Bloomsbury Publishing

Berlin, 1946. During one of the coldest winters on record, Pavel Richter, a decommissioned GI, finds himself at odds with a rogue British Army colonel and a Soviet General when a friend deposits the frozen body of a dead Russian spy in his apartment. So begins the race to take possession of the spy's secret, a race which threatens Pavel's friendship with a street orphan named Anders and his budding love for Sonia, his enigmatic upstairs neighbour. As the action hurtles towards catastrophe, the hunt merges with one for the truth about the novel's protagonist: who exactly is Pavel Richter?

When Nelly reads a description of herself in a book, she is convinced that she is a mouse after all she is grey, has big ears and a thin tail. When she meets some mice, the confusion only grows in this delightfully funny tale of mixed messages and taking everything you read in books just a little too literally.

It is 1837, and for the luxuriantly bearded Pirate Captain and his rag-tag pirate crew, life on the high seas has gotten a little dull. With nothing to do but twiddle their hooks and lounge aimlessly on tropical beaches, the Captain decides it's time they had an adventure. A surprisingly successful boat raid leads them to the young Charles Darwin, in desperate need of their help. And so the pirates set forth for London in a bid to save the scientist from the evil machinations of a diabolical Bishop. There they encounter grisly murder, vanishing ladies, the Elephant Man — and have an exciting trip to the zoo.

encompassing Charles Darwin, Queen Victoria and a villainous secret society. A photographic retelling of the original uproarious story by acclaimed author Gideon Defoe. 'I HATE pirates!' declares Queen Victoria. Nevertheless, deterined to win the coveted Pirate of the Year Award, the Pirate Captain takes his life in his hands and enters the city of London. With the help of Darwin, a manpanzee and a crew of motley misfits, the Pirate Captain struggles to seize booty and restore his pirate honour. Having written the script for the film, Gideon Defoe has brilliantly revisited his story for younger readers. This hilarious book will delight a new generation of fans.

Using the full-color stickers, children will love creating new adventures for the Pirate Captain and his band of misfits. Fans can play out scenes from the film or imagine fresh dangers for all their favorite characters. The possibilities are as varied as their imaginations!

London, 1840: Wagner's latest opera plays to packed houses while disgruntled workers gather in crowded pubs to eat ice cream and plan the downfall of the bourgeoisie. And the Pirate Captain — his disguise proving something of a letdown — finds himself incarcerated in Scotland Yard, in a case of mistaken identity. Discovering that his doppelganger is none other than Karl Marx, the Captain and his crew are unwittingly caught up in a sinister plot to discredit the communists. From the gloomy streets of Soho to the leafy boulevards of Paris, The pirates! In an Adventure with Communists is a story of intellectual giants, enormous beards, volcanoes and valkyries, doubloons and dancing girls, and a quest to discover whether ham really might be the opium of the people.

'How can you talk about being civil when innocent animals are being tortured to death? Civil? I'll be civil when the killing's done'. The island of Anacapa, off the coast of California, is overrun with black rats which are threatening the ancient population of ground-nesting birds. Alma Boyd Takesue of the National Park Service is the spokesperson for a campaign to exterminate these man-introduced rodents once and for all. Alma, highly self-disciplined with a stubborn streak, speaks as a conservationist, though the fact that her grandmother was once stranded on Anacapa for three weeks with nothing but thousands of crawling rats for company might explain some of her zeal. With days to go before the aerial rat-poisoning, Alma's plan is in danger of sabotage. Dave LaJoy and Anise Reed, a pair of notorious environmental activists, are recognisable from a distance by his knotted dreadlocks and her flame-red cyclone of hair. Dave is an electronics salesman with barely-controlled rages, for whom the plight of the rats is yet another of life's many injustices, along with lazy tramps and second-rate wine. Anise is a struggling folk singer with her own, terrible reasons for getting involved in 'the cause'. From the outset, Alma, Dave and Anise are at ideological loggerheads. But when Alma's sights turn to the infestation of non-native pigs on Santa Cruz — where Anise was brought up by her single mother and a clan of ranchers — the stakes are raised, and the debate threatens to boil over into something much more real... When the Killing's Done is T.C. Boyle's blistering new novel, a sweeping epic of family, ecology and the right to life — no matter what the fallout.

