• Ladybird Read It Yourself Bookset: Levels 1 to 4 (20 titles) — Hardcover

    Age Range: 5 – 8  years

    Read It Yourself with Ladybird is one of Ladybird’s best-selling series. For over thirty-five years it has helped young children who are learning to read develop and improve their reading skills.

    Each Read It Yourself book is very carefully written to include many key, high-frequency words that are vital for learning to read, as well as a limited number of story words that are introduced and practised throughout. Simple sentences and frequently repeated words help to build the confidence of beginner readers and the four different levels of books support children all the way from very first reading practice through to independent, fluent reading.

    Each book has been carefully checked by educational consultants and can be read independently at home or used in a guided reading session at school. Further content includes comprehension puzzles, helpful notes for parents, carers and teachers, and book band information for use in schools.

    There are Four Levels in this set:

    Level 1 Read it yourself titles are suitable for very early readers who have had some initial reading instruction and are ready to take their first steps in reading real stories. Each story is told very simply, using a small number of frequently repeated words.

    Level 2 Read it yourself titles are ideal for children who have received some initial reading instruction and can read short, simple sentences with help.

    Level 3 Read it yourself titles are suitable for children who are developing reading confidence and stamina, and are eager to start reading longer stories with a wider vocabulary.

    Level 4 Read it yourself titles are ideal for children who are ready to read longer stories with a wider vocabulary and are keen to read independently.

     

  • Ladybird Tales Bookset: Classics (23 titles) – Hardcover

    Age Range: 5 – 8  years

    This awesome hardback bookset Ladybird edition of Classics is a perfect first illustrated introduction to these classic fairy tales for young readers from 3+.

    Exciting titles in the Ladybird Tales series include The Three Billy Goats Gruff, Cinderella, The Three Little Pigs, Jack and the Beanstalk, Goldilocks and the Three Bears, The Gingerbread Man, Hansel and Gretel, Little Red Riding Hood, Sleeping Beauty, Rumpelstiltskin, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Rapunzel, The Magic Porridge Pot, The Enormous Turnip, Puss in Boots, The Elves and the Shoemaker, The Big Pancake, Dick Whittington, The Princess and the Frog, The Princess and the Pea, Chicken Licken and The Little Red Hen.

    Ladybird Tales are based on the original Ladybird retellings, with beautiful pictures of the kind children like best – full of richness and detail. Children have always loved, and will always remember, these classic fairy tales and sharing them together is an experience to treasure. Ladybird has published fairy tales for over forty-five years, bringing the magic of traditional stories to each new generation of children.

  • Ladybird Bookset: The Basics – First Skills and Key Words Series (41 titles) – Hardcover

    This promo set includes the 5 books in the First Skills Ladybird series and the 26 books in the Key Words with Peter and Jane set (Books 1a, 1b, 1c to12a, 12b, 12c).

    Titles in this set are:

    First Skills: ABC

    First Skills: Counting

    First Skills: Colours and Shapes

    First Skills: Telling the Time

    First Skills: Big and Little

    Key Words with Peter and Jane 1 – 12 (each level has a, b and c)

  • The Black Hermit (African Writers Series, AWS51)

    In this play, Remi, the first of his tribe to go to university, ponders whether or not he should return to his people. Or should he continue to be a black hermit in the town? Amidst the backdrop of a politically torn country, Remi himself is torn between his sense of tribalism and nationalism. This struggle runs deep, as he finds it at the heart of his afflictions between himself, his marriage and familial relations, and his greater sense of obligations to his people and the country. The overwhelming nature of these problems drives him into isolation as a black hermit. His self-imposed exile into the city leads him to find contentment in the Jane, his new lover, and nightly clubbing. However, after he is lobbied to return to the tribe, he must now confront the demons of his past.

    The Black Hermit was the first published East African play in English. The play was published in a small edition by Makerere University Press in 1963, and republished in Heinemann’s African Writers Series in 1968.

  • No Longer at Ease (African Writers Series, AWS3)

    Obi Okonkwo is an idealistic young man who, thanks to the privileges of an education in Britain, has now returned to Nigeria for a job in the civil service. However in his new role he finds that the way of government seems to be backhanders and corruption. Obi manages to resist the bribes that are offered to him, but when he falls in love with an unsuitable girl – to the disapproval of his parents – he sinks further into emotional and financial turmoil. The lure of easy money becomes harder to refuse, and Obi becomes caught in a trap he cannot escape.

