Still wet behind the ears in 1894, Carl Benedict was “crazy to get away and work on the range.” In the summer, he hooked up with a big outfit called the Figure 8 to round up cattle in the Texas Panhandle. Out of that experience came this book, published fifty years later, about what it was really like to be a cowboy in some ornery country checkered by canyons and gyp water springs. A Tenderfoot Kid on Gyp Water is all the more engaging for being unpretentious. During daily drives, the Kid learns how to ride, rope, brand, and hobble cattle and horses. The cowboys who teach him are not stereotyped or romanticized. Life on the range is too immediate and real to require Hollywood heroics. But every day brings drama: blockbuster fights of fierce wild bulls, treacherous river crossings with thousands of cattle in the water at once. Some nights bring thunderstorms and stampedes. And through it all those “cattle, horses, and also men who were not physically fit and healthy soon died or disappeared.” “One of the best books ever written on the Texas range.”—William S. Reese, Six Score: The 120 Best Books on the Range Cattle Industry. “Intelligence, [a] sense of humor, rightness of heart, observant sympathy for nature, and gentle sensitiveness [are] manifest throughout A Tenderfoot Kid on Gyp Water.”—J. Frank Dobie.

Somewhere between France and England there is an island that no one has ever bothered to discover. On it lives Wilma Tenderfoot, a determined ten-year old girl who dreams of one day becoming a World-Famous Detective. So she can't help thinking it's destiny when, dispatched from the Institute for Woeful Children to her new home as a live-in skivvy, she discovers that the genius gentleman detective Theodore P. Goodman lives next door. A ten-year-old girl of great determination (and her pet beagle, Pickle) and a World-Famous Detective of great repute might not be the most obvious crime-solving duo – but Wilma Tenderfoot is not about to let that put either of them off! And it looks like their first dastardly case is about to begin . . . Feisty but funny, cheeky but charming – Wilma Tenderfoot and her unique mystery-solving methodology is hard to resist!

Warm, nostalgic and very funny, Mike Harding's memoir of his early life in post-war Manchester is as idiosyncratic and engaging as the man himself.

Allen Vincent is a sensitive man working at a bank who only wants to be recognized for his complex inner nature. His boss will not stick up for him against the abusive bank manager, and his parents dote on his older brother more than on him. Allen finds himself at the gym and tries to forge a stronger self out of his soft and shy beginnings.