Pity poor Captain Alan Lewrie, Royal Navy! He’s been wind-muzzled for weeks in Portsmouth, snugly tucked into a warm shore bed with lovely, and loving, Lydia Stangbourne, a Viscount’s daughter, and beginning to enjoy indulging his idle streak, when Admiralty tears Lewrie away and order him to the Bahamas, into the teeth of ferocious winter storms. It’s enough to make a rakehell such as he weep and kick furniture! At least his new orders allow Lewrie to form a small squadron from what ships he can dredge up at Bermuda and New Providence and hoist his first broad pendant, even if it is the lesser version, and style himself a Commodore. Lewrie is to scour the shores of Cuba and Spanish Florida, the Keys and the Florida Straits in search of French and Spanish privateers which have been taking British merchantmen at an appalling rate, and call upon neutral American seaports to determine if privateers are getting aid and comfort from that quarter. Lewrie is to be “Diplomatic.” Diplomatic? Lewrie? Not bloody likely!

Reeling Through Life: How I Learned to Live, Love, and Die at the Movies looks at how film shapes identity. Through ten cleverly constructed essays, Ison explores how a lifetime of movie-watching has, for better or worse, taught her how to navigate the world and how to grapple with issues of career, family, faith, illness, sex, and love. Cinema is a universal cultural experience, one that floods our senses with images and sounds, a powerful force that influences our perspective on the world around us. Ison discusses the universal aspects of film as she makes them personal, looking at how certain films across time shaped and molded who she has become. Drawing on a wide ranging catalog of films, both cult and classic, popular and art-house, Reeling Through Life examines how cinema shapes our views on how to make love, how to deal with mental illness, how to be Jewish, how to be a woman, how to be a drunk, and how to die with style. Rather than being a means of escape or object of mere entertainment, Ison posits that cinema is a more engaging form of art, a way to slip into other identities and inhabit other realities. A way to orient oneself into the world. Reeling Though Life is a compelling look at one popular art form and how it has influenced our identities in provocative and important ways

Una noche de 1987, alguien abandona a una niña recién nacida en el aeropuerto de Heathrow. Un año antes, tres chicas, Martha, Clio y Jocasta, se habían conocido por casualidad en un viaje y habían prometido volver a encontrarse, aunque pasará mucho tiempo antes de que cumplan la promesa. Para entonces, Kate, la niña abandonada, ya será una adolescente. Vive con una familia adoptiva que la quiere, aunque ahora Kate desea conocer a su madre biológica. Es decir, una de aquellas tres jóvenes, ahora mujeres acomodadas. Pero ¿qué la llevó a una situación tan desesperada? La trama que desgrana este libro se sitúa allí donde confluyen entre estas cuatro vidas. Y es que Kate verá cumplido su deseo aunque, como enseñan algunas fábulas, a veces sea mejor no desear ciertas cosas…