Fragile Lives. A Heart Surgeon's Stories of Life and Death on the Operating Table

Internationally bestselling author of The Four Agreements, Don Miguel Ruiz gives us a mystical tour of his life and calling as a “Nagual” in this gripping spiritual and autobiographical teaching novel.Internationally bestselling author Don Miguel Ruiz became a trusted and well-known teacher of spiritual wisdom through his popular works such as The Four Agreements, Mastery of Love, and The Voice of Knowledge. Now he is ready to take his students on a new journey, inviting us to confront and learn a deeper level of spiritual teaching and wisdom than he has attempted before.Using the occasion of his heart attack in 2002 and subsequent coma where it was not clear he would live, Ruiz and his cowriter Barbara Emrys have created an enchanting and mystical tale of the internal spiritual struggle Ruiz undergoes as his body lies unconscious. He must choose whether or not to come back to life. Re-experiencing the people, ideas, and encounters that have shaped him through his childhood and career, we encounter the challenges of “the way of the Nagual,”—a person who is called to teach and embody the deepest spiritual truths of the universe.In the tradition of Carlos Castaneda and other shamans who have come before him, Ruiz invites us to grapple with truths that are beyond what can be put into words but nonetheless promise to transform everything we know.

The highly anticipated return of Dalziel and Pascoe, the hugely popular police duo and stars of the long-running BBC TV series, in a new psychological thriller.Caught in a huge Semtex explosion, it seems the only thing preventing Superintendent Andy Dalziel from death is his size – and sheer bloody-mindedness.An injured DCI Peter Pascoe is convinced there’s a conspiracy at work, despite the security services concluding the blast was in fact an accident. Who, then, are the mysterious Knights Templar with their gruesome acts of vengeance? And what of a hit-and-run on one of Pascoe’s colleagues? And, most importantly, will Dalziel ever wake up to hear the truth…?

‘Now when I hear birdsong, I feel an entry to that understory. When I am feeling too squeezed on the ground, exhausted by everything in my care, I look for a little sky. There are always birds flying back and forth, city birds flitting around our human edges, singing their songs.’One winter, Kyo Maclear became unmoored. Her father had recently fallen ill and she suddenly found herself lost for words. As a writer, she could no longer bring herself to create; her work wasn’t providing the comfort and meaning that it had before.But then Kyo met a musician who loved birds. The musician felt he could not always cope with the pressures and disappointments of being an artist in a big city. When he watched birds and began to photograph them, his worries dissipated. Intrigued, Kyo found herself following the musician for a year, accompanying him on his birdwatching expeditions; the sounds of birds in the city reminded them both to look outwards at the world.Intricate and delicate as birdsong, Birds Art Life Death asks how our passions shape and nurture us, and how we might gain perspective, overcome our anxieties and begin to cherish the urban wild spaces where so many of us live.

The Soldier’s Seduction The last time he’d seen Phoebe, they’d wound up in bed together. Now, after two years, soldier Wade Donnelly had every intention of repeating that incredible night. The incredible secret she needed to share would have to wait until morning…The Heart of a Mercenary Hunter McBride – he’d buried his past and his emotions long ago to become the ultimate warrior. His mission was to get the proof of a deadly toxin out of the Congo jungle – with or without the innocent beauty who possessed it. But with every minute counting down to disaster, Sarah showed Hunter how to live again.Straight Through the Heart Special Agent Eric Vinland was in one hell of a fix. Dawn Moon would be masquerading as his wife on a Greek island where they hoped to outbid “other” terrorists for a disk. But the sexual attraction sparked between them like a high-voltage wire, demanding his attention!

The extraordinary life and times of Carl Barat, Libertine.From his childhood in suburban Basingstoke, through times of literally being down and out in London and Paris, to success as one of the co-founders of one of Britain's most revered bands, Carl Barat has gone through the glass darkly as bands fell apart around him, friendships faltered and egos and hedonism threatened to pull his life apart.Untitled Autobiography tells his extraordinary story, in themed chapters. Love tells of early, unrequited ardour, first heartache and the enduring feelings he has for his best friend, Pete Doherty. Work details time spent on the night shift in factory jobs; his first taste of the bright lights and big city as an usher in theatreland; of the moment when rock and roll really did become just another chore. London looks at the city that shaped him and helped nurture him as a song writer even as he slept on its streets; Icons his fascination with Sir Alec Guinness, his adoration of David Niven, the affinity he felt for the War Poets; Drugs – well, you can probably guess.Each chapter is chronologically linked by pages from Barat's journal, each recalling a pivotal moment from his life. The Libertines first NME cover in June 2002; their last ever show in Paris just before Christmas in 2004. Walking out on stage with Pete once more at the Hackney Empire in April 2007; touring broken-hearted and solo along America's West Coast in early 2009. His first night onstage at the Riverside Hammersmith, in Sam Shephard's Fool For Love in January 2010. His thoughts on the upcoming Libertines reunion in August 2010.Untitled Autobiography is a revealing and intimate self-portrait, a story of love and fighting and the creativity that came of that, and a fascinating account of the London of the last decade, with The Libertines its beating heart.

