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Daunt Books Children's Short Story Competition 2013

Western Europe

• France
• Benelux
• Germany
• Austria
• Switzerland

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  Austria Map by Michelin

  Price: £5.99    Add to Basket

  Typically good Michelin road mapping with index, distance indicators and Vienna street plan.

  Map scale: 1:400000

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  Vienna Wallpaper City Guide by Phaidon

  Price: £5.95    Add to Basket

  Travellers favouring style over substance will love these sleek little guides, showcasing the finest in Viennese shopping, eating, drinking and so on.

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  France Red Guide 2013 by Michelin

  Price: £15.99    Add to Basket

  The Michelin Red Guide is the definitive hotel and restuaraunt guide to France. Updated each year and with considerable practical benefits, it deserves its 'essential' reputation. The listings are symbol-based with short and helpful descriptions in English.

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  The Piano Teacher by Elfriede Jelinek

  Price: £7.99    Add to Basket

  A gripping and often disturbing novel that tells of Erika Kohut, a middle-aged piano teacher still living with her viciously domineering mother and finding relief only in the seedy side of 1980s Vienna. A powerful trawl through the dark side of sexuality and a great evocation of a city.

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  Marie Antoinette: The Portrait of an Average Woman by Stefan Zweig

  Price: £11.99    Add to Basket

  Austrian master Zweig applies his considerable gifts of observation and description to the life of Marie Antoinette, weaving a beautiful biography against the epic backdrop of revolutionary France. First published in 1933, this remains a favourite examination of the young Queen.

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  The Radetzky March by Joseph Roth

  Price: £9.99    Add to Basket

  This is Roth's masterpiece and a gem of 20th Century literature not to be missed. It is the story of four generations of the Trottas, a family of soldiers and bureaucrats, and follows the Austro-Hungarian monarchy from the height of its power to descent into the war that would lead to its collapse. In his portrayal of Emperor Franz Joseph, Roth pioneered the use of an historical figure in fiction, and his book draws out brilliantly the comedy and tragedy of the Trottas and their world.

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  Keeping Up With The Germans by Philips Oltermann

  Price: £9.99    Add to Basket

  Philips Oltermann's family transplanted from Germany to the UK in 1996, when he was 16. 15 years later, he has decided to look at the history of the Anglo-German relationship, a subject he is uniquely qualified to approach. Taking as his starting point 8 historical encounters, he chronicles the startling, often hilarious series of misunderstanding and collusions that have taken us from being wary of one another's cuisine to all-out war, and back again to a convivial, if sometimes grudging, respect.

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  A Place of Greater Safety by Hilary Mantel

  Price: £9.99    Add to Basket

  Fans of Wolf Hall will find this remarkable dramatisation of the French Revolution as believable, gripping and wonderfully written as her recent Booker winner. Mantel describes a time of unimaginable horror through the eyes of three pivotal, real-life figures: Georges-Jacques Danton, Maximilien Robespierre and Camille Desmoulins.

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  A Long Long Way by Sebastian Barry

  Price: £7.99    Add to Basket

  In the utterly believable and at times achingly moving voice of Willie Dunne, an 18 year old Dubliner sent to the Trenches in 1914, Sebastian Barry describes the true horror of the trenches and the dilemmas of an Irish boy as he weighs his allegiance to British victory with his personal attachment to Irish Republicanism. An outstanding, emotional and important book, we couldn't recommend it more highly.

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  Secret Paris by Jacques Garance & Maud Ratton

  Price: £10.99    Add to Basket

  One of an excellent series of guides from Jonglez which uncover hidden secrets of a city.

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  Paris Tales by Helen Constantine

  Price: £9.99    Add to Basket

  A delightful little volume. From Colette at Montmartre, to Roger Grenier in the Places Des Fetes, this excellent collection of stories describes the city in a way no guidebook ever could. A treat for the Eurostar, certainly.

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  The Paris Mapguide by Michael Middleditch

  Price: £5.99    Add to Basket

  This unique fusion of map and guide is lightweight, easy-to-use, enormously popular and frankly essential. Outlines the highlights in a dozen or so pages, dedicating the rest to mapping of the highest quality. Be sure to carry one.

