When Dr. Primrose loses his fortune in a disastrous investment, his idyllic life in the country is shattered and he is forced to move with his wife and six children to an impoverished living on the estate of Squire Thornhill. Taking to the road in pursuit of his daughter, who has been seduced by the rakish Squire, the beleaguered Primrose becomes embroiled in a series of misadventures — encountering his long-lost son in a traveling theater company and even spending time in a debtor's prison. Yet Primrose, though hampered by his unworldliness and pride, is sustained by his unwavering religious faith. In The Vicar of Wakefield, Goldsmith gently mocks many of the literary conventions of his day — from pastoral and romance to the picaresque — infusing his story of a hapless clergyman with warm humor and amiable social satire.

Anne Farquharson is a Highland girl — tempestuous, bold, determined to be her own woman. Yet the clan Farquharson is threatened. The Highlands suffer at the domineering hand of English King George, while there are rumours that Bonnie Prince Charlie, exiled to France, is raising an army in a bid for the throne. When Anne marries a clan chief and creates a shaky alliance, she is doing more than taking his bed. Soon she is drawn into the heart of a brutal and bloody conflict, and as the Jacobite rebellion escalates, she and her husband find themselves on opposite sides of the battlefield. White Rose Rebel is inspired by the true story of a Highland heroine who risked everything for her country and its rightful king.

For seventeen years, the Cambridgeshire hamlet of Jude's Ferry has lain abandoned, requisitioned by the Government for military training. In its thousand-year-old history, it had been famous for one thing — never having recorded a single crime. But when local reporter Philip Dryden joins the Territorial Army on exercise in the empty village, its spotless history is literally blown apart. For the TA's shells reveal a hidden cellar beneath the old pub. And inside the cellar hangs a skeleton, a noose around its neck... Two days later, a man is pulled from the reeds in the river near Ely — he has no idea who he is or how he got there. But, he knows the words 'Jude's Ferry' are important, and he knows he is afraid...

1918, the closing months of the war. Army psychiatrist William Rivers is increasingly concerned for the men who have been in his care — particularly Billy Prior, who is about to return to combat in France with young poet Wilfred Owen. As Rivers tries to make sense of what, if anything, he has done to help these injured men, Prior and Owen await the final battles in a war that has decimated a generation. The Ghost Road is the Booker Prize winning account of the devastating final months of the First World War. This is the third book in the Regeneration trilogy.

There are things you should know about blackmail... At 38, Simone has responsibilities: she's a district judge with two small boys, and a husband on the verge of bankruptcy and breakdown. When she receives a letter post-marked New York she has no idea that opening it will threaten all she has worked for and call into question her judgement. For the photographs contained in the letter remind her of things she regrets from twenty years ago, and a man she'd decided to forget. But blackmail, like the heart, never forgets...

Recently named the world's chief clairvoyant, Cassandra Palmer still has a thorn in her side. As long as Cassie and a certain master vampire — the sizzling-hot Mircea — are magically bound to each other, her life will never be her own. The spell that binds them can only be broken with an incantation found in the Codex Merlini, an ancient grimoire. The Codex's location has been lost in the present day, so Cassie will have to seek it out in the only place it can still be found — the past. But Cassie soon realizes the Codex has been lost for a reason. The book is rumored to contain dangerous spells, and retrieving it may help Cassie to deal with Mircea, but it could also endanger the world.

Between 1920 and 1934, Gerald Brenan lived in the remote Spanish village of Yegen and South of Granada depicts his time there, vividly evoking the essence of his rural surroundings and the Spanish way of life before the Civil War. Here he portrays the landscapes, festivals and folk-lore of the Sierra Nevada, the rivalries, romances and courtship rituals, village customs, superstitions and characters. Fascinating details emerge, from cheap brothels to archaeological remains, along with visits from Brenan's friends from the Bloomsbury group — Lytton Strachey and Virginia Woolf among them. Knowledgeable, elegant and sympathetic, this is a rich account of Spain's vanished past.

No, Groucho is not my real name, I'm just breaking it in for a friend. Presenting the greatest and most hilarious examples of Groucho, one of the most influential and well-loved figures in the long and glittering history of comedy. From early scripts to complete screenplays, from magazine funnies to fascinating personal correspondence, via books, greedy banks, even greedier lawyers and the coming of television, Kanfer's collection captures the essence of Groucho's inimitable comic genius. I never forget a face, but in your case I'll make an exception.

A man, dispirited by ageing, endeavours to steal a younger man's face; a doctor yearns for a virus that might eliminate his discomfort by turning everyone else into doubles of himself; a Colonel lays out the precepts of the life of DE (Do Easy); conspirators posthumously succeed in blowing up a train full of nerve gas; a mandrill known as the Purple Better One runs for the presidency with brutal results; and the world drifts towards apocalypses of violence, climate and plague. The hallucinatory landscape of William Burroughs' compellingly bizarre, fragmented novel is constantly shifting, something sinister always just beneath the surface.

It is 1718 and, in a small parish near Newcastle, Eliza Tally, a headstrong girl of 15, embarks on a reckless love affair that will prove her undoing. When her lover casts her off, denying their union, she is forced to travel to London, a city that attracts and alarms her in equal measure. There she takes up a position in the house of an apothecary, Grayson Black, whom she trusts to salvage what remains of her reputation. From the highly-acclaimed author of The Great Stink comes a gloriously-written tale of consuming passions and obsessions. Set against the clamour and roar of eighteenth-century London, The Nature of Monsters brings vividly to life a world where the line separating science and madness is dangerously blurred, and where a single life counts for little in the relentless pursuit of progress.