There were people on the banks of the river. Among the tangled waterways and giant anacondas of the Brazilian Rio Negro, an enigmatic scientist is developing a drug that could alter the lives of women for ever. Dr Annick Swenson's work is shrouded in mystery; she refuses to report on her progress, especially to her investors, whose patience is fast running out. Anders Eckman, a mild-mannered lab researcher, is sent to investigate. A curt letter reporting his untimely death is all that returns. Now Marina Singh, Anders's colleague and once a student of the mighty Dr Swenson, is their last hope. Compelled by the pleas of Anders's wife, who refuses to accept that her husband is not coming home, Marina leaves the snowy plains of Minnesota and retraces her friend's steps into the heart of the South American darkness, determined to track down Dr. Swenson and uncover the secrets being jealously guarded among the remotest tribes of the rainforest. What Marina does not yet know is that, in this ancient corner of the jungle, where the muddy waters and grasses hide countless unknown perils and temptations, she will face challenges beyond her wildest imagination. Marina is no longer the student, but only time will tell if she has learnt enough.

Where does the Queen keep her armies? Up her sleevies! Laugh your way through this hilarious book packed with hundreds of splendidly silly jokes on every topic under the sun, such as animals, school and family, plus plenty of good old knock, knock jokes and lots of royalty themed jokes. Handy practical tips will advise you on crucial regal accomplishments, such as how to perfect the royal wave and how to pull off headscarf chic when walking one's corgis. Interactive elements include devising your Fantasy Royal Family and designing your own palace. A bonus fact section at the back of the book contains fascinating and little-known facts about the Queen and the Royal Family — did you know that Buckingham Palace has its own cinema, post office, chapel, swimming pool, staff cafeteria and doctor's surgery?

What better way to get to grips with animal words than in the company of the selfish crocodile! Stars, flowers and insects bring the pages to life in this fantastic first word book for children who like their books snappy.

A brother is as easily forgotten as an umbrella. James Joyce, Ulysses Recently having abandoned his RD Laing-influenced experiment in running a therapeutic community — the so-called Concept House in Willesden — maverick psychiatrist Zack Busner arrives at Friern Hospital, a vast Victorian mental asylum in North London, under a professional and a marital cloud. He has every intention of avoiding controversy, but then he encounters Audrey Dearth, a working-class girl from Fulham born in 1890 who has been immured in Friern for decades. A socialist, a feminist and a munitions worker at the Woolwich Arsenal, Audrey fell victim to the encephalitis lethargica sleeping sickness epidemic at the end of the First World War and, like one of the subjects in Oliver Sacks' Awakenings, has been in a coma ever since. Realising that Audrey is just one of a number of post-encephalitics scattered throughout the asylum, Busner becomes involved in an attempt to bring them back to life — with wholly unforeseen consequences. Is Audrey's diseased brain in its nightmarish compulsion a microcosm of the technological revolutions of the twentieth century? And if Audrey is ill at all — perhaps her illness is only modernity itself? And what of Audrey's two brothers, Stanley and Albert: at the time she fell ill, Stanley was missing presumed dead on the Western Front, while Albert was in charge of the Arsenal itself, a coming man in the Imperial Civil Service. Now, fifty years later, when Audrey awakes from her pathological swoon, which of the two is it who remains alive? Radical in its conception, uncompromising in its style, Umbrella is Will Self's most extravagant and imaginative exercise in speculative fiction to date.

When Coraline moves with her parents to a new house she is fascinated by the fact that their 'house' is only half of the building! Divided into flats years ago, there is a brick wall behind a door where once there was a corridor. Coraline, being an inquisitive and bored girl, opens the door one day to find that the wall has gone and in its place is a corridor. As she wanders down it little does she know a nightmarish mystery is beginning for her, one that takes her into the arms of alternate parents who are strangely like her own and a family life that seems almost normal — but just isn't! Will Coraline ever find her way back to her real parents? Stephen King has called Neil Gaiman 'a treasure house of story'. In this wonderful novel, which has been likened to both Alice in Wonderland and the Narnia Chronicles, we get to see Neil at his storytelling best.

