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  Division of the Roman Empire...

  Editors Charles River

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  Rome’s Imperial Crisis has been difficult for historians to summarize, which is why, despite being one of the most intriguing periods in Roman history, it is often overlooked by people who have chosen to focus on the more cohesive periods before and after it. Even though he is best remembered for his religious reforms and what his (mostly Christian) admirers described as his spiritual enlightenment, Constantine was also an able and effective ruler in his own right. Rising to power in a period of decline and confusion for the Roman Empire, he gave it a new and unexpected lease on life by repelling the repeated invasions of the Germanic tribes on the Northern and Eastern borders of the Roman domains, even going so far as to re-expand the frontier into parts of Trajan’s old conquest of Dacia (modern Romania), which had been abandoned as strategically untenable.  
  	However, it can be argued that despite his military successes – the most notable of which occurred fighting for supremacy against other Romans – Constantine may well have set the stage for the ultimate collapse of the Roman Empire as it had existed up until that point. It was Constantine who first decided that Rome, exposed and vulnerable near the gathering masses of barbarians moving into Germania and Gaul, was a strategically unsafe base for the empire, and thus he expanded the city of New Rome on the Dardanelles Straits, creating what eventually became Constantinople. By moving the political, administrative, and military capital of the empire from Rome to the East, as well as the imperial court with all its attendant followers, Constantine laid the groundwork for the eventual schism which saw the two parts of the Roman Empire become two entirely separate entities, go their own way, and eventually collapse piecemeal under repeated waves of invasion.

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  Parallel Lives - A Love Story...

  Iain Pears

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  An extraordinary love story of two unlikely figures played out against the backdrop of the Cold War. 
    
  Best-selling novelist and art historian Iain Pears enchants readers with the real-life romance between Larissa Salmina, a Russian art curator, and Francis Haskell, a British art historian. His fabulous book brings into sharp focus the strange world of the Soviet Union, and the even stranger world of a certain variety of the English elite. It seeks to show how leaving the Soviet Union was a sacrifice for her and how it was the English man, not the Russian woman, who was set free because of their meeting. 
    
  Larissa was born in northern Russia, the daughter of a Soviet army officer from a noble family who survived the siege of Leningrad by eating cats’ tails and being evacuated over the ice. Francis was the grandson of an Iraqi Jew, forever feeling out of place in his adopted country of England. Parallel Lives is the story of how these two star-crossed lovers met, instantly understand each other, and were prepared to risk heartbreak, and in her case, retribution, to be together. 
    
  Escaping Leningrad, teenage Larissa lived in the Urals surrounded by Spanish revolutionaries, and after the war rose to become the youngest commissar in the Soviet Union and keeper of Italian drawings at the Hermitage. She took the Russian contribution to the Venice Biennale in 1962 and lost it on the journey. She briefly absconded with her supervisor’s corpse, developed a useful sideline in forgery, and stole (“I didn’t steal it. I liberated it”) a Matisse from the Italian government. Francis was a distinguished art historian, comfortably at home in King’s College Cambridge. But he was lonely, self-doubting, and had all but abandoned hope of falling in love. Larissa swept away all the years of anguish in one meal. 
    
  Iain Pears, who was neighbors with Larissa and Francis in Oxford, knew both his principal characters well. In telling Larissa and Francis’s love story, he is also capturing the Europe of a bygone era: a world of dancers, exiles, and the occasional spy, of artists, aristocrats, and academics. It is a tale of a world we have lost.

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  The Worry-Free Parent Workbook -...

  Sissy Goff

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  The Tools You Need to Stop the Spread of Worry 
   
  Anxiety has an amazing ability to spread. But there are practical things you can do to fight back. In this encouraging, well-designed companion workbook to The Worry-Free Parent, veteran counselor and parenting expert Sissy Goff helps you dig deeper into the roots of your anxiety and identify targeted ways to overcome it. 
   
  Through clinically tested questions and exercises, learn how to 
   
  ● uncover more of what keeps you stuck in worry 
  ● reframe your concerns with worry-fighting truths and Scripture 
  ● implement joy-filled practices to foster deeper connection in your family 
  ● find practical ways to experience freedom in your daily life  
   
  Here are the space and tools you need to grab hold of peace, embrace grace, and become the person, parent, and family you want to be. 
   
  Also available from Sissy Goff! The Worry-Free Parent, packed with foundational principles and advice for becoming a worry-free family.

