CELIA BRAYFIELD

What do you do when the kids you work with have never heard of the Bonzo Dog Doo Dah band, when your marijuana empire has been hijacked and your mates think Lady in Red is a really quite a good song? For Percy George Hodsoll, the answer was easy. You drive your motorbike over the central reservation and go out in a blaze of glory. George had friends - luckier, happier, richer men who got a band together to play classic R & B: Mickey, the star commercials director, has a career on borrowed time; Rhys, the conscientious doctor, is in love with Mickey's wife; four-square, big-hearted Andy, starting over after redundancy, with a dangerously sexy new neighbour; Sam, the egotist supreme, is leaving home for a woman who thinks she's an Egyptian goddess. Without George, life, love and masculinity catch up with the four old friends. It's time to move on, but where to? Start a new life? Fix the old one? Divorce? Suicide? Sex? Prison? Decisions, decisions...Funny, sad, moving, hilarious - a social comedy that touches the heart of modern middle England.

What do you do when your daughter tells you it's time to leave the nest? Throw the computer into the back of the car, pack your bags and move your entire household, including your cats, to France, naturally. Celia Brayfield tells of her year in "la France profonde", a tiny village in the Bearn, France's answer to Texas and the land of the Three Musketeers. The book gives an insight into a writer's life that's full of funny and perceptive anecdotes - the wildlife in the woodpile, the low-life in the Fandango cafe, why Frenchmen are so sexy, not to mention the portraits of Peter Mayle's children, some of the half-million Brits who are out there living their dreams.

Black Beauty is a novel that changed our world. Intended to induce kindness in a Victorian audience who relied on horses for transport, travel and power, it remains a dearly loved childrens classic. Writing Black Beauty is the story of the remarkable woman who wrote this phenomenal book.Born in 1820 to a young Quaker couple, Anna Sewell grew up in poverty in London. She was 14 when she fell and injured her ankle, leaving her permanently disabled. Rejecting the limitations that Victorian society forced on disabled people, she developed an extraordinary empathy with horses, learning to ride side-saddle and drive a small carriage.Rebellious and independent-minded, Anna left the Quaker movement as a young woman but remained close friends with the women writers and abolitionists who had been empowered by its liberal principles. It was not until she became terminally ill, aged 51, that she wrote her own book. It was published in 1877, but Anna tragically died just five months later.After modest success in Britain, Black Beauty was taken up by American activist George Thorndike Angell, who made it one of the bestselling novels of all time. Using newly discovered archive material, Celia Brayfield shows how Anna Sewell developed the extraordinary resilience to rouse the conscience of Victorian Britain and make her mark upon the world.

The most wanted, the most feared, the most hated, the most powerful job in journalism: being a reviewer means writing about something you love and getting paid for it. So for a lot of people its the No 1 dream job in the media. Whether your passion is film, music, books, visual arts or the stage, you can get closer to it as a reviewer and establish a career in one of the most influential roles open to a writer. Get the edge on the competition with a book thats a treasure trove of wisdom, experience and downright cunning, passed on by the best critics writing today.A great review will be read by millions, and writing it calls for a high degree of skill. Based on a lifelong passion, packed into a few hundred words and often written in less than an hour, a review makes heavy demands on writers technique and experience. This book explains how to seize your readers attention and how to be witty always, fascinating most of the time and bitchy when you need to be. Reviews from classic writers like Pauline Kael or Kenneth Tynan are contrasted with todays hot names including Mark Kermode and Stewart Maconie. We look back at the history of the critic and some of the groundbreaking groups who have shaped our culture, including Dorothy Parker and the Algonquin Round Table, the French New Wave directors who founded Les Cahiers du Cinema and Londons celebrated Modern Review, founded by Julie Burchill, Toby Young and Cosmo Landesman.