Random House, Inc.

The second installment of a Clone Wars-period duology featuring embattled medics struggling to save lives is set between the events of the films «Episode II: Attack of the Clones» and the upcoming «Episode III».

The Yuuzhan Vong are poised to conquer the galaxy and Luke, Mara, and Jacen are missing in unknown space in this climactic finale of the 19-book New Jedi Order series.

Now in paperback — a thrilling, classic, stand-alone novel by the bestselling «Star Wars» author of all time. Luke and Mara Jade Skywalker come face to face with a shocking past on a mission to salvage a piece of Jedi history.

On a crucial mission, Han and Leia Solo face fortune-hunting marauders, Imperial enemies, and dark secrets about Leia's father on Tatooine.

The monumental novel considered one of the greatest ever written is an epic of the Napoleonic Wars, a philosophical study, and a celebration of the Russian spirit.

Sayo Masuda's story is an extraordinary portrait of rural life in Japan and an illuminating contrast to the fictionalised lives of glamorous geishas. At the age of six masuda's poverty-stricken family sent her to work as a nursemaid. At the age of twelve, she was indentured to a geisha house. In «Autobiography of A Geisha», Masuda chronicles a harsh world in which young women faced the realities of sex for sale and were deprived of their freedom and identity. She also tells of her life after leaving the geisha house, painting a vivid panorama of the grinding poverty of rural life in wartime Japan. Many years later Masuda decided to tell her story. Although she could barely read or write she was determined to tell the truth about life as a geisha and explode the myths surrounding their secret world. Remarkable frank and incredibly moving, this is the record of one woman's survival on the margins of Japanese society.

With his first book, John King has written a cult classic for our times: telling, for once, the truth about soccer violence. Forget the armchair nostalgia of «Fever Pitch» of the transatlantic reportage of «Among the Thugs» — this is a book that gets inside. A collection of linked stories, «The Football Factory» centres on Vince Matthews, a seasoned Chelsea hooligan who represents a disaffected society operating by appalling rules. From first-hand experience, we are shown the usual mix of social degradation, unemployment, racism, excessive drink, bad sex and casual violence — the facts of life — but also how they fall into a political context of surveillance, media manipulation and division. Football violence has not been eradicated, it has simply been moved out of the grounds and beyond the cameras. Like the slaughter of Iraqi conscripts in the Gulf War, hooligans and what they do have been pushed under the carpet: out of sight, out of mind. This is what «The Football Factory» is about.

Of all John Fowles' novels The French Lieutenant's Woman received the most universal acclaim and today holds a very special place in the canon of post-war English literature. From the god-like stance of the nineteenth-century novelist that he both assumes and gently mocks, to the last detail of dress, idiom and manners, his book is an immaculate recreation of Victorian England. Not only is it the epic love story of two people of insight and imagination seeking escape from the cant and tyranny of their age, The French Lieutenant's Woman is also a brilliantly sustained allegory of the decline of the twentieth-century passion for freedom.

Whether for the loo or bedside entertainment or as a work of reference or self-improvement The Funniest Thing You Never Said is the biggest and best humorous quotation book there is — a complete one-stop shop of witty one liners. Quotations are ordered not by A-Z, but by thematic categories: love; business; religion; celebrity, you name it, every category is covered. The collection includes all the classics from Oscar Wilde to Winston Churchill, Dorothy Parker to Groucho Marx but also mines many new hidden gems from lesser lights and includes many contemporary quotes by everyone from Jilly Cooper to Jonathan Ross. A standard companion for new collectors, and a fresh perspective for serious quotation addicts.

Cold-blooded murder just isn't Thomas Lang's cup of tea. Offered a tidy sum to assassinate an American industrialist, he opts to warn the intended victim instead — a good deed that soon takes a bad turn. Quicker than he can down a shot of his favourite whiskey, Lang is bashing heads with a Buddha statue, matching wits with evil billionaires, and putting his life (among other things) in the hands of a bevy of femmes fatales. Up against rogue CIA agents, wanna-be terrorists, and an arms dealer looking to make a high-tech killing, Lang's out to save the leggy lady he has come to love...and prevent an international bloodbath to boot.

High summer in Cuba, 1953, and Havana gleams with possibility. Flush with booming casinos, sex and drugs, Havana is a lucrative paradise for everyone from the Mafia and United Fruit to pimps, porn-makers, and anyone looking to grab a piece of the action — including the Cuban government, which naturally honours the interests of its old ally, the USA. Of course, where there's paradise, trouble can't be far behind. Trouble, in this case, makes its entrance in the terrifically charismatic and silver-tongued form of a young revolutionary named Fidel Castro. The Caribbean is fast becoming a strategic Cold War hub, and Soviet intelligence has taken Castro under its wing. The CIA's response is to send the one man capable of eliminating Castro: the legendary gunfighter and ex-Marine hero Earl Swagger, who proved his lethal talent in Stephen Hunter's previous novels. In Cuba, Earl finds himself up to his neck in treacherous ambiguity, where the old rules about honour and duty don't apply, and where Earl's target seems to have more guts and good luck than anyone else in Cuba.

