Random House, Inc.

Seconds before the Earth is demolished for a galactic freeway, Arthur Dent is saved by Ford Prefect, a researcher for the revised Guide. Together they stick out their thumbs to the stars and begin a wild journey through time and space.

In these stories whose lives come into focus through single events or sudden memories which bring the past bubbling to the surface. The past, as her characters discover, is made up not only of what is remembered, but also what isn't. The past is there, just out of the picture, but if memories haven't been savoured, recalled in the mind and boxed away, it's as if they have never been until a moment when the pieces of the jigsaw re-form suddenly, sometimes pleasurably but more often painfully. Women look back at their young selves, at first marriages made when they were naive and trusting, at husbands and their difficult, demanding little ways. There is in this new collection an underlying heartbreak, a sense of regret in her characters for what might have been, for a fork in the road not taken, a memory suppressed in an act of prudent emotional housekeeping. But at the same time there is hope, there are second changes her are people who reinvent themselves, seize life by the throat, who have moved on and can dare to conjure up the hidden memories, daring to go beyond what is remembered.

Little Wilson and Big God, the first part of Anthony Burgess's two-volume autobiography, tells the story of a disaffected Manchester Catholic from his birth in 1917 up to the commencement, in 1959, of his career as a professional writer. Born Jack Wilson, the son of Catholic Irish and Lancashire parents, Burgess grew up in one of the toughest areas of Manchester, with a burgeoning awareness of an artistic talent which for a long time could not find its proper outlet. It deals also with an unending struggle to reconcile a Catholic conscience with the prematurely discovered pleasures of sex. It details his tempestuous first marriage, an army career more comic than heroic, and his years as an education officer in Malaya and Borneo. It was in the Far East, at the age of thirty-seven, his marriage in trouble, drinking heavily, that Burgess began to write the first of the novels that were to make his name.

'I remember, too, the light on the slopes, long shadows in tufts and hollows, with cattle, brilliant as painted china, treading their echoing shapes' Cider With Rosie is a wonderfully vivid memoir of Laurie Lee's childhood and youth in a remote Cotswold village. From the moment he is set down in the long grass, 'thick as a forest and alive with grasshoppers', he depicts a word that is both tangibly real yet belonging to a now distant past.

In this enchanting and comprehensive collection, the lullabies we all were rocked to sleep with, such as Rock-a-Bye Baby and Hush Little Baby, Don't You Cry, mingle with traditional lullabies from around the world. Here are beautiful lyrics to sing or read to little ones, from Shakespeare's lullaby for the fairy queen, Titania, to Brahms's Lullaby; and from Gershwin's Summertime to Langston Hughes's lovely lullaby for a night black baby. Here, too, are poems for children that range from tender to nonsensical, from quiet to raucous — from Walter de la Mare to T. S. Eliot to Lewis Carroll, Edward Lear, and Ogden Nash. Whether the intent is to soothe or to amuse, there's something here for every mood, every child, and the child in every adult. A delightful, gift-perfect collection.

It's the poky little puppy's first Christmas, and he's not sure what to expect. When he meets an animal friend who's lost his home, Poky's quick to help-and learns all about the spirit of Christmas.

As girls, Nel and Sula shared each other's discoveries and dreams in the poor black mid-West of their childhood. Then Sula ran away to live her dreams and Nel got married. Ten years later Sula returns and no one, least of all Nel, trusts her. SULA is the story of the fear that makes people accept self-pity; the fear that will not countenance escape and that justifies itself through myth and legend. Sula herself is cast as a witch and demon by the people who resent her strength. They attack her with the most pervasive weapon of all, the weapon of language and story. But Sula is a woman of power, a wayward force who challenges the smallness of a world that tries to hold her down.

Made into a successful film starring Jodie Foster, and Anthony Hopkins as the homicidal genius and cannibal, Hannibal Lecter, this is the story of a killer on the loose who knows that beauty is only skin deep, and a trainee investigator who's trying to save her own hide.

In this propulsive novel by the author of Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World and The Elephant Vanishes, one of the most idiosyncratically brilliant writers at work in any language fuses science fiction, the hard-boiled thriller, and white-hot satire into a new element of the literary periodic table. As he searches for a mysteriously vanished girlfriend, Haruki Murakami's protagonist plunges into a wind tunnel of sexual violence and metaphysical dread in which he collides with call girls; plays chaperone to a lovely teenaged psychic; and receives cryptic instructions from a shabby but oracular Sheep Man. Dance Dance Dance is a tense, poignant, and often hilarious ride through the cultural Cuisinart that is contemporary Japan, a place where everything that is not up for sale is up for grabs.

