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Full of rich dialogue, Cormac McCarthy's insightful and philosophical play, The Sunset Limited, probes the deepest questions of human existence.A startling encounter on a New York subway platform leads two strangers to a run-down tenement where a life or death decision must be made. In that small apartment, 'Black' and 'White', as the two men are known, begin a conversation that leads each back through his own history - mining the origins of two diametrically opposing world views, they begin a dialectic redolent of the best of Beckett. White is a professor whose seemingly enviable existence of relative ease has left him nonetheless in despair. Black, an ex-con and ex-addict, is the more hopeful of the men - though he is just as desperate to convince White of the power of faith as White is to deny it. Their aim is no less than this: to discover the meaning of life. Deft, spare, and full of artful tension, The Sunset Limited by Cormac McCarthy is a beautifully crafted, consistently thought-provoking, and deeply intimate work by one of the most insightful writers of our time.

When beautiful, spirited Finnula Crais kidnaps the dashing knight Hugh Fitzstephen, she has no idea that she's ensnared the new Earl of Stephensgate on his way home from the Crusades. Nor does she realize that Hugh is quite happy to be kidnapped by an enchanting tomboy, and will do anything it takes to avoid being rescued. With Finnula determined to hold Hugh to ransom, and Hugh equally determined to steal Finnula's heart, it isn't long before the fireworks start! And just when it looks as if there might be a happy ending, disaster strikes. When an attempt is made on the new Earl's life, there is only one suspect - and even if he loves her dearly, Hugh can't let her get away with it . . .Ransom My Heart is a risque historical romance written by Princess Mia Thermopolis of Genovia (with a little help from Meg Cabot), as featured in The Princess Diaries series.

'I have already touched on my childhood in Strange Places, Questionable People. But the further through life I get the more I want to revisit it. I want to look at the whole of my childhood, the England I grew up in and my family.' This is not a mere exercise in nostalgia, rather it is a journey through the England of the late 1940s in all its shabby wonder, which also tells the somewhat strange and often deeply painful story of John Simpson's family. Here we meet his father and his grandmother, still living in the small and rather depressing south London suburb which his family built, dominated and, finally, declined with. We meet the grandfather who drank the family money away and abandoned his wife and children, and the grandfather who toured the country with a Wild West show. We learn, too, of the broken marriages and the unfulfilled lives, of the people who died, and the lives which were just beginning. Candid, beautifully written and touching, Days from a Different World will enchant all those who read it.

1950 - Seven year old Carol Martin lies encased in an iron lung, struck down by the killer disease, polio. Distraught at her side, her mother, Violet, wonders if this is her punishment - for Carol is the love child who should not have been born . . .Family of Women is the story of three generations of women:Bessie: scarred by a childhood of poverty in the slums of Victorian Birmingham and left a young widow with four children, is a hard, bullying woman who will go to disturbing lengths to keep her family under her thumb.Violet: one of Bessie's four children, marries young to escape, into the arms of a man whose life will be broken by war.Linda: grows up on a large housing estate in the 1950s with older sister Joyce and her beloved young sister Carol. Intelligent and energetic, she craves education and something more than the life she sees around her. Torn from her longed for place at the grammar school, she gives up hoping for anything better. It takes a tragic love affair to make her question the limitations of her life and the secrets which haunt her family.Spanning more than half of the last century, Family of Women by Annie Murray is a story of one family - and of the joys, struggles and changes in women's lives.

