Sid knows the perils of racing all too well, but in his day jockeys didn't usually cross the finish line with three. 38 rounds in the chest-which is how he found Huw Walker, the winner of a coveted race only a few hours earlier. Now Halley's quest for answers will push him to his very limits-both on and off the track.

The most eloquent and expressive statesman of his time — phrases such as 'iron curtain', 'business as usual', 'the few', and 'summit meeting' passed quickly into everyday use — Winston Churchill used language as his most powerful weapon at a time when his most frequent complaint was that the armoury was otherwise empty. In this volume, David Cannadine selects thirty-three orations ranging over fifty years, demonstrating how Churchill gradually hones his rhetoric until the day when, with spectacular effect, 'he mobilized the English language, and sent it into battle' (Edward R. Murrow).

Ten Days That Shook the World is John Reed's eyewitness account of the Russian Revolution. A contemporary journalist writing in the first flush of revolutionary enthusiasm, he gives a gripping record of the events in Petrograd in November 1917, when Lenin and the Bolsheviks finally seized power. Containing verbatim reports both of speeches by leaders and the chance comments of bystanders, set against an idealized backcloth of the proletariat, soldiers, sailors, and peasants uniting to throw off oppression, Reed's account is the product of passionate involvement and remains an unsurpassed classic of reporting.

When brutal terrorists strike at the heart of Washington, the usual suspects are blamed. But this time, America's worst nightmare has come true — the terror comes from within. Former 'black ops' soldier Jason March is the mastermind behind the vicious attacks. Only one man has the power to stop March's bloodlust — the man who trained him — Ryan Kealey. Once an elite but maverick Special Forces officer, Kealey must return to service. His mission is to hunt down his former pupil and end the killing...

Families are toxic... Thanksgiving, New England, and writer Cynthia has been persuaded by elder sister Frances to come and visit for the autumn holiday. Cynthia is reluctant to join in this family reunion because she'd rather not see their long-estranged father. Yet Frances is adamant that they must all meet to clear the air — poisoned ever since their mother died when they were children. But Cynthia has her own ideas about how to use this family occasion. It's time to lift the lid on some unwelcome home truths about what happened all those years ago. And this time her daddy's feelings are not to be spared...

In India, at the birth of the last century, an infant is brought howling into the world, his remarkable paleness marking him out from his brown-skinned fellows. Revered at first, he is later cast out from his wealthy home when his true parentage is revealed. So begins Pran Nath's odyssey of self-discovery — a journey that will take him from the streets of Agra, via the red light disrict of Bombay, to the green lawns of England and beyond — as he struggles to understand who he really is.

Captain Cleve Connell arrives in Korea with a single goal: to become an ace, one of that elite fraternity of jet pilots who have downed five MIGs. But as his fellow airmen rack up kill after kill — sometimes under dubious circumstances — Cleve's luck runs bad. Other pilots question his guts. Cleve comes to question himself. And then in one icy instant 40,000 feet above the Yalu River, his luck changes forever. Filled with courage and despair, eerie beauty and corrosive rivalry, James Salter's luminous first novel is a landmark masterpiece in the literature of war.

In exile, in danger, on the run, for six years Alec Milius has been trying to escape his past. But his past refuses to release him. Abandoned by MI6 after a disastrous operation with the CIA, Milius has slowly rebuilt his life in Madrid: he has a flat, a job — and a relationship with the wrong woman. Older and wiser than the young spy who first caught the eye of British Intelligence, Milius still has a talent for deception and a fatal weakness for secrets. So when a prominent politician disappears in suspicious circumstances he can't resist tracking him down. But the rules have changed. Alec is now working alone outside the boundaries of any official agency. Paranoid and expendable, he soon becomes vulnerable to the ruthless duplicities of the secret world. He can trust no one. But as he comes face to face with the nightmare of modern terror, Alec is given one last chance for redemption.

For nine years, Adam has been the centre of his mother, Cara's world. And, she thinks, she has been the centre of his, until the day he disappears. When he is found in the woods behind his school, beside the body of a little girl whom Cara has never heard of before, it feels as if her world has been torn apart. As Adam is locked into silence, unable to tell his mother what he has seen, Cara's desperation to understand her little boy becomes fiercer than ever. A heart-rending, utterly unputdownable story of the tangled bond between mother and child, Eye Contact engages the heart and will not let it go.

By the age of 32, Ronit has left London and transformed her life. She has become a cigarette-smoking, wise-cracking, New York career woman, who is in love with a married man. But when Ronit's father dies she is called back into the very different world of her childhood, a world she thought she had left far behind. The orthodox Jewish suburb of Hendon, north London is outraged by Ronit and her provocative ways. But Ronit is shocked too by the confrontation with her past. And when she meets up with her childhood girlfriend Esti, she is forced to think again about what she has left behind.

Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler team up again to create this funny and adorable sequel to The Gruffalo. One night, the Gruffalo’s child wanders into the woods to search for the Big Bad Mouse. But instead, she comes upon a small mouse in the woods . . . and decides to eat him! But wait, what is that? A shadow of a very large, scary creature falls on the ground. Could it be the Big Bad Mouse after all?

The novel (1915) chronicles the lives of three generations of the Brangwen family over a period of more than 60 years, setting them against the emergence of modern England. The central figure of ursula becomes the focus of Lawrence's examination of relationships and the conflicts they bring, and the inextricable mingling of the physical and the spiritual. Suffused with biblical imagery, The Rainbow addresses searching human issues in a setting of precise and vivid detail.

On one level the novel is about the homecoming of Lavretsky, who, broken and disillusioned by a failed marriage, returns to his estate and finds love again — only to lose it. The sense of loss and of unfulfilled promise, beautifully captured by Turgenev, reflects his underlying theme that humanity is not destined to experience happiness except as something ephemeral and inevitably doomed. On another level Turgenev is presenting the homecoming of a whole generation of young Russians who have fallen under the spell of European ideas that have uprooted them from Russia, their home, but have proved ultimately superfluous. In tragic bewilderment, they attempt to find reconciliation with their land.

In A Touch of Magic, Lauren is worried when her little brother Max stops caring for his puppy — how can she and Twilight help him to realize that looking after a pet is very important? In Snowy Dreams, Twilight's magic is fading! Lauren can't believe it. No more magic, no more flying, no more helping others in need — but the worst thing is how unhappy this is making Twilight — what can Lauren do?

Regarded by many as the greatest of the Metaphysical poets, John Donne (1572-1631) was also among the most intriguing figures of the Elizabethan age. A sensualist who composed erotic and playful love poetry in his youth, he was raised a Catholic but later became one of the most admired Protestant preachers of his time. The Selected Poems reflects this wide diversity, and includes his youthful Songs and Sonnets, epigrams, elegies, letters, satires, and the profoundly moving Divine Poems composed towards the end of his life. From joyful poems such as The Flea, which transforms the image of a louse into something marvelous, to the intimate and intense Holy Sonnets, Donne breathed new vigor into poetry by drawing lucid and often startling metaphors from the world in which he lived. His poems remain among the most passionate, profound and spiritual in the English language.

When Sandra is widowed tragically early in her early 40s, with no children to distract her, and a career as a college lecturer only keeping her mildly busy, she feels she needs a new direction in her life. This comes in the unlikely shape of Martha, a woman she meets completely randomly when they both stop to help in a medical emergency in a shopping mall. Martha has also experienced grief, but appears to have worked it through. She is also a keen, talented, but almost obsessive knitter, who lives and breathes her skill. Sandra is fascinated by her work, and eager to develop other strands to her career, decides to organise an exhibition on the history of women's clothing and textiles, asking Martha to help her by creating replicas of various items. What follows is not a conventional friendship, nor a conventional healing, but whatever it is, it changes Sandra's life very much for the better...

Ross O'Carroll-Kelly thought he knew all he needed to about women's bodies... So there I was, roysh, in a state of basically very blissful ignorance, when suddenly Sorcha's up the Damien and I have to listen to, like, women's stuff. And now he's getting a biology lesson he could have so lived without... I am telling you, roysh, I never even knew nipples could crack and I was very happy not knowing it. I mean, all I knew about the whole scenario was six seconds of seriously good loving, and now I'm basically expected to be an expert on how to, like, breathe like Dorth Vader and deal with baby turds. Sometimes, life just isn't fair to the babe magnet supremo... This is so not good for my rep — but do you think Sorcha even, like, cares about that? Not focking likely!

Dense woodland — twisting paths — it's easy to lose your way in the wilderness... The rugged Rocky Mountains are a place some go to hide inside, some to escape into and others to hunt in. Dr Matt Seleckis has never been one for the woods: he remembers his childhood vacations there with his mother and father — and the looming threat of an unexplained death... Now Matt lives in the mountains' shadow, in Utah with his wife and young son. Yet the prospect of a hunting trip alone with his father is bringing back dark, unwelcome memories — of a certain vacation, of his beloved parents. And of a hushed-up tragedy that he's sure concerns him. But with the arrival of these unsettling memories comes the creeping realisation that in nature, death for the unwary lies around every corner. And in the woods, it's easy to take a wrong turn.

In a great courtroom drama, Maigret has to explain why he does not believe that Gaston Meurant was capable of slitting his aunt's throat for money and smothering a small child. But in saving him from the gallows, Maigret must expose some dark secrets about Meurant's life. This is a painful story of an oppressive domestic tragedy and the compassionate insight of a remarkable detective. A truly wonderful writer... marvellously readable — lucid, simple, absolutely in tune with that world he creates of run-down hotels, cold, dark barges, quayside canal-taverns, lurking prostitutes, pot-bellied burghers, taciturn youths, slippery barmen — Muriel Spark, Sunday Times.