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  Perfume by Patrick Suskind

  Price: £8.99    Add to Basket

  Dark, intoxicating, pungent, bewitching: Suskind's incredible novel is all of this and more. Abandoned as a baby on the filthy streets of 18th century Paris, Jean-Baptiste Grenouille grows up to be a sublime parfumier who will stop at nothing to attain the scent he desires most: that of an innocent young virgin.

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  Paris City-Lit by Heather Reyes, Ed.

  Price: £8.99    Add to Basket

  A brilliant collection of Paris writing comprising dozens of excerpts arranged under headings such as 'Le menu', 'Sex in the city' and 'Cities of the dead'. Featured writers range from Proust and Flaubert to Jan Morris and Julian Barnes. Perfect for dipping in and out of at leisure.

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  Have Mercy On Us All by Fred Vargas

  Price: £7.99    Add to Basket

  This was the first of Vargas's terrific Commissaire Adamsberg novels to be translated, and this richly evocative series of chilling Parisian thrillers deserves your immediate attention. Here our hero investigates mysterious graffiti appearing on the doors of what appear to be plague victims, while retired Breton sailor Joss Le Guern sets himself up as a modern-day town crier. Both men become drawn into a sinister gothic murder mystery of the first order.

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  Suite Francaise by Irene Nemirovsky

  Price: £7.99    Add to Basket

  Perhaps the 21st century's most significant publishing event thus far was the discovery of this lost manuscript by one of interwar France's finest novelists. Amidst the chaos of occupation Nemirovsky set out to write her own 'War and Peace' before she inevitably fell prey to the Nazi war machine. Chronicling first a group of Parisians and second the inhabitants of a small French town, the novel, though strictly unfinished, teems with wonderful characters and with moments of great humanity as well as evil. Perceptive and remarkable, this is essential reading.

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  Overlord by Max Hastings

  Price: £7.99    Add to Basket

  Based on eyewitness accounts and contemporary documents, Hastings has rewritten the accepted history of Operation Overlord - the plan to free Europe from German occupation. From both Allied and German perspectives, it comes the nearest to a comprehensive account of the D-day landings and the following campaign.

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  Pudlo Normandy & Brittany by Gilles Pudlowski

  Price: £8.99    Add to Basket

  Pudlowski's frank and knowledgeable guide describes and rates hotels and restaurants in all price ranges.

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  Food Wine Burgundy by David Downie

  Price: £19.99    Add to Basket

  An excellent and well-researched guide to the local markets, food artisans, winemakers and chefs of the five districts of Burgundy, organised by town.

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  Mourjou: The Life and Food of an Auvergne Village by Peter Graham

  Price: £15.00    Add to Basket

  Each chapter of this marvellous book is dedicated to typical food from the Auvergne with recipes, descriptions of the countryside and Peter Graham's travels through it.

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  Pig Earth by John Berger

  Price: £6.99    Add to Basket

  In exquisitely constructed stories dense with the stuff of everyday life, Berger offers a masterly and elegiac portrait of a declining Alpine peasant culture. Lyrical and haunting.

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  A Traveller's Wine Guide to France by Christopher Fielden

  Price: £12.99    Add to Basket

  Fielden proves an informed and likeable guide as he addresses each wine region ably. This excellent, colourful book is packed with photographs, maps, and listings, plus plenty to read.

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  Eleanor of Aquitaine by Alison Weir

  Price: £9.99    Add to Basket

  The best biography of this Medieval Queen of France, Queen of England and mother of King Richard the Lion Heart. Well-informed and yet deliciously readable.

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  Caesar's Vast Ghost: Aspects of Provence by Lawrence Durrell

  Price: £6.99    Add to Basket

  Durrell's last book is a tribute to Provence, where he lived for 30 years. Part memoir, travelogue, history and poetry collection, it is a highly personal and unusual work in which he captures as brilliantly as ever the spirit of the landscape.

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  A Year in Provence by Peter Mayle

  Price: £7.99    Add to Basket

  The absolute classic of relocation writing and one that inspired a hundered imitations, Mayle's beguiling and much-loved book paints an idyllic portrait of ex-pat life in the Luberon, though one that is not without its hilarious scrapes.