When Peter's parents are killed, he is sent to an orphanage in Warsaw. Then German soldiers take him away to be measured and assessed. They decide that Peter is racially valuable. He is Volksdeutsche: of German blood. With his blond hair, blue eyes, and acceptably proportioned head, he looks just like the boy on the Hitler Jugend poster. Someone important will want to adopt Peter. They do. He is sent to Germany to meet his new family. Professor Kaltenbach and his wife have three daughters, but they have always wanted a son. The professor in particular is very pleased to welcome such a fine Aryan specimen to his household. People will be envious. But Peter is not quite the specimen they think. He is forming his own ideas about what he is seeing, what he is told. Peter doesn't want to be a Nazi, and so he is going to play a very dangerous game. The most dangerous game he could possibly choose to play in 1941, in Berlin.

I always think that if you walk around thinking you can have anything you want, you usually can.For confident nineteen-year-old Anna, finding men is easy, holding on to them unnecessary. Moving to Paris brings her a new job, a new life and a new friend in the form of a woman twenty years her senior, Beth. As they fall in love with the city, Anna is irresistibly drawn to Beth's warmth and charm. When Beth falls in love with an attractive Frenchman, Christian, Anna struggles to overcome her increasing jealousy. But who is her real rival: Christian or Beth? A sultry tale of betrayal and regret, Harm's Way traces Anna's story as she learns one of life's hardest lessons: that if you believe you can have anything you want, you may end up with nothing but regret.

«You're not responsible for your ancestry, are you... But if that's so, why have marched under banned slogans, got yourself beaten up by the police, arrested a couple of times; plastered walls with subversive posters... The past is valid only in relation to whether the present recognizes it». In this collection of new stories Nadine Gordimer crosses the frontiers of politics, memory, sexuality, and love with the fearless insight that is the hallmark of her writing. In the title story a middle-aged academic who had been an anti-apartheid activist embarks on an unadmitted pursuit of the possibilities for his own racial identity in his great-grandfather's fortune-hunting interlude of living rough on diamond diggings in South Africa, his young wife far away in London. “Dreaming of the Dead” conjures up a lunch in a New York Chinese restaurant where Susan Sontag and Edward Said return in surprising new avatars as guests in the dream of a loving friend. The historian in “History” is a parrot who confronts people with the scandalizing voice reproduction of quarrels and clandestine love-talk on which it has eavesdropped. “Alternative Endings” considers the way writers make arbitrary choices in how to end stories and offers three, each relating the same situation, but with a different resolution, arrived at by the three senses: sight, sound, and smell.»

An epic of biblical proportions, The Year of the Flood is a feast of imagination and a journey to the end of the world. Adam One is the leader of the God's Gardeners, a religious group devoted to living under the command of the natural world. They wear beige cloth-sacks, cultivate mushrooms, harvest honey and curse each other by shouting: Pig-Eater! Their community is only tolerated by the CorpSeCorps, the ruling power, because they are not perceived as threatening. But, this is a world where gene-splicing is the norm; where lions and lambs have become Liobams and pigs have human DNA. The times, and species, are changing at a rapid rate, and with loyalites as thin as environmental stability, the future is a dangerous place. And, if the Waterless Flood does indeed arrive, as predicted by the Gardeners, will there even be a future to contemplate? Ren is a trapeze dancer at Scales and Tails, and can work a plank just as well. After a rip in her biofilm she is placed in solitary confinement until they can guarantee she is without disease. Her story is one part of our gateway into this uniquely constructed world. The other is Toby, an ex-counter-girl at SecretBurger ('Because we all love a Secret'), a natural cynic and source of extensive homeopathic knowledge; she knows her aminatas from her puffballs. Their stories weave beneath the holy teachings and saintly-songs of Adam One to create a truly apocalyptic vision, a world that harnesses Atwood's wit, dystopic imagination and sharp insight. The result is a collective blast of a novel and one that will remain with you until the Waterless Flood comes.

