Anna packs her bags one day without telling anyone where and why she is going — just that she'll be back soon. Her thoughts, as she boards a plane, is that this journey will give her time to think about her life — as a woman hitting forty, a journalist and a single mother. She has no premonition that she will become a statistic in a missing person file. Left at home is Anna's beloved six year old daughter Lily, her gay friend Paul who is surrogate father to Lily, and her eccentric best friend Estella. When Anna doesn't return, they make uneasy excuses, until, as time passes, the mind-numbing possibility that Anna might not be coming back, becomes terrifyingly real. And while those closest to her battle with their imaginations, Anna is on a dark journey — in one scenario Anna is on a ravishing, sexual adventure, on the other, much darker voyage, she is the victim of a stranger's dangerous sexual fantasy. In a masterpiece of emotionally intelligent and nerve-wracking suspense, Sarah Dunant takes us to the very edge.

As D. M. Thomas states in his masterly biography of the Nobel Prize-winning author Alexander Solzhenitsyn, 'He helped to bring down the greatest tyranny the world has seen, besides educating the West as to its full horror. No other writer in our century has had such an influence on our history.' The author of The First Circle, Cancer Ward and The Gulag Archipelago can truly be said to have altered Russia and thus the pattern of our times. This is as much a disturbing, haunting history of the twentieth century as it is a biography of a great novelist. Given the extraordinary language of Thomas and his novelistic gifts which he uses to render his story, this work will come to be regarded as one of the great biographies of recent decades. Particularly impressive is the vast cooperation of Solzhenitsyn's first wife, Natalya, who has provided an astonishing portrait of her ex-husband's life in Russia before his departure in 1974 from the then Soviet Union. The photographs which will be used for the book come from her own collection as well.

The bestselling author of THE STRANGER BESIDE ME, DEAD BY SUNSET and BITTER HARVEST, Ann Rule is an acknowledged expert on violent crimes. In this fifth volume of fascinating true cases, she explores the circumstances that has driven ordinary people to cross society's boundaries and commit the desperate act of murder. In THE END OF THE DREAM, Ann Rule chillingly profiles the workings of a criminal mind, and confirms she is the world's number-one writer of true crime.

A teenage girl finds unexpected sexual freedom on a trip to Amsterdam. A woman trapped at a dinner party comes up against an ugly obsession. The stories in FREE LOVE are about desire, memory, sexual ambiguity and the imagination. In the harsh light of dislocation, the people in them still find connections, words blowing in the street, love in unexpected places. Ali Smith examine show things come together and how they break apart. She disconcerts and affirms with the lightest touch, to make us love and live differently.

An assignment brings Vincent — permanent student and budding young writer — into the world of Sebastian Wells and the Prometheus League. Under the guise of a Victorian gaming society it operates extremist and covert activities. Threatening exposure, Vincent is thrown into a game of life or death.

Mightiest of ocean liners, the Titanic lies two-and-a-half miles down in the North Atlantic. And in her hold — perhaps the only amount anywhere of an incredibly rare substance that could make the free world invulnerable to foreign attack forever! The Americans want it. So do the Russians. And the sea never gives up its secrets without a struggle. Which makes the task facing ace maritime troubleshooter Dirk Pitt one of the most stupendous tests of human courage and ingenuity ever... RAISE THE TITANIC! is the ultimate sea adventure thriller, a masterpiece of breathtaking action and suspense that, once started, will grip the reader until the last page has been turned.

A little knowledge can be a very dangerous thing. Innocent in the ways of the world, an ingenue when it comes to pop and fashion, the Elect of God of a small but committed Stirlingshire religious cult: Isis Whit is no ordinary teenager. When her cousin Morag — Guest of Honour at the Luskentyrian's four — yearly Festival of Love — disappears after renouncing her faith, Isis is marked out to venture among the Unsaved and bring the apostate back into the fold. But the road to Babylondon (as Sister Angela puts it) is a treacherous one, particularly when Isis discovers that Morag appears to have embraced the ways of the Unsaved with spectacular abandon. Truth and falsehood; kinship and betrayal; 'herbal' cigarettes and compact discs — Whit is an exploration of the techno-ridden barrenness of modern Britain from a unique perspective.

Over half a century after her movie debut at the age of ten, Elizabeth Taylor is the only star from Hollywood's Golden Age who continues to hit the headlines. After nine marriages, numerous affairs, 30 operations, two Academy Awards and frequent sojourns in drug and alcohol rehabilitation clinics, she has now reinvented herself as businesswoman, AIDS campaigner and diamond collector, while extending her career into television and the theatre. But, until now, this most public of lives has always maintained a certain element of mystery. The sheer volume of coverage she has attracted over the years has inevitably led to a degree of inconsistency, and Taylor herself as been reticent about many aspects of her life. For years Elizabeth Taylor's life fluctuated between disaster and triumph, and — not at all conincidentally — along the way she became one of America's finest screen actresses. Outspoken, lusty, mercurial, she is quicksilver incarnate; generous and compassionate, also totally self-absorbed and egocentric. This biography is based on a great cache of material, including studio diaries, letters and personal journals.

