Random House, Inc.

In his latest «New York Times» bestseller, Koontz delivers «a good, old-fashioned, barn-burning, beat-the-clock thriller that pits an innocent man against the worst sort of evil» («Denver Post»).

Ged was the greatest sorcerer in all Earthsea, but once he was called Sparrowhawk, a reckless youth, hungry for power and knowledge, who tampered with long-held secrets and loosed a terrible shadow upon the world. This is the tale of his testing, how he mastered the mighty words of power, tamed an ancient dragon, and crossed death's threshold to restore the balance.

This work presents a sparkling and sexy tale of glamour modelling, romance and the treacherous promises of fame. Eighteen-year-old Angel has only one dream: to leave behind the sheltered safety of her home and head for the modelling agencies of the big city. Young, beautiful and sexy, she seems destined for a successful career in modelling and, very quickly, the glitzy world of celebrity fame and riches becomes her new home. But then she meets Mickey, the lead singer of a boy band, who is as irresistible as he is dangerous, and Angel discovers that a rising star can just as quickly fall...

Mandy has been picked on at school for as long as she can remember. That's why she is delighted when cheeky, daring, full-of-fun Tanya picks her as a friend. Mum isn't happy — she thinks Tanya's a bad girl and a bad influence. Mandy's sure Tanya can only get her out of trouble, not into it...or could she?

In this enviable gathering, Haruki Murakami has chosen for his party some of the very best short story writers of recent years, each with their own birthday experiences, each story a snapshot of life on a single day. Including stories by Russell Banks, Ethan Canin, Raymond Carver, David Foster Wallace, Denis Johnson, Claire Keegan, Andrea Lee, Daniel Lyons, Lynda Sexson, Paul Theroux, William Trevor and Haruki Murakami, this anthology captures a range of emotions evoked by advancing age and the passing of time, from events fondly recalled to the impact of appalling tragedy. Previously published in a Japanese translation by Haruki Murakami, this English edition contains a specially written introduction.

»Fury» is a wickedly brilliant and pitch-black comedy about a middle-aged professor who finds himself in New York City in the summer of 2000. Not since, the Bombay of «Midnight's Children» have a time and place been so intensely and accurately captured in a novel. «Fury» opens on a New York living at breakneck speed in an age of unprecedented decadence. Malik Solanka, a Cambridge-educated self-made millionaire originally from Bombay, arrives looking, perversely, for escape. This former philosophy professor is the inventor of the hugely popular doll, Little Brain, whose multiform ubiquity — as puppet, cartoon and masked woman — now rankles with him. He becomes frustratingly estranged from his own creation. At the same time, his marriage is disintegrating: it escalates into a rage-filled battle, and Solanka very nearly commits an unforgiveable act. Horrified by the fury within him, he flees home and family and becomes a sort of spiritual mendicant — except that he has a credit card and a duplex on the Upper West Side. Solanka discovers that he has come to a city roiling with anger, where cab drivers spout invective and a serial killer is murdering women with a lump of concrete, a metropolis whose population is united by petty spats and bone-deep resentment. His own thoughts, emotions and desires, meanwhile, are also running wild.

High school student Mai Taniyama, her handsome boss Kazuya Shibuya (aka Naru), and other members of Shibuya Psychic Research are now tackling the eerie case of the Morishita family. What is the tragic story hidden within the Morishitas' old house? Is it haunted by a mischievous poltergeist, or by something far more sinister? As Mai and Naru dig deep to uncover the home's dark secrets, they learn that every child who has ever lived there has died under mysterious circumstances. And they soon discover that the malevolent forces at the house have a disturbing face: the creepy smile of Ayami Morishita's doll. Of course, destroying a child's toy should be a simple matter, right?

He is one of the most haunting characters in all of literature. At last, the evolution of his evil is revealed. Hannibal Lecter emerges from the nightmare of the Eastern Front, a boy in the snow, mute, with a chain around his neck. He seems utterly alone, but he has brought his demons with him. Hannibal's uncle, a noted painter, finds him in a Soviet orphanage and brings him to France, where Hannibal will live with his uncle and his uncle's beautiful and exotic wife, Lady Murasaki. Lady Murasaki helps Hannibal to heal.With her help he flourishes, becoming the youngest person ever admitted to medical school in France. But Hannibal's demons visit him and torment him.When he is old enough, he visits them in turn. He discovers he has gifts beyond the academic, and in that epiphany, Hannibal Lecter becomes death's prodigy.