The appearance of a hastily-constructed barbed wire entanglement through the heart of Berlin during the night of 12-13 August 1961 was both dramatic and unexpected. Within days, it had started to metamorphose into a structure that would come to symbolise the brutal insanity of the Cold War: the Berlin Wall. A city of almost four million was cut ruthlessly in two, unleashing a potentially catastrophic East-West crisis and plunging the entire world for the first time into the fear of imminent missile-borne apocalypse. This threat would vanish only when the very people the Wall had been built to imprison, breached it on the historic night of 9 November 1989. The Berlin Wall reveals the strange and chilling story of how the initial barrier system was conceived, then systematically extended, adapted and strengthened over almost thirty years. Patrolled by vicious dogs and by guards on shoot-to-kill orders, the Wall, with its more than 300 towers, became a wired and lethally booby-trapped monument to a world torn apart by fiercely antagonistic ideologies. The Wall had tragic consequences in personal and political terms, affecting the lives of Germans and non-Germans alike in a myriad of cruel, inhuman and occasionally absurd ways. The Berlin Wall is the definitive account of a divided city and its people.

Throughout his career as a novelist, William Boyd has never stopped writing non-fiction, providing a fascinating counterpoint to the world of his novels. Bamboo gathers together Boyd's writing on literature, art, the movie business, television, people he has met, places he has visited and autobiographical reflections on his African childhood and his years at boarding school. From Pablo Picasso to the allure of the British caff, from Charles Dickens to Catherine Deneuve, from mini-cabs to Brideshead Revisited, this collection proves an engrossing and revealing companion to the work of one of Britain's leading novelists.

When two young women meet under extraordinary circumstances in the eighteenth century West Indies, they are unified in their desire to escape their oppressive lives. The first is a slave, forced to work in a plantation mansion and subjected to terrible cruelty at the hands of the plantation manager. The second is a spirited and rebellious English girl, sent to the West Indies to marry well and combine the wealth of two respectable families. But fate ensures that one night the two young women have to save each other and run away to a life no less dangerous but certainly a lot more free. As pirates, they roam the seas, fight pitched battles against their foes and become embroiled in many a heart-quickening adventure. Written in brilliant and sparkling first-person narrative, this is a wonderful novel in which Celia Rees has brought the past vividly and intimately to life.

Mankind has always been fascinated by space — prehistoric man built temples to honour the moon and sun, early civilisations developed theories about what went on up there, and scientists and philosophers from Pythagoras to Copernicus have been drawn to it ever since. Our obsession has led us in to space itself. Not to mention the numerous amazing books, films and UFO 'experiences'. Everything there is to know about space is here. With pictures. It's very very funny. And, of course, supremely edifying.Written by Tracey Turner (101 Things) and illustrated by celebrated cartoonist Sally Kindberg.

Maybe some people just like to keep things private. Secret, I guess you'd say. Love came late to Meri, but in a rush: she met Nathan at thirty-six, he moved in a month later, and they married a month after that. Now they are moving to New England and a house of their own — a new life that Meri is not sure she even wants. She loves her husband, but feels there may be trouble ahead. Nathan, however, is boyishly excited that their next-door neighbour is the eminent Senator Tom Naughton, a political hero of his, now in his seventies. The Senator is nowhere to be seen, but Meri strikes up an unexpected friendship with his wife, the elegant Delia, sensing that she has much to learn from her — about marriage, love and motherhood. But soon she comes close to a terrible breach of trust that could ruin everything.

The moment Jem joins her class, Alice knows her life is irrevocably changed. Glamorous, different, a subversive, Jem seduces Alice — and then vanishes as abruptly as she came, leaving Alice bereft. Then, five years on, Jem blazes across her sphere again, trailing mystery, chaos and large-scale casualty. And the infuriating, demoniac Giovanni appears who, sharing Jem's gift for suffusing life with magic, becomes Alice's very own dangerous Sarastro, holding the talisman.

