Showing results by author "Stephen" in All Categories

Stephen Fry believes that if you can speak and read English, you can write poetry. But it is no fun if you don't know where to start or have been led to believe that anything goes. Stephen, who has long written poems, and indeed has written long poems, for his own private pleasure, invites you to discover the incomparable delights of metre, rhyme and verse forms.

Traditionally, businesses have relied on a 'command and control' management style, focusing on rigid hierarchies and compliance from employees. Covey argues we must shift from a 'command and control' to a 'trust and inspire' leadership model. Trusting and inspiring your team is defined by commitment from both sides, with a focus on effectiveness and fostering a growth mindset. It is based on the belief that employees are creative, collaborative, and full of potential; through trust, you can inspire them to do their best work.

Thailand 1996. The Year of The Rat. Pete, a young travel writer, wanders into a Bangkok go-go bar and meets the love of his life. Joy is the girl of his dreams, young, stunningly pretty, and one of the Zombie Bar's top-earning pole dancers. What follows is a roller-coaster ride of sex, drugs, and deception, as Pete discovers that his very own private dancer is not all that she claims to be. And that far from being the girl of his dreams, Joy is his own personal nightmare.

When Navy SEALS track down and kill Osama Bin Laden in Pakistan, it's obvious there was a traitor on the inside. After the false friends are revealed to be two British students, Malik and Chaudhry - former Islamic fundamentalists recruited by MI5 - they become targets themselves. Dan 'Spider' Shepherd must teach the pair how to survive undercover with al-Qaeda closing in. But Spider is not used to playing the handler.

A mesmerising tale of unjust imprisonment and offbeat escape, Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption is one of Stephen King's most beloved and iconic stories and it helped make Castle Rock a place listeners would return to over and over again. Suspenseful, mysterious and heart-wrenching, this iconic King novella, populated by a cast of unforgettable characters, is about a fiercely compelling convict named Andy Dufresne who is seeking his ultimate revenge.

When a new disease turns people into sadistic, laughing killers, a light infantry battalion fights to maintain order in Boston. As infection spreads, the Army loses control, and the soldiers find themselves fighting the people they once swore to protect. As the country slides into violent collapse, the lost battalion learns the last bastion of the federal government is still holding out in Florida. Harry Lee, its commander, decides the only hope is to lead the survivors there.

Returned to the Earth of 2037 by the Firstborn, mysterious beings of almost limitless technological prowess, Bisesa Dutt is haunted by the memories of her five years spent on the strange alternate Earth called Mir, a jigsaw-puzzle world made up of lands and people cut out of different eras of Earth's history.

It's 2045-2059. After the cataclysmic upheavals of Step Day and the Yellowstone eruption humanity is spreading farther into the Long Earth, and society, on a battered Datum Earth and beyond, continues to evolve. Now an elderly and cantankerous AI, Lobsang, lives in disguise with Agnes in an exotic, far-distant world. He’s convinced they’re leading a normal life in New Springfield - they even adopt a child - but it seems they have been guided there for a reason.

Half a million years in the future, on a dead, war-ravaged world at the centre of the galaxy, there is a mile-high statue of Michael Poole. Poole, born on Earth in the fourth millennium, was one of mankind's most influential heroes. He was not a warrior, not an emperor. He was an engineer, a builder of wormhole transit systems. But Poole's work would ultimately lead to a vast and destructive conflict, a million-year war between humanity and the enigmatic, powerful aliens known as the Xeelee. The Xeelee won.

Steve-O is best known for his wildly dangerous, foolish, painful, embarrassing, and sometimes death-defying stunts. At age 48, however, he faces his greatest challenge yet: getting older. A Hard Kick in the Nuts: What I’ve Learned from a Lifetime of Terrible Decisions is a captivating exploration of life and how to live it by an individual who has already lived way more than a lifetime’s worth of extreme experiences. Steve-O grapples with the right balance between maturity and staying true to yourself, avoiding selfishness, and finding the right partner for life.

