In Francis's best thriller (Evening Standard), a movie star must give the performance of his life when he crosses paths with killers while investigating race-horse tampering in South Africa.

When a tiny snail meets a humpback whale, the two travel together to far-off lands. It's a dream come true for the snail, who has never left home before. But when the whale swims too close to shore, will the snail be able to save her new friend?

There! Pop said. There's the house. There's Gore Court for you. What about that, eh? How's that strike you? Better than St Paul's, ain't it, better than St Paul's? And so Pop Larkin — junk-dealer, family man and Dragon's Blood connoisseur — manages to sell the nearby crumbling, tumbling country home to city dwellers Mr and Mrs Jerebohm for a pretty bundle of notes. Now he can build his daughter Mariette the pool she's long been nagging him for. But the Larkin's new neighbours aren't quite so accepting of country ways — especially Pop's little eccentricities. In fact, it's not long before a wobbly boat, a misplaced pair of hands and Mrs Jerebohm's behind have Pop up before a magistrate...

Clive Cussler's legions of fans have come to expect high adventure at sea, exotic locales, cutting-edge science and page-turning pace. Lost City is no exception — Cussler proves once again that he is the Grandmaster. An enzyme that will dramatically prolong life has been discovered two thousand feet down in the North Atlantic, in an area known as 'Lost City'. But why are the people attempting to harvest it getting killed? Why are the scientists in a remote Greek laboratory disappearing one by one? What does this all have to do with a body found frozen in the ice high up in the Alps? For Kurt Austin, leader of NUMA's Special Assignments Team, and his colleague Joe Zavala, it's clear they have their work cut out for them, but it may be even bigger than they think in fact, it may be their greatest challenge of all Rich with hair-raising action and endless imagination that have become Cussler's hallmarks, Lost City is an exceptional thriller.

You only find true love once. When Werther dances with the beautiful Lotte, it seems as though he is in paradise. It is a joy, however, that can only ever be short-lived. Engaged to another man, she tolerates Werther's adoration and encourages his friendship. She can never return his love. Broken-hearted, he leaves her home in the country, trying to escape his own desire. But when he receives a letter telling him that she is finally married, his passion soon turns to destructive obsession. And as his life falls apart, Werther is haunted by one certainty. He has lost his reason for living.

Gloria Hunniford's daughter, TV presenter Caron Keating, was 34 when she was diagnosed with breast cancer. Initially, she was declared in the clear but the cancer came back, despite her attempts to fight it off with every therapy going. She died aged 41. This is Gloria's account of Caron's life. It is outstanding from the beginning feels painfully truthful, but is utterly absorbing. It does make you cry endlessly. It is about the difficult bond between mothers and daughters, and about what happens to a family when one of its members gets taken over by a disease. Gloria's honesty in writing this book is extraordinary both Caron and Gloria come across as amazingly strong, loving and inspiring characters — Daily Express. We see Caron as a daughter, a sister, a wife, a friend and a mother, but most of all as a fighter. This is not a story of illness and death rather it's a beautiful, emotional celebration of an extraordinary life that sadly ended far too soon. A beautiful read — Daily Record.

On a bright morning in Rome, a terrible explosion rips a hole in the Israeli embassy. Moments later, four gunmen cut down survivors as they stagger from the burning building. Gabriel Allon is hastily recalled to Israel and drawn once more into the heart of the secret service he'd hoped to leave behind. For the blast has led to a disturbing revelation: a dossier that strips away Allon's secrets and lays bare his history. A dossier that had fallen into terrorist hands...

A mouse is taking a stroll through the deep, dark wood when along comes a hungry fox, then an owl, and then a snake. The mouse is good enough to eat but smart enough to know this, so he invents . . . the gruffalo! As Mouse explains, the gruffalo is a creature with terrible claws, and terrible tusks in its terrible jaws, and knobbly knees and turned-out toes, and a poisonous wart at the end of its nose. But Mouse has no worry to show. After all, there’s no such thing as a gruffalo.

TIME AND CHANCE, the second part of the trilogy about Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine, opens during the glory years of their reign. While Henry redefined the role of medieval kingship, Eleanor gave birth to their children, founding a dynasty that would endure for 300 years. But even in these happy times, shadows were lurking. Battles on two borders. The disastrous appointment of Thomas Becket as Archbishop of Canterbury. And when Henry took lovely young Rosumund Clifford into his bed, little did he realise that in making an enemy of his proud, passionate queen he was making the gravest mistake of all...

This is an exquisitely written, partly autobiographical treatment of one of Turgenev's favorite themes — man's inability to learn about love without first losing his innocence.

Jean Rhys' late, literary masterpiece Wide Sargasso Sea was inspired by Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre, and is set in the lush, beguiling landscape of Jamaica in the 1830s. Born into an oppressive, colonialist society, Creole heiress Antoinette Cosway meets a young Englishman who is drawn to her innocent sensuality and beauty. After their marriage the rumours begin, poisoning her husband against her. Caught between his demands and her own precarious sense of belonging, Antoinette is driven towards madness.

In the past: a man crawls desperately through a claustrophobic escape tunnel beneath a POW camp in the Cambridgeshire Fens. Above, a shadow passes across the moon, while ahead only death awaits him. In the present: Philip Dryden is reporting on an archaeological dig at the old POW camp, when a body is uncovered. But there is something odd: the man appears to have been shot in the head, and the position indicates that he was trying to get into the camp, not escape it. It's a puzzle which excites Dryden far more than the archaeologists or the police. That is, until a second, more recent, body is discovered...

