The Separation, Dinah Jefferies' stunning debut novel, is the heartbreaking tale of a family fractured by lies and one mother's love reaching across the distance of years and continents. A country at war with itself, a family divided and betrayed, a bond that can never be broken... Malaya, 1955. Lydia Cartwright returns from visiting a sick friend to an empty house. The servants are gone. The phone is dead. Where is her husband Alec? Her young daughters, Emma and Fleur? Fearful and desperate, she contacts the British District Officer and learns that Alec has been posted up country. But why didn't he wait? Why did he leave no message? Lydia's search takes her on a hazardous journey through war-torn jungle. Forced to turn to Jack Harding, a man she'd vowed to leave in her past, she sacrifices everything to be reunited with her family. And while carrying her own secrets, Lydia will soon face a devastating betrayal which may be more than she can bear... Dinah Jefferies was born in Malaya in 1948 and moved to England at the age of nine. She has worked in education, once lived in a 'rock 'n roll' commune and, more recently, been an exhibiting artist. She spends her days writing, with time off to make tiaras and dinosaurs with her grandchildren. The Separation is her first book.

Let David Lynn Golemon thrill you with Primeval from the magnificent Event Group series. A race to find the treasure of the last czar has uncovered an ancient evil. When Czar Nicholas II was executed with his family it brought Russia's Romanov dynasty to an end. But some believed that the Czar's children, Alexei and Anastasia, survived the slaughter and escaped with the royal treasury. One hundred years later, a battered old journal turns up in a second-hand bookshop that appears to date back to the night of the execution. Inside are clues, not only to the fate of the Czar's children, but also to the location of the Romanov's treasure. Major Jack Collins of the Event Group, a top secret agency tasked dedicated to revealing the truth about history's greatest myths and legends, follows the lead deep into Russia's vast, unexplored wilderness where he and his team are soon confronted by a terrifying, even more incredible secret... Praise for David Lynn Golemon: Sure to satisfy fans of The X-Files. (Publishers Weekly). Imagine mixing in a blender Tom Clancy with the movie Predator and the X-Files... non-stop action. (Library Journal). David Lynn Golemon grew up in Chino, California and worked for the US military in a classified role. He now lives and writes in Long Island, New York. His Event Group Series includes the titles Event, Legend, Ancient, Leviathan and Primeval.

What kind of world would you like to inhabit? Here, Keri Smith begins with a list. Writing down everything the reader is drawn to, from things they love or collect to things that fascinate and excite, including objects, colours, sounds, textures, memories, places and people, the list serves as the building block for the creation of a new world. This world is based entirely on who the reader is as an individual, and as such is completely unique. Prompted to think about landscape, place names, maps, currency and more Keri Smith encourages everyone to push their imaginations to the limit.

Passionate, compassionate, vitally inventive and scrupulously playful, Ali Smith's novels are like nothing else. How to be Bothis a novel all about art's versatility. Borrowing from painting's fresco technique to make an original literary double-take, it's a fast-moving genre-bending conversation between forms, times, truths and fictions. There's a renaissance artist of the 1460s. There's the child of a child of the 1960s.Two tales of love and injustice twist into a singular yarn where time gets timeless, structural gets playful, knowing gets mysterious, fictional gets real — and all life's givens get given a second chance.Please Note: This book has a dual structure and can be read in two ways. There are two stories in the book and they can be read in either order.

The final book in the #1 New York Times bestselling series that redefined the spy novel for young readers — Alex Rider! Alex Rider's life changed forever with the silent pull of a trigger. Every story has a beginning. For teen secret agent Alex Rider, that beginning occurred prior to his first case for MI6, known by the code name Stormbreaker. By the time Stormbreaker forever changed Alex's life, his uncle had been murdered by the assassin Yassen Gregorovich, leaving Alex orphaned and craving revenge. Yet when Yassen had a clear shot to take out Alex after he foiled the Stormbreaker plot, he let Alex live. Why? This is Yassen's story. A journey down the darker path of espionage. Like a James Bond for young readers, international #1 bestseller Anthony Horowitz delivers a blockbuster thrill ride in this, his final Alex Rider novel.

#1 New York Times bestselling author Elizabeth George delivers a new masterpiece of suspense in her Inspector Lynley series: a gripping child-in-danger story that tests Detective Sergeant Barbara Havers as never before. Barbara is at a loss: Hadiyyah, the daughter of her friend Taymullah Azhar, has been taken by her mother, and Barbara can’t really help. Azhar has no legal claim. Just when Azhar is beginning to accept his soul-crushing loss, he gets more shocking news: Hadiyyah has been kidnapped from an Italian marketplace. As both Barbara and her partner, Inspector Thomas Lynley, soon discover, the case is far more complex than a typical kidnapping, revealing secrets that could have far-reaching effects outside of the investigation. With both her job and the life of a little girl on the line, Barbara must decide what matters most and how far she’s willing to go to protect it.

