As any herpetologist will tell you, the fer-de-lance is among the most dreaded snakes known to man. When someone makes a present of one to Nero Wolfe, Archie Goodwin knows he's getting dreadully close to solving the devilishly clever murders of an immigrant and a college president. As for Wolfe, he's playing snake charmer in a case with more twists than an anaconda — whistling a seductive tune he hopes will catch a killer who's still got poison in his heart.

It is 1955. Michael Corleone has won a bloody victory in the war among New York's crime families. Now he wants to consolidate his power, save his marriage, and take his family into legitimate businesses. To do so, he must confront his most dangerous adversary yet, Nick Geraci, a former boxer who worked his way through law school as a Corleone street enforcer, and who is every bit as deadly and cunning as Michael. Their personal cold war will run from 1955 to 1962, exerting immense influence on the lives of America's most powerful criminals and their loved ones

With Kafka on the Shore, Haruki Murakami gives us a novel every bit as ambitious and expansive as The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, which has been acclaimed both here and around the world for its uncommon ambition and achievement, and whose still-growing popularity suggests that it will be read and admired for decades to come. This magnificent new novel has a similarly extraordinary scope and the same capacity to amaze, entertain, and bewitch the reader. A tour de force of metaphysical reality, it is powered by two remarkable characters: a teenage boy, Kafka Tamura, who runs away from home either to escape a gruesome oedipal prophecy or to search for his long-missing mother and sister; and an aging simpleton called Nakata, who never recovered from a wartime affliction and now is drawn toward Kafka for reasons that, like the most basic activities of daily life, he cannot fathom. Their odyssey, as mysterious to them as it is to us, is enriched throughout by vivid accomplices and mesmerizing events. Cats and people carry on conversations, a ghostlike pimp employs a Hegel-quoting prostitute, a forest harbors soldiers apparently unaged since World War II, and rainstorms of fish (and worse) fall from the sky. There is a brutal murder, with the identity of both victim and perpetrator a riddle — yet this, along with everything else, is eventually answered, just as the entwined destinies of Kafka and Nakata are gradually revealed, with one escaping his fate entirely and the other given a fresh start on his own. Extravagant in its accomplishment, Kafka on the Shore displays one of the world’s truly great storytellers at the height of his powers.

«The №1 «New York Times» bestselling memoir by President Clinton — he top-selling presidential memoir of all time — arrives in a two-volume mass market release. Concentrating on his early life, this first volume contains new photographs and new material by the author.»

A violent crime brings together four lives in Steel's 60th bestselling novel, the story of a mother's courage, a family's terror, and a triumph of human strength and dignity in the face of overwhelming odds.

In a fresh, funny look at what happens when a woman who has everything finally meets her match, Danielle Steel proves that, in life and love, it's never too late for a second chance.

Edward Rutherfurd's great Irish epic reveals the story of the people of Ireland through the focal point of the island's capital city. The epic begins in pre-Christian Ireland during the reign of the fierce and powerful High Kings at Tara, with the tale of two lovers, the princely Conall and the ravishing Deirdre, whose travails echo the ancient Celtic legend of Cuchulainn. From this stirring beginning, Rutherfurd takes the reader on a graphically realised journey through the centuries. Through the interlocking stories of a powerfully-imagined cast of characters — druids and chieftains, monks and smugglers, merchants and mercenaries, noblewomen, rebels and cowards — we see Ireland through the lens of its greatest city.

«Tiffany Aching, a hag from a long line of hags, is trying out her witchy talents again as she is plunged into yet another adventure when she leaves home and is apprenticed to a «real» witch. This time, will the thieving, fighting and drinking skills of the Nac Mac Feegle — the Wee Free Men — be of use, or must Tiffany rely on her own abilities? This is the third novel in the junior Discworld series that started with the enormously popular tale: The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents.»

Scott Spectrum, Head Script Writer, Science Fiction Channel, is being haunted by a ghost giraffe called Jim. Scott thinks he is the man who has everything — high speed Internet connection, hitech armchair, alien shaped slipper, a beautiful wife called Continence...But according to Jim, Scott's days are numbered. Jim is on a mission to save Scott from certain death by sexual repression. He hasn't touched Continence for years and she's left furiously polishing the sideboard, dreaming of black stallions. To save himself, Scott must perform every sex act in the lovemaker's lexicon. Jim Giraffe knows all about sex. He also love pizza and beer and breath that smells of tree tops. The prudish Scott is at first shocked by his perverted foul-mouthed yellow and blue saviour. But he accepts Jim's help and comes to see him as his best friend. Little does he realise that the ghost giraffe has his own agenda and that his suburban idyll is about to be turned upside down.