'Find what you were looking for, Inspector?' Every day the same question. A different uniform but the same question. They thought Lucia enjoyed being here. They thought that was why she kept coming back. But they were asking the wrong thing. She had found what she was looking for - she had found what she had been sent to discover - but she had found out more besides. The question was what to do about it. The question was whether to do anything at all. In the depths of a sweltering summer, teacher Samuel Szajkowski walks into his school assembly and opens fire. He kills three pupils and a colleague before turning the gun on himself. Lucia May, the young policewoman who is assigned the case, is expected to wrap up things quickly and without fuss. The incident is a tragedy that could not have been predicted and Szajkowski, it seems clear, was a psychopath beyond help. Soon, however, Lucia becomes preoccupied with the question no one else seems to want to ask: what drove a mild-mannered, diffident school teacher to commit such a despicable crime? Piecing together the testimonies of the teachers and children at the school, Lucia discovers an uglier, more complex picture of the months leading up to the shooting. She realises too that she has more in common with Szajkowski than she could have imagined. As the pressure to bury the case builds, she becomes determined to tell the truth about what happened, whatever the consequences . . .

Ever and Damen have travelled through countless past lives - and fought off the world's darkest enemies - in search of each other. But just when their destiny seems finally within reach, a powerful curse falls upon them. A single touch of their hands, a soft brush of their lips will mean death for Damen - cast into the darkness of the Shadowland. But as she seeks to break the curse, Ever meets Jude - a green-eyed, golden surfer boy who understands magick, and understands Ever better than she realises. And she begins to ask a terrifying question: even if you're immortal, can true love really last forever?

A heartfelt Birmingham saga, Birmingham Rose is Annie Murray's debut novel and was a Sunday Times bestseller. Life is bleak for Rose Lucas, a spirited, intelligent girl, born into a large family in the slums of pre-war Birmingham. But her friendship with Diana, daughter of a vicar from middle-class Moseley, gives her hope. She learns to aspire to a different kind of existence, vowing never to become a child-bearing drudge like her mother.Life, however, never follows the way of dreams. After a childhood marked by tragedy, Rose eventually finds and loses the love for which she has striven so hard. From Italy, where she has travelled during the Second World War, she is forced to return to Birmingham and an unhappy marriage, her hopes and illusions shattered. But Rose will not be defeated and she, too, is determined to rise once again above the devastation of her life . . .

When Steve Duno found a puppy - flea-bitten and emaciated - on a Californian roadside, he had no idea what he was letting himself in for. Lou, as he called the dog, was the offspring of marijuana farm guard dogs; a half-Rotweiller, half-Alsatian bundle of intelligence, loyalty, and mischief. Despite his traumatic beginnings, Lou went on to achieve great things, from foiling an armed robbery and fighting kidnappers, to comforting elderly war veterans and Alzheimer's patients. Most importantly, he inspired his owner to become a pet behaviourist, and worked with him to rehabilitate hundreds of aggressive dogs that would otherwise have been put to sleep. With a vocabulary of over 200 words, there was never any doubt that Lou was smart. But he was also funny, heroic, and, for 16 years, Steve's best friend and companion. This is their story.

At the age of 45, Lucy Henshaw has finally left home. Her decision to go has been reached neither lightly nor suddenly, since her marriage has been broken for some eighteen years. However, as the mother of twin sons and a daughter, Lucy has felt it her duty to stay as a couple in the family house she was born in near Bolton, giving her children the security she knows they need. Now that her family is grown, content in the knowledge that she loves them, Lucy decides she is free to leave. She secretly purchases a beautiful house overlooking the Mersey, near Liverpool, and there she plans to start afresh. Within hours, she has met some characters: her new neighbour Moira, who is disabled and dying, and sees Lucy as the ideal new companion for her husband, Richard; Shirley Bishop, built like a battleship and a cleaner extraordinaire, towing her several-inches-shorter husband as a handy gardener behind her; and Dr David Vincent, who is grieving for the loss of his young son. It is soon apparent that Lucy need have no anxieties about being lonely. It is these new friends, too, who come to Lucy's rescue when her husband Alan, falls ill. Always a wastrel and fraudster who has tried to control her, his illness only seems to offer him another opportunity to complicate Lucy's life all over again. Mersey View is a compelling and gritty novel set in Liverpool, and is a wonderful story, rich with warmth and humour, by a much-loved storyteller at the height of her powers.

