Books

Haunted by a past she can’t escape, Laura Cunningham desires nothing more than to keep her world small and precise - her quiet relationship and growing jewellery business are all she needs to get by. Until the December day when Rob Blake walks into her studio and commissions a necklace that will tell his enigmatic wife Cat’s life in charms

Billie is saving up for a special toy, and Jack is helping her do jobs. But what will happen when Jack wants to spend the money on something else?

There is nothing to be found in the pages of these books but misery and despair. You still have time to choose something else to read. But if you must know what unpleasantries befall the charming and clever Baudelaire children read on...The Penultimate Peril. Sadly this next-to-last chronicle of the lives of the Baudelaire orphans, and it is next-to-first in its supply of unpleasantness

Princess Emily is excited about her first Grand Ball, but she’d rather be on the zip wire in the castle grounds than trying on dresses. Her three friends feel the same, so they slip out after dinner. A zip wire in the dark is excellent fun! But things take a serious turn when the girls find a trapped deer in the forest. Who would do such an awful thing, and why?

The Rescue Princesses are having such fun staying with Jaminta! The Kingdom of Onica is amazing, with its Cloud Mountain and the tiny baby panda who lives there... The mountain is also home to the lost Onica Crystals. But someone is out to steal them - someone who won't let a baby panda stand in their way. Can the Rescue Princesses find the crystals first and keep the baby panda safe from the thieves?

The second book in the fabulous Rescue Princesses series finds the Princesses staying on the tropical island of Ampali for the summer. They are to attend the Royal Regatta in a few days’ time and are busy getting ready for all the festivities. Clarabel is sent out to collect shells to decorate the palace and discovers a badly wounded dolphin. He guides her to a beautiful pearl, and seems to be able to talk to her through the jewel. In staging a daring rescue, the Princesses need all their strength and bravery, and discover ancient treasure along the way!

In the highly anticipated Thinking, Fast and Slow, Kahneman takes us on a groundbreaking tour of the mind and explains the two systems that drive the way we think. System 1 is fast, intuitive, and emotional; System 2 is slower, more deliberative, and more logical. Kahneman exposes the extraordinary capabilities—and also the faults and biases—of fast thinking, and reveals the pervasive influence of intuitive impressions on our thoughts and behavior. The impact of loss aversion and overconfidence on corporate strategies, the difficulties of predicting what will make us happy in the future, the challenges of properly framing risks at work and at home, the profound effect of cognitive biases on everything from playing the stock market to planning the next vacation—each of these can be understood only by knowing how the two systems work together to shape our judgments and decisions.

If you are looking for a story about cheerful youngsters spending a jolly time at boarding school, look elsewhere. Violet, Klaus and Sunny Baudelaire are intelligent and resourceful children, and you might expect that they would do very well at school.