thus spake zarathustra - second hand

Martha and the infamous League of Pensioners are back in The Little Old Lady Strikes Back , from the author of the smash-hit The Little Old Lady Who Broke All the Rules .

After stealing some priceless Russian jewels from the Stockholm Auction House, Martha and her gang flee to the small village of Hemmavid to lie low. But what they find is a village in crisis, so they decide they want to help revive the place.

But to do so, the village needs money. In steps the League of Pensioners to arrange events to attract paying tourists. Which all turns out to be a rather delicate, and dramatic, balancing act when you are wanted by the police. Even when the school is about to be closed, they step up to put on classes in technology, seamanship and entrepreneurship so that the students can start companies and create new jobs and hopefully a future.

Having donned the mantle of guerrilla fighters, come to save Sweden’s countryside from depopulation, Will they be able to help the villagers get the attention of the politicians to save the village without being caught?

Catharina Ingelman-Sundberg's socially engaged, riotous comedy is perfect for fans of The Hundred-Year-Old Man Series and The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel .

Basketball star Johnny Chang is murdered and detective Dave Washburn is assigned to the case. What Washburn does not know is that Chang had found a manuscript that taught the secrets of Chinese immortality. With the formula Chang planned to become the greatest basketball player ever and he intended to become immortal. Washburn begins looking for the obvious motives: greed, hate and jealousy. However, the hard-boiled detective soon discovers that nothing about Chang is obvious or ordinary. Washburn, like Chang, will find himself swept away on the wings of dragons.

John Collier's edgy, sardonic tales are works of rare wit, curious insight, and scary implication. They stand out as one of the pinnacles in the critically neglected but perennially popular tradition of weird writing that includes E.T.A. Hoffmann and Charles Dickens as well as more recent masters like Jorge Luis Borges and Roald Dahl. With a cast of characters that ranges from man-eating flora to disgruntled devils and suburban salarymen (not that it's always easy to tell one from another), Collier's dazzling stories explore the implacable logic of lunacy, revealing a surreal landscape whose unstable surface is depth-charged with surprise.

'The screaming ambulance slows down a fraction as it hits the junction of parkway and Camden High Street. It feels as if my bladder is in my head, and any minute now it will explode, and blast piss and blood at a million-foot-pounds pressure out of my coke-scarred nostrils.' Noah Arkwright has experienced too much. A filmmaker and now a dry alcoholic, he's lived life to the full - sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll his relentless backdrop - but now the stakes are even higher. In his struggle to survive, Noah's cancer forces him to evaluate his chequered past life, and as a picture builds of a brave and incredibly foolish man, gradually it becomes clear that he's a modern-day hero of truly epic proportions.