Little, Brown and Company

Alisha Barba’s dreams of being a detective were shattered when a murder suspect broke her back across a brick wall. Now on her feet again, with her police career in limbo, she receives a message from an old school friend, Cate Beaumont, who is eight months pregnant and in trouble. On the night they arrange to meet, Cate is mown down by a car that kills her husband instantly. As paramedics fight to save her life they discover there is no baby. Her pregnancy is an elaborate lie, a cruel deception. Why? What happened? As Alisha sets out to answer these questions she is drawn deeper and deeper into a dangerous quest that will take her from the East End of London to Amsterdam’s red light district and into a murky underworld of sex trafficking, slavery and exploitation. A gripping thriller, with twists at every turn, The Night Ferry is Michael Robotham’s finest novel yet.

It's Edinburgh in August. A group of people, drawn to the city for the forthcoming Festival, meet for the first time, little knowing that the events of this long hot summer, and the arrival of Angelique Pascal, a talented and beautiful violinist, will throw their lives into turmoil. Angelique Pascal is in Edinburgh to headline at the Festival’s finale and her fiery spirit is already making waves. Tired of being controlled by her overbearing tutor, Albert, Angelique finds herself yearning for a moment’s respite from both the constant touring and the restrictions of her celebrity status. But when events take a sinister turn and Angelique must flee in terror from all that she has known, she finds safety in the most unexpected place. Starburst is the enthralling new novel from the bestselling author of An Ocean Apart. Combining intrigue, passion and suspense, this is storytelling of the highest quality.

For Crystal Wyatt, growing up on a ranch in Northern California, Hollywood seems a million miles away. Bold, passionate and enchantingly beautiful, she knows her destiny is waiting for her. But no one said it was going to be easy. Singled out for her devastating looks and captivating singing voice, Crystal soon embarks on the dangerous road to stardom. Her dreams are creeping closer, but then so are those determined to stop her. And when the darkest of scandals comes out, Crystal must face the challenge of her life.

Bettina Daniels has it all. Pampered, adored and adorable, she has youth, beauty and the most glamorous of lifestyles. Everything her father’s love, fame and money can buy. Then, without warning, her father is gone. Bettina is left with a mountain of debts and no one to pick up the pieces. Lost and lonely in a difficult new life, Bettina must learn to take her own chances. But can she resist the promises of strangers... however tempting they might be?

Step beyond the wall of your own imagination to the place where erotic enchantment lies… When Sleeping Beauty awakes at the Prince's kiss it is the beginning of our story, not the end. Once the prisoner of a spell, locked in the sleep of innocence — now she is the prisoner of sensual love, held fast by the magic of desire. Claimed by the Prince as the slave of his passions, Sleeping Beauty learns that tenderness and cruelty, pleasure and pain, longing and fulfilment are all one in the awesome kingdom of love. Beauty she is — but she is sleeping no more…

Isabella and Amadeo. The toast of international society and the undisputed leaders of Rome couture. Together they ruled the House of San Gregoria, a monument to Isabella's fabulous designs and stunning beauty, to Amadeo's unerring flair and golden Florentine elegance. And beyond their enchanted world of splendour shone their boundless, undying love for one another. Then suddenly their dream was shattered. Amadeo was gone — for ever. Isabella fled to Rome for a new life of bitter struggles and haunting memories. With her proud courage and all her zest for living could she ever say goodbye to the past and dare… to love again.

Deep in the heart of Russia, a group of casually dressed young men are learning a different kind of lesson. The undergraduates sprawled around a game board aren't chilling out on campus: the young KGB agents attending the Charm School are brushing up on their American. When a young tourist goes to the aid of a stranger on a dark Russian road, he is astonished to find a fellow American on the run. The man has been missing for over a decade, plucked from the jungles of Vietnam to become an unwilling tutor at the institution. Now his former students are poised to strike at the heart of America.

Ben Tyson is a good man, a brilliant corporate executive, an honest handsome family man, admired by men and desired by women. But sixteen years ago Ben Tyson was a lieutenant in Vietnam. There, in 1968, the men under his command committed a murderous atrocity — and together swore never to tell the world what they had done. Now the press, army justice and the events he tried to forget have caught up with Ben Tyson. His family, his career and his personal sense of honour hang in the balance.

They were forced to meet by the rivers of Babylon...In Israel, two Concorde jets take off for a UN conference that will finally bring peace to the Middle East. Covered by F-14 fighters, accompanied by security men, the planes carry warriors, pacifists, lovers, enemies, dignatories — and a bomb planted by a terrorist mastermind. Suddenly they're forced to crash-land at an ancient desert site. Here, with only a handful of weapons, the men and women of the peace mission must make a desperate stand against an army of crack Palestinian commandos — while the Israeli authorities desperately attempt a rescue bid. A story of compulsive excitement, rich in personal drama and political tension that must rank as one of the greatest of our times.