On 8 September 1941, eleven short weeks after Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa, his brutal surprise attack on the Soviet Union, Leningrad was surrounded. The siege would not be lifted for two and a half years and during the 872 days of blockade and bombardment as many as two million Soviet lives would be lost. Had the city fallen, the history of the Second World War — and of the twentieth century — would have been very different. Leningrad is a gripping narrative history interwoven with personal stories — immediate accounts of daily siege life drawn from diarists and memoirists on both sides. These twentieth-century European civilians living through unbearable hardship reveal the terrible details of life in the blockaded city: the all-consuming and daily search for food; crawling up ice-rounded steps on hands and knees, hauling a bucket of water; a woman who has just buried her father noticing how the cemetery guards have used a frozen corpse with outstretched arm and cigarette between its teeth as a signpost to a mass grave; another using a dried pea to make a rattle for her evacuated grandson's first birthday, and putting it away in a drawer when she hears, six months later, that he has died of meningitis. In Leningrad, Anna Reid answers many of the previously unanswered questions about the siege. How good a job did Leningrad's leadership do — would many lives have been saved if it had been better organised? How much was Stalin's and Moscow's wariness of western-leaning Leningrad (formerly the Tsars' capital, St Petersburg) a contributing factor? How close did Leningrad come to falling into German hands? And, above all, how did those who lived through it survive?

It takes a particular kind of man to want an embroidered polo player astride his left nipple. Occasionally, when I am tired and emotional, or consumed with self-dislike, I try to imagine myself as someone else, a wearer of Yarmouth shirts and fleecy sweats, of windbreakers and rugged Tyler shorts, of baseball caps with polo players where the section of the brain that concerns itself with aesthetics is supposed to be. But the hour passes. Good men return from fighting Satan in the wilderness the stronger for their struggle, and so do I. The winner of the 2010 Man Booker Prize, Howard Jacobson, brims with life in this collection of his most acclaimed journalism. From the unusual disposal of his father-in-law's ashes and the cultural wasteland of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang to the melancholy sensuality of Leonard Cohen and desolation of Wagner's tragedies, Jacobson writes with all the thunder and joy of a man possessed. Absurdity piles upon absurdity, and glorious sentences weave together to create a hilarious, heartbreaking and uniquely human collection. This book is not just a series of parts, but an irresistible, unputdownable sum which triumphantly out-Thurbers Thurber.

No one writes about food or cooking quite like Anthony Bourdain. In his books Kitchen Confidential and A Cook's Tour, Bourdain captivated readers all over the world with his gritty, action-packed tales of the kitchen. Now he brings his inimitable style and energy to Anthony Bourdain's Les Halles Cookbook. It features over a hundred mouth watering recipes from lobster bisque to cassoulet, and from boeuf bourguignon to creme brulee, all from Anthony's own restaurant, the Brasserie Les Halles in New York. Also including Anthony's words of wisdom and general principles, this is guaranteed to be as much a good read as a guide to cooking up a storm in the kitchen.

Kirpal Singh is travelling on the slow train to Kashmir. As India passes by the window in a stream of tiny lights, glistening fields and huddled, noisy towns, he reflects on his destination, which is also his past: a military camp to which he has not returned for fourteen years... Kirpal, Kip to his friends, is timorous and barely twenty when he arrives for the first time at General Kumar's camp, nestled in the shadow of the mighty Siachen Glacier that claimed his father's life. He is placed under the supervision of Chef Kishen, a fiery, anarchic mentor with long earlobes and a caustic tongue, who guides Kip towards the heady spheres of food and women. The smell of a woman is a thousand times better than cooking the most sumptuous dinner, kid, he muses, over an evening beer. Kip is embarrassed — he has never slept with a woman, though a loose-limbed nurse in the local hospital has caught his eye. In Srinagar, Kashmir, a contradictory place of erratic violence, extremes of temperature and high-altitude privilege, Kip learns to prepare indulgent Kashmiri dishes such as Mughlai mutton and slow-cooked Nahari, as well as delicacies from Florence, Madrid, Athens and Tokyo. Months pass and, though he is Sikh, Kip feels secure in his allegiance to India, the right side of this interminable conflict. Then, one muggy day, a Pakistani terrorist with long, flowing hair is swept up on the banks of the river, and changes everything. Mesmeric, mournful and intensely lyrical, Chef is a brave and compassionate debut about hope, love and memory, set against the devastatingly beautiful, war-scarred backdrop of occupied Kashmir.

One of Tsutsui's best-known and most popular works in his native Japan, The Girl Who Leapt through Time is the story of fifteen-year-old schoolgirl Kazuko, who accidentally discovers that she can leap back and forth in time. In her quest to uncover the identity of the mysterious figure that she believes to be responsible for her paranormal abilities, she'll constantly have to push the boundaries of space and time, and challenge the notions of dream and reality.

