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Three cheers for the ingenious, inventive, United States of America! From the kitchen to the office to outer space, America has been at the forefront of the advances of the human race for the last two centuries. It's given birth to more new products, devices, medicines, leisure pursuits, sports, musical genres, and vehicles than any other country or people ancient or modern. More Nobel prize winners come from these shores than the next five countries combined. Atom Bomb to Santa Claus celebrates the country's pioneering drive by describing some of its greatest innovations and some of its greatest – and most surprising – inventors. It challenges the imagination to know that the same country that gave the world the artificial heart and e-mail, also originated sliced bread and Chinese fortune cookies. Guaranteed to entertain and enlighten, Atom Bomb to Santa Claus is an amazing chronicle of some of America's most important and imaginative creations. Purchase on Amazon

Tell us a little bit about yourself. Where are you from?  Where am I from? I’ve often wondered that myself. The bare biographical details are that I spent my childhood in Hertfordshire and my teenage years in Norfolk, but I’ve never felt I was from either place. I hot-footed it to London immediately after university and I have never left. I love London and couldn’t imagine living anywhere else. It’s my spiritual home. Lots of people hate London (and are happy to tell Londoners so) but for those of us who have chosen to live here long term, it inspires a passion that you don’t often find elsewhere. London also features heavily in my writing, it’s almost another character in fact. As for my writing, I write novels about clever, resourceful, funny women who solve their own problems. I have a very distinctive voice as an author, but there’s nothing manufactured about it, it’s simply the only way I can write. My friends tell me that reading my books is like hearing me talk (something I do a

Tell us a little bit about yourself. Where are you from?  I was raised on a chicken farm in a remote Pennsylvania village. After abandoning the chickens, I worked as a professional student, oceanographer, bum, woodworker, research chemist, chemistry teacher, and science writer in that order. I have also written for national magazines, including backpacking and woodworking magazines. I've written some fiction, but I didn't like the results. I occasionally write poetry of Valentine's Day. How long have you been writing?  I've always liked to write. I started writing more when I started backpacking. Campfires attract muses.  What was the inspiration for your most recent book? When I realized that science concepts were discovered in almost the same sequence they are taught. What was the hardest part about writing this book? Writing it was easy and fun. The hard part came when discovered that promoting it is hard and frustrating. Do you often develop characters fr

Work/Life/Cycle Staying friends should be easy. But then, so should growing up, and George, Harry and Ian have never really got the hang of that either. They spent their twenties in a state of permanent childish abandon. Now, adulthood is catching up with them and the icy blast of work, commitments and relationships is beginning to take its toll. In one last ditch attempt to keep responsibility from eroding their friendship entirely, the trio decide to take a cycling holiday across the breadth of the country. Which would be fine if they’d ever cycled before. Or if George’s idea of modern cycling wear wasn’t tweed, long socks and cycling clips. Purchase on Amazon About the Author Richard Mapes is an author of comedy novels, who has variously been a scientist, a musician, a film director and a rock star, and is getting tired of being asked what he wants to be when he grows up. Currently, he works for Facebook, making creative tools for advertisers, but he has previously wor

Tell us a little bit about yourself. Where are you from?  I grew up in Fishkill, NY, which is a world away from Austin, TX where I live now, but I love both. This is my first novel, and I went at it with more vigor than any other short story I've ever written, but I'm getting back to that and writing screenplays. in college I used to write for a TV show whenever they'd let me and I wanted to write a novel with the mindset that everything I write might some day make the big screen. The first job I really loved was working at movie theater back in the day when film projectors were still the primary means of showcasing movies. I loved threading up the projector, cleaning it, putting the film together, and I said to myself someday I'll see my own work turned into something like this. Although whether that'll be in film or digital doesn't really concern me as long as I can chomp away on some movie theater food and watch it on the big screen in some cheap second run

At 12.16am on Wednesday, June 5, 1968, Senator Robert F. Kennedy was shot and mortally wounded in the kitchen service pantry of the Ambassador Hotel, Los Angeles. He had just won the California Primary, an important victory in his quest for nomination as the Democratic Party’s candidate in the US Presidential election late that year. A little over 24 hours later, he was pronounced dead.  A 24-year-old Palestinian immigrant, Sirhan Bishara Sirhan, was captured in the pantry with a smoking gun in his hand. Eyewitnesses had seen him step out in front of Kennedy and begin shooting with a small calibre revolver. He fired all eight bullets in its chamber. In April 1969, Sirhan was convicted of Robert Kennedy’s murder and the wounding of five others. He was sentenced to death, later commuted to life imprisonment. He has been in prison – often in solitary confinement – ever since. Fifteen applications for parole have been rejected.  That is the official history of the murder of Robert F. Ken

Tell us a little bit about yourself. Where are you from? I live in a fabulous town in Somerset, England with my husband, our children and our fantastic ginger cat. Primarily I write contemporary adult fiction but I also like to dabble in children's fiction and short stories, the odd poem may fall out of my pen too! How long have you been writing?  I've been writing since around 2003 but that was all fairly primitive. I was really writing with intent from around 2010. I did an MA in Creative writing in 2013/14 which helped to hone my skills and take my work to the next level. What was the inspiration for your most recent book? Redferne Lane all started with the school run. I was lucky to have an idyllic walk along a pedestrian only path next to a meadow when I took my children to school. I imagined a set of houses at one end and a big old house at the other end of this path and that became Redferne Lane . Grace was a character that has been in my head for quite a w

In this perceptive biography of Donald Maclean, Robert Cecil draws on his close acquaintance with the man, first at Cambridge and then as his colleague in the Diplomatic Service, to give an insider’s view of Maclean and his circle of ideological spies: Burgess, Philby and Blunt. He details Maclean’s recruitment as an agent by the Comintern in 1934, his early years in Paris, marriage, breakdown in Cairo and ultimate flight, with Burgess, to the Soviet Union.  The heart of the book is Maclean’s years in Washington from 1944-48, a time when crucial decisions about the post-war world were being made. Maclean was assigned top secret work connected with the development of the atomic bomb – the ‘Manhattan Project’. He was undoubtedly Stalin’s best source in Washington, and Russian knowledge of US nuclear capabilities fuelled the atomic-weaponry race. His treachery did immense damage to Anglo-American relations. The other casualty, which Cecil is well-placed to describe, was to the gentleman

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