Shortlisted for the Booker Prize Time's Arrow tells the story, backwards, of the life of Nazi war criminal, Doctor Tod T Friendly. He dies and then feels markedly better, breaks up with his lovers as a prelude to seducing them and mangles his patients before he sends them home... Escaping from the body of the dying doctor who had worked in Nazi concentration camps, the doctor's consciousness begins living the doctor's life backwards, aware only that he is living the life of a horrible man at a horrible place in time.

In this propulsive novel by the author of Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World and The Elephant Vanishes, one of the most idiosyncratically brilliant writers at work in any language fuses science fiction, the hard-boiled thriller, and white-hot satire into a new element of the literary periodic table. As he searches for a mysteriously vanished girlfriend, Haruki Murakami's protagonist plunges into a wind tunnel of sexual violence and metaphysical dread in which he collides with call girls; plays chaperone to a lovely teenaged psychic; and receives cryptic instructions from a shabby but oracular Sheep Man. Dance Dance Dance is a tense, poignant, and often hilarious ride through the cultural Cuisinart that is contemporary Japan, a place where everything that is not up for sale is up for grabs.

On they went singing 'Eternal Memory', and whenever they stopped, the sound of their feet, the horses and the gusts of wind seemed to carry on their singing...Doctor Zhivago is the epic novel of Russia in the throes of revolution and one of the greatest love stories ever told. Yuri Zhivago, physician and poet, wrestles with the new order and confronts the changes cruel experience has made in him and the anguish of being torn between the love of two women.

Until that September of 1952, Luke Chandler had never kept a secret or told a single lie. But in the long, hot summer of his seventh year, two groups of migrant workers — and two very dangerous men — came through the Arkansas Delta to work the Chandler cotton farm. And suddenly mysteries are flooding Luke's world. A brutal murder leaves the town seething in gossip and suspicion. A beautiful young woman ignites forbidden passions. A fatherless baby is born... and someone has begun furtively painting the bare clapboards of the Chandler farmhouse, slowly, painstakingly, bathing the run-down structure in gleaming white. And as young Luke watches the world around him, he unravels secrets that could shatter lives — and change his family and his town forever...

«Glue» is the story of four boys growing up in the Edinburgh schemes, and about the loyalties, the experiences — and the secrets — that hold them together into their thirties. Four boys becoming men: Juice Terry, the work-shy fanny-merchant, with corkscrew curls and sticky fingers; Billy the boxer: driven, controlled, playing to his strengths; Carl, the Milky Bar Kid, drifting along to his own soundtrack; and the doomed Gally — who has one less skin than everyone else and seems to find catastrophe at every corner. As we follow their lives from the seventies into the new century — from punk to techno, from speed to Es — we can see each of them trying to struggle out from under the weight of the conditioning of class and culture, peer pressure and their parents' hopes that maybe their sons will do better than they did. What binds the four of them is the friendship formed by the scheme, their school, and their ambition to escape from both; their loyalty fused in street morality: back up your mates, don't hit women and, most importantly, never grass — on anyone. Despite its scale and ambition, «Glue» has all Irvine Welsh's usual pace and vigour, crackling dialogue, scabrous set-pieces and black, black humour, but it is also a grown-up book about growing up — about the way we live our lives, and what happens to us when things become unstuck.»

Greeks living in Germany who speak Italian because they run a pizzeria; Katka, whose mescalin cactus enables her to separate body and mind, with the result that they check in a psychiatric clinic together; Klaus who tries to broaden his vocabulary with the help of a radio programme, Russian for Children, and promptly ends up in jail on his first visit to Moscow; contract killers on the trams; bodies in the basement; lunatics on the road: welcome to the wonderfully absurd world of Wladimir Kaminer. Kaminer moved from Moscow to Berlin ten years ago in a lucky wave of emigration, hoping for a better life and an apartment of his own. But, he found much more: a country adrift in the extraordinary flux of reunification and a city that was casting a spell on artists, drifters, losers and hopeless idealists. Of his encounters with these people, Kaminer makes unforgettable tales of compassion and humour. And in relating the singulary offbeat encounters of his own life, he manages to capture something universal about our disjointed times.

