In the title story in this collection of five novellas, a journalist visits a celebrated but reclusive painter. He is intrigued by the complicated erotic relationship between the elderly artist and the beautiful young women who share their lives with him.

In the unusual world of Green Town, Illinois, a twelve-year-old discovers the wonders of reality and the power of imagination during the summer of 1928.

From the icy blast of reveille through the sweet release of sleep, Ivan Denisovich endures. A common carpenter, he is one of millions viciously imprisoned for countless years on baseless charges, sentenced to the waking nightmares of the Soviet work camps in Siberia. Even in the face of degrading hatred, where life is reduced to a bowl of gruel and a rare cigarette, hope and dignity prevail. This powerful novel of fact is a scathing indictment of Communist tyranny, and an eloquent affirmation of the human spirit.

Twenty years after he earned a reputation for killing eighty-seven men during the Vietnam War, Bob Lee Swagger finds that his skills are in demand when an organization with ties to the CIA hires him for a particularly dangerous mission.

In a new and major novel, the creator of fantastic universes o vampires and witches takes us now into the world of Isaiah and Jeremiah, and the destruction of Solomon's Temple, to tell the story of Azriel, Servant of the Bones. He is ghost, genii, demon, angel--pure spirit made visible. He pours his heart out to us as he journeys from an ancient Babylon of royal plottings and religious upheavals to Europe of the Black Death and on to the modern world. There he finds himself, amidst the towers of Manhattan, in confrontation with his own human origins and the dark forces that have sought to condemn him to a life of evil and destruction.

Every weekend, in basements and parking lots across the country, young men with good white-collar jobs and absent fathers take off their shoes and shirts and fight each other barehanded for as long as they have to. Then they go back to those jobs with blackened eyes and loosened teeth and the sense that they can handle anything. Fight Club is the invention of Tyler Durden, projectionist, waiter and dark, anarchic genius. And it's only the beginning of his plans for revenge on a world where cancer support groups have the corner on human warmth.

Joe Lassiter is an ex-FBI investigator bent on revenge. His sister and young nephew have been murdered and the killer hospitalised. Despite warnings from the police Lassiter will stop at nothing to discover why. His search leads him to uncover an attempt by the Vatican to destroy all traces of a discovery that has sent them into such an alarm, that they have charged a right-wing fundamentalist hit-squad to rid the world of all evidence of it. The discovery originates from a confession in a remote village in Italy. A confession that sends the local priest into a panic and the Vatican into an uproar. The confession belongs to the late Dr Franco Baresi, and concerns the work at his fertility clinic — a fertility clinic that Lassiter's sister attended and, as he horrifyingly discovers, all the other victims in a recent series of murders that have swept the world. Women who were infertile until they attended the clinic. Lassiter must discover the remaining mothers before the hit men, and meanwhile his sister's killer is on the loose...

The setting is Berlin. Into this divided city, wrenched between East and West, between past and present; comes twenty-five-year-old Leonard Marnham, assigned to a British-American surveillance team.Though only a pawn in an international plot that is never fully revealed to him, Leonard uses his secret work to escape the bonds of his ordinary life — and to lose his unwanted innocence. The promise of his new life begins to be fulfilled as Leonard becomes a crucial part of the surveillance team, while simultaneously being initiated into a new world of love and sex by Maria, a beautiful young German woman. It is a promise that turns to horror in the course of one terrible evening — a night when Leonard Marnham learns just how much of his innocence he's willing to shed.

On a remote jungle island, genetic engineers have created a dinosaur game park. An astonishing technique for recovering and cloning dinosaur DNA has been discovered. Now one of mankind’s most thrilling fantasies has come true and the first dinosaurs that the Earth has seen in the time of man emerge. But, as always, there is a dark side to the fantasy and after a catastrophe destroys the park’s defence systems, the scientists and tourists are left fighting for survival…

«No book in modern times has matched the uproar sparked by Salman Rushdie's «The Satanic Verses», which earned its author a death sentence. Furor aside, it is a marvelously erudite study of good and evil, a feast of language served up by a writer at the height of his powers, and a rollicking comic fable. The book begins with two Indians, Gibreel Farishta («for fifteen years the biggest star in the history of the Indian movies») and Saladin Chamcha, a Bombay expatriate returning from his first visit to his homeland in 15 years, plummeting from the sky after the explosion of their jetliner, and proceeds through a series of metamorphoses, dreams and revelations. Rushdie's powers of invention are astonishing in this Whitbread Prize winner.»

The famous confession of Alexander Portnoy who is thrust through life by his unappeasable sexuality, yet held back at the same time by the iron grip of his unforgettable childhood.