Innocence will be sacrificed... On the floor of a church in northern Sweden, the body of a man lies ritually mutilated and defiled — and in the night sky, the aurora borealis dances as the snow begins to fall. Rebecka Martinsson is heading home to Kiruna, the small town she'd left in disgrace years before. A Stockholm tax lawyer, Rebecka has a good reason to return: her friend Sanna, whose brother has been horrifically murdered in the church of the cult he helped create. Beautiful and fragile, Sanna needs someone like Rebecka to remove the shadow of guilt that is engulfing her, to forestall an ambitious prosecutor, and to confront the rumours circulating in a closed and frightened community. But to help her friend, and to find the real killer of a man she once adored and is now not sure she ever knew, Rebecka must relive the darkness she left behind in Kiruna, delve into a sordid conspiracy of deceit, and confront a killer whose motives are dark and impossible to guess...

The Orpheus Deception opens with a brutal assassination attempt on the rainy streets of Venice that sets CIA agent Micah Dalton on a collision course with a vengeful Serbian warlord. Picking up where The Echelon Vendetta left off — Dalton is still on the run from the CIA, finding himself ever more entangled in a web of conspiracies. He tries to uncover the links between a savage act of piracy in the South China Sea, the disappearance of a CIA agent, and an elusive ship known only as Orpheus. As he desperately seeks to unlock the shattering secret, Dalton is once again caught up in an international chase that takes him from Italy to Singapore and finally back to his homeland and ever-greater danger to himself...

«As dawn breaks over London, the body of a young man is discovered in a windswept Notting Hill churchyard. The killer has left Detective Chief Inspector Grant Foster and his team a grisly, cryptic clue... However, it's not until the clue is handed to Nigel Barnes, a specialist in compiling family trees, that the full message becomes spine-chillingly clear. For, it leads Barnes back more than one hundred years — to the victim of a demented Victorian serial killer... When a second body is discovered Foster needs Barnes's skills more than ever. Because the murderer's clues appear to run along the tangled bloodlines that lie between 1879 and now. And if Barnes is right about his blood-history, the killing spree has only just begun... From the author of the bestselling «Who Do You Think You Are?» comes a haunting crime novel of blood-stained family histories and gruesome secrets...»

When Chadwick Newsome, a young American favoured with fortune and independence, becomes entangled in a liaison dangereux with a Parisian temptress, his overbearing mother deploys her future husband, the elderly, amiable Strether, as an ambassador to engineer his safe return. But seduced by the ambient charms of Paris and the bewitching comtesse de Vionnet, Strether soon deserts to Chadwick's side, initiating a sparkling tale of mistaken intentions, comic accident and false allegiances which culminates in the deployment of another, less fallible ambassador — the cold, glittering, ruthless Sarah Pocock.

A web of laws had been spun to keep us apart. So writes rising young Ray, public relations man for the Organisation, who is falling in love against all the taboos — with Victor, the country's most popular deejay, on Radio Bantu. The setting is Johannesburg in the Sixties, where such a high profile 'dirty case' can only play into the hands of the powers that be. First published pseudonymously in 1972, Michael Power's frank, masterly exposure of the police-state brutality of that period may now appear without restriction both at home and abroad.

Born in Austria in 1756, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart composed his first piece of music, a minuet, when he was just five years old Soon after, he was performing for kings and emperors. Although he died at the young age of thirty-five, Mozart left a legacy of more than 600 works. This fascinating biography charts the musician's extraordinary career and personal life while painting a vivid cultural history of eighteenth-century Europe. Black-and-white illustrations on every spread explore such topics as the history of opera and the evolution of musical instruments. There is also a timeline and a bibliography. Illustrated by Carrie Robbins. Cover illustration by Nancy Harrison.

Michael Moore returns to give you the low-down on the ins and outs of voting, answering all those pressing questions you've always wondered about, such as, Why should I vote? It only encourages them. Can my vote be bought (and what's the starting price)? The candidates seem to think I'm stupid. Should I just go along to keep them happy? It seems like just anyone can run for office. Is that a good idea? For anyone who thought voting was just a load of ballots, this is the book you need to read before marking your X. Enfranchisement has never been so exciting!

The naked body of a young woman is found hanging from a tree on a London roadside. Scrawled across her back, the words Dirty Girl. Detective Sergeant Stella Mooney and the AMIP 5 squad are faced with a murder as baffling as it is chilling. With no means to identify the victim and no apparent motive, the case is blocked, until... A man is found on a bench by the river, his throat cut back to the vertebrae. And, as before, the killer has left a trademark comment: Filthy Coward. Stella and her team can see there's a connection: but what? One victim is a young girl — maybe one of the hookers who work the Strip; the other a researcher for a prominent and controversial MP. More evidence is needed. And soon enough, it comes: another death; another message...

Francis Saxover and Diana Brackley, two scientists investigating a rare lichen, discover it has a remarkable property: it retards the aging process. Francis, realising the implications for the world of an ever-youthful, wealthy elite, wants to keep it secret, but Diana sees an opportunity to overturn the male status quo by using the lichen to inspire a feminist revolution. As each scientist wrestles with the implications and practicalities of exploiting the discovery, the world comes ever closer to learning the truth. Trouble With Lichen is a scintillating story of the power wielded by science in our lives and asks how much trust should we place in those we appoint to be its guardians?

In the sleepy English village of Midwich, a mysterious silver object appears and all the inhabitants fall unconscious. A day later the object is gone and everyone awakens unharmed — except that all the women in the village are discovered to be pregnant. The resultant children of Midwich do not belong to their parents: all are blonde, all are golden eyed. They grow up too fast and their minds exhibit frightening abilities that give them control over others and brings them into conflict with the villagers just as a chilling realisation dawns on the world outside. The Midwich Cuckoos is the classic tale of aliens in our midst, exploring how we respond when confronted by those who are innately superior to us in every conceivable way.