Penguin Group

Honestly, blowing up another school was the last thing I wanted to do. As the son of a Greek god, I've had my share of near-death disaster. This summer, I didn't choose to battle the cheerleading squad, but when two hissing she-devils with fangs are heading straight for you, what... read full description below.

The classic portrayal of court life in tenth-century Japan written by the court gentlewoman Sei Shonagon, ostensibly for her own amusement, «The Pillow Book» offers a fascinating exploration of life among the nobility at the height of the Heian period, describing the exquisite pleasures of a confined world in which poetry, love, fashion, and whim dominated, while harsh reality was kept firmly at a distance. Moving elegantly across a wide range of themes including nature, society, and her own flirtations, Sei Shonagon provides a witty and intimate window on a womanas life at court in classical Japan.

This selection of Poe's critical writings, short fiction and poetry demonstrates an intense interest in aesthetic issues and the astonishing power and imagination with which he probed the darkest corners of the human mind. «The Fall of the House of Usher» describes the final hours of a family tormented by tragedy and the legacy of the past. In «The Tell Tale Heart», a murderer's insane delusions threaten to betray him, while stories such as «The Pit and the Pendulum» and «The Cask of Amontillado» explore extreme states of decadence, fear and hate.

'My beautiful girls. If you've read this, you'll know it contains some — not all, but some — of the things I want my daughters to know. And the greatest of these is love ...' How would you say goodbye to those you love most in the world? Barbara must say a final farewell to her four daughters. But how can she find the words? And how can she leave them when they each have so much growing up to do? There's commitment-phobic Lisa. Brittle, unhappily married Jennifer. Free-spirited traveller Amanda. And teenage Hannah, stumbling her way towards adulthood. Barbara's answer is to write each daughter a letter, finally expressing the hopes, fears, dreams and secrets she couldn't always voice. These words will touch the girls in different — sometimes shocking — ways, unlocking emotions and passions to set them on their own journey of discovery through life.

St Vladimir's Academy isn't just any boarding school — hidden away, it's a place where vampires are educated in the ways of magic and half-human teens train to protect them. Rose Hathaway is a Dhampir, a bodyguard for her best friend Lissa, a Moroi Vampire Princess. They've been on the run, but now they're being dragged back to St Vladimir's where the girls must survive a world of forbidden romances, a ruthless social scene and terrifying night time rituals. But most of all, staying alive.

The year is AD 255 — the Roman Imperium is stretched to breaking point, its authority and might challenged along every border. The greatest threat lies in Persia to the east, where the massing forces of the Sassanid Empire loom with fiery menace. There the isolated Roman citadel of Arete awaits inevitable invasion. One man is sent to marshal the defences and shore up crumbling walls. A man whose name itself means war: a man called Ballista. Alone, Ballista is called to muster the forces and the courage to stand first and to stand hard against the greatest enemy ever to confront the Imperium. This is part one of Warrior of Rome: an epic of empire, of heroes, of treachery, of courage, and most of all, a story of brutal bloody warfare.

According to business guru Ram Charan, the process of selling is broken. Demand for competitive pricing is ever on the increase, and customers want more than great products at great prices; they want you to know how their business works, so that you can make it work better. It is time for companies to re-think their selling processes, and that's where Charan's concept of Value Creation Selling fits in. It is a new approach that while radical is nonetheless practical and produces stronger customer relationships and long term rewards. VCS will enable you to: gain a deeper knowledge of your customer's business. Use this knowledge to improve your customer's margins. Show how your product and expertise is a winning combination. Someday, every company will listen more closely to the customer.

Outcast, mute, a lone twin cut from a drunk mother in a shack full of junk, Euchrid Eucrow of Ukulore inhabits a nightmarish Southern valley of preachers and prophets, incest and ignorance. When the God-fearing folk of the town declare a foundling child to be chosen by the Almighty, Euchrid is disturbed. He sees her very differently, and his conviction, and increasing isolation and insanity, may have terrible consequences for them both. This new edition of Cave's cult classic has been cut down and reorganized by the author so the plot is clarified and the characters stand out more clearly. The book retains all its brilliance but is much more accessible to the general reader.