Rural Irish girl Ellie loves living in New York, working as a lady's maid for a wealthy socialite. She tries to persuade her husband, John, to join her but he is embroiled in his affairs in Ireland, and caught up in the civil war. Nevertheless Ellie is extremely happy and fully embraces her sophisticated new life. When her father dies she must return home, but she intends to sort her affairs quickly and then return to her beloved America. But once home her sense of duty kicks in and she decides, painfully, that she must stay to look after her mother and resume her marriage. Ellie is suddenly thrown into the simple, rural life she believed she had grown out of...

Dublin, 1914. As Ireland stands on the brink of political crisis, Europe plunges headlong into war. Among the thousands of Irishmen who volunteer to fight for the British Army is Stephen Ryan, a gifted young maths scholar whose working class background has marked him out as a misfit among his wealthy fellow students.Sent to fight in Turkey, he looks forward to the great adventure, unaware of the growing unrest back home in Ireland. His romantic notions of war are soon shattered and he is forced to wonder where his loyalties lie, on his return to a Dublin poised for rebellion in 1916 and a brother fighting for the rebels. Everything has changed utterly, and in a world gone mad his only hope is his growing friendship with the brilliant and enigmatic Lillian Bryce.The Soldier's Song is a poignant and deeply moving novel, a tribute to the durability of the human soul.

The Brighton to London line. The 07:44 train. Carriages packed with commuters. A woman applies her make-up. Another occupies her time observing the people around her. A husband and wife share an affectionate gesture. Further along, a woman flicks through a glossy magazine. Then, abruptly, everything changes: a man has a heart attack, and can't be resuscitated; the train is stopped, an ambulance called. For at least three passengers on the 07:44 on that particular morning, life will never be the same again. Lou witnesses the man's final moments. Anna and Lou share a cab when they realise the train is going nowhere fast. Anna is Karen's best friend. And Karen? Karen's husband is the man who dies. Telling the story of the week following that fateful train journey, One Moment, One Morning is a stunning novel about love and loss, about family and - above all - friendship. A stark reminder that, sometimes, one moment is all it takes, it also reminds us that somehow, and despite everything, life can and does go on.

Kate Linden is a 35 year old single mother, who dreams of a rosy future with a dream man - one who will love both her and her son Sam. But while she's waiting for the arrival of that unknown saviour, she finds herself entangled with her handsome, domineering cousin Julian, the son of her dead mother's twin sister. As she returns to Julian's childhood home in Norfolk for a family weekend, Kate is drawn back into the mysteries that haunt her. What was the truth of the relationship between her mother and Julian's father? Who was responsible for her mother's death in a car crash? How will the patterns of that dark past repeat themselves, or can she escape them? Justine Picardie writes with a clear, beautiful voice about family intrigues and intricacies. Wish I May is a story about the shadows cast by the past, but also of a sustaining hope for the future, and the magical transformations of love.

Ellen is a single mother, and a feature writer for a local Philadelphia newspaper, recently taken over by a new hot editor, Marcelo, who though gorgeous, has not been short in letting staff go. Ellen knows that, like others, her job may be on the line, and she is more vulnerable than most, for she has a three-year old adopted son, Will, who is the love of her life. As she goes to collect her post one morning, she picks up a 'Missing Child' card, and is struck by the uncanny resemblance between Will and the little boy, Timothy Braverman, who was kidnapped from his home in Miami two years ago. Timothy's parents have a website for their child, and the story is grim: not only was Timothy kidnapped, but his childminder was killed. The ransom was paid, the child never returned to his home. For Ellen, the story is heartfelt: she first got to know Timothy as a small baby, when he was in hospital undergoing heart surgery; his adoption was hard won. As she searches further, something niggles at Ellen, and she begins to delve into the story of Will's birth mother, and uncover a horrendous story that, as the novel goes on, has far reaching consequences . . .

