Macmillan Publishers

First published in 2005, The Sea was critically acclaimed as an extraordinary achievement. It went on to win that year's Man Booker Prize, one of the most hotly contested in the history of the award. When Max Morden returns to the seaside village where he once spent a childhood holiday, he is both escaping from a recent loss and confronting a distant trauma. Mr and Mrs Grace and their twin children Myles and Chloe appeared that long-ago summer as if from another world. He grew to know them intricately, even intimately, and what ensued would haunt him for the rest of his years and shape everything that was to follow. In 2012 Picador celebrate our 40th anniversary. During that time we have published many prize-winning and bestselling authors including Bret Easton Ellis and Cormac McCarthy, Alice Sebold and Helen Fielding, Graham Swift and Alan Hollinghurst. Years later, Picador continue to bring readers the very best contemporary fiction, non-fiction and poetry from across the globe.

With the flair for narrative and the meticulous research that readers have come to expect, Andrew Marr turns his attention to the monarch and to the monarchy, chronicling the Queen's pivotal role at the centre of the state, which is largely hidden from the public gaze, and making a strong case for the institution itself. Arranged thematically, rather than chronologically, Marr dissects the Queen's political relationships, crucially those with her Prime Ministers; he examines her role as Head of the Commonwealth, and her deep commitment to that Commonwealth of nations; he looks at the drastic changes in the media since her accession in 1952 and how the monarchy and the monarch have had to change and adapt as a result. Indeed he argues that under her watchful eye, the monarchy has been thoroughly modernized and made as fit for purpose in the twenty-first century as it was when she came to the throne and a 'new Elizabethan age' was ushered in.

Paris, 1869. Houses are being razed, whole neighbourhoods reduced to ashes. By order of Emperor Napoleon III, Baron Haussmann has set into motion a series of large-scale renovations that will permanently transform Paris into a modern city. In the midst of the tumult, one woman will take a stand. Rose Bazelet is determined to fight against the destruction of her family home until the very end; as others flee, she stakes her claim in the basement of the house on rue Childebert, ignoring the sounds of change that come closer and closer each day. Attempting to overcome the loneliness of her daily life, she begins to write letters to Armand, her late husband. And as Rose delves into her memories, she reveals the secrets held within the walls of her beloved house.

One International Bestseller. When thirty-four-year-old ex-war veteran Jack Armstrong is told he has only weeks to live, his first concern is for his beloved wife Lizzie, and their children: baby Jackie, twelve-year-old would-be actor Cory and rebellious teenage daughter Mikki. It seems so cruel that an apparently fatal illness should claim him, a survivor of Afghanistan and Iraq, when he still has so much left to live for. On Christmas Eve, as Jack prepares to say goodbye to his family, unthinkable tragedy strikes again and Lizzie is killed in a car accident. Just when Jack thought living was far harder than dying, and the children's future looked so bleak, something remarkable happens which gives Jack the valuable second chance he'd only dreamed of. Unexpectedly, the family inherits Lizzie's beautiful childhood home on the oceanfront in South Carolina. During one unforgettable summer Jack and the children struggle to rebuild their lives. They learn to live again — and to love again. And they learn the biggest lesson of all — the importance of family.

Be careful what you wish for...John and Naomi Klaesson are grieving the death of their four-year-old son from a rare genetic disorder. They desperately want another child, but when they find out they are both carriers of a rogue gene, they realize the odds of their next child contracting the same disease are high. Then they hear about geneticist, Doctor Leo Dettore. He has methods that can spare them the heartache of ever losing another child to any disease — even if his methods are more than they can afford. At his clinic is where their nightmare begins. They should have realized something was wrong when they saw the list. Choices of eye colour, hair, sporting abilities. They can literally design their child. Now it's too late to turn back. Naomi is pregnant, and already something is badly wrong...