One summer a group of strangers — each with their own reason for wanting to step out of their busy life — meet at rented beachouse in sunny Nantucket. There's Daniel, who's causing heartbreak for his wife Bee; recently divorced Daff, who feels she's lost touch with her daughter Jess; and Michael — son of the house's mischievous, free-spirited owner Nan — who is having an ill-advised fling with his boss. With so many lost souls gathered under one roof, very soon there are tears and laughter, friendship and — for some — even love. Each one of them is hoping for a new beginning. But will any of them find it?

When Audrey makes a devastating discovery about her husband, New York radical lawyer Joel Litvinoff, she is forced to re-examine everything she thought she knew about their forty-year marriage. Joel's children will have to deal with this unsettling secret themselves, but meanwhile, they are trying to cope with their own dilemmas. Rosa, beautiful, disillusioned revolutionary, is grappling with a new-found attachment to Orthodox Judaism. Unhappily married Karla is falling in love with an unlikely suitor at the hospital where she works. Adopted brother Lenny is back on drugs again. In the course of battling their own demons and each other, every member of the family is called upon to decide what — if anything — they still believe in.

In one of the most celebrated debut novels of recent years, Ross Raisin tells the story of solitary young farmer, Sam Marsdyke, and his extraordinary battle with the world. Expelled from school and cut off from the town, mistrusted by his parents and avoided by city incomers, Marsdyke is a loner until he meets rebellious new neighbour Josephine. But what begins as a friendship and leads to thoughts of escape across the moors turns to something much, much darker with every step.

Scabrous, vicious and unpleasant in life, Lily Bloom has not been noticeably mellowed by death. She has changed addresses, of course, and now inhabits a basement flat in Dulston — London's borough for those no longer troubled by breathing — but if anything her temperament has worsened. Finding it hard to deal with the (enforced) company of a calcified, pop-obsessed fetus, her dead, foul mouthed son and three gruesome creatures made of her own unwanted fat, she must find something to do with her time. So how do the dead live? And what happens when they stop being dead?

Roy is still young when his father, a failed dentist and hapless fisherman, puts a 44 magnum to his head and commits suicide on the deck of his beloved boat. Throughout his life, Roy returns to that moment, gripped by its memory and the shadow it casts over his small-town boyhood, describing with poignant, mercurial wit his parents' woeful marriage and inevitable divorce, their kindnesses and weaknesses, the absurd and comic turning-points of his past. Finally, in Legend of a Suicide, Roy lays his father's ghost to rest. But not before he exacts a gruelling, exhilarating revenge. Revolving around a fatally misconceived adventure deep in the wilderness of Alaska, this is a remarkably tender story of survival and disillusioned love.

While clearing out her grandmother's cottage for sale, Connie Goodwin finds a parchment inscribed with the name Deliverance Dane. And so begins the hunt to uncover the woman behind the name, a hunt that takes her back to Salem in 1692...and the infamous witchcraft trials. But nothing is entirely as it seems and when Connie unearths the existence of Deliverance's spell book, the Physick Book, the situation takes on a menacing edge as interested parties reveal their desperation to find this precious artifact at any cost. What secrets does the Physics Book contain? What magic is scrawled across its parchment pages? Connie must race to answer these questions — and reveal the truth about Salem's women — before an ancient family curse once more fulfills its dark and devastating prophecy..

'More than 300 million people in the world speak English and the rest, it sometimes seems, try to...' Only Bill Bryson could make a book about the English language so entertaining. With his boundless enthusiasm and restless eye for the absurd, this is his astonishing tour of English. From its mongrel origins to its status as the world's most-spoken tongue; its apparent simplicity to its deceptive complexity; its vibrant swearing to its uncertain spelling and pronunciation, Bryson covers all this as well as the many curious eccentricities that make it as maddening to learn as it is flexible to use. Bill Bryson's classic Mother Tongue is a highly readable and hilarious tale of how English came to be the world's language.

Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.' Pipes and kettledrums herald the arrival of gypsies on their annual visit to Macondo, the newly founded village where Jose Arcadio Buendia and his strong-willed wife, Ursula, have started their new life. As the mysterious Melquiades excites Aureliano Buendia's father with new inventions and tales of adventure, neither can know the significance of the indecipherable manuscript that the old gypsy passes into their hands. Through plagues of insomnia, civil war, hauntings and vendettas, the many tribulations of the Buendia household push memories of the manuscript aside. Few remember its existence and only one will discover the hidden message that it holds...This new edition of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's most celebrated novel is published to coincide with celebrations to mark the 80th birthday of this Nobel Prize winning author in 2007.

