Stephen Davies

After carrying a bowl of milk on her head across dunes and the River Niger, and even up a mountain, without spilling a drop despite many distractions, Penda gets a surprise when she arrives at the grasslands to give her father his lunch.

Part thriller, part love story, this contemporary YA novel is based on true-to-life events in Mali in 2012 and centers on the power of individuals to take a stand against terrorism. Kadi is the 15-year-old daughter of a librarian in modern-day Timbuktu. Ali is the son of shepherds and has been conscripted by the Defenders of Faith, an arm of Al Qaeda. When these two teens meet, it's hate at first sight. Forced together by a series of tumultuous events,...

This is Poetry that goes a bit left of centre. It is a strange mix of free verse and rhyme that takes you to dark places in the mind and the universe which surrounds it. Amid the dark there are rays of light to bring balance and evoke a smile. The extraordinary thing about the poems collected here is that they should be the product of only one mind. It is as if 60 separate writers were given the task of producing a single piece on any subject and...

Watch out! The Locusts are coming... A terrifying army of locusts is making its way along the edge of the Sahara desert, devastating crops in one village after another. Gidaado's village is next. When the locusts arrive Gidaado will need all his wits about him in order to survive. He will need his friend Sophie. He will need his three-stringed guitar. And he will need an albino camel as fast as the harmattan wind...

Never mess with power-hungry people!' Or so Sophie's Dad is always telling her. But when her friend Gidaado the Fourth starts working for a famous General, Sophie finds herself mixed up in some very dirty business. She discovers that General Crêpe-Sombo is not at all the kind, peaceful man he pretends to be. To expose the villain before he becomes President, Sophie and Gidaado will need all their wits about them. They will also need a dog whistle,...

Earth: An Alien Enterprise focuses on unpublished or little-known contacts with aliens, the infiltration thereof, and Earth's top-secret liaison programmes. This fascinating new edition tells the story of contact between aliens and humans from all across the globe, dating back to 1932, including meetings with military personnel and American presidents such as Eisenhower and Kennedy. For the first time, a former member of MI6 reveals her conversation...

What will you do when your AI misbehaves? The promise of artificial intelligence is automated decision-making at scale, but that means AI also automates risk at scale. Are you prepared for that risk? Already, many companies have suffered real damage when their algorithms led to discriminatory, privacy-invading, and even deadly outcomes. Self-driving cars have hit pedestrians, HR algorithms have precluded women from job searches, mortgage systems have...

Video games are big business. They can be addicting. They are available almost anywhere you go and are appealing to people of all ages. They can eat up our time, cost us money, even kill our relationships. But it's not all bad! This book will show that rather than being a waste of time, video games can help us develop skills, make friends, succeed at work, form good habits, and be happy. Taking the time to learn what's happening in our heads as we...

Take control of your communications-before someone else does What if someone told you that your behavior was controlled by a powerful, invisible force? Most of us would be skeptical of such a claim-but it's largely true. Our brains are constantly transmitting and receiving signals of which we are unaware. Studies show that these constant inputs drive the great majority of our decisions about what to do next-and we become conscious of the decisions...

Why is it that our current twenty-first century A.D. is so similar to the twenty-first century B.C.? Is history destined to repeat itself? Will biblical prophecies come true, and if so, when? It has been more than three decades since Zecharia Sitchin's trailblazing book The 12th Planet brought to life the Sumerian civilization and its record of the Anunnaki-the extraterrestrials who fashioned man and gave mankind civilization and religion. In...