Higgin's life is all the more clear-eyed for being written without his co-operation.

Alex Higgins: Snooker Legend

Eye of the Hurricane

Tom Palmer

When the Gelderd End sings 'If you're proud to be a Leeds fan clap your hands' you clap your hands . . . but should you? 
 
Leeds United Football Club have one of the worst reputations in the country. For years the fans and players - fairly or unfairly - have been associated with thuggery. In If You're Proud to be a Leeds Fan Tom Palmer tries to work out just why he claps and why, when he has to miss a home game for work, he feels so bad. 
 
Set in the 2001-02 Premiership season, the author follows Leeds United at stadiums home and away, in bars watching satellite, listening to Radio Leeds and Radio Five Live and watching the pages of Ceefax. He focuses as much on the fans as on the action on the pitch and tries to establish whether Leeds fans and players are really so bad. 
 
The book examines the highs and lows of the club's recent history and their impact on the supporters - from the Paris riot in 1975 to relegation in 1982 and the glory of the 1992 League win. Palmer discusses the Bowyer-Woodgate trial, the board's plans to take Leeds United away from Elland Road, the controversial replacement of manager David O'Leary with Terry Venables, and the club's persistent hooliganism problems, especially the fans' unceasing hatred of Manchester United. 
 
If You're Proud to be a Leeds Fan tries to explain why, in the face of so many reasons why you shouldn't, you still find yourself clapping. 
 
The book includes Leeds poet Tony Harrison's poem 'v.'.

If You're Proud To Be A Leeds Fan

John Scally

Rugby is not a game for those who think that centres are what you find in a box of Black Magic or who confuse Jonah Lomu with Joanna Lumley. At the same time, it is not a game for the bright: what kind of tortured mind would invent an oval ball? Of course, it helps if you know the rules and don't have any fear. In this respect you are in the same boat as most referees, particularly if you have a problem with your eyesight. 
 
Odd-Shaped Balls captures the humour, the agony and the ecstasy of one of the world's most popular sports. It snoops inside sweaty, smelly dressing-rooms, reveals the passions of coaches and fans - without whom rugby would cease to exist - and delves deep into the sport's archives to recall its heroes, villains and victims, all of whom are part of the daily currency. 
 
The book is no less than a who's who of the game, with both old and young getting the opportunity to have their say. Lining out is a cast of mischief-makers, miscreants and mad-hatters: from Max Boyce to Keith Wood; from Sean Fitzpatrick to Austin Healy; from Bill Beaumont and his streaker to Gavin Hastings; from Gareth Edwards to David Campese; and from the man in the scrum to the man at the bar. All exponents of surrealism, comic genius and savage wit, they offer a quirky insight into the sporting psyche as well as providing some riotous good laughs. 
 
With hundreds of funny stories, Odd-Shaped Balls is a light-hearted romp through decades of rugby tomfoolery that is guaranteed to put a smile on the face of all sports fans.

Odd-Shaped Balls

Mischief-Makers, Miscreants and Mad-Hatters Of Rugby

Officer 'A'

Welcome to the Criminal Investigation Department, aka the Crime Factory. 
 
Where the cops take and sell drugs (or steal them from the police storeroom), where they fit up, 'verbal' and harrass criminals, fight each other, drink-drive, abuse search warrants, have sex with sources, stab one another in the back (metaphorically), put each other under surveillance, abuse every aspect of their power, take bribes, cover up scandals, massage crime stats, leak sensitive information to the press . . . 
 
The Crime Factory. 
 
Where they perform life-saving medical care in the street, comfort people as they die, deal with gruesome suicides and murders as first-on-scene, attend cot-death post-mortems, examine rotting dead junkies for signs of murder, watch guilty rapists and paedophiles walk free, fight drunk soldiers, gypsies and various psychotic individuals, go undercover to catch scumbags who force-feed them crack, find missing children, arrest thieves, muggers, dealers, rapists and murderers . . . 
 
The Crime Factory. 
 
It's enough to drive anyone insane. 
 
The first book of its kind, this is the unforgettable and explosive true story of what life is really like as a police detective in the twenty-first century.

The Crime Factory

The Shocking True Story of a Front-Line CID Detective

Ian Botham

Sir Ian Botham and the Ashes are as closely intertwined as willow and leather or Merv Hughes and his moustache. You simply cannot think of one without the other. In this book, Sir Ian takes you on a ride through a lifetime's relationship with cricket's oldest and most treasured prize, revealing just how it has shaped his life and how he has helped to turn it into the contest it is today. 
 
From the moment he first watched the likes of Ken Barrington stride to the wicket in jaw-jutting defiance to the day he flayed Australia's bowling attack around Headingley as if playing with his mates in the park, and then onwards to his role in commentating on what was arguably the finest series of the lot, in 2005, Sir Ian has a rich and varied connection with the Ashes, and he tells all here. 
 
