Every night, Kawashima Masayuki creeps from his bed and watches over his baby girl's crib while his wife sleeps. But this is no ordinary domestic scene. He has an ice pick in his hand, and a barely controllable desire to use it. Deciding to confront his demons, Kawashima sets into motion a chain of events seeming to lead inexorably to murder.

Nineteen-year-old Joy Louie has run away from her home in 1950s America to start a new life in China. Idealistic and unafraid, she believes that Chairman Mao is on the side of the people, despite what her family keeps telling her. How can she trust them, when she has just learned that her parents have lied to her for her whole life, that her mother Pearl is really her aunt and that her real father is a famous artist who has been living in China all these years? Joy arrives in Green Dragon Village, where families live in crowded, windowless huts and eke out a meagre existence from the red soil. And where a handsome young comrade catches her eye... Meanwhile, Pearl returns to China to bring her daughter home — if she can. For Mao has launched his Great Leap Forward, and each passing season brings ever greater hardship to cities and rural communes alike. Joy must rely on her skill as a painter and Pearl must use her contacts from her decadent childhood in 1930s Shanghai to find a way to safety, and a chance of joy for them both. Haunting, passionate and heartbreakingly real, this is the unforgettable new novel by the internationally acclaimed Lisa See.

Inventor. Visionary. Genius. Dropout. Adopted. Steve Jobs was the founder of Apple and he was all of these things. Steve Jobs has been described as a showman, artist, tyrant, genius, jerk. Through his life he was loved, hated, admired and dismissed, yet he was a living legend; the genius who founded Apple in his parent's garage when he was just 20 years old, revolutionising the music world. He single-handedly introduced the first computer that could sit on your desk and founded and nurtured a company called Pixar bringing to life Oscar wining animations Toy Story and Finding Nemo. So how did the man, who was neither engineer nor computer geek change the world we live in, making us want every product he touched? On graduation day in 2005, a fifty-year-old Steve Jobs said: 'Today I want to tell you three stories from my life, That's it. Just three stories'. The first story is about connecting the dots. My second story is about love and loss. My third story is about death. This is his story...Critically acclaimed author Karen Blumenthal takes us to the core of this complicated and legendary man, from his adoption and early years through to the pinnacles of his career, his dismissal from his duties at Apple (for being too disruptive and difficult) to the graduation where he gave the commencement speech just 6 years before his death, giving life to what were soon to become some of most famous quotes of his career, ending with the message: Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you. Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life.

Berlin, 1946. During one of the coldest winters on record, Pavel Richter, a decommissioned GI, finds himself at odds with a rogue British Army colonel and a Soviet General when a friend deposits the frozen body of a dead Russian spy in his apartment. So begins the race to take possession of the spy's secret, a race which threatens Pavel's friendship with a street orphan named Anders and his budding love for Sonia, his enigmatic upstairs neighbour. As the action hurtles towards catastrophe, the hunt merges with one for the truth about the novel's protagonist: who exactly is Pavel Richter?

When Nelly reads a description of herself in a book, she is convinced that she is a mouse after all she is grey, has big ears and a thin tail. When she meets some mice, the confusion only grows in this delightfully funny tale of mixed messages and taking everything you read in books just a little too literally.

It is 1837, and for the luxuriantly bearded Pirate Captain and his rag-tag pirate crew, life on the high seas has gotten a little dull. With nothing to do but twiddle their hooks and lounge aimlessly on tropical beaches, the Captain decides it's time they had an adventure. A surprisingly successful boat raid leads them to the young Charles Darwin, in desperate need of their help. And so the pirates set forth for London in a bid to save the scientist from the evil machinations of a diabolical Bishop. There they encounter grisly murder, vanishing ladies, the Elephant Man — and have an exciting trip to the zoo.

encompassing Charles Darwin, Queen Victoria and a villainous secret society. A photographic retelling of the original uproarious story by acclaimed author Gideon Defoe. 'I HATE pirates!' declares Queen Victoria. Nevertheless, deterined to win the coveted Pirate of the Year Award, the Pirate Captain takes his life in his hands and enters the city of London. With the help of Darwin, a manpanzee and a crew of motley misfits, the Pirate Captain struggles to seize booty and restore his pirate honour. Having written the script for the film, Gideon Defoe has brilliantly revisited his story for younger readers. This hilarious book will delight a new generation of fans.

Using the full-color stickers, children will love creating new adventures for the Pirate Captain and his band of misfits. Fans can play out scenes from the film or imagine fresh dangers for all their favorite characters. The possibilities are as varied as their imaginations!

London, 1840: Wagner's latest opera plays to packed houses while disgruntled workers gather in crowded pubs to eat ice cream and plan the downfall of the bourgeoisie. And the Pirate Captain — his disguise proving something of a letdown — finds himself incarcerated in Scotland Yard, in a case of mistaken identity. Discovering that his doppelganger is none other than Karl Marx, the Captain and his crew are unwittingly caught up in a sinister plot to discredit the communists. From the gloomy streets of Soho to the leafy boulevards of Paris, The pirates! In an Adventure with Communists is a story of intellectual giants, enormous beards, volcanoes and valkyries, doubloons and dancing girls, and a quest to discover whether ham really might be the opium of the people.

