"I've listened to all the stories of my generation, then watched 'em get sick or fade away. And it wasn't this world that killed 'em. It was the other... the memory of it." Britain, the near future. Much of the country is underwater and the government has been reduced to a group of fascist strongmen. In a rural outpost of the state, the men patrol the moors for illegals whilst the women run a self-sufficient farm to provide what all they need to survive. The living conditions are harsh, every meagre ration is grown from scratch and they must battle with inclement weather and a draconian government. As their numbers dwindle, they struggle to retain a semblance of civilisation in the face of the inevitable onset of global war. Stark and imperative, but shot through with a sense of warm compassion, Beth Steel's debut play Ditch is a clear-eyed look at how we might behave when the conveniences of our civilisation are taken away, and a frightening vision of a future that could all too easily be ours. Ditch is a brutal and uncompromising play, with a grounded, earthy sense of humanity. The result is both heart-rending and chilling, depicting a convincing, bleak vision of the future.

Ditch is a subversive, compelling portrait of a young man's plunge into adulthood, set in Toronto, Buffalo and the suburbs of Maryland. Niedzviecki's prose quickly dumps you into the head of Ditch, awkward, aimless, endearing — still living with his mom, driving a delivery van to get by — and into the rather more complicated mind, diary, e-mail and website of a young runaway who moves into the upstairs apartment. Debs is beautiful, tortured and much projected upon, largely because of the kind of pictures of herself she puts up on her website. Both she and Ditch are searching for absent pasts and possible futures, and Debs is on the run from something particularly nasty. Ditch is a sudden stumble into an instantly recognizable, constantly shifting, unforgettable world where everything happens through the filters of memory and modems.

In the first book-length consideration of the topic for sixty years, Kevin Donnelly examines the importance of music in British film, concentrating both on musical scores, such as William Walton's score for Henry V (1944) and Malcolm Arnold's music for The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), and on the phenomenon of the British film musical.

"Founder of business strategy consulting firm argues that customers are more persuaded by improvised conversations than scripted sales pitches. Presents techniques and practices for six habits people can learn to enable spontaneous conversations that persuade customers to say 'yes'"--