Pineapple Books, Phetchabun

13/01/2013

Time To Hunt (Bob Lee Swagger #3)
by Stephen Hunter

He is the most dangerous man alive. He only wants to live in peace with his family, and forget the war that nearly killed him...

It's not going to happen.

Stephen Hunter's epic national bestsellers, Point of Impact and Black Light, introduced millions of readers to Bob Lee Swagger, called "Bob the Nailer," a heroic but flawed Vietnam War veteran forced twice to use his skills as a master sniper to defend his life and his honor. Now, in his grandest, most intensely thrilling adventure yet, Bob the Nailer must face his deadliest foe from Vietnam--and his own demons--to save his wife and daughter.

During the latter days of the Vietnam War, deep in-country, a young idealistic Marine named Donny Fenn was cut down by a sniper's bullet as he set out on patrol with Swagger, who himself received a grievous wound. Years later Swagger married Donny's widow, Julie, and together they raise their daughter, Nikki, on a ranch in the isolated Sawtooth Mountains in Idaho. Although he struggles with the painful legacy of Vietnam, Swagger's greatest wish--to leave his violent past behind and live quietly with his family--seems to have come true.

Then one idyllic day, a man, a woman, and a girl set out from the ranch on horseback. High on a ridge above a mountain pass, a thousand yards distant, a calm, cold-eyed shooter, one of the world's greatest marksmen, peers through a telescopic sight at the three approaching figures.

Out of his tortured past, a mortal enemy has once again found Bob the Nailer. Time to Hunt proves anew why so many consider Stephen Hunter to be our best living thriller writer. With a plot that sweeps from the killing fields of Vietnam to the corridors of power in Washington to the shadowy plots of the new world order, Hunter delivers all the complex, stay-up-all-night action his fans demand in a masterful tale of family heartbreak and international intrigue--and shows why, for Bob Lee Swagger, it's once again time to hunt.

22/12/2012

Merry Christmas One and all.

15/12/2012

We Were Soldiers Once...And Young
by Harold G. Moore

In November 1965, some 450 men of the 1st Battalion, 7th Cavalry, under the command of Lt. Col. Hal Moore, were dropped by helicopter into a small clearing in the Ia Drang Valley. They were immediately surrounded by 2,000 North Vietnamese soldiers. Three days later, only two and a half miles away, a sister battalion was chopped to pieces. Together, these actions at the landing zones X-Ray and Albany constituted one of the most savage and significant battles of the Vietnam War.
How these men persevered--sacrificed themselves for their comrades and never gave up--makes a vivid portrait of war at its most inspiring and devastating. General Moore and Joseph Galloway, the only journalist on the ground throughout the fighting, have interviewed hundreds of men who fought there, including the North Vietnamese commanders. This devastating account rises above the specific ordeal it chronicles to present a picture of men facing the ultimate challenge, dealing with it in ways they would have found unimaginable only a few hours earlier. It reveals to us, as rarely before, man's most heroic and horrendous endeavor.

05/12/2012

The Innocent by David Baldacci

America has enemies--ruthless people that the police, the FBI, even the military can't stop. That's when the U.S. government calls on Will Robie, a stone cold hitman who never questions orders and always nails his target.
But Will Robie may have just made the first--and last--mistake of his career . . .

It begins with a hit gone wrong. Robie is dispatched to eliminate a target unusually close to home in Washington, D.C. But something about this mission doesn't seem right to Robie, and he does the unthinkable. He refuses to kill. Now, Robie becomes a target himself and must escape from his own people.
Fleeing the scene, Robie crosses paths with a wayward teenage girl, a fourteen-year-old runaway from a foster home. But she isn't an ordinary runaway-her parents were murdered, and her own life is in danger. Against all of his professional habits, Robie rescues her and finds he can't walk away. He needs to help her.
Even worse, the more Robie learns about the girl, the more he's convinced she is at the center of a vast cover-up, one that may explain her parents' deaths and stretch to unimaginable levels of power.
Now, Robie may have to step out of the shadows in order to save this girl's life . . . and perhaps his own

03/12/2012

We love this picture

30/11/2012

http://www.bangkokpost.com/opinion/opinion/323406/how-to-tell-whether-you-re-still-a-farang

As a Thai who has spent some time abroad I consider myself able to evaluate whether a farang, (I use this term endearingly) has been properly assimilated into Thai society.

24/11/2012

Catching the Sun
by Tony Parsons

Just how badly do you want to find paradise?When taxi driver Tom Finn is almost jailed for confronting two burglars in his own home, he leaves broken Britain and takes his wife and children to live on the tropical island of Phuket, Thailand.

Phuket is all the Finn family dreamed of - a tropical paradise where the children swim with elephants, the gibbons sing love songs in the jungle, the Andaman Sea is like turquoise glass and this young family is free to grow.

But both man-made disaster and the unleashed forces of nature shatter this tropical idyll.

CATCHING THE SUN is a gripping, moving story of a family who go in search of Paradise - and end up discovering themselves.

