A magnificent reconstruction of Napoleon's life and legend written by a distinguished Oxford scholar.

Welcome to Rome. It is the summer of 1978, and the Krasnansky family, bickering, tired and confused, are supposed to be passing through. Alongside thousands of other Soviet Jewish refugees — among them criminals, dissidents and refuseniks — they await passage to their new homes in the West. But escaping Communism is not so easy, especially when some of the Krasnanskys insist on bringing it with them, and even more so when their sponsor in the USA lets them down and they find that they're no longer passing through at all. On the contrary, they're stuck. Welcome, then, to the waiting room of your life, and to a tragic yet comic tale of reckless brothers and long-suffering sisters, ailing parents and innocent children, of love affairs and criminal liaisons, of a wonderfully troubled family and a perpetually wandering people, and their epic search for a home: somewhere, anywhere — or Canada, as it turns out.

Cassia has always trusted the Society to make the right choices for her: what to read, what to watch, what to believe. So when Xander's face appears on-screen at her Matching ceremony, Cassia knows he is her ideal mate... until she sees Ky Markham's face flash for an instant before the screen fades to black. The Society tells her it's a glitch, a rare malfunction, and that she should focus on the happy life she's destined to lead with Xander. But Cassia can't stop thinking about Ky, and as they slowly fall in love, Cassia begins to doubt the Society's infallibility and is faced with an impossible choice: between Xander and Ky, between the only life she's known and a path that no one else has dared to follow.

«This is a collection of all the Beatrix Potter stories featuring Peter Rabbit: «The Tale of Peter Rabbit», «The Tale of Benjamin Bunny», «The Tale of the Flopsy Bunnies» and «The Tale of Mr. Tod».»

«'It seemed to me that the bees were working on the very same kinds of problems we are trying to solve. How can large, diverse groups work together harmoniously and productively? Perhaps we could take what the bees do so well and apply it to our institutions'. When Michael O'Malley first took up beekeeping he thought it would be a nice hobby to share with his son. But he noticed that bees not only work together to achieve a common goal but, in the process, create a remarkably productive organization, like a miniature but incredibly successful business. O'Malley also realized that bees can teach managers a lot, identifying 25 powerful insights such as: Distribute authority — the queen bee delegates relentlessly and worker bees make daily decisions; Keep it simple — bees exchange only relevant information; and, Protect the future — when a lucrative vein of nectar is discovered, the entire colony doesn't rush off to mine it. Blending practical advice with interesting facts about the hive, «The Wisdom of Bees» is a useful and entertaining guide for any manager looking to get the most out of his or her organization.»

All of the true things I am about to tell you are shameless lies. Dr Felix Hoenikker, one of the founding fathers of the atomic bomb, has left a deadly legacy to the world. For he is the inventor of Ice-nine, a lethal chemical capable of freezing the entire planet. The search for its whereabouts leads to Hoenikker's three eccentric children, to a crazed dictator in the Caribbean, to madness. Will Felix Hoenikker's death wish come true? Will his last, fatal gift to humankind bring about the end that, for all of us, is nigh? Told with deadpan humour and bitter irony, Kurt Vonnegut's cult tale of global apocalypse preys on our deepest fears of witnessing the end and, worse still, surviving it...

Maxwell Sim seems to have hit rock bottom. Estranged from his father, newly divorced, unable to communicate with his only daughter, he realizes that while he may have seventy-four friends on Facebook, there is nobody in the world with whom he can actually share his problems. Then a business proposition comes his way – a strange exercise in corporate PR that will require him to spend a week driving from London to a remote retail outlet on the Shetland Isles.

At twenty-seven, Anne Elliot is no longer young and has few romantic prospects. Eight years earlier, she had been persuaded by her friend Lady Russell to break off her engagement to Frederick Wentworth, a handsome naval captain with neither fortune nor rank. What happens when they encounter each other again is movingly told in Jane Austen's last completed novel. Set in the fashionable societies of Lyme Regis and Bath, Persuasion is a brilliant satire of vanity and pretension, but, above all, it is a love story tinged with the heartache of missed opportunities.

The Ryans — father and son — are fighting on two fronts... When a deadly terrorist alliance creates the potential to blackmail any world power into submission, it's got to be stopped before it is too late. That's just the trigger Jack Ryan Jr needs to take his work for shadowy intelligence agency the Campus from the back room to the sharp end: black ops. Meanwhile, his father, Jack Ryan Sr, campaigning for re-election as US President, is up against a privately funded vendetta to discredit him. Caught at the heart of conspiracy is former Navy SEAL, John Clark. And Ryan Sr soon discovers that being his friend could have deadly consequences. With the breakneck speed and military action scenes that have made him the premier thriller writer of our time, Tom Clancy delivers a novel of high-tech warfare in which the enemy within may be even more devastating than the enemy without.

Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of my tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta. Humbert Humbert is a middle-aged, frustrated college professor. In love with his landlady's twelve-year-old daughter Lolita, he'll do anything to possess her. Unable and unwilling to stop himself, he is prepared to commit any crime to get what he wants. Is he in love or insane? A silver-tongued poet or a pervert? A tortured soul or a monster? Or is he all of these?

Andy Warhol kept these diaries faithfully from November 1976 right up to his final week, in February 1987. Written at the height of his fame and success, Warhol records the fun of an Academy Awards party, nights out at Studio 54, trips between London, Paris and New York, and surprisingly even the money he spent each day, down to the cent. With appearances from and references to everyone who was anyone, from Jim Morrison, Martina Navratilova and Calvin Klein to Shirley Bassey, Estee Lauder and Muhammad Ali, these diaries are the most glamorous, witty and revealing writings of the twentieth century.

People should not leave looking-glasses hanging in their rooms any more than they should leave open cheque books or letters confessing some hideous crime. If she concealed so much and knew so much one must prize her open with the first tool that came to hand — the imagination. Virginia Woolf's writing tested the boundaries of modern fiction, exploring the depths of human consciousness and creating a new language of sensation and thought. Sometimes impressionistic, sometimes experimental, sometimes brutally cruel, sometimes surprisingly warm and funny, these five stories describe love lost, friendships formed and lives questioned. This book includes The Lady in the Looking Glass, A Society, The Mark on the Wall, Solid Objects and Lappin and Lapinova.

Survivor, genius, perfumer, killer: this is Jean-Baptiste Grenouille. He is abandoned on the filthy streets of Paris as a child, but grows up to discover he has an extraordinary gift: a sense of smell more powerful than any other human's. Soon, he is creating the most sublime fragrances in all the city. Yet there is one odour he cannot capture. It is exquisite, magical: the scent of a young virgin. And to get it he must kill. And kill. And kill...

There once lived a woman who was so fat, she couldn't fit in a taxi, and when going into the subway she took up the whole width of the escalator. One of the 50 original and exciting books of short stories, publishing in February to celebrate half a century of Penguin Modern Classics, this book contains Through the Wall and Anna and Maria.

In this collection of eight witty and sharply written essays, Orwell looks at, among others, the joys of spring (even in London), the picture of humanity painted by Gulliver and his travels, and the strange benefit of the doubt that the public permit Salvador Dali. Also included here are a mouth-watering essay on the delights of English Cooking and a shocking account of killing an elephant in Burma. Great Ideas: throughout history, some books have changed the world. They have transformed the way we see ourselves — and each other. They have inspired debate, dissent, war and revolution. They have enlightened, outraged, provoked and comforted. They have enriched lives — and destroyed them. Now Penguin brings you the works of the great thinkers, pioneers, radicals and visionaries whose ideas shook civilization and helped make us who we are.

Not suitable for children under 2 years of age Early one morning a little spider begins to spin her web on a fencepost and she doesn't stop until it is finished... Alongside the visual excitement of Eric Carle's vibrant collages of familiar animals is the tactile experience of feeling the spider's web as it grows from a simple line into a complex and beautiful creation — this is a perfect story for reading aloud and sharing.

Basil Brontosaurus is teased at play school by all the other little dinosaurs, who call him stupid. His mother tells him he's special because he has two brains — one in his head and one is his back. Basil is so pleased that he starts to throw his weight around at play school. That is, until he meets a large Tyrannosaurus rex!

If you had one wish this Christmas, what would it be? Sarah wishes not to be lonely. She shouldn't be — not with Eddie, her husband, and their two children by her side... but since Sarah waved farewell to the bright lights of the big city and moved to a picture perfect home in the country, her marriage is missing its usual sparkle. So when Eddie's job takes him away from home shortly before Christmas, the enforced break in their relationship — while tricky — probably couldn't have come at a better time. But will his absence make her heart grow fonder? And if so, for whom? As seasonal cheer begins to flow, Sarah discovers rather a lot can happen in one holiday... especially when it's Christmas. Jane Green and her friends are delighted to bring you this enchanting trio of tales for the holiday — stories about falling headlong in love and the miracle of second chances.

In 1901, a young frontiersman named Peter Force comes to New York City and finds a job digging the first subway tunnels. Into his path falls the beautiful mathematical prodigy Cheri-Anne Toledo, whose memories appear to come from another world: the long-forgotten Kingdom of Ohio. Could she have stumbled onto the most dangerous secret imaginable: the key to travelling through time? Peter must find out fast, as the pair are pursued by titans Thomas Edison and J.P. Morgan into the dark labyrinth beneath the metropolis. Peter and Cheri-Anne find themselves wrestling with the nature of history, technology, and the unfolding of time itself.