World Chess Champion Garry Kasparov shares the powerful secrets of strategy he has learned from dominating the world’s most intellectually challenging game for two decades – lessons about mastering the strategic and emotional skills to navigate life’s toughest challenges and maximise success no matter how tough the competition. Drawing on a wealth of revealing and instructive stories, not only from his finest games, but also from a wide-ranging and perceptive knowledge of current affairs, Kasparov reveals the strategic ways of thinking that always give a player – in life as in chess — the edge. With a raconteur’s engaging charm, a great chess strategist takes us inside a brilliant strategic mind. As Sun Tzu distilled the secrets of the art of war and Machiavelli unveiled the lessons to be learned from courtly intrigue, Garry Kasparov – a player whose record is likely never to be rivalled – reveals how and why the game of chess is a fitting and powerful teacher, of how to be prepared for, and how to win in, even the most competitive situations.

»The Kennedys» uncovers the truth behind the greatest conspiracy story of the twentieth century: the devastating plot against America's first family. Mind-boggling in its implications, the conspiracy aimed at changing the direction of American politics but went much further, altering the political direction of the whole world. In the view of the conspirators, John F. Kennedy should never have become president. His plans to put the needs of the people before those of big business were intolerable. There were fears that he had a socialist streak which might well be identifiable as communist. From the moment he took office, he was on his way out. It was only a question of time. This is a story of hatred, revenge and murder that was covered up by stark fear for many years. It is a tale of intrigue, unholy alliances and unimaginable callousness. Revealing the amalgamation of two potent forces dedicated to ridding the White House of the Kennedys, the question demanding to be asked is: who really ruled the United States? To many across the world, the answer may be frightening. «The Kennedys» is an unbelievably dramatic, dynamic and awesomely gripping work that will shock and enlighten many.

This sweeping account of the siege of Stalingrad aims to give as panoramic a view of Soviet society during World War II as Tolstoy did of Russian life in the epoch of the Napoleonic Wars. Completed in 1960 and then confiscated by the KGB, it remained unpublished at the author's death in 1964; it was smuggled into the West in 1980. Grossman offers a bitter, compelling vision of a totalitarian regime where the spirit of freedom that arose among those under fire was feared by the state at least as much as were the Nazis. His huge cast of characters includes an old Bolshevik now under arrest, a physicist pressured to make his scientific discoveries conform to «socialist reality» and a Jewish doctor en route to the gas chambers in occupied Russia. Ironically, just as Stalingrad is liberated from the Germans, many of the characters find themselves bound in new slavery to the Soviet government. Yet Grossman suggests that the spirit of freedom can never be completely crushed. His lengthy, absorbing novel, which rejected the compromises of a lifetime and earned its author denunciation and disgrace testifies eloquently to that spirit.

Fourteen-year-old Prue and her sister Grace have been educated at home by their controlling, super-strict father all their lives. They know they are different to 'normal' girls but their attempts to find out what being an ordinary teenager are like — buying nice clothes instead of wearing Mum's odd hand-made garments, reading teenage magazines etc — are greeted with fury by their Dad. But when Dad has a stroke and ends up in hospital, unable to move or speak, Prue suddenly discovers what it's like to have a little freedom. Unable to cope with their education and a sick husband, the girls' mother sends them to the local comprehensive and they experience school life for the first time. Prue had never thought it would be so bitchy and that she'd find it so hard to fit in. The only person she can talk to is her kindly, young, handsome Art teacher, Rax. She and Rax bond over art lessons, and soon he asks to babysit for his young children while he and his wife have a night out on a Friday. This becomes a regular 'date' and Prue can't wait for the ten minutes they have along together as he drives her home. As her feelings for Rax develop, she begins to realise that perhaps he feels the same way about her. But he can't act upon them, can he? This title presents an absorbing portrait of a forbidden relationship for teenage readers from the mega bestselling Jacqueline Wilson.

This is a stunning international thriller of psychology and conspiracy, espionage and prophecy, history and suspense. After someone he has under surveillance is slaughtered — literally — CIA agent Jack Dunphy is ordered to leave London immediately and return to the US, where he is dumped into a tedious desk job that seems calculated to make him quit. Determined to learn why, Dunphy uses all his CIA tradecraft on the agency that has turned against him — and discovers the fragments of a story that seems too wild to be true, providing him with evidence of a conspiracy that goes back to the time of Christ, a conspiracy so vast and deep and old that the CIA itself is but a cover for it. Embroiled in a plot far more elaborate than he ever could have imagined, with players too powerful and consequences too deadly, Dunphy must uncover the shocking truth — or die trying...