    Showing a man lost in cultural limbo, and a Nigeria entering a new age of disillusionment, No Longer at Ease concludes Achebe’s remarkable trilogy charting three generations of an African community under the impact of colonialism, the first two volumes of which are Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God.

  • The Lovers (African Writers Series)

    The Lovers collects Head’s short fiction of the 1960s and 70s, written mainly in Serowe, Botswana, and depicting the lives and loves of African village people pre- and post-independence.

    An earlier selection called Tales of Tenderness and Power was published in the Heinemann African Writers Series in 1990, but this expanded and updated volume adds many previously unavailable stories collected here for the first time. Anthology favourites like her breakthrough The Woman from America and The Prisoner who Wore Glasses are included, leading up to the first complete text of her much translated title story.

  • A Grain of Wheat (African Writers Series, AWS36)

    Barack Obama, via Facebook: “A compelling story of how the transformative events of history weigh on individual lives and relationships.”

    The Nobel Prize–nominated Kenyan writer’s best-known novel

    Set in the wake of the Mau Mau rebellion and on the cusp of Kenya’s independence from Britain, A Grain of Wheat follows a group of villagers whose lives have been transformed by the 1952–1960 Emergency. At the center of it all is the reticent Mugo, the village’s chosen hero and a man haunted by a terrible secret. As we learn of the villagers’ tangled histories in a narrative interwoven with myth and peppered with allusions to real-life leaders, including Jomo Kenyatta, a masterly story unfolds in which compromises are forced, friendships are betrayed, and loves are tested.

  • The Joys of Motherhood (African Writers Series, AWS227)

    The fourth novel from the Nigerian-born writer, Buchi Emecheta, The Joys of Motherhood is recognised as one of Africa’s 100 Best Books of the 20th Century in an initiative organised by the Zimbabwean International Book Fair.

    First published in 1979, The Joys of Motherhood is the story of Nnu Ego, a Nigerian woman struggling in a patriarchal society. Unable to conceive in her first marriage, Nnu is banished to Lagos where she succeeds in becoming a mother. Then, against the backdrop of World War II, Nnu must fiercely protect herself and her children when she is abandoned by her husband and her people.

    The Joys of Motherhood is a powerful commentary on polygamy, patriarchy and women’s changing roles in urban Nigeria.

  • Gathering Seaweed: African Prison Writing (African Writers Series)

    This anthology introduces the African literature of incarceration to the general reader, the scholar, the activist and the student. The visions and prison cries of the few African nationalists imprisoned by colonialists, who later became leaders of their independent dictatorships and in turn imprisoned their own writers and other radicals, are brought into sharper focus, thereby critically exposing the ironies of varied generations of the efforts of freedom fighters.

    Extracts of prose, poetry and plays are grouped into themes such as arrest, interrogation, torture, survival, release and truth and reconciliation.

    Contributors include: Kunle Ajibade, Obafemi Awolowo, Steve Biko, Breyten Breytenbach, Dennis Brutus, Nawal El Saadawi, M J Kariuki, Kenneth Kaunda, Caesarina Kona Makhoere, Nelson Mandela, Emma Mashinini, Felix Mnthali, Augustino Nato, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Kwame Nkrumah, Abe Sachs, Ken Saro Wiwa, Wole Soyinka, and Koigi wa Wamwere.

    Although an often harrowing indictment of the history, culture and politics of the African continent and the societies from which this literature comes, the anthology presents excellent prose, poetry and drama, which stands up in its own right as serious literature to be cherished, read and studied.

  • The Trouble with Nigeria (African Writers Series)

    The eminent African novelist and critic, here addresses Nigeria’s problems, aiming to challenge the resignation of Nigerians and inspire them to reject old habits which inhibit Nigeria from becoming a modern and attractive country. In this famous book now reprinted, he professes that the only trouble with Nigeria is the failure of leadership, because with good leaders Nigeria could resolve its inherent problems such as tribalism; lack of patriotism; social injustice and the cult of mediocrity; indiscipline; and corruption.