Ted Wallace is an old, sour, womanising, cantankerous, whisky-sodden beast of a failed poet and drama critic, but he has his faults too. Fired from his newspaper, months behind on his alimony payments and disgusted with a world that undervalues him, Ted seeks a few months repose and free drink at Swafford Hall, the country mansion of his old friend Lord Logan. But strange things have been going on at Swafford. Miracles. Healings. Phenomena beyond the comprehension of a mud-caked hippopotamus like Ted...

Once again, the setting d Piemburgem, the deceptively peaceful-looking capital of Zululand, where Kommondant van Heerden, Konstabel Els and Luitenant Vekramp continue to terrorise true Englishman and even truer Zulus in their relentless search for a perfect South Africa. While that great Anglophile, Kommondant van Heerden, gropes his way towards attaining true 'Englishness' in the company of the eccentric Dornford Yates Club, Luitenant Vekramp, whose hatred of all things English is surpassed only by his fear of sex, sets in motion an experiment in mass chastity, with the help of the redoubtable lady psychiatrist, Dr. Von Bliminstein, which has remarkable and quite unforseen results. The Kommondant, hunting the fox in the Aardvark Mountains, succumbs to the bizarre charms of Mrs Heathcote-Kilkoon, as Luitenant Verkramp's essays in counter espionage backfire in a bird sanctuary. Once more, Konstable Els, homicidal to the last, saves the day — or what's left of it — in one of the most savage hunts ever chronicled in fiction.

Mad Madge designed her own clothes and her coach was black with silver decoration. As John Evelyn wrote, gentlemen visitors were 'much pleased by the extraordinary fanciful habit, garb and discourse of the Duchess'. Born into an East Anglian royalist family in 1623, young Margaret Lucas went into Court service, accompanying the Queen, Henrietta Maria, to Oxford during the Civil War and sharing her hair-raising escape to France in 1644. In Paris, she met and married William Cavendish, Marquis of Newcastle, a great horseman. They lived together in exile for 10 years, as part of the migr-royalist circle that included aristocrats and the intellectual giants of the day, such as Descartes and Hobbes. Margaret had always loved poetry and philosophy — and now she became a writer. Plays, short fiction, fantasies, 'science fiction' and verse, orations, letters, essays, an autobiography and a biography, six philosophical treatises and one utopia — She made her mark as one of the most determined and prolific of female writers in an age when less than one per cent of published work was by women and society was shocked that she dared to publish under her own name.

On a remote Greek Island, Nicholas Urfe finds himself embroiled in the deceptions of a master trickster. As reality and illusion intertwine, Urfe is caught up in the darkest of psychological games...John Fowles expertly unfolds a tale that is lush with over-powering imagery in a spellbinding exploration of the complexities of the human mind. By turns disturbing, thrilling and seductive, The Magus is a cerebral feast.

Michael Young is convinced his brilliant history thesis will win him a doctorate, a pleasant academic post, a venerable academic publisher and his beloved girlfriend Jane. A historian should know better than to imagine that he can predict the future. Leo Zuckerman is an ageing physicist obsessed with the darkest period in human history, utterly driven by his fanatical hatred of one man. A lover's childish revenge and the breaking of a rotten clasp cause the two men to meet in a blizzard of swirling pages. Pages of history. When they come together nothing — past, present or future — will ever be the same again.

This is a guide for all tastes and budgets with a choice of sites not to be missed. Fold-out maps give the reader instant orientation and help visitors to make the best of their stay. The guide also contains details of restaurants, bars, pubs, theatres, music venues, shops, markets, hotels...and all the practical advice needed. This is a map and a guide, all in one.

The last train of the night pulls into the gas-lit platform of Baker Street underground station. A young woman is found strangled, her body abandoned in a second-class carriage. The brutal 'Railway Murder' brings Inspector Decimus Webb to the newly-formed Metropolitan Line on bleak winter's night. His investigation leads him through the slums of Victorian London to the Holborn Refuge, a home for 'Fallen women', and to Clara White, a respectable servant. But Clara has her own tragic and shameful history. As her past is revealed, Inspector Webb must decide whether she is merely a victim of circumstances, or prime suspect. Only then can he unearth a dark secret, hidden in the depths of underground London. Lee Jackson's second novel brilliantly recreates the sights, sounds and smells of Victorian London, taking readers on a suspense-filled journey through its criminal underworld.