«Twenty two year old, Sumire is in love for the first time with a woman seventeen years her senior. But, whereas Miu is a glamorous and successful older woman with a taste for classical music and fine wine, Sumire is an aspiring writer who dresses in an oversized second hand coat and heavy boots like a character in a Jack Kerouac novel. Surprised that she might, after all, be a lesbian, Sumire spends hours on the phone talking to her best friend, K about the big questions in life: what is sexual desire and should she ever tell Miu how she feels about her? K, a primary school teacher, is used to answering questions, but what he most wants to say to Sumire is «I love you.» He consoles himself by having an affair with the mother of one of his pupils. But, when a desperate Miu calls him out of the blue from a sunny Greek island and asks for his help, he soon discovers that all is not as it seems and something very strange has happened to Sumire.»

Victor Mancini has devised a complicated scam to pay for his mother's hospital care: pretend to be choking on a piece of food in a restaurant and the person who 'saves you' will feel responsible for you for the rest of their lives. Multiply that a couple of hundred times and you generate a healthy flow of cheques, week in, week out. Victor also works at a theme park with a motley group of losers, cruises sex addiction groups for action, and visits his mother, whose Alzheimer's disease now hides what may be the startling truth about his parentage.

Confess, Fletch The flight from Rome had been pleasant enough, even if the business he was on wasn’t exactly. His Italian fiance’s father had been kidnapped and presumably murdered, and Fletch is on the trail of a stolen art collection that is her only patrimony. But when he arrives in his apartment to find a dead body, things start to get complicated. Confess, Fletch Inspector Flynn found him a little glib for someone who seemed to be the only likely suspect in a pretty clear case of homicide. He wasn’t exactly uncooperative, but it wasn’t like he was entirely forthcoming either. And Flynn wasn’t entirely convinced that the nineteenth-century Western artist Edgar Arthur Tharp really occupied most of Fletch’s thoughts. Confess, Fletch With the police on his tail and a few other things to do beside prove his own innocence, Fletch makes himself at home in Boston, renting a van, painting it black, and breaking into a private art gallery. That is when he’s not “entertaining” his future mother-in-law and visiting with the good Inspector Flynn and his family.

Fletch He’s an investigative reporter whose methods are a little unorthodox. Currently he’s living on the beach with the strung-out trying to find to the source of the drugs they live for. Fletch He’s taking more than a little flack from his editor. She doesn’t appreciate his style. Or the expense account items he’s racking up. Or his definition of the word deadline. Or the divorce lawyers who keep showing up at the office. Fletch So when multimillionaire Alan Stanwyk offers Fletch the job of a lifetime, which could be worth a fortune, he’s intrigued and decides to do a little investigation. What he discovers is that the proposition is anything but what it seems.

Fletch’s Fortune He hadn’t been a practicing journalist for years, although people remembered him and he still has a few contacts. And he’s pretty sure he hasn’t paid his dues to the American Journalism Alliance anytime recently. But somebody has. Fletch’s Fortune Enjoying himself on the French Riviera, developing a killer tan, and sleeping with the neighbor’s wife, Fletch is feeling pretty flush. But when agents Eggers and Fabens show up with a little more information about Fletch than is comfortable and an invitation to the A.J.A. convention, how could he refuse? Fletch’s Fortune So he finds himself enlisted as a spy among his peers. But before he can even set up his surveillance, there’s a murder. And almost everybody’s a suspect. Because a lot of people were employed by Walter March, and most of them had a reason to hate him.

Henry Wilt, tied to a daft job and a domineering wife, has just been passed over for promotion yet again. Ahead of him at the Polytechnic stretch years of trying to thump literature into the heads of plasterers, joiners, butchers and the like. And things are no better at home where his massive wife, Eva, is given to boundless and unpredictable fits of enthusiasm — for transcendental meditation, yoga or the trampoline. But if Wilt can do nothing about his job, he can do something about his wife, in imagination at least, and his fantasies grow daily more murderous and more concrete. After a peculiarly nasty experience at a party thrown by particularly nasty Americans, Wilt finds himself in several embarrassing positions: Eva stalks out in stratospheric dudgeon, and Wilt, under the inspiration of gin, puts one of his more vindictive fantasies into effect. But suspicions are instantly aroused and Wilt rapidly achieves an unenviable notoriety in the role of The Man Helping Police With Their Enquiries. Or is he exactly helping? Wilt's problem — although he's on the other side of the fence — is the same as Inspector Flint's: where is Eva Wilt? But Wilt begins to flourish in the heat of the investigation, and as the police stoke the flames of circumstantial evidence, Wilt deploys all his powers to show that the Law can't tell a Missing Person from a hole in the ground.

