Hell and high water

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Sean Conway

In 2013, Sean Conway embarked on his bid to be the first person to swim the length of Britain, raising money for the charity War Child. Accompanied by three support crew on a tiny, leaky yacht, he set out from Land's End, aiming to hit John O'Groats in two months. From swimming alongside a dolphin and amidst stunning night-time phosphorescence, to tackling treacherous tides and growing a huge beard to protect himself from jellyfish stings, this is a story of immense courage and determination over an incredible 900-mile journey.

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Anthony Holden

In June 1805, a 56-year-old Italian immigrant disembarked in Philadelphia carrying only a violin. Before dying in New York, in his ninetieth year, he would find New World respectability as a bookseller, then as the first Professor of Italian at Columbia University. For now, he set up shop as a grocer. There was always an air of mystery about the Abbe Lorenzo Da Ponte. A scholarly poet, teacher and priest, with a devoted wife, he also had a reputation as a womaniser. Da Ponte charmed all he met, pioneering the place of Italian music in American life. But his self-assurance also excited mistrust. When the first Italian opera was performed in New York in 1825, he had the nerve to claim he had written it. He had, so he said, known Mozart. Not to mention Casanova. Like the memoirs he had recently written, to pay off more debts, the old man was so full of tall stories.... The many lives of Lorenzo da Ponte - librettist of Mozart's three great operas, The Marriage of Figaro, Don Giovanni and Cosi fan tutte - begin in Venice, linger in Vienna and London and wind up in New York, where today he lies buried in an unmarked grave in the world's largest cemetery. Anthony Holden's biography does justice at last to a great collaborator - the man who wrote Mozart.

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Barbara Vine

It is 1905. Asta and her husband Rasmus have come to East London from Denmark with their two little boys. With Rasmus constantly away on business, Asta keep loneliness and isolation at bay by writing a diary. These diaries, published over seventy years later, reveal themselves to be more than a mere journal. For they seem to hold they key to an unsolved murder and to the mystery of a missing child. It falls to Asta's granddaughter Ann to unearth the buried secrets of nearly a century before.

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Frances Osborne

Using letters, diaries, and family legend, Frances Osborne explores the life of Idina, her enigmatic great-grandmother, following her from Edwardian London to the hills of Kenya, where she reigned over the scandalous antics of the 'Happy Valley set'" - Back cover.