The year is 1327. Franciscans in a wealthy Italian abbey are suspected of heresy, and Brother William of Baskerville arrives to investigate. When his delicate mission is suddenly overshadowed by seven bizarre deaths, Brother William turns detective. He collects evidence, deciphers secret symbols and coded manuscripts, and digs into the eerie labyrinth of the abbey where extraordinary things are happening under the cover of night. A spectacular popular and critical success, «The Name of the Rose» is not only a narrative of a murder investigation but an astonishing chronicle of the Middle Ages.

This work tells the story of man's fascination with butterflies, as symbols, as objects of beauty, and of obsession — in the tradition of Susan Orlean's «The Orchid Thief». From Hindu mythology to Aztec sacrifices, butterflies have served as a metaphor for resurrection and transformation. Even during World War II, children in a Polish death camp scratched hundreds of butterflies onto the wall of their barracks. But as Sharman Apt Russell points out in this rich and lyrical meditation, butterflies have above all been objects of obsession. From the beastly horned caterpillar whose blood helps it count time, to the peacock butterfly with wings that hiss like a snake, Russell traces butterflies through their life cycles, exploring the creatures' own obsessions with eating, mating, and migrating. She reveals the logic behind our endless fascination with butterflies as well as the driving passion of such legendary collectors as the tragic Eleanor Glanville, whose children declared her mad because of her compulsive butterfly collecting, and the brilliant Henry Walter Bates, whose collections from the Amazon in 1858 helped develop his theory of mimicry in nature. Russell also takes us inside some of the world's most prestigious natural history museums, where scientists painstakingly catalogue and categorize new species of Lepidoptera, hoping to shed light on insect genetics and evolution. «An Obsession with Butterflies» is a luminous journey through an exotic world of strange beauty; a book to be treasured by anyone who's ever watched a butterfly mid-flight.

Beauty is neither a history of art, nor a history of aesthetics but Umberto Eco draws on the histories of both these disciplines to define the ideas of beauty that have informed sensibilities from the classical world to modern times. In terms of form and style, Beauty has been conceived for a vast and diversified readership: taking in painting, sculpture, architecture, film, photography, the decorative arts, novels and poems, it offers a rich and intelligent panorama of this huge subject. It traces the philosophy of aesthetics through history and examines some of the many treatises that have sought to define it. Beauty is Umberto Eco at his most captivating and eclectic: we read not only of Botticelli and Michelangelo but of how the fashion of the 1960s owes much to ancient Egyptian dress, and how ancient Roman and eighteenth-century hairstyles have much in common. It makes the familiar new, and sheds a brilliant new light on the unfamiliar. Illustrated in full colour throughout and produced to the highest standards, Beauty is an indispensable book.

As the mightly alien fleet from the very latest computer game thunders across the computer screen, Johnny prepares to blow them into the usual million pieces. And they send him a message: We surrender. They're not supposed to do that. They're supposed to die. And computer joysticks don't have 'Don't Fire' buttons... It's hard enough, trying to save Mankind from the Galactic Hordes. It's even harder trying to save the Galactic Hordes from Mankind. But it's only a game, isn't it?

A sweltering week in late August. Where better to enjoy the last days of summer than on the beautiful Bay of Naples? But even as Rome's richest citizens relax in their villas around Pompeii and Herculaneum, there are ominous warnings that something is going wrong. Wells and springs are failing, a man has disappeared, and now the greatest aqueduct in the world — the mighty Aqua Augusta — has suddenly ceased to flow...Through the eyes of four characters — a young engineer, an adolescent girl, a corrupt millionaire and an elderly scientist — Robert Harris brilliantly recreates a luxurious world on the brink of destruction.

Former KGB spy Vladimir Putin, named Prime Minister of Russia in 1999 and, one year later, President, has been something of a media darling in the West, having successfully marketed himself as an enlightened leader with both feet planted firmly on the Eastern borders of Europe. Anti-establishment journalist and human-rights activist Anna Politkovskaya disagrees strenuously with this point of view. In her new book, she trains her steely gaze on, as she puts at, Putin «without the rapture». From her privileged vantage-point at the heart of Russian current affairs, Politkovskaya reports from behind the scenes, dismantling both Putin the man and Putin the brand name, arguing that he is a power-hungry product of his own history in the security forces and so unable to prevent himself from stifling dissent and other civil liberties at every turn. After centuries of living under tyrants, Politkovskaya argues, this is not what contemporary Russians want. The book is, however, not simply a biography or an analysis of Putin's presidency. Politkovskaya's writing is known for its humanity and its passion, and her focus is on individual human beings and their stories. As she puts it, «my book is jottings made on the margins of life in Russia. For the time being, I cannot analyse that existence. I'm just living and noting what I see». So her readers are treated to expos-s of mafia dealings and scandals in the provinces, of corruption in the military and the judiciary, of the decline of the dissident intelligentsia and concomitant rise of street traders, and of the truth behind the Moscow theatre siege. Other shocking stories fill out an intimate portrait of nascent civil institutions being subverted under the unquestioning eyes of the West.