«To Don Raymonde Aprile's children he was a loyal family member, their father's adopted «nephew». To the FBI he was a man who would rather ride his horses than do Mob business. No one knew why Aprile, the last great American Don, had adopted Astorre Viola many years before in Sicily; no one suspected how he had carefully trained him... and how, while the Don's children claimed respectable careers in America, Astorre Viola waited for his time to come. Now his time has arrived. The Don is dead, his murder one bloody act in a drama of ambition and deceit — from the deadly compromises made by an FBI agent to the greed of two crooked NYPD detectives and the frightening plans of a South American mob kingpin. In a collision of enemies and lovers, betrayers and loyal soldiers, Astorre Viola will claim his destiny. Because after all these years, this moment is in his blood...»

Humphrey Van Weyden, rescued by the crew of the Ghost, becomes an unwilling sailor under the command of Wolf Larsen.

Educated in the Florence of Cosimo de' Medici, trained in knighthood at his father's mountaintop castle, Vittorio inhabits a world of courtly splendor and country pleasures — a world suddenly threatened when his entire family is confronted by an unholy power. In the midst of this upheaval, Vittorio is seduced by the beautiful and sinister vampire Ursula — setting in motion a chilling chain of events that will mark his life for eternity. Against a backdrop of the wonders — both sacred and profane — and the beauty and ferocity of Renaissance Italy, Anne Rice creates a passionate and tragic legend of doomed young love and lost innocence.

«This is a narrative particle accelerator that zooms between Wild Turkey Whiskey and Bob Dylan, unicorn skulls and voracious librarians, John Coltrane and Lord Jim. Science fiction, detective story and post modern manifesto all rolled into one rip-roaring novel, «Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World» is the tour de force that expanced Haruki Murakami's international following, tracking one man's descent into the kafkaesque underworld farce, compassion and detachment, slang and philosophy. The result is a wildly inventive fantasy and a meditation on the many uses of the mind.»

When he hears her favourite Beatles song, Toru Watanabe recalls his first love Naoko, the girlfriend of his best friend Kizuki. Immediately he is transported back almost twenty years to his student days in Tokyo, adrift in a world of uneasy friendships, casual sex, passion, loss and desire — to a time when an impetuous young woman called Midori marches into his life and he has to choose between the future and the past.

Gertrude has lost her husband and Anne, an ex-nun, her God. They plan to live together and do good works. Tim is a different sort of soldier. He plans to live off rich friends. Who will judge whom in this story?

«The hill people and the Mexicans arrived on the same day. It was a Wednesday, early in September 1952. The Cardinals were five games behind the Dodgers with two weeks to go, and the season looked hopeless. The cotton, however, was waist high to my father, almost over my head, and he and my grandfather could be heard before supper whispering words that were seldom heard. It could be a «good crop». Thus begins the new novel from John Grisham, a story inspired by his own childhood in rural Arkansas. The narrator is a farm boy named Luke Chandler, age seven, who lives in the cotton fields with his parents and grandparents in a little house that's never been painted. The Chandlers farm eighty acres that they rent, not own, and when the cotton is ready they hire a truckload of Mexicans and a family from the Ozarks to help harvest it. For six weeks, they pick cotton, battling the heat, the rain, the fatigue, and sometimes, each other. As the weeks pass Luke sees and hears things no seven year old could possibly be prepared for, and finds himself keeping secrets that not only threaten the crop but will change the lives of the Chandlers forever. «A Painted House» is a moving story of one boy's journey from innocence to experience.»

This is the story of nine people, each of whom is looking for love, and the resulting complex relationships between them. Impelled by affection, lust, lost scruple, illusion and disillusion, wanting to be free yet needing to be involved, these characters perform the linked figures of their destiny.

Marian Taylor, who has come as a 'companion' to a lonely woman in a remote castle, becomes aware that her employer is a prisoner, not only of her own obsessions, but of an unforgiving husband. Hannah, the Unicorn, seemingly an image of persecuted virtue, fascinates those who surround her, some of whom plan to rescue her from her dream of redemptive suffering. But is she an innocent victim, a guilty woman, a mad woman, or a witch?

After coming home at the end of World War II, Walter Mosca finds himself too restless for his civilian role in America. So he returns to Germany to find the woman he had once loved — and to start some kind of life in a vanquished country. But ahead of Walter stretches a dark landscape of defeat and intrigue, as he succumbs to the corrupting influences of a malevolent time. Now he enters a different kind of war, one in which he must make a fateful decision–between love and ambition, passion and greed, life and death...

Do you like green eggs and ham? If so, you'll love them with flaps and stickers! Flip the flaps to see where those green eggs and ham will pop up next! All the fun and charm of the original book is here in this interactive version of Dr. Seuss's classic Green Eggs and Ham!

