The Little Coffee Shop of Kabul

Two weeks after September 11th, award-winning journalist ?sne Seierstad went to Afghanistan to report on the conflict there. In the following spring she returned to live with an Afghan family for several months. For more than twenty years Sultan Khan defied the authorities - be they communist or Taliban - to supply books to the people of Kabul. He was arrested, interrogated and imprisoned by the communists and watched illiterate Taliban soldiers burn piles of his books in the street. He even resorted to hiding most of his stock in attics all over Kabul.But while Khan is passionate in his love of books and hatred of censorship, he is also a committed Muslim with strict views on family life. As an outsider, Seierstad is able to move between the private world of the women - including Khan's two wives - and the more public lives of the men. And so we learn of proposals and marriages, suppression and abuse of power, crime and punishment. The result is a gripping and moving portrait of a family, and a clear-eyed assessment of a country struggling to free itself from history.

The leader of one of the country's most violent biker gangs, Den Laurey, should have been behind bars. But thanks to a daring escape on the LA freeway, several US marshals are dead and Laurey is riding free. Rackley, back on the Service's warrant squad, is in hot pursuit of the outlaw and his ruthless gang with a media whirlwind and the entire Los Angeles law-enforcement community driving him.Just when Laurey is within his grasp, circumstances force Rackley to let him go with devastating results. A few miles up the road, a sheriff's deputy is attacked: Tim's pregnant wife, Dray. Driven by guilt, Tim vows to hunt Laurey down. With the stakes rising, Tim must unravel a horrifying secret and confront a deadly terror that reaches from the back alleys of Mexico to the poppy fields of Afghanistan . . . and threatens to explode on the dark streets of LA.

Latifa was born into an educated middle-class Afghan family in Kabul in 1980. She dreamed of one day of becoming a journalist, she was interested in fashion, movies and friends. Her father was in the import/export business and her mother was a doctor.Then in September 1996, Taliban soldiers seized power in Kabul. From that moment, Latifa, just 16 years old became a prisoner in her own home. Her school was closed. Her mother was banned from working. The simplest and most basic freedoms - walking down the street, looking out a window - were no longer hers. She was now forced to wear a chadri. My Forbidden Face provides a poignant and highly personal account of life under the Taliban regime. With painful honesty and clarity Latifa describes the way she watched her world falling apart, in the name of a fanatical interpretation of a faith that she could not comprehend. Her voice captures a lost innocence, but also echoes her determination to live in freedom and hope. Earlier this year, Latifa and her parents escaped Afghanistan with the help of a French-based Afghan resistance group.

Love and fine wine go together, but in both cases it's important to recognise the real thing.Will HONOR BRADY find true love with wine merchant HUGO LANCASTER, who sweeps her off to his chateau in France?Her friend DIARMUID KEENAN doesn't think so. But then, he can't find the real thing himself.Is winemaker DIDIER ROUSSEAU really interested in Honor - or in Hugo's chateau?And will young American MELANIE MILLAR find roots in the same chateau through a wartime secret in her family past?

Mouth-watering recipes inside!As dawn breaks over the Pont Neuf, and the cobbled alleyways of Paris come to life, Anna Trent is already awake and at work; mixing and stirring the finest, smoothest, richest chocolate; made entirely by hand, it is sold to the grandes dames of Paris.It's a huge shift from the chocolate factory she worked in at home in the north of England. But when an accident changed everything, Anna was thrown back in touch with her French teacher, Claire, who offered her the chance of a lifetime - to work in Paris with her former sweetheart, Thierry, a master chocolatier.With old wounds about to be uncovered and healed, Anna is set to discover more about real chocolate - and herself - than she ever dreamed.