20/11/2012

Empire Rising (2007)
(The second book in the Eskkar Saga series)
A novel by Sam Barone

Special guest review by Lissa aged 9 months: This book is great fun to throw about and bend the cover. Daddy always makes funny faces when I pull out the very tasty bookmark, which makes me laugh.

Thanks for that Lissa, now on with the real stuff...

It is 3157 B.C.—The beginning of the Bronze Age and the rise of cities—and at the eastern edge of the great southern desert in Mesopotamia, men are at war. Bandits and worse plunder the countryside seeking women, slaves, and gold. Into this unsettled land come the outcast Korthac and the remnants of his mighty desert fighters. They encounter a band of thieves led by Ariamus. The two join forces and set their sights on the biggest prize of all: the burgeoning city of Akkad—the town formerly known as Orak that just a few months earlier defeated a horde of raiding barbarians by building an impenetrable wall. Akkad is known not only for its riches, but also for the courage and wisdom of its leaders, the former barbarian Eskkar and his enchanting wife, Trella. Together they drove off the barbarian horde, and now they face an even more daunting challenge—to preserve their victory.

But it's only by defeating Eskkar, Trella, and the people of Akkad that Korthac and Ariamus can claim Akkad's wealth and enslave its people . . .

Korthac devises a plan to slip his men into Akkad and conquer the city from within. And while Eskkar is roaming the land, winning the trust of other towns and bringing them into his growing empire, Korthac and Ariamus strike, wreaking havoc on the young city.

Told with rich historical detail and set in a time of promise and peril, Sam Barone's thrilling, beautifully rendered tale places him in the ranks of the best historical fiction writers working today. Empire Rising is another marvelous trip into the past with an unforgettable cast of characters.

10/11/2012

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Located behind the new Government bus station, Phetchabun City

02/11/2012

Kraken by China Miéville

China Miéville has written one of the strangest, funniest, and flat-out scariest books you will read this—or any other—year. The London that comes to life in Kraken is a weird metropolis awash in secret currents of myth and magic, where criminals, police, cultists, and wizards are locked in a war to bring about—or prevent—the End of All Thin...more With this outrageous new novel, China Miéville has written one of the strangest, funniest, and flat-out scariest books you will read this—or any other—year. The London that comes to life in Kraken is a weird metropolis awash in secret currents of myth and magic, where criminals, police, cultists, and wizards are locked in a war to bring about—or prevent—the End of All Things.

In the Darwin Centre at London’s Natural History Museum, Billy Harrow, a cephalopod specialist, is conducting a tour whose climax is meant to be the Centre’s prize specimen of a rare Architeuthis dux—better known as the Giant Squid. But Billy’s tour takes an unexpected turn when the squid suddenly and impossibly vanishes into thin air.

As Billy soon discovers, this is the precipitating act in a struggle to the death between mysterious but powerful forces in a London whose existence he has been blissfully ignorant of until now, a city whose denizens—human and otherwise—are adept in magic and murder.

There is the Congregation of God Kraken, a sect of squid worshippers whose roots go back to the dawn of humanity—and beyond. There is the criminal mastermind known as the Tattoo, a merciless maniac inked onto the flesh of a hapless victim. There is the FSRC—the Fundamentalist and Sect-Related Crime Unit—a branch of London’s finest that fights sorcery with sorcery. There is Wati, a spirit from ancient Egypt who leads a ragtag union of magical familiars. There are the Londonmancers, who read the future in the city’s entrails. There is Grisamentum, London’s greatest wizard, whose shadow lingers long after his death. And then there is Goss and Subby, an ageless old man and a cretinous boy who, together, constitute a terrifying—yet darkly charismatic—demonic duo.

All of them—and others—are in pursuit of Billy, who inadvertently holds the key to the missing squid, an embryonic god whose powers, properly harnessed, can destroy all that is, was, and ever shall be.

25/10/2012

Yes it is back folks...Book Of The Week! We know how much you have missed it?

Yoga For People Who Can't Be Bothered To Do It
by Geoff Dyer

“I have an idea for a self help-book,” I said. “Yoga for People Who Can’t Be Bothered to Do It.”
“But you can’t be bothered to write it, right?”
This isn’t a self-help book, but it is a book about how Geoff Dyer could do with a little help. In mordantly funny and thought-provoking prose, the author of Out of Sheer Rage describes a life most of us would love to live—and how much that life frustrates and aggravates him. From Amsterdam to Cambodia, from Rome to Indonesia, from New Orleans to Libya, from Detroit to Ko Pha-Ngan, Dyer finds himself both floundering about in a sea of grievances and losing himself in moments of transcendental calm. This aberrant quest for peak experience leads, ultimately, to the Zone: to the Black Rock Desert in Nevada where—to quote Tarkovsky’s Stalker—“your most cherished desire will come true.”
Yoga for People Who Can’t Be Bothered to Do It is a chronicle of how Geoff Dyer learned to feel completely at home in a state of perpetual arrival and departure.

16/09/2012

A trap is only a trap if you don't know about it. If you know about it, it's a challenge. ― China Miéville