Air Babylon


Book Description

Heard the one about the airline that has introduced 'corpse cupboards' on new planes to cope with the number of people who die in the air? Heard the story about the First Class air hostess who got fired for sitting on the face of a passenger during a long haul flight? Heard about the amount of knickers and false teeth that are left behind in the body of the plane? Heard how pissed-off stewards put laxatives in your drinks? Heard about the pilot who ran out of runway? Heard of the disabled passengers who miraculously walk again? No? Then you haven't read Air Babylon. Do you know the best place to have sex on a plane? Do you know how to dress for an upgrade? Do you know that one drink in the air equals three on the ground? Do you know who is checking you in? Who is checking you out? Do you know exactly what happens to your luggage once it leaves your sight? Is it secure? Are you safe? Do you really know anything about the business that you entrust your life to several times a year? Air Babylon is a trawl through the highs, the lows, and the rapid descents of the travel industry. It catalogues the births, the deaths, the drunken brawls, the sexual antics, and the debauchery behind the scenes of the ultimate service industry - where the world is divided into those who wear the uniform and those who don't...




Hotel Babylon


Book Description

'Something strange occurs to guests as soon as they check in. Even if in real life they are perfectly well-mannered, decent people with proper balanced relationships, as soon as they spin through the revolving hotel doors the normal rules of behaviour no longer seem to apply.' All of the following is true.Only the names have been changed to protect the guilty. All the anecdotes, the stories, the characters, the situations, the highs, the lows, the scams, the drugs, the misery, the love, the death and the insanity are exactly as was told by Anonymous - someone who has spent his whole career working in hotels at the heart of London's luxury hotel industry. However, for legal reasons, the stories now take place in a fictitious hotel known as Hotel Babylon. More than a decade is compressed into a day. Everything else is as it should be. The rich spend money, the hotel makes money and the chambermaids still fight the bellboys over a two-pound coin.It's just another twenty-four hours in an expensive London hotel.




Alas, Babylon


Book Description

The classic apocalyptic novel that stunned the world.




The Town of Babylon


Book Description

A FINALIST FOR THE 2022 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR FICTION LONGLISTED FOR THE 2023 ASPEN WORDS LITERARY PRIZE ONE OF THE MOST ANTICIPATED BOOKS OF 2022 – Boston Globe, BuzzFeed, LitHub, Electric Literature, LGBTQ Reads, Latinx in Publishing *Recommended by The New York Times* In this contemporary debut novel—an intimate portrait of queer, racial, and class identity —Andrés, a gay Latinx professor, returns to his suburban hometown in the wake of his husband’s infidelity. There he finds himself with no excuse not to attend his twenty-year high school reunion, and hesitantly begins to reconnect with people he used to call friends. Over the next few weeks, while caring for his aging parents and navigating the neighborhood where he grew up, Andrés falls into old habits with friends he thought he’d left behind. Before long, he unexpectedly becomes entangled with his first love and is forced to tend to past wounds. Captivating and poignant; a modern coming-of-age story about the essential nature of community, The Town of Babylon is a page-turning novel about young love and a close examination of our social systems and the toll they take when they fail us.




Hospital Babylon


Book Description

Hospital Babylon is an in-depth, amusing and highly insightful expose of the extraordinary world of modern medicine. It will take the reader on a journey through the various departments and wards where babies are made, thighs are reduced, noses straightened and spare kidneys are flown in from the Indian subcontinent. We will meet doctors who sleep with nurses. Doctors who sleep with patients. Doctors who fiddle their insurance forms. Doctors who suck fat, pump up breasts, plump lips and lengthen penises. The doctor who specialises in flatulence. The doctor who shoots up before he operates. Doctor Feelgood who will give you anything and everything you need. As well as the doctor who makes a fortune doing buttock enlargements in the Caribbean. En route, we will discover what touches them, what amuses them and quite how obsessively insane you have to be to make it to the top. Why does a private room cost over £1000 a night? Who are the people changing your bedpan? Holding your hand as you go to sleep? What do they do to you while you're out cold? Why are drugs so expensive? How easy is it for the pharmaceutical companies to grease the good doctor's palm? Who exactly is profiting from your illness, embarrassing affliction or brand new nose? And, of course, what happens when it all goes wrong? Packed with true stories, anecdotes and revelations, Hospital Babylon is a riveting, entertaining and shocking look at 24 hours in the life of a hospital. Both amusing and appalling, it will make you question whether you should sign that consent form after all...




This Is What Happened


Book Description

From CWA Gold Dagger winner Mick Herron comes a shocking, twisted novel of psychological suspense about one woman's attempt to be better than ordinary. Twenty-six-year-old Maggie Barnes is someone you would never look at twice. Living alone in a month-to-month sublet in the huge city of London, with no family but an estranged sister, no partner, and not much in the way of friends, Maggie is just the kind of person who could vanish from the face of the earth without anyone taking notice. Or just the kind of person MI5 needs to infiltrate the establishment and thwart an international plot that puts all of Britain at risk. Now one young woman has the chance to be a hero—if she can think quickly enough to stay alive.




Fashion Babylon


Book Description

CAUTION: Reading this book will forever change the way you peruse the racks at Bergdorf's or flip through the pages of Vogue. Taking the reader through six months in a designer's life, Fashion Babylon follows an anonymous A-list British fashion designer looking to break out across the pond. Structured around three of the annual "must" industry events, this irresistible work of reportage goes inside the well-cut seams of the fashion world, where women are paid tens of thousands of dollars for simply getting dressed and where a wrong skirt length can cost you your career. You'll find out how a collection is put together -- from the objects of inspiration to the catwalk, into the shops and, hopefully, onto the cover of a magazine -- and learn who goes to the shows and where they sit...and whose backside they have to kiss to get there. Witty, naughty and jam-packed with celebrity gossip, Fashion Babylon decodes the markups and the comedowns, the fabulous extremes and the shoddy shortcuts behind one of the most lucrative and secretive businesses in the world.




Restaurant Babylon


Book Description

The saucy secrets of the world's finest kitchens What makes a restaurant hot? Whose name do you need to drop to get a table? Why is one place booked solid for the next nine months while somewhere equally delicious is as empty and inhospitable as the Gobi desert? In Restaurant Babylon, Imogen Edwards-Jones and her anonymous industry insider lift the lid on all the tricks of the food trade and what really makes this £90 billion a year industry tick. So please do sit down, pour yourself some heavily marked-up wine and make yourself comfortable (although we'll need that table back by 8.30 sharp). 'Shocking and at times jaw-dropping, this is a must-read' HEAT




Victorian Babylon


Book Description

"In this innovative look at nineteenth-century London, Lynda Nead offers a fresh account of modernity and metropolitan life. Taking a highly interdisciplinary approach, Nead charts the relationship between London's formation into a modern city in the 1860s and the emergence of new ways of producing and consuming visual culture."--BOOK JACKET.