'How can you talk about being civil when innocent animals are being tortured to death? Civil? I'll be civil when the killing's done'. The island of Anacapa, off the coast of California, is overrun with black rats which are threatening the ancient population of ground-nesting birds. Alma Boyd Takesue of the National Park Service is the spokesperson for a campaign to exterminate these man-introduced rodents once and for all. Alma, highly self-disciplined with a stubborn streak, speaks as a conservationist, though the fact that her grandmother was once stranded on Anacapa for three weeks with nothing but thousands of crawling rats for company might explain some of her zeal. With days to go before the aerial rat-poisoning, Alma's plan is in danger of sabotage. Dave LaJoy and Anise Reed, a pair of notorious environmental activists, are recognisable from a distance by his knotted dreadlocks and her flame-red cyclone of hair. Dave is an electronics salesman with barely-controlled rages, for whom the plight of the rats is yet another of life's many injustices, along with lazy tramps and second-rate wine. Anise is a struggling folk singer with her own, terrible reasons for getting involved in 'the cause'. From the outset, Alma, Dave and Anise are at ideological loggerheads. But when Alma's sights turn to the infestation of non-native pigs on Santa Cruz — where Anise was brought up by her single mother and a clan of ranchers — the stakes are raised, and the debate threatens to boil over into something much more real... When the Killing's Done is T.C. Boyle's blistering new novel, a sweeping epic of family, ecology and the right to life — no matter what the fallout.

There were people on the banks of the river. Among the tangled waterways and giant anacondas of the Brazilian Rio Negro, an enigmatic scientist is developing a drug that could alter the lives of women for ever. Dr Annick Swenson's work is shrouded in mystery; she refuses to report on her progress, especially to her investors, whose patience is fast running out. Anders Eckman, a mild-mannered lab researcher, is sent to investigate. A curt letter reporting his untimely death is all that returns. Now Marina Singh, Anders's colleague and once a student of the mighty Dr Swenson, is their last hope. Compelled by the pleas of Anders's wife, who refuses to accept that her husband is not coming home, Marina leaves the snowy plains of Minnesota and retraces her friend's steps into the heart of the South American darkness, determined to track down Dr. Swenson and uncover the secrets being jealously guarded among the remotest tribes of the rainforest. What Marina does not yet know is that, in this ancient corner of the jungle, where the muddy waters and grasses hide countless unknown perils and temptations, she will face challenges beyond her wildest imagination. Marina is no longer the student, but only time will tell if she has learnt enough.

Where does the Queen keep her armies? Up her sleevies! Laugh your way through this hilarious book packed with hundreds of splendidly silly jokes on every topic under the sun, such as animals, school and family, plus plenty of good old knock, knock jokes and lots of royalty themed jokes. Handy practical tips will advise you on crucial regal accomplishments, such as how to perfect the royal wave and how to pull off headscarf chic when walking one's corgis. Interactive elements include devising your Fantasy Royal Family and designing your own palace. A bonus fact section at the back of the book contains fascinating and little-known facts about the Queen and the Royal Family — did you know that Buckingham Palace has its own cinema, post office, chapel, swimming pool, staff cafeteria and doctor's surgery?

What better way to get to grips with animal words than in the company of the selfish crocodile! Stars, flowers and insects bring the pages to life in this fantastic first word book for children who like their books snappy.

A brother is as easily forgotten as an umbrella. James Joyce, Ulysses Recently having abandoned his RD Laing-influenced experiment in running a therapeutic community — the so-called Concept House in Willesden — maverick psychiatrist Zack Busner arrives at Friern Hospital, a vast Victorian mental asylum in North London, under a professional and a marital cloud. He has every intention of avoiding controversy, but then he encounters Audrey Dearth, a working-class girl from Fulham born in 1890 who has been immured in Friern for decades. A socialist, a feminist and a munitions worker at the Woolwich Arsenal, Audrey fell victim to the encephalitis lethargica sleeping sickness epidemic at the end of the First World War and, like one of the subjects in Oliver Sacks' Awakenings, has been in a coma ever since. Realising that Audrey is just one of a number of post-encephalitics scattered throughout the asylum, Busner becomes involved in an attempt to bring them back to life — with wholly unforeseen consequences. Is Audrey's diseased brain in its nightmarish compulsion a microcosm of the technological revolutions of the twentieth century? And if Audrey is ill at all — perhaps her illness is only modernity itself? And what of Audrey's two brothers, Stanley and Albert: at the time she fell ill, Stanley was missing presumed dead on the Western Front, while Albert was in charge of the Arsenal itself, a coming man in the Imperial Civil Service. Now, fifty years later, when Audrey awakes from her pathological swoon, which of the two is it who remains alive? Radical in its conception, uncompromising in its style, Umbrella is Will Self's most extravagant and imaginative exercise in speculative fiction to date.