The stories in this collection move from Malaya to America and England, and include some of Maugham's most famous tales; 'Flotsam and Jetsam', the story of an old woman trapped for years in a loveless marriage in the remote rubber plantations; 'The Man with the Scar', and notably the opening story 'The Vessel of Wrath', a tale of the unexpected love that grows between a devout missionary nurse and a drunken reprobate. In this second volume of his collected stories, Maugham illustrates his characteristic wry perception of human foibles and his genius for evoking compelling drama from an acute sense of time and place.

The third volume of Somerset Maugham's Collected Short Stories, introduced by the author, contains the celebrated series about Ashenden, a secret service agent in World War I. Based on Maugham's own experiences with the British Intelligence service in Switzerland, the stories are vignettes in which he dramatizes both the romance and absurdity of espionage as well as its ruthlessness and brutality. Accountable only to 'R', Ashenden travels all over the Continent on assignments which entangle him with such characters as the traitor Grantley Caypor, the passionate Guilia Lazzari, and the sinister 'hairless Mexican'.

Bilbo's Last Song is a poem written by Bilbo, hero adventurer of The Hobbit, before he leaves Middle Earth to take a ship to the Undying Lands beyond the sunset at the end of The Lord of the Rings. Pauline Baynes' illustrations depict the journey that brings the ring bearers and the company of elves to the Grey Havens and the ship that is waiting to take them on their final journey. Running concurrently is a series of vignettes showing scenes from The Hobbit; so Bilbo remembers his first journey as he contemplates his last. A friend of the author's for many years, Pauline Baynes has included several of Tolkien's own ideas in her portrayal of the characters and scenes.

My name is Meredith Gentry, but of course it's not my real name. I dare not even whisper my true name after dark for fear that one hushed word will travel over the night winds to the soft ear of my aunt, the Queen of the Air and Darkness. She wants me dead. I don't even know why. Meredith Gentry, Princess of the high court of Faerie, is posing as a human in Los Angeles, living as a P.I. specializing in supernatural crime. But now the Queen's assassin has been dispatched to fetch her back-whether she likes it or not. Suddenly Meredith finds herself a pawn in her dreaded aunt's plans. The job that awaits her: enjoy the constant company of the most beautiful immortal men in the world. The reward: the crown-and the opportunity to continue to live. The penalty for failure: death.

In a searing novel of love and loyalty, guilt and honor, the acclaimed author of the New York Times bestseller The Horse Whisperer gives his millions of readers another hero... The Smoke Jumper. His name is Connor Ford and he falls like an angel of mercy from the sky, braving the flames to save the woman he loves but knows he cannot have. For Julia Bishop is the partner of his best friend and fellow smoke jumper, Ed Tully. Julia loves them both — until a fiery tragedy on Montana's Snake Mountain forces her to choose between them, and burns a brand on all their hearts. In the wake of the fire, Connor embarks on a harrowing journey to the edge of human experience, traveling the world's worst wars and disasters to take photographs that find him fame but never happiness. Reckless of a life he no longer wants, again and again he dares death to take him, until another fateful day on another continent, he must walk through fire once more...

Tracy Beaker's not exactly sure what her mother does, because Tracy has been in foster care for as long as she can remember. She has a picture of her mother, who's pretty enough to be in movies, so maybe she is. And maybe one day Tracy's mother will show up and reclaim her long-lost daughter, and together they'll have fabulous adventures. Then again, maybe she won't. In the meantime, Tracy's doing everything she can to take care of herself — even though she has to share her birthday cake. And even though the other girls she lives with are mean and nasty and rude and horrible. Mostly. Then a journalist shows up to write a story about their orphanage, and she and Tracy strike up a special friendship. In a story written with humor and sensitivity, Tracy emerges as a spirited girl who's not quite as tough as she lets everybody think she is.

Fenella McCabe works alone in the archive section of Trust Art, housed in one of the corridors of the Tate Gallery. She is hoping to trace a piece of art stolen in the 1930s and simultaneously trying to decide between two men.

On the hottest day of the summer of 1934, thirteen-year-old Briony Tallis sees her sister Cecilia strip off her clothes and plunge into the fountain in the garden of their country house. Watching her is Robbie Turner, her childhood friend who, like Cecilia, has recently come down from Cambridge. By the end of that day, the lives of all three will have been changed for ever. Robbie and Cecilia will have crossed a boundary they had not even imagined at its start, and will have become victims of the younger girl's imagination. Briony will have witnessed mysteries, and committed a crime for which she will spend the rest of her life trying to atone.