Marital troubles? Sick of life? Suicide the answer? Why not get yourself a contract killer? Nothing easier, provided you communicate only by phone and box number. You give him your photograph, specify when and where to find you, then sit back and prepare to die. Murdered, you will be of greater interest than ever you were in life. More to him than met the eye will be the judgement. A mysterious killing lives long in the popular memory. Our hero meticulously plans his own demise, except for one detail: what if he suddenly decides he wants to live? This darkly funny tale is Kurkov on top form.

For Arthur Rowe the charity fete was a trip back to childhood, to innocence, a welcome chance to escape the terror of the Blitz, to forget twenty years of his past and a murder. Then he guesses the weight of the cake, and from that moment on he's a hunted man, the target of shadowy killers, on the run and struggling to remember and to find the truth.

With Sancho Panza, a deposed Communist mayor, his faithful Rocinate, an antiquated motorcar, Monsignor Quixote roams through modern-day Spain in a brilliant picaresque fable. Like Cervantes' classic, «Monsignor Quixote» offers enduring insights into our life and times.

Yambo, a sixty-ish rare book dealer who lives in Milan has suffered a loss of memory; not the kind of memory neurologists call 'semantic' (Yambo remembers all about Julius Caesar and can recite every poem he has ever read), but rather his 'autobiographical' memory: he no longer knows his own name, doesn't recognize his wife or his daughters, doesn't remember anything about his parents or his childhood. His wife, who is at his side as he slowly begins to recover, convinces him to return to his family home in the hills somewhere between Milan and Turin. Yambo promptly retreats to the sprawling attic, cluttered with boxes of newspapers, comics, records, photo albums and adolescent diaries. There, he relives the story of his generation: Mussolini, Catholic education and guilt, Josephine Baker, Flash Gordon, Cyrano de Bergerac. As he recovers his memory, two voids remain shrouded in fog: a terrible event he experienced during the resistance, and the vague image of a girl whom he loved at sixteen, then lost.But a relapse occurs. Now in a coma, his memories run wild, and life racing before his eyes takes the form of a graphic novel. Yambo struggles through the frames to find at last the face of the girl he loves: she descends the stairs of their high school and morphs into a Dante-esque promise (or threat) of the afterlife, as he struggles harder to capture her simple, innocent, real-life image — the schoolgirl he never forgot. Copiously illustrated throughout with images from comics, book jackets, record sleeves and other printed ephemera, «The Mysterious Flame» is a fascinating and hugely entertaining new novel from the incomparable Umberto Eco.

During the past 16 years, acclaimed author and documentary-maker, Laurence Rees has met and interviewed a large number of former Nazis, and his unique insights into the Nazi psyche and the Second World War have received enormous praise. Following the success of Rees's bestselling «Auschwitz», this substantially revised and updated edition of «The Nazis — A Warning from History» tells the powerfully gripping story of the rise and fall of the Third Reich. At the heart of the book lie compelling eyewitness accounts of life under Adolf Hitler, spoken through the words of those who experienced the Nazi regime at every level of society. An extensive new section on the Nazi/Soviet war (previously published in Rees's «War of the Century») provides a chilling insight into Nazi mentality during the most bloody conflict in history. Described as 'one of the greatest documentary series of all times', «The Nazis — A Warning from History» won a host of awards, including a Bafta and an International Documentary Award. The accompanying book broke new ground in our understanding of the Nazi regime and was praised for 'getting to the heart of the most troubling and elusive questions of Germany before and during World War Two'. The dramatic and incredible story that unfolds in these pages, once read, is not easily forgotten. '...scholars across the world owe a considerable debt of gratitude to Laurence Rees for his immense and unique contribution to historical understanding'. — From the citation awarding Laurence Rees Honorary Doctorate from the University of Sheffield in July 2005.

Knowledge can be dangerous! For ten-year-old teacher Negi Springfield and his all-girl class, it's time for final exams! If his students manage not to end up with the lowest scores in school, the principal has promised to make Negi an official teacher. To prepare for the tests, the class takes a trip to the school's Library Island. But, this is no quiet place to study — stone golems, traps, and secret passageways are the norm throughout the enormous library building. With all of these distractions, can Negi's class hope to climb out of the cellar — both academically and literally?

