Tales from the Bedroom Floor

London: John Murray, 2005 Why is this book on the bedroom floor?: This is another of the bargains I picked up in the library booksale when I worked there. The price inside showed that it would have cost one lucky punter 40p, so I got it for half that because of library privilege. About the Author: A prolific writer and television producer, Stephen Walker has won numerous awards for his work including an Emmy, a BAFTA and the Rose d'Or at Montreux. He is currently working on a book surrounding the events of Major Yuri Gagarin's flight into space. Plot: A tense account of one of the most vivid events in history, when the city of Hiroshima suffered a spectacular bombing raid, destroying the city and ushering in the start of the nuclear age. Review: On a bright, clear morning, high above the mountains which surrounded the port of Hiroshima, air raid sirens began to shriek. Although this was not an uncommon occurrence, this particular air raid differed in three important respects...

London: Yellow Jersey, 2016 Why is this book on the bedroom floor?: I’m somewhat of a collector of football books, but only if they give me some insight into the theoretical aspect of the game; the why rather than the what. And what better way to find out how to win stuff than listen to the Germans? And it was a Christmas present from my Amazon list, if any fans of mine are feeling generous. About the Author: A former law student, Raphael Honigstein moved to London in the early nineteen-nineties. He is the English football correspondent for the Süddeutsche Zeitung and the German football correspondent for The Guardian and talkSPORT . Most recently, Honigstein has become a major contributor to The Athletic and a regular presence on BT Sport . He is also the author of Englischer Fussball: A German View of Our Beautiful Game . His Twitter handle is @honigstein . Plot: How does a team win a World Cup, particularly if they are paradoxically a perennial favourite but expected to fail? D...

London: Omnibus Press, 2001 Why is this book on the bedroom floor? - I’m currently researching a new novel with a background in the music industry, so I’m interested to learn how supergroups of ABBA's calibre reached the top. This book is cheating slightly - technically it belongs to Worcestershire Libraries, but when I came to borrow it, there was a fault because the library has had a new database and this book doesn’t exist on it, having been missed in their scanning exercise. So this is a non-book, in my possession, but like a good ex-librarian, I very much intend to return it. About the Author - Hailing from Sweden, Carl Magnus Palm is one of the world’s foremost ABBA historians, and in addition to acclaimed books about the band, he has been heavily involved with special editions of the band’s reissues and work with the ABBA museum with Stockholm. Although he has written about other artists, his focus seems to be continuing research into ABBA and what he doesn’t kno...

London: Profile, 2014 Why is this book on the bedroom floor? - I spotted this in a charity shop. It was the spine which caught my attention, proving that you can’t judge a book by its cover but you can certainly get arrested by it. About the author - Gaston Dorren is a language writer from the Netherlands. He speaks six languages and reads in a number of others. Lingo was based on his book Language Tourism , published in Dutch in 2012 and subsequently published in different languages. He continued the theme of Lingo by writing Babel , about the twenty most spoken languages in the world today. He seems like a very engaging and enthusiastic bloke, at least based on his website at https://languagewriter.com/. The English edition was translated by Alison Edwards, and there were contributions by Jenny Audring and Frauke Watson. Plot - Around continental Europe in sixty languages, Lingo tells us something interesting beyond the vocab for each and every one. Review - In my seco...