In the immediate aftermath of the Revolution, the Western powers were anxious to prevent the spread of Bolshevism across Europe. Lenin and Trotsky were equally anxious that the Communist vision they were busy introducing in Russia should do just that. But neither side knew anything about the other. The revolution and Russia's withdrawal from the First World War had ensured a diplomatic exodus from Moscow and the usual routes to vital information had been closed off. Into this void stepped an extraordinary collection of opportunists, journalists and spies sometimes indeed journalists who were spies and vice versa: in Moscow Britain's Arthur Ransome, the American John Reed and Sidney Reilly 'Ace of Spies' all traded information and brokered deals between Russia and the West; in Berlin, Paris and London, the likes of Maxim Litvinov, Adolf Ioffe and Kamenev tried to infiltrate the political elite and influence foreign policy to the Bolshevik's advantage. Robert Service, acclaimed historian and one of our finest commentators on matters Soviet, turns his meticulous eye to this ragtag group of people and, with narrative flair and impeccable research, reveals one of the great untold stories of the twentieth century.

The Macmillan Children's Readers bring together a variety of enjoyable fiction and non-fiction titles. Six colour coded levels, designed for children aged 6-12, stimulate the pupils' interest in reading and learning English. The Readers include activity pages and a picture dictionary or wordlist. The upper levels also have fact-files and non-fiction tales to grab the interest of both boys and girls.

The Macmillan Readers series are carefully graded from Starter to Upper Intermediate (A1-B2) to help students choose the right reading material for their ability. Our list of titles includes great stories from both contemporary and classic authors. 15th July 1988. Emma and Dexter meet for the first time on the night of their university graduation. Soon their lives will go in separate directions. But where will they be on 15 July of the following year, and the year after that? One Day is a wonderful and moving love story which takes place over the decades of the eighties and nineties.

How tall is the tallest skyscraper? Which is the biggest rocket? Which beetle is as heavy as a hamster? Read and discover the facts in Macmillan Factual Readers, a six-level series which allows young English language learners to explore a variety of fascinating real-world topics. Each reader has been carefully graded to reinforce the main structures and vocabulary covered in most major language courses. All readers include a glossary with explanations of key vocabulary. Beautifully designed in full colour with striking images, the Macmillan Factual Readers help learners build confidence and fluency in their reading ability as well as enhancing their knowledge of other subjects. Free Teaching Notes, audio and exercises are available to download.

Jackie Collins's fierce heroine Lucky Santangelo is back — with a vengeance — and the stakes are higher than ever. Love. Beauty. Success. Lucky has everything her name implies. And as the force behind a high-profile casino and hotel complex, The Keys in Vegas, Lucky has exactly what billionaire businessman Armand Jordan is determined to take from her — and he's not afraid to play dirty.

A brilliant, funny, and heartbreaking novel about the glories and vicissitudes of young love. His many awards include fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, a Whiting Writers' Award, and the Harold D. Vursell Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Author of Middlesex (bestselling winner of the 2003 Pulitzer Prize, with more than 3 million copies sold) and the now classic The Virgin Suicides (made into a haunting film by Sofia Coppola).

From David Baldacci — the modern master of the thriller and #1 worldwide bestselling novelist-comes a new hero: a lone Army Special Agent taking on the toughest crimes facing the nation. And Zero Day is where it all begins.... John Puller is a combat veteran and the best military investigator in the U.S. Army's Criminal Investigation Division. His father was an Army fighting legend, and his brother is serving a life sentence for treason in a federal military prison. Puller has an indomitable spirit and an unstoppable drive to find the truth. Now, Puller is called out on a case in a remote, rural area in West Virginia coal country far from any military outpost. Someone has stumbled onto a brutal crime scene, a family slaughtered. The local homicide detective, a headstrong woman with personal demons of her own, joins forces with Puller in the investigation. As Puller digs through deception after deception, he realizes that absolutely nothing he's seen in this small town, and no one in it, are what they seem. Facing a potential conspiracy that reaches far beyond the hills of West Virginia, he is one man on the hunt for justice against an overwhelming force. David Baldacci is one of the world's favorite storytellers. His books are published in over 45 languages and in more than 80 countries, with over 110 million copies in print. David Baldacci is also the cofounder, along with his wife, of the Wish You Well Foundation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to supporting literacy efforts across America.