A dark epic, Nights of Villjamur is the first book in Mark Charan Newton's Legends of the Red Sun fantasy series.An ice age strikes a chain of islands, and thousands come to seek sanctuary at the gates of Villjamur. It's a city of ancient spires and bridges, a place where banshees wail and cultists use forgotten technology. And beyond the now besieged walls, the dead have been seen walking across the tundra. When the Emperor commits suicide, his heir, Rika, is brought home to lead the Jamur Empire. But the corrupt Chancellor has his own designs on the throne. Meanwhile, a senior investigator in the city inquisition must solve the savage murder of a city politician, and a charming rogue manipulates his way into the imperial residence with a hidden agenda. Then one crime leads to another and a plot is uncovered that could mean genocide for thousands of citizens. It seems that, in this land under a red sun, the long winter is bringing more than just snow . . .

Lynda Graham has been fortunate in life. She is happily married, with two wonderful children, Ciaran and Katie. She has a beautiful home and garden in one of the most affluent suburbs of Dublin. Her world feels safe and uncomplicated, one she now takes for granted. That is until Jon, a friend of Ciaran's from university - handsome, charming and clever - inveigles his way into their lives.There's something about Jon that Lynda finds unnerving - he is almost too perfect. And her instinct is right: Jon's arrival sets in motion a spiral of events that contributes to the gradual disintegration of all she holds dear.When Jon leaves, his disappearance is even more destructive than his presence. Lynda's quest to track him down reveals unpalatable truths about his past and the reason for his existence in their lives. Lynda knows that Jon is out there somewhere - watching, waiting, malevolent. And she also knows that she must do whatever it takes to protect the most precious thing she has - her family.'Dunne has a clever knack of turning ordinary lives into compelling fiction'Irish Post

Robert Hooke was one of the most inventive, versatile and prolific scientists of the late 17th Century, but for 300 years his reputation has been overshadowed by those of his two great contemporaries, his friend Sir Christopher Wren and his rival Sir Isaac Newton. If he is remembered today, it is as the author of a law of elasticity or as amisanthrope who accused Newton of stealing his ideas on gravity. This book, the first life of Hooke for nearly fifty years, rescues its subject from centuries of obscurity and misjudgement. It shows us Hooke the prolific inventor, the mechanic, the astronomer, the anatomist, the pioneer of geology, meteorology and microscopy, the precursor of Lavoisier and Darwin. It also gives us Hooke the architect of Bedlam and the Monument, the supervisor of London's rebuilding after the Great Fire, the watchmaker, the consumer of prodigious quantities of medicines and purgatives, the candid diarist, the lover, the hoarder of money and secrets, the coffee house conversationalist. This is an absorbing study of a fascinating and unduly forgotten man.

After victory in World War II, Britain was a relieved but also a profoundly traumatized country. Simon Winder, born into this nation of uncertain identity, fell in love (as many before and since) with the man created as the antidote, a quintessentially British figure of great cultural significance: James Bond. Written with passion, wit and a great deal of personal insight and affection, this book is his wildly amusing attempt to get to grips with Bond's legacy and the difficult decades in which it really mattered. 'A more entertaining tour of 007, and the period associations that get sucked into Winder's great comic intelligence, is hard to imagine' London Review of Books 'Diversions for the general reader and delights for the Bond enthusiast' Sunday Times 'A delightfully quirky, immediately engaging book' Scotland on Sunday

George Layton's stories evoke a nostalgic, atmospheric view of growing up in the 1950s. From the funny and faintly ridiculous to the terribly tragic, every tale brings a young boy's small world, and its big implications, to life.

Frank lies in bed, his dying dreams haunted by memories of one long-ago summer, the sticky heat of night, and the stories his father told about Christ, the red-breasted robin, and kings Arthur and Alfred. But other images also rise to the surface, unbidden and unwanted, and Frank finds himself forced to recall his older sister, Iris, whose existence - and terrible crime - he has spent long years struggling to forget.