More gripping than The Hunger Games, The Vault by Emily McKay is the third in this series following on from The Farm and The Lair. In a world where vampires rule and teenaged humans are quarantined as a food source, there is only one choice: resist or die. But fighting the Ticks comes at a terrible cost to twin sisters Mel and Lily and their best friend Carter — with Lily exposed to the Tick virus and lying in a coma, it's up to Mel and Carter to search for the cure — but time isn't on their side. With every passing heartbeat, Mel is becoming more and more purely vampire. Now their only choice is to split up in a race to save Lily — and to save humanity.

Peter Rabbit's Christmas Collection is full of festive fun. A treasure trove of Christmas delights, this collection includes some of Beatrix Potter's best-known works, such as The Tale of Peter Rabbit and The Tale of Benjamin Bunny. Hidden among these favourites are some of her previously-unpublished Christmas-card illustrations. This beautiful treasury has something for everyone. Beatrix Potter is regarded as one of the world's best-loved children's authors of all time. From her first book, The Tale of Peter Rabbit, published by Frederick Warne in 1902, she went on to create a series of stories based around animal characters including Mrs. Tiggy-winkle, Benjamin Bunny, Jemima Puddle-duck, Mr. Jeremy Fisher and Tom Kitten. Her humorous, lively tales and beautiful illustrations have become a natural part of childhood. Look out for The Christmas Tale of Peter Rabbit by Emma Thompson, too!

The major new biography that restores a sense of surprise, even wonder, to the way we think about Stalin, the twentieth century, revolution, and indeed the art of history itself. The product of a decade of scrupulous and intrepid research, Stalin contains a host of astonishing revelations. Kotkin gives an intimate new view of the Bolshevik regime's inner geography, bringing to the fore materials from Soviet military intelligence and the secret police. He explains how chaos from revolution and civil war became a permanent feature of Soviet administration, even as the regime and Stalin acquired ever more power. The book details Stalin's invention of a fabricated trial and mass executions as early as 1918, the technique he would later impose across the whole country. It places Stalin's momentous decision for collectivization more deeply than ever in the tragic history of imperial Russia. Above all, Kotkin offers a convincing explanation for the Soviet Union's enduring and monstrous power. Volume two will be published in 2016 and volume three in 2018.

The dazzling new novel in the #1 New York Times—bestselling series from the grand master of adventure... It is called zero-point energy, and it really exists — a state of energy contained in all matter everywhere, and thus all but unlimited. Nobody has ever found a way to tap into it, however — until one scientist succeeds. Unfortunately, his intentions are far from noble. The scientist is determined to avenge himself upon those who have scorned and vilified him, and constructs machines that will use the zero-point energy to unleash an apocalypse of earthquakes and cracks in the Earth’s tectonic plates. With disaster drawing closer, Kurt Austin and the NUMA team race to find the machines before they’re activated. For if they fail, the world will literally be torn apart...

When Charles Wallace Murry goes searching through a 'wrinkle in time' for his lost father, he finds himself on an evil planet where all life is enslaved by a huge pulsating brain known as 'It'. How Charles, his sister Meg and friend Calvin find and free his father makes this a very special and exciting mixture of fantasy and science fiction, which all the way through is dominated by the funny and mysterious trio of guardian angels known as Mrs Whatsit, Mrs Who and Mrs Which.

Stella Sweeny is back in Dublin. After living the dream in New York for a year — touring her self-help book, appearing on talk shows all over the USA and living it up in her 10-room duplex on the Upper West Side — she's back to normality with a bang. And she's got writer's block. Stella wants a clean break as she didn't exactly leave New York on a high. Why isshe back in Ireland so soon? Who is it who keeps calling? Stella wants to get back to being the woman she used to be. But can she? And should she?

Gideon calls me his angel, but he's the miracle in my life. My gorgeous, wounded warrior, so determined to slay my demons while refusing to face his own. The vows we'd exchanged should have bound us tighter than blood and flesh. Instead they opened up old wounds, exposed pain and insecurities, and lured bitter enemies out of the shadows. I felt him slipping from my grasp; my greatest fears becoming my reality; my love tested in ways I wasn't sure I was strong enough to bear. At the brightest time in our lives, the darkness of his past encroached and threatened everything we'd worked so hard for. We faced a terrible choice: the familiar safety of the lives we'd had before each other or the fight for a future that suddenly seemed an impossible and hopeless dream...

This is a pacy, compelling and penetrating account — from the great Norman Stone. The best short primer on the war in twenty years. (Andrew Roberts). Norman Stone's gripping book tells the narrative of the Second World War in as brief a compass as possible, making a sometimes familiar story utterly fresh and arresting. As with his highly acclaimed World War One: A Short History, there is a compelling sense of a terrible story unfolding, of a sceptical and humorous intelligence at work, and a wish to convey to an audience who may well have no memory of the conflict just how high the stakes were.