Some things never change. New York City, 1896. Hypocrisy in high places is rife, police corruption commonplace, and a brutal killer is terrorising young male prostitutes. Unfortunately for Police Commissioner Theodore Roosevelt, the psychological profiling of murderers is a practice still in its infancy, struggling to make headway against the prejudices of those who prefer the mentally ill — and the 'alienists' who treat them — to be out of sight as well as out of mind. But as the body count rises, Roosevelt swallows his doubts and turns to the eminent alienist Dr Laszlo Kreizler to put a stop to the bloody murders — giving Kreizler a chance to take him further into the dark heart of criminality, and one step closer to death.

Sharrow was once the leader of a personality-attuned combat team in one of the sporadic litt commercial wars in the civilisation based around the planet Golter. Now she is hunted by the Huhsz, a religious cult which believes that she is the last obstacle before the faith’s apotheosis, and her only hope of escape is to find the last of the apocalyptically powerful Lazy Guns before the Huhsz find her.

Count Sessine is about to die for the very last time ... Chief Scientist Gadfium is about to receive the mysterious message she has been waiting for from the Plain of Sliding Stones ... And Bascule the Teller, in search of an ant, is about to enter the chaos of the crypt ... And everything is about to change ... For this is the time of the encroachment and, although the dimming sun still shines on the vast, towering walls of Serehfa Fastness, the end is close at hand. The King knows it, his closest advisers know it, yet sill they prosecute the war against the clan Engineers with increasing savagery. The crypt knows it too; so an emissary has been sent, an emissary who holds the key to all their futures.

«Set in 12th century Shrewsbury, this story features the further adventures of Brother Cadfael, as he investigates another mystery. Other titles featuring this character include «The Summer of the Danes», «Monk's Hood» and «The Sanctuary Sparrow».»

«A fiction debut from the author of «The Weight of Water» and «The Pilot's Wife».»

«A collection of short fiction by the author of «The Wasp Factory» and «Against a Dark Background». The title story is a novella continuing the Culture sequence but set on Earth in 1977. The other stories range from science fiction to horror, and dark-coated fantasy to morality tale.»

The man known as Cheradenine Zakalwe was one of Special Circumstances' foremost agents, changing the destiny of planets to suit the Culture through intrigue, dirty tricks or military action. The woman known as Diziet Sma had plucked him from obscurity and pushed him towards his present eminence, but despite all their dealings she did not know him as well as she thought. The drone known as Skaffen-Amtiskaw knew both of these people. It had once saved the woman’s life by massacring her attackers in a particularly bloody manner. It believed the man to be a burnt-out case. But not even its machine intelligence could see the horrors in his past.

The Culture — a human/machine symbiotic society — has thrown up many great Game Players, and one of the greatest is Gurgeh. Jernau Morat Gurgeh. The Player of Games. Master of every board, computer and strategy. Bored with success, Gurgeh travels to the Empire of Azad, cruel and incredibly wealthy, to try their fabulous game ... a game so complex, so like life itself, that the winner becomes emperor. Mocked, blackmailed, almost murdered, Gurgeh accepts the game, and with it the challenge of his life — and very possibly his death.

The war raged across the galaxy. Billions had died, billions more were doomed. Moons, planets, the very starsThe war raged across the galaxy. Billions had died, billions more were doomed. Moons, planets, the very stars themselves, faced destruction, cold-blooded, brutal, and worse, random. The Idirans fought for their Faith; the Culture for its moral right to exist. Principles were at stake. There could be no surrender. Within the cosmic conflict, an individual crusade. Deep within a fabled labyrinth on a barren world, a Planet of the Dead proscribed to mortals, lay a fugitive Mind. Both the Culture and the Idirans sought it. It was the fate of Horza, the Changer, and his motley crew of unpredictable mercenaries, human and machine, actually to find it, and with it their own destruction. Consider Phlebas — a space opera of stunning power and awesome imagination.

Marian is determined to be ordinary. She lays her head gently on the shoulder of her serious fiancee and quietly awaits marriage. But she didn't count on an inner rebellion that would rock her stable routine, and her digestion. Marriage a la mode, Marian discovers, is something she literally can't stomach... The Edible Woman is a funny, engaging novel about emotional cannibalism, men and women, and desire to be consumed.

Two couples. Two love stories. One epic tale. Ninety-one-year-old Ira Levinson is in trouble. Struggling to stay conscious after a car crash, with his mind fading, an image of his adored — and long-dead — wife Ruth appears. Urging him to hang on, she lovingly recounts the joys and sorrows of their life together — how they met, the dark days of WWII and its unrelenting effect on their families. A few miles away, college student Sophia Danko's life is about to change. Recovering from a break-up, she meets the young, rugged Luke and is thrown into a world far removed from her privileged school life. Sophia sees a new and tantalising future for herself, but Luke is keeping a secret that could destroy it all. Ira and Ruth. Sophia and Luke. Two couples, separated by years and experience, whose lives are about to converge in the most unexpected — and shocking — of ways. The new love story from the multi-million-copy bestselling author of The Notebook, The Lucky One and The Best of Me. Nicholas Sparks is one of the world's most beloved authors.