Three days that could change the world's political landscape... A man wakes up to find himself lying on the ground in a railway station, his mind stripped bare of all recollection. He has no idea how he got there. He does not even know his own name. Convinced he is a drunken down and out, it isn't until a newspaper report about a satellite launch catches his eye that he begins to suspect all is not what it seems... The year is 1958, and America is about to launch its first satellite, in a desperate attempt to match the Soviet Sputnik and regain the lead in the space race. As Luke Lucas gradually unravels the mystery of his amnesia, he realizes that his fate is bound up with that of the rocket that stands ready on launch pad 26B at Cape Canaveral. And as he relearns the story of his life, he uncovers long-kept secrets about his wife, his best friend and the woman he once loved more than life itself...

Having come thus far in his deliberations, Van Veeteren gave in to temptation and lit a cigarette. It was time to address the big question, and that would no doubt need a bit of extra effort. Why? Why in hell's name should anybody march up to somebody's door, ring the bell and shoot whoever opened it? A young woman shivers in the December cold as her mother's body is laid to rest in a cemetery. The only thing that warms her is the thought of the revenge she will soon take... Then a middle-aged man is killed at his home, shot twice in the chest and twice below the belt. He had recently received a series of bizarre phone calls where an old song is played down the line — evoking an eerie sense of both familiarity and unease. Before the police can find the culprit, a second man is killed in the same way. Chief Inspector Van Veeteren and his team must dig far back into each man's past — but with few clues at each crime scene, can they find the killer before anyone else dies?

Don't you see, he'd have liked to ask her, don't you see, that if only you'd told me everything that first time we could have saved a life? Possibly two... Janek Mitter stumbles into his bathroom one morning after a night of heavy drinking, to find his beautiful young wife, Eva, floating dead in the bath. She has been brutally murdered. Yet even during his trial Mitter cannot summon a single memory of attacking Eva, nor a clue as to who could have killed her if he had not. Only once he has been convicted and locked away in an asylum for the criminally insane does he have a snatch of insight — but is it too late? Drawing a blank after exhaustive interviews, Chief Inspector Van Veeteren remains convinced that something, or someone, in the dead woman's life has caused these tragic events. But the reasons for her speedy remarriage have died with her. And as he delves even deeper, Van Veeteren realizes that the past never stops haunting the present...

Back in print after a decade, expanded with new original material, this is the first volume of George R. R. Martin's Wild cards shared-world series. There is a secret history of the world — a history in which an alien virus struck the Earth in the aftermath of World War II, endowing a handful of survivors with extraordinary powers. Some were called Aces — those with superhuman mental and physical abilities. Others were termed Jokers — cursed with bizarre mental or physical disabilities. Some turned their talents to the service of humanity. Others used their powers for evil. Wild Cards is their story. Originally published in 1987, Wild Cards I includes powerful tales by Roger Zelazny, Walter Jon Williams, Howard Waldrop, Lewis Shiner, and George R. R. Martin himself. And this new, expanded edition contains further original tales set at the beginning of the Wild Cards universe, by eminent new writers like Hugo-winner David Levine, noted screenwriter and novelist Michael Cassutt, and New York Times bestseller Carrie Vaughn.

The Macmillan Children's Readers bring together a variety of enjoyable fiction and non-fiction titles. Six colour coded levels, designed for children aged 6-12, stimulate the pupils' interest in reading and learning English. The Readers include activity pages and a picture dictionary or wordlist. The upper levels also have fact-files and non-fiction tales to grab the interest of both boys and girls.

First you take a drink, F. Scott Fitzgerald once noted, then the drink takes a drink, then the drink takes you. Fitzgerald wrote alcohol into almost every one of his stories. On Booze gathers debutantes and dandies, rowdy jazz musicians, lost children and ragtime riff-raff into a newly compiled collection taken from The Crack-Up, and other works. On Booze portrays The Jazz Age as Fitzgerald experienced it: roaring, rambunctious, and lush with quite a hangover.

