Bøker utgitt av Little, Brown

Precious Ramotswe and Grace Makutsi, Gaborone's No. 1 Lady Detectives, do not always agree on important issues - one being the complex male psyche. Grace believes that food is the source of men's happiness, while Precious takes a more nuanced view: men are not so different from women, they want to be loved and needed, too. It is pride that is so often their undoing.Mma Ramotswe is reminded of this when ­her husband, J. L. B. Matekoni, is offered a daunting business opportunity; one which, if it fails, threatens their existing livelihood, including the detective agency. Somehow, Precious must guide her husband to the right decision, while being mindful of how much he wants The Joy and Light Bus Company to succeed. Meanwhile, there are other problems to solve. A wealthy client's elderly father has changed his will, making his devoted live-in nurse a significant beneficiary, and the ladies are tasked with uncovering the woman as a fraud. And then there is the disturbing rumoured maltreatment of children living and working on a local farm, which a concerned Mma Ramotswe is intent on investigating. Professional and moral duty battles with female instinct and Mma Ramotswe is determined not to jump to conclusions until she has all the facts. She knows only too well how cunning people can be. After all, she herself is not beyond a little trickery - especially when it comes to righting wrongs and seeing justice served, or when innocent lives are at stake.

Before the Second World War, Singapore was richer than any Asian metropolis except for Tokyo, and by far the most ethnically diverse. But in 1965, it had independence forced upon it in a sudden rupture with newly formed Malaysia and found itself facing catastrophe. It took the bloody-minded determination and vision of Lee Kuan Yew, its founding premier, to take a small island of diverse ethnic groups with a broken economy and meld it into Asia's first globalised city. Lion City tells this extraordinary story, in doing so examining the different faces of Singaporean life - from food to culture to art and politics - and describing how the different ethnic groups of Singapore were forged by Lee into a distinctive Singaporean identity. It also reveals the way that its combination of economic freedom, clean government and political authoritarianism has been studied as a model around world, but particularly in Asia, and how it compares it in particular to Hong Kong, at a time when fate of the latter hangs in the balance. The book also looks at Singapore's - and east Asia's - future. Today, as Hong Kong struggles to resist assimilation into China, Singapore's value as a neutral base for business is rising again. Its strategic location between China and India is also more significant than ever at a time when these two economies are growing rapidly in importance. Although Singapore remains one of the most Westernized societies in Asia, with strong political, military and economic links to the US in particular, this is beginning to shift as China's influence in the region grows. Finally, as birth rates plummet to far below replacement levels, the book examines the demographic challenge faced by the city.

Friends matter to us, and they matter more than we think. The single most surprising fact to emerge out of the medical literature over the last decade or so has been that the number and quality of the friendships we have has a bigger influence on our happiness, health and even mortality risk than anything else except giving up smoking.Robin Dunbar is the world-renowned psychologist and author who famously discovered Dunbar's number: how our capacity for friendship is limited to around 150 people. In Friends, he looks at friendship in the round, at the way different types of friendship and family relationships intersect, or at the complex of psychological and behavioural mechanisms that underpin friendships and make them possible - and just how complicated the business of making and keeping friends actually is.Mixing insights from scientific research with first person experiences and culture, Friends explores and integrates knowledge from disciplines ranging from psychology and anthropology to neuroscience and genetics in a single magical weave that allows us to peer into the incredible complexity of the social world in which we are all so deeply embedded.Working at the coalface of the subject at both research and personal levels, Robin Dunbar has written the definitive book on how and why we are friends.

A discarded painting in a junk pile, a skeleton in an attic, and the greatest racehorse in American history: from these strands, a Pulitzer Prize winner tells a sweeping story of spirit, obsession, and injustice across American historyKentucky, 1850. An enslaved groom named Jarret and a bay foal forge a bond of understanding that will carry the horse to record-setting victories across the South. When the nation erupts in civil war, an itinerant young artist who has made his name on paintings of the racehorse takes up arms for the Union. On a perilous night, he reunites with the stallion and his groom, very far from the glamour of any racetrack.New York City, 1954. Martha Jackson, a gallery owner celebrated for taking risks on edgy contemporary painters, becomes obsessed with a 19th equestrian oil painting of mysterious provenance.Washington, DC, 2019. Jess, a Smithsonian scientist from Australia, and Theo, a Nigerian-American art historian, find themselves unexpectedly connected through their shared interest in the horse-one studying the stallion's bones for clues to his power and endurance, the other uncovering the lost history of the unsung Black horsemen who were critical to his racing success.Based on the remarkable true story of the record-breaking thoroughbred, Lexington, who became America's greatest stud sire, Horse is an original ,gripping, multi-layered reckoning with the legacy of enslavement and racism in America.

'Marvellous...escapes the inane, balance-sheet view of Empire and sees its full complexity' Sathnam Sanghera, bestselling author of Empireland On Saturday 29 September 1923, the Palestine Mandate became law and the British Empire reached what would prove to be its maximum territorial extent, covering a scarcely credible quarter of the world's land mass, containing 460 million people. But the tide was beginning to turn.This book is a new way of looking at the British Empire. It immerses the reader in the contemporary moment, focusing on particular people and stories from that day, gleaned from newspapers, letters, diaries, official documents, magazines, films and novels: from a remote Pacific Island facing the removal of its entire soil, across Australia, Burma, India and Kenya to London and the West Indies.In some ways, the issues of a hundred years ago are with us still: debates around cultural and ethnic identity in a globalised world; how to manage multi-ethnic political entities; racism; the divisive co-opting of religion for political purposes; the dangers of ignorance. In others it is totally alien. What remains extraordinary is the Empire's ability to reveal the most compelling human stories. Never before has there been a book which contains such a wide spread of vivid experiences from both colonised and coloniser: from Pan-Africanists in West Africa to militant Buddhists in Burma; governors, policemen and nurses. 'An engrossing and wide-ranging account of the zenith of the British Empire - with all the contradictions, brittleness, ambition and hubris that moment entailed. Across Continents and characters, Matthew Parker provides a new, global history of British imperialism which feels both epic and immediate' Tristram Hunt

'I would be most unhappy to think that any part of this memoir should be cut on grounds of 'decency', for those bits are essential...' So begins the lively true story of aristocrat and travel writer Roderic Fenwick-Owen. Born in 1920, Fenwick-Owen had an extraordinary life, which careered between some of the biggest moments in history and took him to the ends of the earth, meeting (and even living with) some of the 20th Century's most well-known people along the way, including Eisenhower, Jackson Pollock and Marlene Dietrich. After eye-opening schoolboy exploits with his classmates Christopher Lee and Queen Elizabeth II's cousin (whilst his father ran away with the family's nanny), Roderic spent the 1930s trying to fit in at Eton and Oxford and getting into various mischief all the while. In the summer of 1939, he witnessed Nazi Germany when he went to stay with a friend, and only managed to get home the day before war broke out. He served first in the ambulance service in the north of England and then in air raid shelters during the Blitz, before joining the RAF and being stationed in Italy. In the years afterwards he travelled far and wide, was briefly married to a Tahitian princess and became the court poet to Sheikh Shakhbut in Abu Dhabi. Dripped throughout his life are his numerous and passionate love affairs with both men and women, and the effects the decriminalisation of the former had on his happiness. A 20th Century Sort of Life is a marvellous obituary of an ever-changing and now lost world, that was frequently the best of times, and sometimes the worst.