There is a vampire stalking the night! Normally ten-year-old teacher/magician Negi Springfield would have no problem dispatching such a villain, but this vampire has a magic-enhancing partner — a team that partnerless Negi cannot defeat — and worse, the vampire is a student in his own class! Now he must find a partner of his own, but with a class full of beautiful girls all vying for the position, it won't be an easy task. Add in Negi's old friend, a skirt-chasing weasel from Wales, and the nice orderly chaos of Negi's life turns into a hilarious melee of sirens and sorcery!

Who was Dmitri Shostakovich? The USSR's official figurehead composer and son of the revolution that brought the Soviet state into being, or a secret dissident whose contempt for the totalitarian regime was scathing? Perhaps both? Since the posthumous publication in 1979 of alleged memoirs by Shostakovich, the controversy about the composer and his music has escalated into the most rancorous debate the world of classical music has ever known. Ian MacDonald's «The New Shostakovich» presents the case for the dissident view, arguing passionately that the meaning of the composer's music cannot be fully appreciated without a knowledge of the terrible times he and his fellow artists lived through under Soviet Communism. A widely read and critically acclaimed book in the 1990s, this new edition has been comprehensively revised, extensively corrected, and updated with much new material. Whichever side of the debate readers support, «The New Shostakovich» presents them with a viewpoint which cannot be ignored.

In December 2004, the world watched as hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians gathered to defy the results of a transparently rigged presidential election. The charismatic popular candidate, Viktor Yushchenko, was disfigured after being poisoned by his opponents. The security forces threatened violent repression. But the demonstrators stayed and, as international pressure grew, the corrupt old regime that had been supported by Putin's Kremlin was deposed. It was the most significant moment for Europe since the fall of the Berlin Wall. «An Orange Revolution» is the gripping account of this historic uprising and the events that led to it. Often in thrall to the Kremlin but aspiring to the liberties of western Europe, Ukraine was treated roughly by the twentieth century, occupied by the Germans and annexed by the Soviets. It saw guerrilla fighting after the Second World War and dissent was crushed by successive Communist administrations. Its history has been one of corruption, power struggles, organised crime, but a resiliently optimistic population. Based on firsthand observation and interviews with major players and anonymous demonstrators alike, this is about a people who have forced a lasting change: judges who defied death threats, a murdered journalist, amateur musicians who composed an anthem for the people, and soldiers who staked their lives to back the opposition. «An Orange Revolution» also traces the story of the author's family, who paid a high price for speaking out. An Orange Revolution is a captivating book about a defining moment in European history.

After the opening essay on the general significance of literature, Eco examines a number of major authors from the Western canon. A stimulating chapter on the poetic qualities of Dante's «Paradiso» is followed by one on the style of the Communist Manifesto. The next three essays centre on nineteenth and early twentieth-century literature: one on the French writer Nerval's masterpiece, «Sylvie» (a major influence on Eco and a novella that he translated into Italian), one on Oscar Wilde's love of paradox, and one on Joyce's views on language. The last three pieces deal with the road that leads from Cervantes via Swift to Borges' «Library of Babel», then an essay on Eco's own anxiety about Borges' influence on him, and the volume ends with an article on the enigmatic Italian critic and anthropologist Piero Camporesi. «On Literature» is a provocative and entertaining collection of sprightly essays on the key texts that have shaped Eco, the novelist and critic. This volume will appeal to anyone interested in how new light is shed on old masters by a great contemporary mind.

Ah, the trusty penis. The cock, knob, widgie, pink python, groin bollard — call it what you will, this is one part of the male anatomy that never ceases to provide endless fascination, and frequently mirth. Half the population have one, and the other half, so Freud would have us believe, would like to. And yet still our flaccid friend is so often misunderstood. The «Penis Book» seeks to redress the balance, exposing all (quite literally) there is to know about the honourable member. Throbbing with facts, figures, photos and illustrations, the book leaves no foreskin unturned in its quest to bring you the low-down on its subject. Told with wit, vim and lashings of wicked humour, even the most prudish won't be able to resist raising a smile (and perhaps something else). The «Penis Book» is a celebration of the male member in all its purple-helmeted glory. So whether you're male or female, straight or gay, you'll find something in here to titilate and stimulate.