Henry Stuart’s life is the last great forgotten Jacobean tale. Shadowed by the gravity of the Thirty Years’ War and the huge changes taking place across Europe in seventeenth-century society, economy, politics and empire, his life was visually and verbally gorgeous. NOW THE SUBJECT OF BBC2 DOCUMENTARY The Best King We Never Had Henry Stuart, Prince of Wales was once the hope of Britain. Eldest son to James VI of Scotland, James I of England, Henry was the epitome of heroic Renaissance princely virtue, his life set against a period about as rich and momentous as any.Educated to rule, Henry was interested in everything. His court was awash with leading artists, musicians, writers and composers such as Ben Jonson and Inigo Jones. He founded a royal art collection of European breadth, amassed a vast collection of priceless books, led grand renovations of royal palaces and mounted operatic, highly politicised masques.But his ambitions were even greater. He embraced cutting-edge science, funded telescopes and automata, was patron of the North West Passage Company and wanted to sail through the barriers of the known world to explore new continents. He reviewed and modernised Britain’s naval and military capacity and in his advocacy for the colonisation of North America he helped to transform the world.At his death aged only eighteen, and considering himself to be as much a European as British, he was preparing to stake his claim to be the next leader of Protestant Christendom in the struggle to resist a resurgent militant Catholicism.In this rich and lively book, Sarah Fraser seeks to restore Henry to his place in history. Set against the bloody traumas of the Thirty Years’ War, the writing of the King James Bible, the Gunpowder Plot and the dark tragedies pouring from Shakespeare’s quill, Henry’s life is the last great forgotten Jacobean tale: the story of a man who, had he lived, might have saved Britain from King Charles I, his spaniels and the Civil War with its appalling loss of life his misrule engendered.

In these elegant, unsparing and intimate stories, the Folio Prize-winning author, Akhil Sharma, exposes the paradoxes, ironies and harmonies that characterise modern life. Marrying the minimalism of Chekhov and Carver with a flair for dark comedy, A Life of Adventure and Delight is a collection full of wisdom, wonder and reflection. .

In these elegant, unsparing and intimate stories, the Folio Prize-winning author, Akhil Sharma, exposes the paradoxes, ironies and harmonies that characterise modern life. Marrying the minimalism of Chekhov and Carver with a flair for dark comedy, A Life of Adventure and Delight is a collection full of wisdom, wonder and reflection. .

This audiobook comprises two works: Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness and his autobiographical A Personal Record. The opening of Heart of Darkness finds Charles Marlow in fading light on the Thames Estuary, as he and his companions relax on deck, waiting for the turn of the tide. He tells of the time he turned 'freshwater sailor' on the River Congo, of his perilous journey upriver in a little steamboat with a band of white colonialists and a group of cannibals that takes him closer to the coveted ivory, closer to Kurtz the rogue agent, closer to certain unspeakable rites and the heart of darkness. Serialised in three parts in 1899, Heart of Darkness was first published in 1902. A Personal Record is a 'fragment of biography', an autobiographical work by Joseph Conrad, published in 1912. It has also been published under the title Some Reminiscences. It is a masterpiece of atmospheric writing and the main contemporary source to detail his early life. Conrad, Polish by birth, who goes on to become one of the greatest novelists of the English language, describes his childhood and adolescence, discusses his forebears, one of whom fought on the side of Napoleon and ate a Lithuanian dog, the exile of his parents, the death of his mother and his relationship with Uncle Tadeusz. Thereafter Conrad beautifully interweaves the tales of why he went to sea and how he came to be a writer. Its digressive structure is precisely what makes it a magical and timeless work about exile, destiny and art.

Certain philosophers of Antiquity compared the world to a large animal; but if the world were an animal, it would have a skin similar to the skin that envelops each living being and gives it unity. The world is neither an animal nor a machine but an interminable jumble whose destination is nothing other than the maelstrom in which the very idea of the world slips away. The world has no skin other than the turbulence that makes histories, customs, moments of grandeur and decadence. Because it is not a skin, this extension of space-time is much more fragile than the skins that are already always fragile, because everything here touches its extremities. The world is everything that passes between us – ourselves and everything that happens to us, everything that becomes of our contacts, our gazes, our movements; and through referrals from skin to skin, from the fleeting to the immemorial, you reach, without even knowing it, the entire actuality of the world: the act of its existence. This act is made up of works and disasters, splendours, horrors, and catastrophes. As long as it is ours, it is the act of an infinite emergence that is all the sense there is: a sense that incessantly goes from skin to skin and is itself never enveloped by anything. The texts in this volume are all oriented by the concern for what is currently happening to us – we, late humanoids – when we arrive at an extremity of our history, whether this extremity should turn out to be a stage, a rupture, or quite simply a last breath.