The magnificent conclusion to one of the greatest science fiction sagas of our time. The time of reckoning has arrived. As a final genocidal Crusade threatens to enslave humanity forever, a new messiah has come of age. She is Aenea and she has undergone a strange apprenticeship to those known as the Others. Now her protector, Raul Endymion, one-time shepherd and convicted murderer, must help her deliver her startling message to her growing army of disciples. But first they must embark on a final spectacular mission to discover the underlying meaning of the universe itself. They have been followed on their journey by the mysterious Shrike — monster, angel, killing machine — who is about to reveal the long-held secret of its origin and purpose. And on the planet of Hyperion, where the story first began, the final revelation will be delivered — an apocalyptic message that unlocks the secrets of existence and the fate of humankind in the galaxy.

What do we do when the world's walls — its family structures, its value-systems, it political forms — crumble? The central character of this novel, 'Moor' Zogoiby, only son of a wealthy, artistic-bohemian Bombay family, finds himself in such a moment of crisis. His mother, a famous painter and an emotional despot, worships beauty, but Moor is ugly, he has a deformed hand. Moor falls in love, with a married woman; when their secret is revealed, both are expelled; a suicide pact is proposed, but only the woman dies. Moor chooses to accept his fate, plunges into a life of depravity in Bombay, then becomes embroiled in a major financial scandal. The novel ends in Spain, in the studio of a painter who was a lover of Moor's mother: in a violent climax Moor has, one more, to decide whether to save the life of his lover by sacrificing his own.

«Slaughterhous-Five» is one of the world's great anti-war books. Centering on the infamous fire-bombing of Dresden, Billy Pilgrim's odyssey through time reflects the mythic journey of our own fractured lives as we search for meaning in what we are afraid to know.»

«Edgar Allan Poe remains the unsurpassed master of works of mystery and madness in this outstanding collection of Poe's prose and poetry are sixteen of his finest tales, including «The Tell-Tale Heart», «The Murders in the Rue Morgue», «The Fall of the House of Usher», «The Pit and the Pendulum», «William Wilson», «The Black Cat», «The Cask of Amontillado» and «Eleonora». Here too is a major selection of what Poe characterized as the passion of his life, his poems — «The Raven», «Annabel Lee», «Ulalume», «Lenore», «The Bells» and more, plus his glorious prose poem «Silence — A Fable» and only full-length novel, «The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym».»

«Fashioned from the same experiences that would inspire the masterpiece «Huckleberry Finn», «Life on the Mississippi» is Mark Twain’s most brilliant and most personal nonfiction work. It is at once an affectionate evocation of the vital river life in the steamboat era and a melancholy reminiscence of its passing after the Civil War, a priceless collection of humorous anecdotes and folktales, and a unique glimpse into Twain’s life before he began to write. Written in a prose style that has been hailed as among the greatest in English literature, «Life on the Mississippi» established Twain as not only the most popular humorist of his time but also America’s most profound chronicler of the human comedy.»

«Subtitled ‘A Romantic Novel in Honour of the Passing of a Great Race’, «The Torrents of Spring» – Hemingway’s second published work – wonderfully parodies the themes and styles of the ‘great race’ of writers of his generation. Spring is coming to the small towns of Michigan, but the snow still covers the land when Scripps O’Neil sets of for Chicago, decides to stop a while in Petoskey, and meets up with Yogi Johnson. Their bizarre stories are a brilliant satire on conventional fiction. The characters they meet are absurd and yet strangely familiar. Short, fast-paced, funny, «The Torrents of Spring» throws light on Hemingway’s later work – and is a delight to read.»

Following on from his bestselling study of violence, THE FOOTBALL FACTORY, John King considers Britain's other obsession-sex. Formed in the chemical mists of New year's Eve, The Sex Division sees the once-sacred act of procreation at its most material, as five men devise system based on the sexual act. In this lagerosoaked league, the most that women can offer man is 4 points-unless, that is, she leaves her handbag unattended...From its base in the asset-stripped, emotionally castrated 90s, HEADHUNTERS shows the dreams of The Sex Division members breaking through the heavy media cloud of anorexic pin-ups and paedophile fashion. A missing brother, prophetic visions, a love affair, and tit-for-tat confrontation draw the characters out into the open-revealing the men behind the machismo, their need for mutual respect, and their recognition of the hidden or suppressed affinities.

A turn-of-the-century doctor tracks a cunning killer in the New York Times bestselling sequel to the acclaimed historical thriller The Alienist.

When Mitchell McDeere qualified third in his class at Harvard, offers poured in from every law firm in America. The firm he chose was small, but-well respected. They were prepared to match, and then exceed Mitch's wildest dreams: eighty thousand a year, a BMW and a low-interest mortgage. Now the house, the car and the job are his. Then the nightmares begin: the secret files, the bugs in the new bedroom, the mysterious deaths of colleagues, and the millions of dollars of mob money pouring through the office into the Cayman Islands, dollars that the FBI would do anything to trace. Now Mitch is in the place where dreams end and nightmares begin...