For forty years Western intelligence agents have known a terrible secret: the Russians have a mole — code-named Talbot — inside the CIA. At first Talbot is suspected of killing European agents. Then a street-smart ex-cop uncovers a storm of espionage and murder on the streets of New York, while in a Long Island suburb a civic demonstration against the Russian mission masks a desperate duel of nerves and wits. Engineered by Talbot, a shadow world of suspicion and deceit is spilling onto the streets — leading to a new Soviet weapon and a first-strike war plan threatening the foundations of American government. For the U.S., time is running out. For Talbot, the time is now...

After 6,000 years of horrifying stillness, Akash, mother of all vampires and Queen of the Damned, has risen from her sleep to let loose the powers of the night. But her monstrous plan for ruling the worlds of the living and the undead must be stopped before she destroys mankind, and it falls to the evil vampire Lestat to fight her all-encompassing evil — for it is he who challenged her power by waking her from sleep.

A love affair pushed to the brink ... Adrienne Willis must rethink her entire life when her husband abandons her for another woman. She flees to the small coastal town of Rodanthe, North Carolina, to look after a friend's guesthouse for the weekend. But when a major storm moves in, she is stranded. Until a guest arrives — Paul Flanner, who has just sold his medical practice and arrived in Rodanthe to escape his own shattered past. Now, with the storm closing in, two wounded people will turn to each other for comfort — and in one weekend, set in motion feelings that will resonate throughout the rest of their lives.

Jaz Parks, assassin and black ops agent, is plunged head-first into her latest mission — a confrontation between her ancient vampire boss Vayl, and his previous undead allies. The CIA is hunting arch-criminal Samon, and needs Vayl’s ex-friends for information. But the team will have to wade through knotty vampire politics, a were-on-were blood-fest and some nasty (oh, and blood smeared…) visions to get to it. Luckily Jaz’s highly trained killing-machine brother is on the job. Unluckily, he has reached the end of his carefully hoarded sanity, and the mission targets suddenly don’t seem quite so realistic. The last thing Jaz wants is to end up on the dead side of the balance sheet …

Jody never asked to become a vampire. But when she wakes up under an alley Dumpster with a badly burned arm, an aching neck, superhuman strength, and a distinctly Nosferatuan thirst, she realises the decision has been made for her. Making the transition from the nine-to-five grind to an eternity of nocturnal prowlings is going to take some doing, however, and that's where C. Thomas Flood fits in. A would-be Kerouac from Incontinence, Indiana, Tommy (to his friends) is biding his time night-clerking and frozen turkey bowling in a San Francisco Safeway. But all that changes when a beautiful, undead redhead walks through the door ...and proceeds to rock Tommy's life — and afterlife — in ways he never imagined possible.

I tell you your mine will be in ruins and your home destroyed and your children forgotten... but this hill will be standing still to confound you’. So curses Morty Donovan when ‘Copper John’ Brodrick builds his mine at Hungry Hill. The Brodricks of Clonmere gain great wealth by harnessing the power of Hungry Hill and extracting the treasure it holds. The Donovans, the original owners of Clonmere Castle, resent the Brodricks’ success, and consider the great house and its surrounding land theirs by rights. For generations the feud between the families has simmered, always threatening to break into violence...

To be irrevocably in love with a vampire is both fantasy and nightmare woven into a dangerously heightened reality for Bella Swan. Pulled in one direction by her intense passion for Edward Cullen, and in another by her profound connection to werewolf Jacob Black, she has endured a tumultuous year of temptation, loss and strife to reach the ultimate turning point. Her imminent choice to either join the dark but seductive world of immortals or pursue a fully human life has become the thread from which the fate of two tribes hangs. Now that Bella has made her decision, a startling chain of unprecedented events is about to unfold with potentially devastating and unfathomable consequences. Just when the frayed strands of Bella's life — first discovered in TWILIGHT, then scattered and torn in NEW MOON and ECLIPSE — seem ready to heal and knit together, could they be destroyed... forever?

Cold War is the story of the half-century since the end of the Second World War — the story of our lives. Its framework is the confrontation, military and ideological, between two great powers that dominated the world during these years. It is a story of crises and conflict on a global scale: from the Berlin Blockade and the Cuban Missile Crisis, to the tanks in the streets of Warsaw, Budapest and Prague, to spies, student riots and encounters in space. In Cold War, Jeremy Isaacs and Taylor Downing record epic history through the detail of individual human experience: the recollections not only of statesmen whose decisions led to these momentous events, but also of the ordinary men and women whose lives were bound up in these years of conflict. Cold War is the first comprehensive history for the general reader to benefit from the recent opening of Soviet, East European and Chinese archives as well as formerly classified American documents. In a driving narrative that it both gripping and informative, the true story of the Cold War can at last be told.