  • Can We Talk And Other Stories (African Writers Series)

    Shimmer Chinodya, winner of the 1989 Commonwealth Writers Prize (Africa region) is one of Zimbabwe’s foremost fiction writers. This collection of short stories reveals his development as a writer of passionate questioning integrity.

    The first stories, ‘Hoffman Street’ and ‘The Man who Hanged Himself’ capture the bewildered innocence of a child’s view of the adult world, where behaviour is often puzzling and contradictory; stories such as ‘Going to See Mr B.V.’ provide the transition between the world of the adult and that of the child where the latter is required to act for himself in a situation where illusions founder on a narrow reality. ‘Among the Dead’ and ‘Brothers and Sisters’ look wryly at the self-conscious, self-centred, desperately serious world of young adulthood while ‘Playing your Cards’, ‘The Waterfall’, ‘Strays’ and ‘Bramson’ introduce characters for whom ambition, disillusion, and disappointment jostle for attention in a world where differences of class, culture, race and morality come to the fore. Finally, in ‘Can we Talk’ we conclude with an abrasive, lucid, sinewy voice which explores the nature of estrangement. The charge is desolation. Can we Talk and Other Stories speaks of the unspoken and unsaid. The child who watches but does not understand, the young man who observes but cannot participate, the man who stands outside not sure where his desires and ambitions lead, the older man, estranged by his own choices. ‘Can we Talk’ is not a question but a statement that insists on being heard, and demands a reassessment of our dreams.

  • No Sweetness Here and Other Stories (African Writers Series)

    In this collection, Ama Aita Aidoo explores postcolonial life in Ghana with her characteristic honesty and humor. Tradition wrestles with new urban influences as Africans try to sort out their identity in a changing culture. True to the tradition of African storytelling, the characters come to life through their distinct voices and speech. If there is no sweetness, there is the salt essential to life, even if it comes from tears, and the strength that comes from a history of endurance.

  • Changes (African Writers Series)

    Changes is a spirited and poignant story about Esi, an independent woman who leaves her husband, Oko, because he intrudes on her time and personal space.

    Confronted with the difficulty of finding love and companionship on acceptable terms, Esi meets Ali and falls in love, but she must decide if she is willing to make the changes necessary for a relationship.

    In Changes, the renowned Ghanaian writer, Ama Ata Aidoo, addresses various issues in contemporary African women’s lives: love, career, betrayal and family, without offering simple solutions.

  • A Squatter’s Tale (African Writers Series)

    Young financier Obi enjoys life in the fast lane in 1990’s Lagos. He walks tall in designer suits with his girlfriend at his side enjoying the envy of those with empty purses.

    When his finance company collapses Obi’s decadent lifestyle comes to an abrupt end and he is forced to flee to the United States. There he has to live on the margins of society. Obi wants money, he wants a woman, and he wants to live the good life.

    This face-paced novel, by turns comic and moving, reveals what success and failure mean for the young Nigerian at home and in exile. Ike Oguine explores the alienation experienced by today’s economic refugees under the cover of light-hearted comedy.

  • Arrows of Rain (African Writers Series)

    This debut novel from the author of the powerful, universally acclaimed Foreign Gods, Inc. looks at a woman’s drowning and the ensuing investigation in an emerging African nation.

    In the country of Madia (based in part on Ndibe’s native Nigeria) a young prostitute runs into the sea and drowns. The last man who spoke to her, the “madman” Bukuru, is asked to account for her last moments. When his testimony implicates the Madian armed forces, Bukuru is arrested and charged with her death. At the first day of trial, Bukuru, acting as his own attorney, counters these charges with allegations of his own, speaking not only of government complicity in a series of violent assaults and killings, but telling the court that the president of Madia himself is guilty of rape and murder. The incident is hushed up, and Bukuru is sent back to prison, where he will likely meet his end. But a young journalist manages to visit him, and together they journey through decades of history that illuminate Bukuru’s life, and that of the entire nation.

    A brave and powerful work of fiction, Arrows of Rain is a brilliant dramatization of the complex factors behind the near-collapse of a nation from one of the most exciting novelists writing today.

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