The Ashes is a series that has provided incredible highs and heartbreaking lows for English and Australian fans alike over the past 35 years. Sir Ian has often been at the centre of the roller-coaster ride. Whether it is his account of his days as England's dogsbody in 1977 in Melbourne or the story of his refusal to let Bob Willis bowl downwind until he was angry enough to skittle the Aussies in 1981, all is revealed in depth in Botham's Book of the Ashes.

Botham's Book of the Ashes

A Lifetime Love Affair with Cricket's Greatest Rivalry

David Leslie

Crimelord is the gripping life story of elusive multimillionaire gangster Tam McGraw. A notorious criminal kingpin, McGraw has risen from extreme poverty in the East End of Glasgow to become one of Scotland's wealthiest men. 
 
When hash started to flood into Scotland from the late 1980s onwards, suspicion centred on McGraw, leader of the infamous Barlanark Team. After a two-year surveillance operation, police discovered the drug had been hidden in buses carrying young footballers and deprived Glasgow families on free holidays abroad. It was a scam reminiscent of the movie The Italian Job, only this time Scots kids had been sitting on hash worth over £40 million. Police claimed McGraw was the financier and mastermind but in 1998 a jury declared him innocent while other suspects were jailed. 
 
As McGraw refuses to discuss his life publicly, his remarkable tale is told through friends, fellow crooks and the occasional rival. It is an outrageous, often hilarious, true gangster story.

Crimelord: The Licensee

The True Story of Tam McGraw

HIDDEN DANGERS IN WHAT WE EAT AND DRINK deals succinctly with the hazards that growing children, teenagers and adults are exposed to. Food and drink today contain many additives, E numbers and other hidden dangers that could affect people physically, mentally and emotionally. The growth in the problems of hyperactivity and autism are just two examples of the perils of an unbalanced food pattern. This book contains advice on food and dietary management, highlights the potential problems with what we consume and provides sensible advice on how to adjust our food pattern accordingly when certain problems arise. The immune system is very complex and depends on the nutritional values necessary for energy and vitality. In today's fast moving society, there are many convenience foods available. These foods can ultimately damage the immune system and, as such, there is a great need for more natural input in order to get the right output, namely healthy living. This carefully researched book gives the opportunity for the readers to help themselves to improved health through making wise choices regarding food and drink.

Hidden Dangers in What We Eat and Drink

A Lifelong Guide to Healthy Living

Robert Potter

Izzy Hammond

'It is my dearest hope that this book will allow me to reach out to others in pain and give them hope, for they too can choose to be a survivor.' 
 
Izzy Hammond's deaf and partially blind parents attracted sympathy from the outside world, but no one knew of the horrific abuse their daughter was subjected to inside the family home. 
 
In Someone To Watch Over Me, Izzy is now able to reveal how the vicious childhood abuse she suffered, first at the hands of her father and then by subsequent predators, cast a shadow over three generations of her family and led to a violent assault upon Izzy by her eldest daughter. Finally able to break the cycle, she has at last reclaimed a life free from the demons that have haunted her for so long.

Someone To Watch Over Me

The True Tale of a Survivor Haunted by the Demons of Abuse

Sarah Bridge

Sarah Bridge is smart, successful . . . and single. As a newspaper journalist, she has a hectic day job, a busy social life and is perfectly happy with both. But something – or someone – is missing. 
 
Embarking on a quest to find her soulmate, she tries everything: from speed-dating and wine-tasting to Scottish dancing and singles holidays, island-hopping and army assault courses to self-help books and fortune-telling. Whether climbing mountains in Morocco or swimming at midnight in the Caribbean, Sarah is on a mission to meet Mr Right. But will anything actually work? And how will she feel after putting herself, and her heart, out there? 
 
 First Catch Your Husband is an entertaining, touching and thought-provoking account of life on the front line of dating. It’s an inspiring tale for anyone who’s ever been, or wanted to be, in love.

First Catch Your Husband

Adventures on the Dating Front Line

Trevor Royle

Ian Archer

'It has to start somewhere for everyone, this daft, wild, extraordinary notion that happiness is a Scottish lap of honour and that the greatest, most hysterical happiness would be a Scottish lap of honour on a World Cup final day, England having just retired to the dressing-rooms, not just beaten, but destroyed, humiliated, thrashed, gubbed . . . ' - Ian Archer 
 
 First published in 1976, We'll Support You Evermore is a collection of reminiscences about the nation's favourite game. Hilarious tales of after-match celebrations and moving accounts of growing up playing football on the mean streets of Glasgow and Edinburgh rub shoulders with memories of superb victories, glorious defeats and drunken jaunts abroad. Together, these produce an entertaining portrait of Scottish supporters. Novelist Alan Sharp and Gordon Williams contribute essays, as do journalists Ian Archer, John Rafferty and Hugh Taylor among others. Each writes about his own personal recollections of the game: the Wembley Wizards, the Famous Five, Third Lanark, the Old Firm, Queen's Park, Hearts, Hibs, and many more. There's something here for every fitba'-daft reader.