Evelyn Waugh's 1934 novel is a bitingly funny vision of aristocratic decadence in England between the wars. It tells the story of Tony Last, who, to the irritation of his wife, is inordinately obsessed with his Victorian Gothic country house and life. When Lady Brenda Last embarks on an affair with the worthless John Beaver out of boredom with her husband, she sets in motion a sequence of tragicomic disasters that reveal Waugh at his most scathing.

From award-winning translators, a masterful new translation – never before published – of the novel in which Fyodor Dostoevsky set out to portray a truly beautiful soul. Just two years after completing Crime and Punishment, Dostoevsky produced a second novel with a very different man at its center. In The Idiot, the saintly Prince Myshkin returns to Russia from a Swiss sanatorium and finds himself a stranger in a society obsessed with wealth, power, and sexual conquest. He soon becomes entangled in a love triangle with a notorious kept woman, Nastasya, and a beautiful young girl, Aglaya. Extortion and scandal escalate to murder, as Dostoevsky’s “positively beautiful man” clashes with the emptiness of a society that cannot accommodate his innocence and moral idealism. The Idiot is both a powerful indictment of that society and a rich and gripping masterpiece.

Until that September of 1952, Luke Chandler had never kept a secret or told a single lie. But in the long, hot summer of his seventh year, two groups of migrant workers — and two very dangerous men — came through the Arkansas Delta to work the Chandler cotton farm. And suddenly mysteries are flooding Luke's world. A brutal murder leaves the town seething in gossip and suspicion. A beautiful young woman ignites forbidden passions. A fatherless baby is born... and someone has begun furtively painting the bare clapboards of the Chandler farmhouse, slowly, painstakingly, bathing the run-down structure in gleaming white. And as young Luke watches the world around him, he unravels secrets that could shatter lives — and change his family and his town forever...

Imagine a million clever rats. Rats that don’t run. Rats that fight… Maurice, a scruffy tomcat with an eye for the main chance, has the perfect fiddle going. He has a stupid-looking kid for a piper, and he has his very own plague of rats – rats who are strangely educated, so Maurice can no longer think of them as ‘lunch’. And everyone knows the stories about rats and pipers – and is giving him lots of money… Until they try the trick in the far-flung town of Bad Blintz, and the nice little con suddenly goes down the drain. Someone there is playing a different tune. A dark, shadowy tune. Something very, very bad is waiting in the cellars. The rats must learn a new word. Evil. It’s not a game any more. It’s definitely a rat-eat-rat world down there. In fact, that might only be the start… Bestselling novelist Terry Pratchett leads readers from tale to tail in a darkly imaginative and fiendishly entertaining story, the first for younger readers set in the Discworld universe, the setting of his phenomenally successful fantasy novels.

»Glue» is the story of four boys growing up in the Edinburgh schemes, and about the loyalties, the experiences — and the secrets — that hold them together into their thirties. Four boys becoming men: Juice Terry, the work-shy fanny-merchant, with corkscrew curls and sticky fingers; Billy the boxer: driven, controlled, playing to his strengths; Carl, the Milky Bar Kid, drifting along to his own soundtrack; and the doomed Gally — who has one less skin than everyone else and seems to find catastrophe at every corner. As we follow their lives from the seventies into the new century — from punk to techno, from speed to Es — we can see each of them trying to struggle out from under the weight of the conditioning of class and culture, peer pressure and their parents' hopes that maybe their sons will do better than they did. What binds the four of them is the friendship formed by the scheme, their school, and their ambition to escape from both; their loyalty fused in street morality: back up your mates, don't hit women and, most importantly, never grass — on anyone. Despite its scale and ambition, «Glue» has all Irvine Welsh's usual pace and vigour, crackling dialogue, scabrous set-pieces and black, black humour, but it is also a grown-up book about growing up — about the way we live our lives, and what happens to us when things become unstuck.

Greeks living in Germany who speak Italian because they run a pizzeria; Katka, whose mescalin cactus enables her to separate body and mind, with the result that they check in a psychiatric clinic together; Klaus who tries to broaden his vocabulary with the help of a radio programme, Russian for Children, and promptly ends up in jail on his first visit to Moscow; contract killers on the trams; bodies in the basement; lunatics on the road: welcome to the wonderfully absurd world of Wladimir Kaminer. Kaminer moved from Moscow to Berlin ten years ago in a lucky wave of emigration, hoping for a better life and an apartment of his own. But, he found much more: a country adrift in the extraordinary flux of reunification and a city that was casting a spell on artists, drifters, losers and hopeless idealists. Of his encounters with these people, Kaminer makes unforgettable tales of compassion and humour. And in relating the singulary offbeat encounters of his own life, he manages to capture something universal about our disjointed times.