On a red-eye flight from LA to Boston, 10 passengers wake up to discover everyone else has disappeared. Brian Engle, a trained pilot, remembers something about a strange aurora borealis and turbulence reports over the desert. Now he has to try to land the plane. But the safe haven of Bangor airport is not what it seems. It's eerily empty. The clocks have stopped. The food and drink is tasteless. The fuel doesn't burn. And the sound, like 'radio static', is getting closer. Craig Toomy, an investment banker, believes he knows what's coming....

After an audacious assassination attempt on boss Daniel Kinahan's life, the Kinahan Cartel recruited an unprecedented number of killers to retaliate against their attackers, the Hutch gang. Kinahan Assassins is the compelling behind-the-scenes account of one man's thirst for vengeance and how it proved fatal for his organization. Kinahan Assassins has the stories of the men who killed for the cartel - including vulnerable drug addicts, a former British soldier, an MMA fighter and an invisible 'Mr Nobody' who acted as a cartel quartermaster - as well as those who gave them orders.

In a crumbling world plagued by natural disasters, collapsing infrastructure, and mass panic, bizarre billboards and advertisements appear throughout town: 'Charles Krantz. Thirty-nine great years. Thanks, Chuck!' Marty Anderson, a schoolteacher, becomes obsessed with these messages as the world, inexplicably linked to Chuck's life, seems to be approaching its end. Told in three acts, presented in reverse order, The Life of Chuck explores one man's past.

Clay Blaisdell is one big mother, but his capers were just small-time until he met George Rackley. George introduced him to a hundred cons and one big idea: kidnapping the child of rich parents. The Gerards are filthy rich, and the last twig on the family tree could be worth millions. There's only one problem: by the time the deal goes down, the brains of the partnership is dead. Or is he? Now Blaze is running into the teeth of a howling storm and the cops are closing in.

Since the turn of the century, a generation has come of age knowing only war, recession, political gridlock, racial hostility, and a simmering fear of environmental calamity. In the country’s forgotten pockets, where industry long ago fled, where foreclosures, Walmarts, and opiates riddle the land, death rates for rural whites have skyrocketed, fueled by suicide, addiction, and a rampant sense of marginalization and disillusionment. This is the world the characters in Stephen Markley’s brilliant debut novel, Ohio, inherit. This is New Canaan.

Todd Bowden is an apt pupil. Good grades, good family, a paper route. But he is about to meet a different kind of teacher, Mr Dussander, and to learn all about Dussander's dark and deadly past...a decades-old manhunt Dussander has escaped to this day. Yet Todd doesn't want to turn his teacher in. Todd wants to know more. Much more. He is about to face his fears and learn the real meaning of power - and the seductive lure of evil.

The 15th thriller in the Spider Shepherd series promises even more enthralling action from the Sunday Times best seller Stephen Leather. He is one of the world's most ruthless terrorists, codenamed Saladin. He plans and executes devastating attacks, and then, ghostlike, he disappears. Ten years ago he blew a plane out of the sky above New York - and now he's struck again, killing dozens in a London strike. But one of the latest victims is related to the acting head of MI5, who knows exactly who she wants on the case: Spider Shepherd.

As an MI5 agent, Spider is used to going undercover, but when he's asked to assume the identity of the contract killer hired to take out President Vladimir Putin, he knows he'll become a wanted man. And things are about to get more complicated: Spider is told that his MI5 controller and close friend Charlotte Button has been running an off-the-books assassination operation, taking vengeance on the men who killed her husband.

The updated version of the best-selling solution to grow your confidence, assertiveness, and self-esteem. Cutting through the nonsense, this book offers a simple and easy-to-understand solution to growing your confidence, assertiveness, and self-esteem. No fancy gimmicks, just solid and actionable advice which can help you fast.

Welcome to the darkest night of the Zulu Alpha, where every loyalty is tested, every moral calculus impossible, and every price paid too costly to be borne. The world's last nuclear supercarrier strike group and its exhausted Marine Raider guardians must now range from the coast of fallen America to an unavoidable date with destiny at the farthest northern point of Australia, to the enclosed and exploding death zone of the world's largest offshore oil field – knowing that everywhere, at all times, absolutely everything will be on the line.