To celebrate Peter's birthday, Frederick Warne is publishing new editions of all 23 of Potter's original tales, which take the very first printings of Potter's works as their guide. The aim of these editions is to be as close as possible to Beatrix Potter's intentions while benefiting from modern printing and design techniques. The colors and details of the watercolors in the volumes are reproduced more accurately than ever before, and it has now been possible to disguise damage that has affected the artwork over the years. Most notably, The Tale of Peter Rabbit restores six of Potter's original illustrations. Four were sacrificed in 1903 to make space for illustrated endpapers, and two have never been used before. Of course, Beatrix Potter created many memorable children's characters, including Benjamin Bunny, Tom Kitten, Jemima Puddle-duck and Jeremy Fisher. But whatever the tale, both children and adults alike can be delighted by the artistry in Potter's illustrations, while they also enjoy a very good read. Because they have always been completely true to a child's experience, Potter's 23 books continue to endure.

From the moment Karen Blixen arrived in Kenya in 1914 to manage a coffee plantation, her heart belonged to Africa. Drawn to the intense colours and ravishing landscapes, Karen Blixen spent her happiest years on the farm and her experiences and friendships with the people around her are vividly recalled in these memoirs. Out of Africa is the story of a remarkable and unconventional woman and of a way of life that has vanished for ever.

Sabotage, conspiracy and piracy above and below the waves finds Dirk Pitt plunged into his most dangerous adventure yet. When the luxury cruise liner Emerald Dolphin — powered by a revolutionary new propulsion system — becomes a raging inferno and sinks mysteriously it is lucky that NUMA special projects director Dirk Pitt is on hand to rescue the passengers and investigate the tragedy. Sifting through the undersea wreckage for signs of foul play, Pitt is unaware of powerful, dark forces playing their hand against him. Forced to fight for his life — and those of friends and colleagues — against ever-more ruthless enemies from a shadowy organization, Pitt finds himself caught between the secrets of the past and the intrigues of the future. A future that will hold the world to ransom...

President Jack Ryan faces a world crisis unlike any he has ever known. A high-level assassination attempt in Russia has the newly elected Ryan sending his most trusted eyes and ears-including antiterrorism specialist John Clark-to Moscow, for he fears the worst is yet to come. And he's right.

Stephen King cranks up the suspense in a different kind of bedtime story. A game of seduction between a husband and wife goes horribly awry when the husband suddenly dies. But the wife's nightmare has just begun.

«On the first day of May, 100 teenage boys meet for an event known throughout the country as «The Long Walk.» If you break the rules, you get three warnings. If you exceed your limit, what happens is absolutely terrifying. Reissue.»

Brought up in the household of a powerful Baron, Candide is an open-minded young man, whose tutor, Pangloss, has instilled in him the belief that 'all is for the best'. But when his love for the Baron's rosy-cheeked daughter is discovered, Candide is cast out to make his own way in the world. And so he and his various companions begin a breathless tour of Europe, South America and Asia, as an outrageous series of disasters befall them — earthquakes, syphilis, a brush with the Inquisition, murder — sorely testing the young hero's optimism.

«The stories collected here, including «The Alien Corn», «Flotsam and Jetsam», and «The Vessel of Wrath», reconfirm Maugham's stature as one of the masters of the short story.»

These thirty stories — most set in the colonies at a time when the Empire was still assured, in a world in which men and women were caught between their own essentially European values and the richness and ambiguity of their unfamiliar surroundings — show a master of the genre at the peak of his power.

«George Orwell's first published work, «Down and Out in Paris and London», is a vivid, sensitive account of the time he lived as one of the poor in the late twenties. In a bug-infested hotel, surviving only between the pawnbroker and a little teaching and writing, Orwell shocked the middle-class establishment with his observation of the misery, the hopelessness and the despair of the poor of a previously unexplored Paris and London.»

For Gertrude Stein and her companion Alice B. Toklas, life in Paris was based upon the rue de Fleurus and the Saturday evenings and ‘it was like a kaleidoscope slowly turning’. Picasso was there with ‘his high whinnying spanish giggle’, as were Cezanne and Matisse, Hemingway and Fitzgerald. As Toklas put it – ‘The geniuses came and talked to Gertrude Stein and the wives sat with me’. A light-hearted entertainment, this is in fact Gertrude Stein’s own autobiography and a roll-call of all the extraordinary painters and writers she met between 1903 and 1932. Audacious, sardonic and characteristically self-confident, this is a definitive account by the American in Paris.

In 1960, when he was almost 60 years old, John Steinbeck set out to rediscover the United States, feeling he might have lost touch with its sights sounds and the essence of its people. This book decribes his travels in a pick-up truck across nearly 40 states with his dog Charlie, a French poodle.

Ethan Allen Hawley has lost the acquisitive spirit of his wealthy forebears. Scarred by failure, Ethan works as a grocery store clerk. But his wife is restless, his teenage children troubled and hungry for material comforts. Then a series of unusual events reignites Ethan's ambition.

«When Georgia Abbot`s fiance cheats on her she leaves her humdrum life in London for a job at «Glow» magazine in Sydney, Australia. At first things seem promising, as she`s swept up in a whirl of parties, dancing and debauchery. But Australian men are — oh dear — starting to look all too familiar.»

Commissioned by the Left Book club in 1936, George Orwell set out to report on working class life in the bleak industrial heartlands of Yorkshire and Lancashire. The experience profoundly changed him, and in Wigan Pier he unleased a brilliant and bitter polemic that has not lost its force with the passage of time. The first edition of The Road to Wigan Pier' included 32 plates. These illustrations of slum conditions, which give added resonance to Orwell's indictment, are restored in this new edition.

The triffids are a monstrous species of stinging plant; they walk, they talk, they dominate the world. The narrator of this novel wakes up in hospital to find that, by missing the end of the world, he has survived to witness a new world. But the new world that awaits him is fantastic and horrific.