It would have been hard to have missed what was written on the wall. Painted in giant whitewashed letters: SHARKEY IS A GRASS. I hadn't a clue who Sharkey was, but I knew one thing. Sharkey's a dead man, I said. Leo knows the value of never grassing: never grass on your best friends, for starters. Everybody, too, knows the gang leaders in town. And you don't grass on them. Not unless you don't value your life — like Sharkey. And then Leo is unlucky enough to witness the murder of one gang leader by another — Armour. Leo is petrified as he realises what he is witnessing and even more petrified when he realises that Armour has seen him. Sure that he is drawing his own last breath, Leo silently says goodbye to his family and everybody he knows. But all Armour does is wink at Leo — very slowly, and leaves the scene of the crime. Leo draws a long, long breath of relief. He has got away with it. But he hasn't — not really. Leo will live to regret that wink and realise that Armour has an insidious hold on him and his family, which will test his family relationships, and his very sense of what is right and wrong. It will take bravery, luck and sheer daring to extricate himself from Armour's deadly web. A riveting and hard-hitting new novel from Cathy MacPhail.

Sparky Christina and her saintly adopted sister Pam couldn't be more different. And when they meet similarly mismatched friends Jago and Peter, the four embark on a dazzling series of pairings and partings, outrageous coincidences and eleventh-hour entrances interrupted one disastrous Halloween when schoolboy revelry turns horribly wrong. Three years on, as Christina analyses the wit, cruelty and crossed genders of Shakespearean comedy, the cast of her own life reunites and the curtain falls on some gloriously unexpected partnerships.

The year is 2140. Peter and Anna are now living on the Outside as Legals. Impatient to see action as an agent in the Underground, Peter is tasked by Pip, its charismatic leader, to infiltrate Pincent Pharma Corporation and find out what's going on in the secret Longevity programme. Peter must feign a reconciliation and win the trust of his grandather, Richard Pincent, one of the most powerful men on the planet, whose company, Pincent Pharma, is chasing the holy grail of modern science — a drug which will reverse ageing and make people look young again. But his grandfather has his own plans for Peter — plans which involve Peter and Anna signing the Declaration and endorsing Longevity+. Richard Pincent will stop at nothing to get what he wants, even if it means ripping Peter and Anna's new life apart. At the heart of the organisation he most despises, Peter stumbles across something more sinister than he could ever have imagined, as powerful forces are gathering to crush the young couple's dreams.

On 20 July 1944, Adolf Hitler narrowly escaped death when an assassin's bomb failed to kill him. The conspirators, among them Axel von Gottberg, were hunted down and hanged from meat-hooks, and their executions were filmed. Sixty years later, Conrad Senior is left a legacy of von Gottberg's papers and letters and becomes obsessed with what they reveal and with finding the film of those brutal executions. Award-winning writer Justin Cartwright has conjured a masterwork that addresses the nature of friendship and what it means to be human, and it is a remarkable tapestry of passion, ideas, frailty and courage.

St Petersburg, 1914. Dr. Otto Spethmann, a famous psychoanalyst, is implicated in a murder. But he is preoccupied with Avrom Rozental, the brilliant chess master who is due to play the most important competition of his life but is on the verge of a breakdown. With the city rife with speculation and alarm, Spethmann broods over his own chessboard, its pieces frozen mid-battle, and contemplates the forces — political, historical, sexual — that are holding him in their grasp.

Marvel at the sheer brilliance of invention, from glass to underpants, the noble compass to the humble pencil. Not forgetting, of course, the undeniably indispensable banana suitcase. Filled with fascinating details about everything from the most common everyday object to inventions which changed society, it will also distinguish the strokes of genius from discoveries of sheer chance, or millennia of evolution... and reveal the real reason why Alfred Nobel had to establish a peace prize (tut, tut). Expand your knowledge of man's accomplishments in the most compelling — and irreverent — way possible.

On 4 October 1957, at the height of the Cold War, the Soviet Union secretly launched Sputnik, Earth's first artificial moon. Powered by a car battery, it passed over the stunned American continent once every 101 minutes and propelled the USSR from backward state to superpower and pioneer of the Space Age. This is the pulse-racing story of a time when two nations and ideologies were pitted against each other in a quest that laid the foundations of the modern technological world.