When a wizardly experiment goes adrift, the wizards of Unseen University find themselves with a pocket universe on their hands: Roundworld, where neither magic nor common sense seems to stand a chance against logic. The Universe, of course, is our own. And Roundworld is Earth. As the wizards watch their accidental creation grow, we follow the story of our universe from the primal singularity of the Big Bang to the Internet and beyond. Through this original Terry Pratchett story (with intervening chapters from Cohen and Stewart) we discover how puny and insignificant individual lives are against a cosmic backdrop of creation and disaster. Yet, paradoxically, we see how the richness of a universe based on rules, has led to a complex world and at least one species that tried to get a grip of what was going on.

Churchill’ s history of World War II is, and will remain, the definitive work. This is Churchill’ s own abridgement of his original six-volume history.

Twenty two year old, Sumire is in love for the first time with a woman seventeen years her senior. But, whereas Miu is a glamorous and successful older woman with a taste for classical music and fine wine, Sumire is an aspiring writer who dresses in an oversized second hand coat and heavy boots like a character in a Jack Kerouac novel. Surprised that she might, after all, be a lesbian, Sumire spends hours on the phone talking to her best friend, K about the big questions in life: what is sexual desire and should she ever tell Miu how she feels about her? K, a primary school teacher, is used to answering questions, but what he most wants to say to Sumire is «I love you.» He consoles himself by having an affair with the mother of one of his pupils. But, when a desperate Miu calls him out of the blue from a sunny Greek island and asks for his help, he soon discovers that all is not as it seems and something very strange has happened to Sumire.

Tibor Fisher's hilarious first novel follows the adventures of two young Hungarian basketball players through the turbulent years between the end of World War II and the anti-Soviet uprising of 1956. In this spirited indictment of totalitarianism, the two improbably heroes, Pataki and Gyuri, travel the length and breadth of Hungary in a epic quest for food, lodging, and female companionship.

Victor Mancini has devised a complicated scam to pay for his mother's hospital care: pretend to be choking on a piece of food in a restaurant and the person who 'saves you' will feel responsible for you for the rest of their lives. Multiply that a couple of hundred times and you generate a healthy flow of cheques, week in, week out. Victor also works at a theme park with a motley group of losers, cruises sex addiction groups for action, and visits his mother, whose Alzheimer's disease now hides what may be the startling truth about his parentage.

A few days later what they have been warned of comes to pass: a life raft is washed up on a beach. In it are two men, dressed in expensive suits, shot dead. The dead men were Eastern European criminals, victims of what seems to have been a gangland hit. But what appears in Sweden to be an open-and-shut case soon takes on a far more sinister aspect. Wallander travels across the Baltic Sea to Riga in Latvia, a nation experiencing the massive social and political upheaval that will lead to its independence from the Soviet Union. There Wallander is plunged into a frozen, alien world of police surveillance, scarcely veiled threats, and lies. Doomed always to be one step behind the shadowy figures he pursues, he comes to understand what it is to live in a nation in which democracy is still only a dream. Only his dogged, almost subconscious desire to se that justice is done brings the truth to light.

Hilary Burde, saved by education from a delinquent childhood, cheated out of Oxford by a tragic love tangle, cherishes his obsessive guilt and disappointment in a dull, orderly civil service job. When the man whom he has harmed and betrayed reappears as head of his department, Hilary hopes for forgiveness, even for redemption and a new life, but finds himself haunted by a ghostly repetition.

Confess, Fletch The flight from Rome had been pleasant enough, even if the business he was on wasn’t exactly. His Italian fiance’s father had been kidnapped and presumably murdered, and Fletch is on the trail of a stolen art collection that is her only patrimony. But when he arrives in his apartment to find a dead body, things start to get complicated. Confess, Fletch Inspector Flynn found him a little glib for someone who seemed to be the only likely suspect in a pretty clear case of homicide. He wasn’t exactly uncooperative, but it wasn’t like he was entirely forthcoming either. And Flynn wasn’t entirely convinced that the nineteenth-century Western artist Edgar Arthur Tharp really occupied most of Fletch’s thoughts. Confess, Fletch With the police on his tail and a few other things to do beside prove his own innocence, Fletch makes himself at home in Boston, renting a van, painting it black, and breaking into a private art gallery. That is when he’s not “entertaining” his future mother-in-law and visiting with the good Inspector Flynn and his family.

Fletch He’s an investigative reporter whose methods are a little unorthodox. Currently he’s living on the beach with the strung-out trying to find to the source of the drugs they live for. Fletch He’s taking more than a little flack from his editor. She doesn’t appreciate his style. Or the expense account items he’s racking up. Or his definition of the word deadline. Or the divorce lawyers who keep showing up at the office. Fletch So when multimillionaire Alan Stanwyk offers Fletch the job of a lifetime, which could be worth a fortune, he’s intrigued and decides to do a little investigation. What he discovers is that the proposition is anything but what it seems.