Mrs. Thornton goes to an auction, and to her surprise acquires a ruined farmhouse and seventy wild acres. It lies in a deep Surrey valley, peeping behind the leaning fruit trees of its orchard. It is built of quarry stone, with pearl-grey timbers, diamond-paned windows and a steep, wide roof encrusted with moss and lichen. The Thorntons give their hearts to it at once and work hard to make the farm a success. There is much to do, much to be learnt and many difficulties to overcome, for the house is very old and the land is overgrown.
The Horse, the Wheel, and Language - How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World
Roughly half the world's population speaks languages derived from a shared linguistic source known as Proto-Indo-European. But who were the early speakers of this ancient mother tongue, and how did they manage to spread it around the globe? Until now their identity has remained a tantalizing mystery to linguists and archaeologists. The Horse, the Wheel, and Language lifts the veil that has long shrouded these original Indo-European speakers, and reveals how their domestication of horses and use of the wheel spread language and transformed civilization.
Amazon Best of the Month, August 2010: "The awful thing about life is this:" says Octave to the Marquis in Renoir's Rules of the Game. "Everyone has his reasons." That could be a motto for novelists as well, few more so than Jonathan Franzen, who seems less concerned with creating merely likeable characters than ones who are fully alive, in all their self-justifying complexity. Freedom is his fourth novel, and, yes, his first in nine years since The Corrections.
James Patterson - Saving the World and Other Extreme Sports
There's one last chance to save the world in MAXIMUM RIDE: SAVING THE WORLD AND OTHER EXTREME SPORTS, the closing chapter of James Patterson's thrilling trilogy. The time has arrived for Max and her winged "Flock" to face their ultimate enemy and discover their original purpose: to defeat the takeover of "Re-evolution", a sinister experiment to re-engineer a select population into a scientifically superior master race..
The Angel Experiment was just a test drive... Now, brace yourself for the MAXIMUM ride! James Patterson shifts high action into overdrive in this eagerly awaited follow-up to his #1 New York Times bestseller. Brave bird-kid Max and her flock fly south on a perilous quest to find their parents, after having rescued Angel and recovered secret documents about their origins.
