Random House, Inc.

»You Are Here» is a dazzling exploration of the universe and our relationship to it. It is the story of how something evolved from nothing, and how something became everything. It is the story of science: the greatest story ever told. Here, for the first time in a single span, is the life of the universe, from quarks to galaxy super-clusters, and from slime to Homosapiens. The universe was once a moment of perfect symmetry, and is now 13.7 billion years of history. Clouds of gas were woven into whatever complexity we find in the universe today: the hierarchies of stars, or the brains of mammals. With wit and erudition, Christopher Potter takes us on a voyage beyond even time and space, to present the state of scientific knowledge at its most up-to-date and exhilarating.

Part noir, part psychedelic romp — private eye Doc Sportello comes, occasionally, out of a marijuana haze to watch the end of an era as free love slips away and paranoia creeps in with the L A fog. In this lively yarn, Thomas Pynchon, working in an unaccustomed genre, provides a classic illustration of the principle that if you can remember the sixties, you weren`t there...

War has changed. In the past, states clashed and battles were fought between armies. Superpowers are pitted against warlords. The author takes readers into the guts of modern conflict. He visits the bombed and abandoned home of Mullah Omar and discovers a deserted Al Qaeda camp where he finds documents describing a plan to attack London.

Angela Hathall is found strangled in her bed but shockingly the death of this meek and solitary woman sparks little emotion from her husband. Called in to investigate, Wexford's curiosity only deepens when he discovers that the Hathall household has been meticulously cleaned but for a single distinctive palm print.

The leader of the vampire coven, the Theatre des Vampires in Paris was snatched from the steppes of Russia as a child, and sold as a slave in Renaissance Venice. From there Armand's story spans several hundred years, culminating in a visit to New Orleans at the end of the twentieth century. Here his victims await either death or immortality.

An unlikely duo teams up in a charade of love, never expecting that they'll find happily-ever-after, in this Loveswept debut by award-winning Jennifer Crusie, who has earned high praise for her fast-paced and hilarious Harlequin romances.

Part blistering espionage thriller, part riveting police procedural, and part piercing expose on social injustice, «The Girl Who Played with Fire» is a masterful, endlessly satisfying novel. Mikael Blomkvist, crusading publisher of the magazine «Millennium» has decided to run a story that will expose an extensive sex trafficking operation. On the eve of its publication, the two reporters responsible for the article are murdered, and the fingerprints found on the murder weapon belong to his friend, the troubled genius hacker Lisbeth Salander. Blomkvist, convinced of Salander's innocence, plunges into an investigation. Meanwhile, Salander herself is drawn into a murderous game of cat and mouse, which forces her to face her dark past.

Prince Zuko is banished from the Fire Nation by his own father, Fire Lord Ozai. Horribly scarred and stripped of everything he holds dear, Zuko wanders the earth for almost three years in search of his only chance at redemption: the Avatar, a mystical being who once kept the four nations in balance.

Danielle Steel celebrates families of every stripe in her compelling «New York Times» bestseller — a tale of three very different couples who struggle and survive, love, laugh, and learn to take life one day at a time.

'I blame those new Brainy Crisps. Since he started eating them, he's been too clever by half'. Can eating a bag of crisps really make you more clever? The company that makes the crisps says so, and they seem to be right. But the Doctor is worried. Who would want to make people more brainy? And why?

What if the person you were meant to be with could never be yours? 17-year-old Lucinda falls in love with a gorgeous, intelligent boy, Daniel, at her new school, the grim, foreboding Sword & Cross... only to find out that Daniel is a fallen angel, and that they have spent lifetimes finding and losing one another as good and evil forces plot to keep them apart. Get ready to fall...

From the author of JPod and Generation X, the bestselling generational classic, comes a dazzling new work that reimagines the very act of reading and storytelling in a crazed digital world.

A man with no eyes. Two tunnels in his head... It's not easy being a witch, and it's not all whizzing about on broomsticks, but Tiffany Aching — teen witch — is doing her best. Until something evil wakes up, something that stirs up all the old stories about nasty old witches, so that just wearing a pointy hat suddenly seems a very bad idea.

News of the untimely death of Charles Dickens reaches James R Osgood at his American publisher. Expecting the arrival of the latest instalment of The Mystery of Edwin Drood and suspicious of unscrupulous New York publishers keen to get their hands on the novel, Osgood sends his clerk, Daniel Sands, to await its arrival.