Katherine Millar is eighteen and desperate to be less fat, less swotty and to have cooler friends. But most of all she wishes she had two parents, instead of one grandma, Poll. Poll is pushing seventy, half blind and utterly poisonous. She has looked after Katherine since she was a baby, when her father was killed in a car crash and her mother vanished. Poll's ambition is for things to stay exactly the same for ever, and for Katherine never to leave their pit village of Bank Top. Katherine has other ideas, and she can feel change is coming; the omens are all around her. In the meantime, she cleans up after Poll, revises for her exams, watches daytime television and surfs the net at the library trying to find out how to be bulimic. What she doesn't quite realize yet is that life won't always wait for you to catch up with it. Swallowing Grandma is a perceptive, vivid and painfully funny novel about the ties of love and loathing, and the ways in which our versions of the past can thwart our visions for the future. In Katherine and Poll, Kate Long has created two unforgettable characters locked in an epic battle over whose side of the story will prevail. 'Wise, warm and witty . . . Will keep you reading until the very last page' Red, Book of the Month

Roy Jenkins follows up Churchill with a book of a very different shape; short and semi-autobiographical, but also full of the wit and erudition which make that book such a success. Each of the twelve cities are described with a mixture of architectural interest, topographical insight, and personal anecdote. Jenkins has three British cities: Cardiff, which was the metropolis of his Monmouthshire childhood, Birmingham which he represented in Parliament for 27 years, and Glasgow, which aroused in him an enthusiasm far transcending politics. Further afield there is Paris, Brussels, where he lived for four years as President of the European Commission; Bonn, and Berlin, surveyed from its pre-war splendour, through to its architectural resurgence of the 1990s, Naples and Barcelona. From Lord Jenkins's over a hundred visits to North America there emerge highly personal recollections of New York and a more objective view of the of Chicago. Dublin, so near to home and yet so distant, makes up the dozen. Twelve Cities is a fascinating and sparkling collection from one of our very finest writers

Ally has everything she ever wanted: a husband, a child, a lovely house in a pretty neighbourhood. Her glamorous, dynamic next-door neighbour, Juno, is also her best friend. But Juno has made a surprising decision; she has signed up for Queen Mum, a reality-TV show. For two weeks, she will live with another family in another town, while her opposite number will be moving in next door to Ally. Juno is excited about the prospect of seeing life from a different perspective. Ally is nervous. She doesn't like change, and knows from bitter experience how something precious can be lost in a moment. Kate Long's novel, written with her customary wit, empathy and incisiveness, is about friendship and love, recklessness and caution and about how the camera, while it sometimes lies, can also reveal uncomfortable truths. 'Delicious' Red 'This is the perfect summer novel - easy to read, but perceptive about the twists of fate that can change our lives' Glamour 'Long is as compulsively readable as ever' Time Out

Winner of the Locus Award for Best Science Fiction Novel, Kraken is a darkly comic, wildly absurd adventure by author of Perdido Street Station, China Mieville.Deep in the research wing of the Natural History Museum is a prize specimen, something that comes along much less often than once in a lifetime: a perfect, and perfectly preserved, giant squid. But what does it mean when the creature suddenly and impossibly disappears? For curator Billy Harrow it's the start of a headlong pitch into a London of warring cults, surreal magic, apostates and assassins. It might just be that the creature he's been preserving is more than a biological rarity: there are those who are sure it's a god. A god that someone is hoping will end the world.

The rise of Barack Obama is one of the great stories of this century: a defining moment for America, and one with truly global resonance. This is the book of his phenomenal journey to election. Through extensive on-the-record interviews with friends and teachers, mentors and disparagers, family members and Obama himself, David Remnick has put together a nuanced, unexpected and masterly portrait of the man who was determined to become the first African-American President. Most importantly, The Bridge argues that Obama imagined and fashioned an identity for himself against the epic drama of race in America. In a way that Obama's own memoirs cannot, it examines both the personal and political elements of the story, and gives shape not only to a decisive period of history, but also to the way it crucially influenced, animated and motivated a gifted and complex man.