Jonathan Coe's widely acclaimed novel is set in the 1970s against a distant backdrop of strikes, terrorist attacks and growing racial tension. A group of young friends inherit the editorship of their school magazine and begin to put their own distinctive spin onto events in the wider world. A zestful comedy of personal and social upheaval, The Rotters' Club captures a fateful moment in British politics — the collapse of 'Old Labour' — and imagines its impact on the topsy-turvy world of the bemused teenager: a world in which a lost pair of swimming trunks can be just as devastating as an IRA bomb.

On Millennium night, with Blair presiding over a superficially cool, sexed-up new version of the country, Benjamin Trotter finds himself watching the celebrations on his parents' TV. Watching, in fact, his younger brother, Paul, now a bright young New Labour MP who has bought wholeheartedly into the Blairite dream. Neither of them can know that their lives are about to implode. Set against the backdrop of a changing Britain and the country's increasingly compromised role in America's 'war against terrorism', the characters struggle to make sense of the perennial problems of love, vocation and family.

Jeremy Paxman's magnificent history of the First World War tells the entire story of the war in one gripping narrative from the point of view of the British people. He writes so well and sympathetically, and chooses his detail so deftly, that if there is one new history of the war that you might actually enjoy from the very large centennial selection this is very likely it. (The Times). We may think we know about it, but what was life really like for the British people during the First World War? The well-known images — the pointing finger of Lord Kitchener; a Tommy buried in the mud of the Western Front; the memorial poppies of remembrance day — all reinforce the idea that it was a pointless waste of life. So why did the British fight it so willingly and how did the country endure it for so long? Using a wealth of first-hand source material, Jeremy Paxman brings vividly to life the day-to-day experience of the British over the entire course of the war, from politicians, newspapermen, campaigners and Generals, to Tommies, factory workers, nurses, wives and children, capturing the whole mood and morale of the nation. It reveals that life and identity in Britain were often dramatically different from our own, and show how both were utterly transformed — not always for the worst — by the enormous upheaval of the war. Rich with personalities, surprises and ironies, this lively narrative history paints a picture of courage and confusion, doubts and dilemmas, and is written with Jeremy Paxman's characteristic flair for storytelling, wry humour and pithy observation. A fine introduction to the part Britain played in the first of the worst two wars in history. The writing is lively and the detail often surprising and memorable. (Guardian). Jeremy Paxman is a renowned broadcaster, award-winning journalist and the bestselling author of seven works of non-fiction, including The English, The Political Animal and Empire.

Catherine Alliott brings us the fabulously funny and wonderfully heart-warming My Husband Next Door. For better or worse... Ella was nineteen and madly in love when she married dashing young artist Sebastian Montclair. But that was a long time ago. Now Ella and the kids live in a ramshackle farmhouse while Sebastian and his paintings inhabit the outhouse next door — a family separated in every way but distance. Is it a marvellously modern relationship — or a disaster waiting to happen? So when charming gardener Ludo arrives on the scene and Sebastian makes a sudden and surprising decision, Ella sees a chance at a fresh start. Yet with two teenagers and her parents on the verge of their own late-life crisis, will Ella be allowed to choose her own path? And how long can she hide from the truth which haunts her broken marriage? Step into Alliott Country with My Husband Next Door. Another huge treat from Catherine Alliott. It's hilarious yet poignant, with wonderful characters, including all the animals! I lapped up every page. (Sophie Kinsella). Captivating and heartwarming. (Closer). Catherine Alliott is the author of twelve bestselling novels including A Rural Affair, One Day in May, The Secret Life of Evie Hamilton, and A Crowded Marriage. She lives with her family in Hertfordshire.

The New York Times bestseller! Sparkling white snowdrifts, beautiful presents wrapped in ribbons, and multicolored lights glittering in the night through the falling snow. A Christmas Eve snowstorm transforms one small town into a romantic haven, the kind you see only in movies. Well, kinda. After all, a cold and wet hike from a stranded train through the middle of nowhere would not normally end with a delicious kiss from a charming stranger. And no one would think that a trip to the Waffle House through four feet of snow would lead to love with an old friend. Or that the way back to true love begins with a painfully early morning shift at Starbucks. Thanks to three of today's bestselling teen authors — John Green, Maureen Johnson, and Lauren Myracle — the magic of the holidays shines on these hilarious and charming interconnected tales of love, romance, and breathtaking kisses.

June and Day arrive in Vegas just as the unthinkable happens: the Elector Primo dies, and his son Anden takes his place. With the Republic edging closer to chaos, the two join a group of Patriot rebels eager to help Day rescue his brother and offer passage to the Colonies. They have only one request—June and Day must assassinate the new Elector. It’s their chance to change the nation, to give voice to a people silenced for too long. But as June realizes this Elector is nothing like his father, she’s haunted by the choice ahead. What if Anden is a new beginning? What if revolution must be more than loss and vengeance, anger and blood—what if the Patriots are wrong? In this highly-anticipated sequel to the New York Times bestseller Legend, Lu delivers a breathtaking thriller with high stakes and cinematic action.