Here is Edward Rutherfurds classic novel of London, a glorious pageant spanning two thousand years. He brings this vibrant citys long and noble history alive through the ever-shifting fortunes, fates, and intrigues of half-a-dozen families, from the age of Julius Caesar to the twentieth century. Generation after generation, these families embody the passion, struggle, wealth, and verve of the greatest city in the world.

International bestselling author Douglas Coupland delivers a real-time, five-hour story set in an airport cocktail lounge during a global disaster. Five disparate people are trapped inside: Karen, a single mother waiting for her online date; Rick, the down-on-his-luck airport lounge bartender; Luke, a pastor on the run; Rachel, a cool Hitchcock blonde incapable of true human contact; and finally a mysterious voice known as Player One. Slowly, each reveals the truth about themselves while the world as they know it comes to an end. In the tradition of Kurt Vonnegut and J. G. Ballard, Coupland explores the modern crises of time, human identity, society, religion, and the afterlife. The book asks as many questions as it answers, and readers will leave the story with no doubt that we are in a new phase of existence as a species — and that there is no turning back.

Europe in 1945 was prostrate. Much of the continent was devastated by war, mass slaughter, bombing and chaos. Large areas of Eastern Europe were falling under Soviet control, exchanging one despotism for another. This work tells of Europe's recovery from the devastation and of the decline and fall of Soviet Communism and the rise of the EC and EU.

Shows you how to bring the ambitious but rubbish philosophies of the world's most popular TV programme to your driving, containing advice on general motoring, as well as specific tips on how to deal with common eventualities like a rapidly sinking amphibious camper van, or a caravan airship that's just crashed into a small bush.

More than four hundred years ago, seven people — five of them women — were beheaded in the Tower of London. Three had been queens of England. The others were found guilty of treason. Why were such important people put to death? Alison Weir's gripping book tells their stories: from the former friend betrayed by a man set on being king, to the young girl killed after just nine days on the throne. Alison Weir is a wonderful storyteller. Through her vivid writing, history comes alive.

Ada grows up motherless in the Jewish pogroms of a Ukrainian city in the early years of the twentieth century. In the same city, Harry Sinner, the cosseted son of a city financier, belongs to a very different world. Eventually, in search of a brighter future, Ada moves to Paris and makes a living painting scenes from the world she has left behind.

When Paul McCartney told the world in 1970 that he had no plans to work with the Beatles again, it was widely viewed as a cultural tragedy by the media and public alike. This title tells the story of the Fab Four post 1969. It also charts the almost Shakespearean rivalry of the Lennon and McCartney families.

The world is changing — the government has seized control of every aspect of society, and now kids are disappearing. For fifteen-year-old Wisty and her older brother Whit, life turns upside-down when they are hauled out of bed one night, separated from their parents, and thrown into a secret compound for no reason they can comprehend. The new government is clearly trying to suppress life, liberty, and the pursuit of being a normal teenager. Imprisoned together and condemned to death, Wisty and Whit begin exhibiting strange abilities and powers they never dreamed of. Maybe there is a reason they were singled out. Can this newly discovered witch and a wizard master their skills in time to save themselves, their parents — and maybe the world?

Abbey of Ruac, rural France: A medieval script is discovered hidden behind an antique bookcase. Badly damaged, it is sent to Paris for restoration, and there literary historian Hugo Pineau begins to read the startling fourteenth-century text. Within its pages lies a fanciful tale of a painted cave and the secrets it contains and a rudimentary map showing its position close to the abbey. Intrigued, Hugo enlists the help of archaeologist Luc Simard and the two men go exploring.

Look at the Birdie evokes a world in which squabbling couples, high school geniuses, misfit office workers, and small-town Lotharios struggle to adapt to changing technology, moral ambiguity, and unprecedented affluence. In Confido, a family learns the downside of confiding their deepest secrets into a magical invention. In Ed Luby's Key Club, a man finds himself in a Kafkaesque world of trouble after he runs afoul of the shady underworld boss who calls the shots in an upstate New York town. In Look at the Birdie, a quack psychiatrist turned 'murder counsellor' concocts a novel new outlet for his paranoid patients. The stories are cautionary they also brim with his trademark humour. Wry, ironic, satirical and poignant Look at the Birdie reflects the anxieties of the postwar era in which they were written and provides an insight into the development of Vonnegut's early style.