Showing results by author "Holt" in All Categories

Ever been offered a promotion that seems too good to be true? You know - the sort they'd be insane to be offering to someone like you. The kind where you snap their arm off to accept, then wonder why all your long-serving colleagues look secretly relieved, as if they're off some strange and unpleasant hook...It's the kind of trick that deeply sinister companies like J.W. Wells & Co. pull all the time. Especially with employees who are too busy mooning over the office intern to think about what they're getting into.

Izzy's family is under the spotlight when her dad comes out as Danielle, a trans woman. Izzy is terrified her family will be torn apart. Will she lose her dad? Will her parents break up? And what will people at school say? Izzy's always been shy, but now all eyes are on her. Can she face her fears, find her voice and stand up for what's right?

Starting a new job is always stressful (especially when you don't particularly want one), but when Paul Carpenter arrives at the office of J. W. Wells he has no idea what trouble lies in store. Because he is about to discover that the apparently respectable establishment now paying his salary is in fact a front for a deeply sinister organisation that has a mighty peculiar agenda. It seems that half the time his bosses are away with the fairies. But they're not, of course. They're away with the goblins.

In 2019, there were more than two million children being homeschooled. That number doubled during the pandemic and is now likely to continue increasing as more parents worry that school might not be the best place for their children to learn and grow. Teach Your Own helped launch the homeschooling movement; now, its timeless and revolutionary message of recognizing the ways children come to understand the world has been updated for today’s environment.

The doughnut is a thing of beauty, a circle of fried, doughy perfection - a source of comfort in trying times, perhaps. For Theo Bernstein it is far, far more. An accident at work lost Theo his job (and his work involved preventing a Very, Very Large Hadron Collider from blowing up, so he's unlikely to get it back). His wife has left him; he doesn't have any money; and news arrives that his good friend, Professor Pieter van Goyen, renowned physicist and Nobel laureate, has died.

When the Supreme Being and his son decide that being supreme isn't for them anymore, it's inevitable that things get a bit of a shake-up. It soon becomes apparent that our new owners, the Venturi brothers, have a very different perspective on all sorts of things. Take Good and Evil, for example. For them it's an outdated concept that never worked particularly well in the first place.

Mount Mellyn stood as proud and magnificent as she had envisioned. But what about its master—Connan TreMellyn? Was Martha Leigh's new employer as romantic as his name sounded? As she approached the mansion towering above the cliffs of Cornwall, an odd chill of apprehension overcame her. TreMellyn's young daugher proved as spoiled and difficult as the three governesses before Martha had discovered. But it was the girl's father whose arrogant demeanor unleashed unfamiliar sensations and turmoil—even as whispers of past tragedy and present danger begin to insinuate themselves into her life.

In his song "You Can't Stop Rock and Roll" Ozzy Osbourne sings, "Rock and roll is my religion and my law". And that's why Raising Hell is a must-have for anyone who wants to hear about the iconoclastic culture of headbangers and the wild lives they lead. The book contains the crazy, funny, and sometimes horrifying anecdotes musicians have told about a lifestyle both invigorating and at times self-destructive.

A heart-warming tale of Armageddon from one of the funniest, most original voices in comic fiction today.... The third planet out from the star was blue, with green splodges. Dirt. Oh, the bomb thought. And then its courage, determination and nobility-of-spirit subroutines cut in, overriding everything else, adrenalizing its command functions and bypassing its cyberphrenetic nodes. Here goes, said the bomb to itself. Calibrate navigational pod. Engage primary thrusters. Ready auxiliary drive.

J.W. Wells seemed to be a respectable establishment, but the company now paying Paul Carpenter's salary is in fact a deeply sinister organisation with a mighty peculiar management team. Paul thought he was getting the hang of it (particularly when he fell head over heels for his colleague Sophie), but death is never far away when you work at J.W. Wells, unlike the stapler - that's always going AWOL. Our love-struck hero is about to discover that custard is definitely in the eye of the beholder. And that it really stings.