We'll Support You Evermore

The Impertinent Saga of Scottish Fitba'

Jeff Randall

'A few seconds ago, I wanted to die. Now I know the reality is I just don't want to live. I never have from the moment I started falling, twenty-one and a half years ago. I'm alive. Shit.' 
 
Jeff Randall originally wrote his memoir by hand, the ink spattering on the page whenever he was writing about something painful and looping beautifully whenever he was recalling happier moments. He wrote it in a matter of weeks and delivered it to his estranged wife in an attempt to explain the demons that had haunted him for so long and that had been responsible for destroying their relationship. 
 
Love Hurts is the powerful true story of a boy whose tormented childhood was characterised by violence and isolation. He was raised in a fragmented, chaotic family, in a world where debt and poverty were the norm. From a young age, he yearned to escape but was sucked into an ever-decreasing spiral of bad choices and self-loathing. 
 
This brutally honest book charts the life of a boy who just wanted to be loved. And by confronting the nightmare of his childhood and coming to terms with his past, he has learned to love himself.

The True Story of a Life Destroyed

Colin MacFarlane

In his last book, The Real Gorbals Story, Colin MacFarlane detailed how he witnessed a once great area, home to wonderful characters and grand old buildings, disappear before his eyes. By the time MacFarlane's tenement was knocked down in the early 1970s, he had left school and been rehoused in another part of the city. In an attempt to extricate himself from his Gorbals gang days, he took a job as an apprentice chef at one of Glasgow's top restaurants, where he soon discovered that his colleagues were just as insane as those he had mixed with on the city streets. Meanwhile, MacFarlane struggled to integrate into the more affluent area that his family had been moved to and soon found himself returning to his old haunts and back in trouble again. 
 
In No Mean Glasgow, MacFarlane charts his eventful, fun-packed passage from Gorbals street boy to grown man on the brink of a new beginning. He describes his adventures with a mixture of humour, sadness and delight. It is a book for those people living all over the world who remember the old Glasgow - a city teeming with warmth, passion, patter and characters who could brighten up even the darkest of days.

No Mean Glasgow

Revelations of a Gorbals Guy

Fifty Years Fighting is the sequel to Jan de Vries's popular first autobiographical volume, A Step At A Time, which prompted readers to ask for more information about the life of the legendary alternative medicine guru. 
 
In Fifty Years Fighting, de Vries focuses on his lengthy struggle for the recognition of alternative medicine. He details how he was threatened with imprisonment by the Inspectorate of Health early in his career and reveals how the same organisation is now promoting this form of medicine today to the extent that, in his home country of Holland, a great majority of doctors have adopted alternative medicine in the way that he envisioned and campaigned for many years before. 
 
In the second part of his autobiographical trilogy, de Vries also describes some of the methods of alternative medicine he has used down the years and the remarkable results he has obtained while administering these treatments. 
 
Fifty Years Fighting is packed with intriguing case histories from Jan's vast experience of practising homoeopathy. Some are very surprising, while others give helpful tips for the reader. Invaluable advice is offered as to what patients can do to help themselves in certain circumstances and on how to obtain physical, mental - and most importantly - spiritual health in life.

Fifty Years Fighting

Another Step In Time

Steven McLaughlin

Clubland UK is a story of violent men and the worlds they inhabit. At the height of the hedonistic ’90s rave era, Steven McLaughlin policed some of Blackpool’s busiest seafront clubs on chaotic nights, as the virulent dance and drug craze exploded onto the scene. 
 
 From the front line, he witnessed the dark underbelly of clubland culture and the predatory menace lurking beneath the smiley-face T-shirts, pilled-up clubbers and frantically waving arms. He saw people revel in it; he saw people excel in it; he saw people profit in it; and he saw people suffer in it. Because sometimes being ‘a face’ in clubland demands the highest price of all. 
 
 From small-town gyms to big-time steroid dealers, from martial-arts myths to back-alley fights, door wars and gang grudges in Britain's gaudiest seaside town, Clubland UK is a story that takes the reader into a twilight world where testosterone, brotherhood, ego and a warrior mentality all collide in a bruising mess. 
 
 This book is a must-read trip into the dark side of the dance decade, a roller-coaster ride of pills and blood-spilling thrills, where agony and ecstasy co-exist in a blurred neon blaze.

Clubland UK

On the Door in the Rave Era

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