England, 31st August 1939: the world is on the brink of war. As Hitler prepares to invade Poland, thousands of children are evacuated from London to escape the impending Blitz. Torn from her mother, eight-year-old Anna Sands is relocated with other children to a large Yorkshire estate which has been opened up to evacuees by Thomas and Elizabeth Ashton, an enigmatic childless couple. Soon Anna gets drawn into their unravelling relationship, seeing things that are not meant for her eyes — and finding herself part-witness and part-accomplice to a love affair, with unforeseen consequences.

At the end of the nineteenth century China is rocked by humiliating foreign attacks and local rebellions. The only constant is the power wielded by one woman: the resilient, ever-resourceful Tzu Hsi, also known as Empress Orchid. Moving from the intimacy of the concubine quarters into the spotlight of the world stage, Orchid makes a dramatic metamorphosis from a strong-willed young woman to a wise political leader, who must not only face the perilous condition of her fading empire but also a series of devastating personal losses. Yearning to step aside yet growing constantly into her role, only she can hold the nation's rival factions together. In this sequel to the bestselling novel Empress Orchid, Anchee Min brings to life one of the most important figures in Chinese history, a very human leader who assumes power reluctantly, and who sacrifices all she has to protect both those she loves and her doomed empire.

A feral boy is captured and civilised in the Languedoc region. A young woman is hired to look after a cloned dog that cost its owners $250,000. A widower in a self-satisfied suburb engulfs his loneliness in a sea of rats. A weary city GP is baffled by a Mexican boy, the son of a taco-seller, who can feel no pain. A junior film editor invents the death of his own daughter because he can't face going in to work. A vindictive teenager with a gasoline fixation runs into trouble with his Japanese neighbour. Two washed-up crooners in 1950s New York get creative while recording a schmaltzy Christmas special. In this beguiling new collection of stories, T. C. Boyle, one of the world's greatest storytellers, explores the improbable, the tragic, the allegorical and the altogether ordinary.

It is Moscow, in 1939. In the recesses of the infamous Lubyanka prison, a young archivist is sent to verify the authorship of an unfinished story, confiscated from one of the many political prisoners there. The writer is Isaac Babel. The great author of Red Cavalry is spending his last days forbidden to write, his final works consigned to the archivist, Pavel Dubrov — who will ultimately be charged with destroying them. Pavel, a former schoolmaster and a lover of literature, a reluctant minion in Stalin's system, makes a reckless decision: he will save the last stories of the writer he admires, whatever the cost. Pavel's daring in the face of a vast bureaucracy of evil invigorates a life that had slowly lost its meaning, even as it guarantees his almost certain undoing. A story of suspicion, courage and unexpected grace, The Archivist's Story is ultimately a tribute to the enduring power of the written word.

Twink is looking forward to her second year Summer term, but when she gets to Peony Branch she is surprised to see a new fairy, Jax. And then unpleasant pranks start being played in the Branch — the rosepetal duvet covers are torn to shreds and homework is stolen. Could it be something to do with the new girl? Or is it something more complicated than that? Glitterwings Academy is a lovingly created series by acclaimed author Lee Weatherly, writing as Titania Woods. Readers of the series can be assured of accomplished narrative, as well as stylish and exciting illustration.

It is the beginning of the summer term, and there is a big surprise for the third years — a very special treasure hunt! But even though the rest of the third years are very excited, Twink cannot find it in her heart to enjoy it. Twink's grandmother is very ill. She is in 'the Doldrums' which is an unshakeable sadness and nobody seems able to find the right 'shock of joy' that will bring her back to good health. Will Twink be able to think of something to help her beloved grandmother? Glitterwings Academy is a lovingly created series by acclaimed author Lee Weatherly, writing as Titania Woods. Readers of the series can be assured of accomplished narrative, as well as stylish and exciting illustration.

Twink can't wait to start her second term, the Summer term, at the fairy school, Glitterwings Academy. She loves the wonderful, huge oak tree that is Glitterwings Academy, and all the exciting new lessons. Best of all, she has made some new friends, Sooze and Bimi. But friendships can sometimes run into difficulty, as Twink is about to find out. Glitterwings Academy is a lovingly created series by acclaimed author Lee Weatherly, writing as Titania Woods. Readers of the series can be assured of accomplished narrative, as well as stylish and exciting illustration.