Over the last half billion years, there have been five major mass extinctions, when the diversity of life on Earth suddenly and dramatically contracted. Scientists are currently monitoring the sixth extinction, predicted to be the most devastating since the asteroid impact that wiped out the dinosaurs. This time around the cataclysm is us. In this book the author tells us why and how human beings have altered life on the planet in a way no species...

"During a routine survey mission on an uncolonized planet, Kira finds an alien relic. At first she's delighted, but elation turns to terror when the ancient dust around her begins to move. As war erupts among the stars, Kira is launched into a galaxy-spanning odyssey of discovery and transformation. First contact isn't at all what she imagined, and events push her to the very limits of what it means to be human. While Kira faces her own horrors,...

"It's summer, but school is in session in the delightful second book of New York Times bestselling author Jenny Colgan's utterly charming School by the Sea series, set at a girls' boarding school in Cornwall. For the second year at Downey House, it's getting harder and harder to stick to the rules ... Maggie Adair's first year as a teacher at Downey House was a surprising success. After making the leap from an inner-city school in Glasgow, she's learned...

On May 1, 1915, a luxury ocean liner as richly appointed as an English country house sailed out of New York, bound for Liverpool, carrying a record number of children and infants. The passengers were anxious. Germany had declared the seas around Britain to be a war zone, and for months, its U-boats had brought terror to the North Atlantic. But the Lusitania was one of the era's great transatlantic "Greyhounds" and her captain, William Thomas Turner,...

Who wouldn't want to live in a treehouse? Especially a 13-story treehouse that has a bowling alley, a see-through swimming pool, a tank full of sharks, a library full of comics, a secret underground laboratory, a games room, self-making beds, vines you can swing on, a vegetable vaporiser and a marshmallow machine that follows you around and automatically shoots your favourite flavoured marshmallows into your mouth whenever it discerns you're hungry....

A former interpreter in Iraq who lost his wife and child in an assassination attempt discovers a dead body on the beach in Virginia and believes it is connected to his past. One early morning on a Norfolk beach in Virginia, a dead body is discovered by a man taking his daily swim--Arman Bajalan, formerly an interpreter in Iraq. After narrowly surviving an assassination attempt that killed his wife and child, Arman has been given lonely sanctuary...

"The stunning, timely new novel from the acclaimed, internationally bestselling author of The Architect's Apprentice and The Bastard of Istanbul. Peri, a married, wealthy, beautiful Turkish woman, is on her way to a dinner party at a seaside mansion in Istanbul when a beggar snatches her handbag. As she wrestles to get it back, a photograph falls to the ground -- an old polaroid of three young women and their university professor. A relic from a past...

"In an effort to help us reconnect with the food that sustains our lives, David Moscow has spent four years going around the world, meeting with rock-star chefs, and sourcing ingredients within local food ecosystems -- experiences taking place in over twenty countries that include milking a water buffalo to make mozzarella for pizza in Italy; harvesting oysters in Long Island Sound and honey from wild bees in Kenya; and making patis in the Philippines,...

"The untold story of climate migration-the personal stories of those experiencing displacement, the portraits of communities being torn apart by disaster, and the implications for all of us as we confront a changing future"-- We think about the dangers of climate change in the future tense: that as global warming gets worse over the coming decades, millions of people will scatter around the world fleeing famine and rising seas. What we often don't...

The Kid doesn't know where her parents are. They left with a promise to come back months ago, and now their seventeen-year-old daughter is stranded on Swan Island. Swan isn't just any island; it is home to an eccentric old age separatist community who have shunned life on the mainland for a haven which is rapidly sinking into the ocean. The Kid's arrival threatens to burst the idyllic bubble that the elderly residents have so carefully constructed...