Welcome to Dawson, Ahriman & Dawson! The team of commercial sorcerers at Dawson, Ahriman & Dawson can help with any metaphysical engineering project, large or small. (Though by definition, they all tend to be pretty large.) They can also create massive great puddles of chaos that might one day swallow up the entire universe. Take, for example, the decision to recruit a certain bearded fellow whose previous work experience mainly involves reindeer and jingle bells. It might have seemed like a good idea at the time, but is he really the best person to save the world from Tiamat the Destroyer?

Monsters are roaming the streets of London. Of course, some monsters are scarier than others: Unicorns? No bother. Vampires? Big deal. Werewolves? Ho hum. Lawyers? … Aaargh! Duncan's boss doesn't think that he's cut out to be a lawyer. He isn’t a pack animal. He lacks the killer instinct. But when his best friend from school barges his way back into Duncan’s life, with a full supporting cast of lawyers, ex-wives, zombies and snow-white unicorns, it’s not long before things become distinctly unsettling.

1803. The Napoleonic Wars. A Royal Navy warship is ordered to pursue an enemy frigate to the icy waters far south in the Indian Ocean. There, it must capture the enemy ship and retrieve a mysterious sea chest, contents unknown, failure not permitted. For the determined young captain and his eager crew, this already dangerous mission turns into a battle with a mysterious vessel that appears not in the sea, but unbelievably, impossibly, in the sky above. But nothing could prepare the crew for what lay beyond the 50th latitude of south.

Kieron Dyer's memoir, Old Too Soon, Smart Too Late, is the first intimate and unsparing portrait of the failures and excesses of the generation of English footballers made rich beyond their wildest dreams by the post-1990 World Cup boom in the game and the explosion of the Premier League. It shares the same brutal honesty and self-awareness of the best-selling No Nonsense by Joey Barton and GoodFella by Craig Bellamy.

Polly, an average, completely ordinary property lawyer, is convinced she's losing her mind. Someone keeps drinking her coffee. And talking to her clients. And doing her job. And when she goes to the dry cleaner's to pick up her dress for the party, it's not there. Not the dress - the dry cleaner's.And then there are the chickens who think they are people. Something strange is definitely going on - and it's going to take more than a magical ring to sort it out.

Stuart Pearce became the face of England's bid to win the 1996 European Championships when his maniacal explosion of joy and relief at scoring a penalty in the quarter-final shootout against Spain captured the mood of a nation. England did not win the tournament, but, against a backdrop of the 'Three Lions' song that played from every pub, every bar, every car radio and every open window in that summer, it cemented the renaissance of the game in this country.

A happy workforce is a productive workforce. At the moment, the Wizard's employees are neither. The goblins are upset with their working conditions, the dragonslayer has thrown a hissy fit over his medical insurance (or lack thereof) and everyone is upset about the terrible canteen coffee. Yet the Wizard hasn't got time to worry about revolution in the workplace - he's about to see his brilliant business plan (based on entrepreneurial flair and involving one or two parallel worlds) disrupted by a clueless young man.

Rosie Holt, the desperate and loyal Tory MP famous for her viral twitter ‘interviews’, is finally here in book form to celebrate the last 14 years of Conservative government and explain to you, the British public, why the so called “scandals” or “controversial” decisions derided by the left were completely right (and intentional) all along. She’ll make Tories of you all yet.

Being the Dark Lord and Prince of Evil is not as much fun as it sounds, particularly if you are a basically decent person. King Mordak is just such a person. Technically he's more goblin than person, but the point is that he is really keen to be a lot less despicable than his predecessors. Not that the other goblins appreciate Mordak's attempts to redefine the role. Why should they when his new health-care program seems designed to actually extend life expectancy, and his efforts to end a perfectly reasonable war with the dwarves appear to have become an obsession?

This enduring classic of educational thought offers teachers and parents deep, original insight into the nature of early learning. John Holt was the first to make clear that, for small children, "learning is as natural as breathing." In this delightful yet profound book, he looks at how we learn to talk, to read, to count, and to reason, and how we can nurture and encourage these natural abilities in our children.