In a darkened room a young man sits telling the macabre and eerie story of his life — the story of a vampire, gifted with eternal life, cursed with an exquisite craving for human blood. Anne Rice's compulsively readable novel is arguably the most celebrated work of vampire fiction since Bram Stoker's Dracula was published in 1897. As the Washington Post said on its first publication, it is a 'thrilling, strikingly original work of the imagination... sometimes horrible, sometimes beautiful, always unforgettable'.

After their fantastic trip round the world in 2004, fellow actors and bike fanatics Ewan McGregor and Charley Boorman couldn't shake the travel bug. And after an inspirational UNICEF visit to Africa, they knew they had to go back and experience this extraordinary continent in more depth. And so they set off on their 15,000-mile journey with two new BMWs loaded up for the trip. Joining up with producer/directors Russ Malkin and David Alexanian and the Long Way Round team, their route took them from John O'Groats at the northernmost tip of Scotland to Cape Agulhas on the southernmost tip of South Africa. Riding through spectacular scenery, often in extreme temperatures, Ewan and Charley faced their hardest challenges yet. With their trademark humour and honesty they tell their story — the drama, the dangers and the sheer exhilaration of riding together again, through a continent filled with magic and wonder.

Prisoner of the palace. Serena was almost too beautiful. Yet behind her aristocratic face there was something hurt, something closed. When she went back to the family palace after the war she was searching for a shining fragment of the past to hold to her heart. The last thing she was looking for was love. But the past was about to vanish for ever, consumed in love so complete it made Serena dissolve with passion in the warm Italian night. All she had treasured before had been taken from her — would it last this time? Or would the priceless promise of love for a lifetime

London, 1838: the controversial practice of Mesmerism, with its genuine practitioners and its fraudulent chancers, has hypnotised the city. Miss Cordelia Preston, a beautiful, ageing, out-of-work actress terrified of returning to the poverty of her childhood, suddenly emerges as a Lady Phreno-Mesmerist. In her candle-lit Bloomsbury basement she learns to harness her talent — and to finally look towards the future. But success is fragile when you have a past filled with secrets. On a wintry, moonlit night a body is found in Bloomsbury Square, and what began as an audacious subterfuge erupts into a scandal. Cordelia's past is revealed, bringing not only heartache but terror — and the mystery of a cloaked figure who waits for her in the shadowy London streets.

'Twas the night (okay, more like the week) before Christmas and little Joshua Barker is in desperate need of a Christmas miracle. Josh is sure he saw Santa take a shovel to the head and now the seven year old has only one prayer: Please Santa, come back from the dead! But coming to Earth, seeking a small child whose wish needs granting, is none other than Archangel Raziel. Unfortunately, he's not sporting the brightest halo in the bunch and before you can say 'Kris Kringle', he's botched his sacred mission and sent the residents of Pine Cove headlong into Christmas chaos, culminating in the most hilarious and horrifying holiday party the town has ever seen.

Mia thinks of herself as a grown up. Her twenty-two-year-old sister, Clare, is once again in the death throes of an affair that was always doomed to failure. Mia now understands that relationships need work; that in an adult partnership, passion and spontaneity give way to something different but more lasting. With Pete she knows that her search for 'The One' can stop. Until, tripping over Pete's phone on the way to the loo one night, she reads a text message that sends her blood cold. Everything in it — its tone, the kisses at the end, Pete's evasions about the sender 'Liz' — is wrong, and suddenly the blinkers are off. It's time to get back in the game, and with everything to play for, Mia is about to discover a capacity for deceit she never knew she had. After all, when Happy Ever After is at stake, any weapon at your disposal is fair game — isn't it?

Wildly funny, unexpectedly poignant, wickedly observant, SEX AND THE CITY blazes a glorious, drunken cocktail trail through New York, as Candace Bushnell, columnist and social critic par excellence, trips on her Manolo Blahnik kitten heels from the Baby Doll Lounge to the Bowery Bar. An Armistead Maupin for the real world, she has the gift of assembling a huge and irresistible cast of freaks and wonders, while remaining faithful to her hard core of friends and fans: those glamorous, rebellious, crazy single women, too close to forty, who are trying hard not to turn from the Audrey Hepburn of BREAKFAST AT TIFFANY'S into the Glen Close of FATAL ATTRACTION, and are — still — looking for love.