At dawn on March 2, 2002, the first major battle of the 21st Century began. Over 200 soldiers of the 101st Airborne and 10th Mountain Divisions flew into Afghanistan's Shahikot valley and into the mouth of a buzz-saw. They were about to pay a bloody price for strategic, higher-level miscalculations that underestimated the enemy's strength and willingness to fight. After the attacks of September 11, 2001, Coalition forces quickly toppled the Taliban regime from the seat of government. But, believing the war to be all but over, the Pentagon and US Central Command refused to commit the forces required to achieve total victory in Afghanistan. Instead, they delegated responsibility for fighting the war's biggest battle to a tangle of untested units thrown together at the last moment. Then the world watched as Anaconda seemed to unravel. Denied the extra infantry, artillery and close air support with which they trained to go to war, the soldiers of this airborne assault fought for survival in brutal high-altitude combat. Backed up by a small, but crucial, team of special forces, they were all that stood between the Coalition and a military disaster. Now, award-winning journalist Sean Naylor, an eyewitness to the action, vividly portrays the fight for Afghanistan's most hostile battleground and details the failures of military intelligence and planning that left victory hanging by a thread.

The Edifice Complex explores the intimate and inextricable relationship between power, money and architecture in the twentieth century. How and why have presidents, prime ministers, mayors, millionaires and bishops come to share such a fascination with grand designs? From Blair to Mitterrand, from Hitler to Stalin to Saddam Hussein, architecture has become an end in itself, as well as a means to an end. This is a book of genuine timeliness, throwing new light on the motivations of the rich and powerful around the world — and on the ways they seek to affect us.

They presided over the most destructive regimes in history, murdered millions and fought the most barbarous war the world had seen. Yet countless Germans and Russians worshipped them and the values they stood for. How did Hitler and Stalin come to cast such a shadow over the twentieth century? Richard Overy’s acclaimed history is the first to examine both the two regimes and the people who lived under them: how dictatorship became possible, the use of terror, the camp systems, the bond between leader and followers, and, above all, how these men managed to draw the wide consent that enabled them to kill on such a colossal scale.

One of the masters of 'weird fiction', H. P. Lovecraft expanded the vast boundaries of the horror genre with his vividly imagined stories of exotic and fantastical otherworlds, nightmarish dreamscapes or the supernatural terrors lurking beneath the surface of small-town America. The shadow of New England's witch-hunting past hangs over many of the tales, as in 'The Shunned House' and 'The Dreams in the Witch House', in which malevolent spectres return to haunt the region. Others, such as 'From Beyond' and 'The Shadow Out of Time', depict the catastrophic results when cosmic channels of time and space are opened, while stories such as 'Polaris' and 'The Doom that Came to Sarnath' portray the downfall of mythical civilizations.

Brothers Tony, Sean and Ned had the perfect upbringing. They adore their parents and actually look forward to coming home for Sunday lunch. But now they’ve grown up and real life’s starting to get in the way. Tony’s dealing with divorce and weight problem. Novelist Sean is up against a serious case of writer’s block and a shock announcement from his ‘perfect’ new girlfriend. And their parents have a new lodger, Gervase. But why is Bernie, their mum, so keen to give this unsavoury waif a home? And what is the real reason for kid brother Ned’s surprise return from his travels in Australia?

Boisterous, ribald, and ultimately shattering, Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest is the seminal novel of the 1960s that has left an indelible mark on the literature of our time. Here is the unforgettable story of a mental ward and its inhabitants, especially the tyrannical Big Nurse Ratched and Randle Patrick McMurphy, the brawling, fun-loving new inmate who resolves to oppose her. We see the struggle through the eyes of Chief Bromden, the seemingly mute half-Indian patient who witnesses and understands McMurphy's heroic attempt to do battle with the awesome powers that keep them all imprisoned.

Can it really be true that 'golf' stands for 'Gentlemen Only Ladies Forbidden'? Or that 'rule of thumb' comes from an archaic legal principle that a man may chastise his wife, but only with a rod no thicker than his thumb? These and hundreds of other stories are commonly told and retold whenever people meet. They grow up in part because expressions are often genuinely mysterious. Why, for example, are satisfying meals 'square' rather than any other shape? And how did anyone ever come up with the idea that if you're competent at something you can 'cut the mustard'? Michael Quinion here retells many of the more bizarre tales, and explains their real origins where they're known. This is a fascinating treasure-trove of fiction and fact for anyone interested in language.

One rainy night in New York City, outstanding law student Chloe Larson wakes from a terrible nightmare. But it's not a nightmare — it's real. Not only is she savagely violated in her own bedroom, Chloe then has to deal with the horror of nobody being brought to justice. Twelve years later a very different Chloe is forging a formidable reputation in the Miami Dade State Attorney's Office, as a vicious serial killer nicknamed Cupid terrorises Florida — tearing out his tortured victim's hearts while they're still conscious. When the police stop a driver on the McArthur Causeway and a mutilated corpse is found in his trunk, it seems the hunt for Cupid is finally over. But as Chloe begins the task of prosecuting the suspect, she soon realises that this case will be anything but easy. Because her past is about to force itself on her present — and the terror is only just beginning. Sometimes there's a price to be paid for justice. And sometimes that price is awful. Revenge could cost Chloe her sanity. The truth could cost her her life. THE PAST. THE PRESENT. THE TERROR.