In 1998 Peter F. Hamilton, the master of space opera and top ten bestselling author, published his first collection of short stories in A Second Chance at Eden. Thirteen years later he returns to short fiction with a new collection. This includes 'Manhattan in Reverse, ' an original story featuring Hamilton's popular detective Paula Myo, from his bestselling Commonwealth series. From 'Watching Trees Grow' and a murder mystery set in an alternative Oxford in the 1800s, to 'The Forever Kitten' and the questions of eternal youth and the sacrifice required to pursue this, these stories deal with intricate themes and sociological issues. They take an intriguing look at what it is it that makes us enduringly human. With all his usual wonderfully imagined futuristic technology, complex characters and brilliantly conceived storytelling, Peter F. Hamilton shows yet again what makes him Britain's number one science fiction writer.

Over the last decade, through digital media, we have crossed a number of significant thresholds: the interconnection of over half of the world's adult population through mobile telephony and the internet and the devotion of more than half the waking hours of a western generation to mediated experience. Yet little mainstream thought has been given to what these transitions signify for the business of daily living; and what thought there has been too often focuses on grand claims of loss or gain. This book asks what it means not simply to live within a digital century, but to live well with it and within it. Unlike most other contemporary accounts, it is neither a tale of technology doom nor glory, but a pragmatic guide to what questions we need to ask of the world around us; what it might mean to answer these; and what practical steps might allow us all both to choose and to use the tools at our disposal, and to live within a digital century in as fully human a sense as possible.

Our relationship with money is one that lasts a lifetime. It can be as important as family life, as competitive as work, and as exciting and secretive as love. Yet books about money tend to take one of two routes: a) how to get more, or b) how to deal with less. This book turns these questions upside down, and looks not at money itself, but at the way we view it. How does money drive us? How does it frighten us? And how can it help us make sense of who we are? Money is too important a part of life for us not to worry about, but by approaching it differently, we can change the way we perceive its worth. With surprising and enlightening new insights, How to Worry Less About Money will help you realise what material wealth really means.

From the New York Times bestselling author of Sarah's Key and A Secret Kept comes an absorbing new novel about one woman's resistance during an epoque that shook Paris to its very core. Paris, France: 1860's. Hundreds of houses are being razed, whole neighborhoods reduced to ashes. By order of Emperor Napoleon III, Baron Haussman has set into motion a series of large-scale renovations that will permanently alter the face of old Paris, moulding it into a modern city. The reforms will erase generations of history — but in the midst of the tumult, one woman will take a stand. Rose Bazelet is determined to fight against the destruction of her family home until the very end; as others flee, she stakes her claim in the basement of the old house on rue Childebert, ignoring the sounds of change that come closer and closer each day. Attempting to overcome the loneliness of her daily life, she begins to write letters to Armand, her beloved late husband. And as she delves into the ritual of remembering, Rose is forced to come to terms with a secret that has been buried deep in her heart for thirty years. The House I Loved is both a poignant story of one woman's indelible strength, and an ode to Paris, where houses harbor the joys and sorrows of their inhabitants, and secrets endure in the very walls...

A wry exchange between an IT-savvy donkey, a book-loving ape and a mouse forms this playful and light-hearted look at the role of books in our digital age. With a subversive and signature Lane Smith twist, this satisfying and perfectly executed picture book has something to say to children and adults alike about the importance and joy of reading.

'Compulsive enough to read in a single sitting, brilliantly intelligent, elegantly constructed and ultimately intriguing' The Times First published in 2002, The Lovely Bones became an instant worldwide bestseller. There are now over ten million copies in print. A film adaptation of the novel, directed by Peter Jackson, was released in 2010. Susie Salmon was fourteen years old when she was murdered by a man from her neighbourhood. Now in heaven, she can have whatever she wishes for except the one thing she wants most: to be back with the people she loved on earth. Susie watches from above as her suburban family is torn apart by grief; as her friends grow up, fall in love, and do all the things she never had the chance to do herself. In time, Susie will realise that even in death, life is not quite out of reach... In 2012 Picador celebrate our 40th anniversary. During that time we have published many prize-winning and bestselling authors including Bret Easton Ellis and Cormac McCarthy, Alice Sebold and Helen Fielding, Graham Swift and Alan Hollinghurst. Years later, Picador continue to bring readers the very best contemporary fiction, non-fiction and poetry from across the globe.