This is a brilliant new book from the bestselling author of «The Tipping Point» and «Blink». Why are people successful? For centuries, humankind has grappled with this question, searching for the secret to accomplishing great things. In this stunning new book, Malcolm Gladwell takes us on an invigorating intellectual journey to show us what makes an extreme overachiever. He reveals that we pay far too much attention to what successful people are like, and too little attention to where successful people are from: their culture, their family, and their generation. Gladwell examines how the careers of Bill Gates and the performance of world-class football players are alike; what top fighter pilots and The Beatles have in common; why so many top lawyers are Jewish; why Asians are good at maths; and why it is correct to say that the mathematician who solved Fermat's Theorem is not a genius. Just as he did in «Blink», Gladwell overturns many of our conventional notions and creates an entirely new model for seeing the world. Brilliant and entertaining, this is a landmark work that will simultaneously delight and illuminate.

In 1939 Hitler mobilized Germany into all-out war. Richard Evans' astonishing, acclaimed history conjures up a whole society plunged into conflict — from generals and front-line soldiers to Hitler Youth activists and middle-class housewives — tracing events from the invasion of Poland and the Battle of Stalingrad to Hitler's plans for genocide and his eventual suicide. The Third Reich at War is a historical masterpiece, showing how Germany rushed headlong into destroying itself and an entire continent.

Hong Kong 1997 — only a few short months of British rule remain before the territory returns to Chinese rule. It’s a febrile place. And in that claustrophobic environment of uncertainty and fear the spooks are hard at work, jostling for position and influence. So when an elderly man emerges from the seas off the New Territories, claiming to know secrets he will share only with the Governor himself, a young MI6 agent, Joe Lennox, sees an opportunity to make his reputation. But when the old man, a high-profile Chinese professor, is spirited away in the middle of the night by Joe’s superiors in collusion with the CIA, it’s clear that there’s a great deal more than a young spy’s career at stake. The professor, it seems, holds the key to a sinister and ambitious plan that could have awesome and catastrophic repercussions for China in the twenty-first century.

At 66 Star Street in Dublin, someone is watching over the lives of the people living in its flats. But no one is aware of it — yet... One of them is ready to take the plunge and fall in love; another is torn between two very different lovers. For some, secrets will come to light, which for others will have tragic consequences.

The scar on Rhoda Gradwyn's face was to be the death of her... When the notorious investigative journalist, Rhoda Gradwyn, books into Mr Chandler-Powell's private clinic in Dorset for the removal of a disfiguring and long-standing scar, she has every prospect of a successful operation and the beginning of a new life. But the Manor holds a secret and deadly enemy. While she lies drowsily recovering from the anaesthetic a white-shrouded figure stealthily enters her bedroom and within minutes Rhoda is dead. Dalgliesh and his team, called in to investigate the murder, and later a second equally horrific death, find themselves confronted with problems even more complicated than the question of innocence or guilt.

Celebrate Doctor Who with this collection of original short stories. Relive the Doctor's adventures as he outwits Daleks, Cybermen and re-encounters the Master.

As another financial turmoil makes headlines today, the year 1929 remains the benchmark for true financial mayhem. Lords of Finance lays the blame for the meltdown at the fallibility of a small number of central bankers, men as prominent in their time as Alan Greenspan is today.

Butch O'Neal is a fighter by nature. A hard-living ex-homicide cop, he's the only human ever to be allowed in the inner circle of the Black Dagger Brotherhood. And he wants to go even deeper into the vampire world-to engage in the turf war with the lessers. His heart belongs to a female vampire, Marissa, an aristocratic beauty who's way out of his league. And if he can't have her, then at least he can fight side by side with the Brothers. But fate curses him with the very thing he wants. When Butch sacrifices himself to save a civilian vampire from the slayers, he falls prey to the darkest force in the war. Left for dead, he's found by a miracle, and the Brotherhood calls on Marissa to bring him back, though even her love may not be enough to save him.