When Coraline moves with her parents to a new house she is fascinated by the fact that their 'house' is only half of the building! Divided into flats years ago, there is a brick wall behind a door where once there was a corridor. Coraline, being an inquisitive and bored girl, opens the door one day to find that the wall has gone and in its place is a corridor. As she wanders down it little does she know a nightmarish mystery is beginning for her, one that takes her into the arms of alternate parents who are strangely like her own and a family life that seems almost normal — but just isn't! Will Coraline ever find her way back to her real parents? Stephen King has called Neil Gaiman 'a treasure house of story'. In this wonderful novel, which has been likened to both Alice in Wonderland and the Narnia Chronicles, we get to see Neil at his storytelling best.

On 8 September 1941, eleven short weeks after Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa, his brutal surprise attack on the Soviet Union, Leningrad was surrounded. The siege would not be lifted for two and a half years and during the 872 days of blockade and bombardment as many as two million Soviet lives would be lost. Had the city fallen, the history of the Second World War — and of the twentieth century — would have been very different. Leningrad is a gripping narrative history interwoven with personal stories — immediate accounts of daily siege life drawn from diarists and memoirists on both sides. These twentieth-century European civilians living through unbearable hardship reveal the terrible details of life in the blockaded city: the all-consuming and daily search for food; crawling up ice-rounded steps on hands and knees, hauling a bucket of water; a woman who has just buried her father noticing how the cemetery guards have used a frozen corpse with outstretched arm and cigarette between its teeth as a signpost to a mass grave; another using a dried pea to make a rattle for her evacuated grandson's first birthday, and putting it away in a drawer when she hears, six months later, that he has died of meningitis. In Leningrad, Anna Reid answers many of the previously unanswered questions about the siege. How good a job did Leningrad's leadership do — would many lives have been saved if it had been better organised? How much was Stalin's and Moscow's wariness of western-leaning Leningrad (formerly the Tsars' capital, St Petersburg) a contributing factor? How close did Leningrad come to falling into German hands? And, above all, how did those who lived through it survive?

No one writes about food or cooking quite like Anthony Bourdain. In his books Kitchen Confidential and A Cook's Tour, Bourdain captivated readers all over the world with his gritty, action-packed tales of the kitchen. Now he brings his inimitable style and energy to Anthony Bourdain's Les Halles Cookbook. It features over a hundred mouth watering recipes from lobster bisque to cassoulet, and from boeuf bourguignon to creme brulee, all from Anthony's own restaurant, the Brasserie Les Halles in New York. Also including Anthony's words of wisdom and general principles, this is guaranteed to be as much a good read as a guide to cooking up a storm in the kitchen.

Kirpal Singh is travelling on the slow train to Kashmir. As India passes by the window in a stream of tiny lights, glistening fields and huddled, noisy towns, he reflects on his destination, which is also his past: a military camp to which he has not returned for fourteen years... Kirpal, Kip to his friends, is timorous and barely twenty when he arrives for the first time at General Kumar's camp, nestled in the shadow of the mighty Siachen Glacier that claimed his father's life. He is placed under the supervision of Chef Kishen, a fiery, anarchic mentor with long earlobes and a caustic tongue, who guides Kip towards the heady spheres of food and women. The smell of a woman is a thousand times better than cooking the most sumptuous dinner, kid, he muses, over an evening beer. Kip is embarrassed — he has never slept with a woman, though a loose-limbed nurse in the local hospital has caught his eye. In Srinagar, Kashmir, a contradictory place of erratic violence, extremes of temperature and high-altitude privilege, Kip learns to prepare indulgent Kashmiri dishes such as Mughlai mutton and slow-cooked Nahari, as well as delicacies from Florence, Madrid, Athens and Tokyo. Months pass and, though he is Sikh, Kip feels secure in his allegiance to India, the right side of this interminable conflict. Then, one muggy day, a Pakistani terrorist with long, flowing hair is swept up on the banks of the river, and changes everything. Mesmeric, mournful and intensely lyrical, Chef is a brave and compassionate debut about hope, love and memory, set against the devastatingly beautiful, war-scarred backdrop of occupied Kashmir.

England, 31st August 1939: the world is on the brink of war. As Hitler prepares to invade Poland, thousands of children are evacuated from London to escape the impending Blitz. Torn from her mother, eight-year-old Anna Sands is relocated with other children to a large Yorkshire estate which has been opened up to evacuees by Thomas and Elizabeth Ashton, an enigmatic childless couple. Soon Anna gets drawn into their unravelling relationship, seeing things that are not meant for her eyes — and finding herself part-witness and part-accomplice to a love affair, with unforeseen consequences.

A feral boy is captured and civilised in the Languedoc region. A young woman is hired to look after a cloned dog that cost its owners $250,000. A widower in a self-satisfied suburb engulfs his loneliness in a sea of rats. A weary city GP is baffled by a Mexican boy, the son of a taco-seller, who can feel no pain. A junior film editor invents the death of his own daughter because he can't face going in to work. A vindictive teenager with a gasoline fixation runs into trouble with his Japanese neighbour. Two washed-up crooners in 1950s New York get creative while recording a schmaltzy Christmas special. In this beguiling new collection of stories, T. C. Boyle, one of the world's greatest storytellers, explores the improbable, the tragic, the allegorical and the altogether ordinary.