Books

This title helps you learn the secret of magic and put on your own astounding magic show with these 20 step-by-step magic tricks to try at home. The Children’s Book of Magic demystifies the mystical by tracing the history of magic from ancient Egypt to the present day exploring the secrets behind some of the greatest magicians from Harry Houdini to Albertus Magnus. From coin tricks to sleight of hand The Children’s Book of Magic explains the best magic tricks for kids through engaging step-by-step sequences helping you master the perfect trick.

With 8 schools of magic and 20 magic tricks inside, you’ll learn how to cut a person in half, make objects levitate or even disappear! You’ll be well on your way to becoming the world’s best magician and putting on your very own magic show! Dive in and discover amazing magic tricks from the secrets of sleight of hand to captivating card tricks and the mysteries of misdirection for your own magic show.

“Sometimes funny, always creepy, genuinely moving, this marvellous spine-chiller will appeal to readers from nine to ninety.” – “Books for Keeps”. “I was looking forward to “Coraline”, and I wasn’t disappointed. In fact, I was enthralled.

This is a marvellously strange and scary book.” – Philip Pullman, “Guardian”. “If any writer can get the guys to read about the girls, it should be Neil Gaiman. His new novel “Coraline” is a dreamlike adventure.

For all its gripping nightmare imagery, this is actually a conventional fairy story with a moral.” – “Daily Telegraph”. Stephen King once called Neil Gaiman ‘a treasure-house of stories’ and, in this wonderful novel, which has been likened to both “Alice in Wonderland” and the “Narnia Chronicles”, we get to see Neil at his storytelling best.

Crime and Punishment is one of the greatest and most readable novels ever written. From the beginning we are locked into the frenzied consciousness of Raskolnikov who, against his better instincts, is inexorably drawn to commit a brutal double murder. From that moment on, we share his conflicting feelings of self-loathing and pride, of contempt for and need of others, and of terrible despair and hope of redemption: and, in a remarkable transformation of the detective novel, we follow his agonised efforts to probe and confront both his own motives for, and the consequences of, his crime.

The result is a tragic novel built out of a series of supremely dramatic scenes that illuminate the eternal conflicts at the heart of human existence: most especially our desire for self-expression and self-fulfilment, as against the constraints of morality and human laws; and our agonised awareness of the world’s harsh injustices and of our own mortality, as against the mysteries of divine justice and immortality.

Democracy in America is a classic of political philosophy. Hailed by John Stuart Mill and Horace Greely as the finest book ever written on the nature of democracy, it continues to be an influential text on both sides of the Atlantic, above all in the emerging democracies of Eastern Europe. De Tocqueville examines the structures, institutions and operation of democracy, and shows how Europe can learn from American success and failures.

His central theme is the advancement of the rule of the people, but he also predicts that slavery will bring about the ‘most horrible of civil wars’, foresees that the USA and Russia will be the Superpowers of the twentieth century, and is 150 years ahead of his time in his views on the position and importance of women.