The Miracle Pill

The Miracle Pill

Peter Walker

Peter Walker

'This book is pretty life-changing – encouraging, optimistic, rich with information. It got me off the sofa.' Jeremy Vine What is the 'miracle pill', the simple lifestyle change with such enormous health benefits that, if it was turned into a drug, would be the most valuable drug in the world? The answer is movement and the good news is that it's free, easy and available to everyone. Four in ten British adults, and 80% of children, are so sedentary they don't meet even the minimum recommended levels for movement. What's going on? The answer is simple: activity became exercise. What for centuries was universal and everyday has become the fetishised pursuit of a minority, whether the superhuman feats of elite athletes, or a chore slotted into busy schedules. Yes, most people know physical activity is good for us. And yet 1.5 billion people around the world are so inactive they are at greater risk of everything from heart disease to diabetes, cancer,...
Read online
  • 260
Death of a Princess

Death of a Princess

Peter Walker

Peter Walker

As detective Superintendent Mark Pemberton investigates the death of a woman nick named The Princess, he finds himself asking the same question time and time again. Accident or murder? The last of the wealthy Milverdale family, The Princess has been found shot in the grounds of her estate. Was the bullet that killed her a stray from a local poacher's gun? Or did someone deliberately set out to shoot her dead? Pemberton soon begins to suspect murder as he uncovers unsavoury rumours which suggest there are many who would wish The Princess harm - and the dissolution of the Milverdale estate means tenants are entitled to buy their properties, revealing yet more suspects. Nonetheless, Pemberton becomes convinced that the key to her death is a deep family secret. Could there be an heir? And would a heir do anything to gain his inheritance - such as making The Princess's death look like a tragic accident?
Read online
  • 62
Some Here Among Us

Some Here Among Us

Peter Walker

Peter Walker

It is 1967, and as America's allies hesitate over whether to send more troops to Vietnam and the strains of 'All You Need is Love' echo from Abbey Road, students take to the streets of Wellington, New Zealand, to protest the war. Among them are Race, Candy, Chadwick and FitzGerald and their elusive, electrifying friend Morgan Tawhai. They are young and hopeful and the world is all before them.Forty years later, in Washington DC, Race's son Toby is navigating his own path across a landscape still trembling with the reverberations of 9/11. Uncertain whether love is really all he needs, Toby, along with his girlfriend JoJo, watches the centuries-old fragments of a comet fall across the sky while America secretly begins planning to invade Iraq.
Read online
  • 39
The Courier's Tale

The Courier's Tale

Peter Walker

Peter Walker

Reginald Pole, diplomat, friend of scholars, cardinals and artists, and cousin to Henry VIII, is first seen stealing into the Medici chapel at dead of night to catch a forbidden glimpse of Michelangelo's masterpiece of funerary sculpture. But as the king's representative in Italy, and an admired scholar himself, it falls to him to make the case for Henry's divorce from Katherine of Aragon. And it falls to the hapless Michael Throckmorton to become Thomas Cromwell's courier to Pole in Rome. In Peter Walker's imaginative novel, in which two worlds, increasingly opposed, are beautifully evoked, we see these famous events that saw England become a Protestant nation through the eyes of the luckless courier. The dubious privilege of being courier to Cromwell and the King, makes of Miuchael Throckmorton's life a tragicomedy of endless journeys back and forth between England and Italy. And even though in time he becomes the loyal friend of the disgraced Pole, who can never risk...
Read online
  • 37
183