Kafka on the Shore follows the fortunes of two remarkable characters. Kafka Tamura runs away from home at fifteen, under the shadow of his father's dark prophesy. The aging Nakata, tracker of lost cats, who never recovered from a bizarre childhood affliction, finds his pleasantly simplified life suddenly turned upside down. Their parallel odysseys are enriched throughout by vivid accomplices and mesmerising dramas. Cats converse with people; fish tumble from the sky; a ghostlike pimp deploys a Hegel-spouting girl of the night; a forest harbours soldiers apparently un-aged since WWII. There is a savage killing, but the identity of both victim and killer is a riddle. Murakami's new novel is at once a classic tale of quest, but it is also a bold exploration of mythic and contemporary taboos, of patricide, of mother-love, of sister-love. Above all it is an entertainment of a very high order.

This moving fable follows the adventures of Matt who becomes king when just a child and decides to reform his country according to his own priorities. Ignoring his grown-up ministers, he decrees that children should be given chocolate every day and builds the best zoo in the world. He fights in battles, braves the jungle, and crosses the desert, but perhaps the most life-altering thing of all is that the lonely boy king finds true friends. This timeless book shows us not only what children's literature can be, but what children can be.

«President Bill Clinton's «My Life» is the strikingly candid portrait of a global leader who decided in early life to devote his intellectual and political gifts, and his extraordinary capacity for hard work, to serving the public. It is the fullest, most concretely detailed, most nuanced account of a presidency ever written, and a testament to the positive impact on America and on the world of his work and his ideals. Here is the life of a great national and international figure, revealed with all his talents and contradictions. Filled with fascinating moments and insights, it is told openly, directly, in President Clinton's completely recognizable voice.»

«Chuck Palahniuk's world has been, well, different from yours and mine. The pieces that comprise «Non-Fiction» prove just how different, in ways both highly entertaining and deeply unsettling. Encounters with alternative culture heroes Marilyn Manson and Juliette Lewis; the peculiar wages of fame attendant on the big budget film production of the movie Fight Club; life as an assembly-line drive train installer by day, hospice volunteer driver by night; the really peculiar lives of submariners; the really violent world of college wrestlers; the underground world of anabolic steroid gobblers; the harrowing circumstances of his father's murder and the trial of his killer — each essay or vignette offers a unique facet of existence as lived in and/or observed by one of America's most flagrantly daring and original literary talents.»

A classic Rendellian loner, Mix Cellini is superstitious about the number 13. Living in a decaying house in Notting Hill, Mix is obsessed with 10 Rillington Place, where the notorious Christie committed a series of foul murders. He is also infatuated with a beautiful model who lives nearby — a woman who would not look at him twice. Mix's landlady, Gwendolen Chawcer is equally reclusive — living her life through her library of books. Both landlady and lodger inhabit weird worlds of their own. But when reality intrudes into Mix's life, a long pent-up violence explodes.

«John Malcolm is barely 30, a high school football hero and Princeton graduate, he controls a hedge fund worth $50m. He made his millions back in the early '90's, a time when dozens of elite young American graduates made their fortunes in hedge funds in the Far East, beating the Japanese at their own game, riding the crashing waves of the Asian markets and winning. Failure meant not only bankruptcy and disgrace a la Nick Leeson, but potentially even death — at the hands of the Japanese Yakuza. «Ugly Americans» tells Malcolm's story, and that of others like him, in a cross between Mezrich's own best-selling «Bringing Down the House» and Michael Lewis' «Liar's Poker».»

Peter Fortune is a daydreamer. He's a quiet ten year old who can't help himself from dropping out of reality and into the amazing world of his vivid imagination. His daydreams are fantastic and fascinating — only in the bizarre and disturbing world of dreams can he swop bodies with the family cat and his baby cousin, Kenneth, or wipe out his entire family with vanishing cream.