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  Languages of the Ancient Near...

  Editors Charles River

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  Perhaps not surprisingly given how advanced they were in comparison to contemporaries, the Egyptians invented one of the first writing systems ever, and for centuries, people thought these ancient texts held some sort of secret, be it aliens, advanced technology lost to the world, or mystical cures for all of the world’s ills. Even the ancient Egyptians saw their writing systems as full of mystery and hidden knowledge - according to Egyptian mythology, writing was invented by the ibis-headed god Thoth, the most intellectual of the gods.  
  	Along with Egypt, the cultural and geographic region known as Mesopotamia was home to some of the world’s earliest civilizations and also the first known form of writing, cuneiform. Many different ethnic groups vied for power in ancient Mesopotamia over the course of antiquity, spanning about 3,000 years, and many of them spoke different languages. Despite these differences, the people in Mesopotamia shared many cultural attributes, including similar religious practices, a common art and architecture style, and a shared use of the cuneiform script. The languages spoken by the peoples of Mesopotamia were as diverse as the many ethnic groups, but as those groups asserted their military, economic, and cultural power over the other groups, two languages became dominant in the region: Sumerian and Akkadian.  
  	The greatest irony of the lack of primary source information about the Phoenicians is that their language and writing happened to be the most influential in antiquity, a byproduct of their voyages and colonization, which spread their language across the Mediterranean. It was the forerunner to the Greek alphabet, from which the Latin alphabet was directly derived, and thus most of the written languages of the modern West. 

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  Evil Shadow Falls An

  W T Delaney

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  An Evil Shadow Falls'By Wise Guidance, you can wage your war'The Sam Holloway TrilogyAn Evil Shadow Falls is the final part of the Sam Holloway trilogy, in which the former Special Forces officer and her team of warrior contractors face their most dangerous mission yet, in a wild adventure that starts in London and ends in armed intervention and death on the high seas. A nuclear warhead had gone missing and a terrorist mastermind, inspired by the events of 9/11 and a fanatical vision of Armageddon is planning a mass-casualty attack against the West that can only be measured in the metrics of madness. The Security and Intelligence agencies must make sense of a complicated jigsaw puzzle of clues, technical intercepts, source reports, and inputs from foreign intelligence services if they are to prevent Ground Zero 2. In a race against time, Sam's team, now including an unlikely ally, a refugee from London's postcode drug wars, and an MI5 agent within ISIS must find the deadly device before it detonates. The last book in the Samantha Holloway series starts in London, has its back story in the wild mountains of Afghanistan, and ends on a stormy night in the mid-Atlantic, with the Special Boat Service on standby and ready to deploy from a Royal Navy warship in support of the Spartan team. But even the best-laid plans rarely survive contact with the enemy, and the team must draw on all their combined skills and courage if they are to thwart a murderous plot that carries with it a horrifying echo of an all-too-possible future reality.***** Brilliant, been there, done that, Delaney nails the authenticity once again...'***** An audible treat that had me hooked to the end...'***** The action races off the page!***** Wow!! What a cracking story!***** This is essentially a ‘rattling good yarn’, a highly topical good vs evil adventure story, fast-paced and packed with incident.

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  The Paris Girl - The Young Woman...

  Francelle Bradford White

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  Andrée Griotteray was nineteen when the Germans invaded France and occupied Paris, where she worked as a clerk in the passport office. When her younger brother, Alain, created a resistance network named Orion, Andrée joined his efforts, secretly typing up and printing copies of an underground newspaper, and stealing ID cards which allowed scores of Jewish citizens to escape persecution. 
   
   
   
  Charming and pretty, Andrée nimbly avoided the unwanted attentions of German officers, even as she secretly began working as an undercover courier. Displaying fearlessness in the face of immense pressure, she traveled throughout the county delivering vital intelligence destined for France's allies—until the day she was betrayed and arrested. Throughout her ordeal, Andrée stayed composed, refusing to inform on her comrades. Before she was set free, she even duped her interrogators into revealing who had betrayed Orion, and continued her underground activities until France's liberation. 
   
   
   
  Weaving in diary entries, letters, and conversations, Andrée's daughter, Francelle, brings a uniquely personal slant to her mother's story. The Paris Girl reveals the narrow escapes and moments of terror, the daily acts of bravery and defiance, and the extraordinary courage displayed by Andrée and so many of her contemporaries, that helped turned the tide of war.

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