«April 1193. England's King Richard Lionheart languishes in a German prison, and treason scents the air. Richard's younger brother, John, seizes Windsor Castle, and Dowager Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine summons her trusted personal «queen's man», Justin de Quincy, to do the impossible — mediate a truce with her rebel son. Amid such fateful events, the murder of a Welsh peddler's daughter seems small. But the cruel demise of the beautiful Melangell so troubles Justin that not even a threatened French invasion can keep him from investigating her death. Yet can he bring Melangell's craven killer to justice?»

After Mario Puzo wrote his internationally acclaimed The Godfather, he has often been imitated but never equaled. Puzo's classic novel, The Sicilian, stands as a cornerstone of his work — a lushly romantic, unforgettable tale of bloodshed, justice, and treachery...The year is 1950. Michael Corleone is nearing the end of his exile in Sicily. The Godfather has commanded Michael to bring a young Sicilian bandit named Salvatore Guiliano back with him to America. But Guiliano is a man entwined in a bloody web of violence and vendettas. In Sicily, Guiliano is a modern day Robin Hood who has defied corruption — and defied the Cosa Nostra. Now, in the land of mist-shrouded mountains and ancient ruins, Michael Corleone's fate is entwined with the dangerous legend of Salvatore Guiliano: warrior, lover, and the ultimate Siciliano.

Julia Lambert is in her prime, the greatest actress in England. Off stage, however, she is bored with her handsome husband, coquettish and undisciplined. She is at first flattered and amused by the attentions of a shy and eager young fan, but before long Julia is amazed to find herself falling wildly, dangerously, in love.

From post-war rationing to the glut of the Thatcher years, from Harold Macmillan's famous 'You've never had it so good' to the winter of discontent, this book contains the essential stuff of modern history. As Britain gets the bomb, CND starts up to ban it. As the cold war years roll on, many a politician is caught with a face as red as the Russian flag. Further afield there's trouble in Cyprus, a crisis over Suez and a serious argument brewing over Icelandic cod! At home the poor old royal family spirals inexorably towards their annus horribilis.

Alternate History is historical fiction that examines the ramifications of a change or changes in known history. Alternate History can use science-fiction devices — such as time-travel — to change history, or it can simply pick a point where, had things merely happened differently (for example: Abraham Lincoln decided not to go to the theater that night, or Henry VIII stayed married to his first wife), history might have taken another path altogether. These books take place 20 years after the Worldwar series. The story begins with the arrival of the alien colonization fleet, and a new phase of the invasion brings thousands of extraterrestrials to Earth.

Crippled and disconsolate, sixteen-year-old Catalina is the one person unable to join in the festivities of the Feast of the Assumption. Yet that is when she miraculously meets and talks with the Blessed Virgin as though she were her own mother. But in the dark days of the Spanish Inquisition, the Church is apt to take a serious view of such an ostentatious claim. The last of Maugham's novels, Catalina is a romantic celebration of Spain and a delightfully mischievous satire on absolutism.

In this stunning novel Andre Dubus III set in present-day California a story of human conflict that has the power and resonance of a classical tragedy. Working on a road crew in California, a former colonel in the Shah's Air Force yearns to restore his family's dignity. When an attractive bungalow comes up at a country auction for a fraction of its value, he sees an opportunity to dream his own American Dream, for himself, his wife and children. But for the house's former owner, a recovering alcoholic and addict down on her luck, the loss of her father's house is the latest in a series of insults life has dealt her. When he becomes involved with a married policeman who takes up her cause, the stage is set for a gut-wrenching tragedy, which keeps the reader gripped and moved to the last page. Dubus has an extraordinary ability to get us inside each of his characters, to see the world as it is for each of them. These are ordinary people, people just looking for a small piece of ground to stand on, driven by the same ordinary needs into inevitable conflict — a conflict in which even the reader, rooting for all of them, has no safe haven. Unfolding relentlessly from its opening pages, House of Sand and Fog is a narrative triumph. It turns both the traditional immigrant success story and a modern love story upside down with a heartrending outcome, combining American realism with a Shak.

The 15th novel in the bestselling series finds Kinsey Milhone investigating why her ex-husband Mickey, the man she left years ago after his implication in a fatal beating, lies dying in an L.A. hospital. Kinsey uncovers evidence that Mickey was innocent of the beating charge, but as she searches those in Mickey's life, she must also search the blind spots of her own life, including one that hides a killer. A New York Times Notable Book.

Much of Peter Ackroyd's work has been concerned with the life and past of London but here, as a culmination, is his definitive account of the city. For him it is an organism with its own laws of growth and change, so this book is a biography rather than a history. Ackroyd reveals the dozens of ways in which the continuity of the city survives — in ward boundaries unchanged since the Middle Ages, in vocabulary and in various traditions — showing London as constantly changing, yet forever the same in essence.