Zahra, aged 3, and Hawra, just a few months old were the only survivors of a missile strike in Baghdad in 2003. Their parents and their five siblings all died. Unable to have children herself, Hala Jaber, an award-winning foreign correspondent, was determined to do all she could to help them. Sent to Iraq by the Sunday Times to cover the war, the last thing she expected was to find herself trying to save two little girls who had lost everything. But what happened next tells us far more about that conflict than any news bulletin ever could. Being a Lebanese Muslim, as well as the employee of a London paper, Hala is in the privileged position of being able to straddle two very different worlds and explain one to the other, and her beautifully written and deeply moving account affords a genuinely fresh insight into the Iraq war and its terrible human cost.

A suspenseful death row drama, Reversible Errors is Scott Turow's sixth Kindle County legal thriller.Rommy "e;Squirrel"e; Gandolph is an inmate on death row for a 1991 triple murder. His slow progress toward execution is nearing completion when Arthur Raven, a corporate lawyer and Rommy's reluctant representative, receives word of new evidence that will exonerate Gandolph. Arthur's opponent is the formidable prosecuting attorney Muriel Wynn. Together with Larry Starczek, the original detective on the case, she is determined to see Rommy's fate sealed. Meanwhile the judge who originally found him guilty is just out of prison herself. Scott Turow's compelling, multi-dimensional characters take the reader into Kindle County's parallel yet intersecting worlds of weary police, small-time crooks and ambitious lawyers. No other writer offers such a convincing picture of how the law and life interact - or such a profound understanding of what is at stake when the state holds the power to end a man's life.

Love is not easy, especially if you find the woman of your dreams and then lose her - as Philip Griffin and his son Stephen each discover in turn. Stephen is just a boy when his mother and sister are killed in a car crash, and his father never recovers from the accident: he wasn't involved but is consumed by grief, his only desire to be reunited with his wife. Before that happens, though, Philip wants to ensure the happiness of his son, Stephen - now a grown man. 'As it is in Heaven, Niall Williams' tale of love and tragedy, will leave you in tears' Tatler 'A bitter-sweet novel about passionate love giving way to commitment, grief to a sort of healing' Irish Times 'A tender and sober novel with a faith in romance that is absolute' Daily Express 'Delicious coincidence and tragedy, as extraordinary lives unravel and intertwine' Guardian

From the bestselling author of Presumed Innocent comes Ordinary Heroes, Scott Turow's Second World War story of family and bravery. All parents keep secrets from their children. My father, it seemed, kept more than most . . . Whilst mourning the death of his father, journalist Stewart Dubin decides to research the life of a man he had always respected, always admired, but possibly never quite knew . . . As a young, idealistic lawyer during the last terrible months of the Second World War, David Dubin was sent to the European Front - ostensibly to bring charges against a brave American hero, Robert Martin, who had suddenly, inexplicably, gone local and stopped following orders. Martin has become a liability and the authorities want him neutralized. But as Dubin learns more about Martin and the demons possessing him, he finds himself falling in love with Martin's enigmatic ex-mistress - a dangerous woman of incredible courage. And someone who will do anything to protect her comrade-in-arms . . . Stewart discovers a journal written by his father - and learns of his incredible courage in the face of battle, reads first-hand of the shattering moral consequences for those caught in the chaos of war and, finally, the secret he had died protecting . . .

Time is a precious resource, both irreplaceable and irreversible, yet we often fill our days with time-wasting activities and leave ourselves without enough time for our real priorities. As an effective manager, you need to possess strong time management skills in order to ensure that both you and your team are working as efficiently and effectively as possible and making the most of every hour of the working day. By first encouraging you to analyze where, how and why you are spending your time at present and then think about the future, set goals and develop plans, John Adair, Britain's foremost expert on leadership training, will help you to: Reduce time pressures by ridding yourself of activities that waste time Learn how to save time by delegating Reallocate your time to achieve your goals/produce better results Effective Time Management contains a multitude of indispensable time-saving tips covering every aspect of the working day, such as meetings, reading, travelling or talking on the phone, which will enable you to use your time to think more creatively and help you to see time as an ally instead of an enemy.