Random House, Inc.

A P.G. Wodehouse novel Joey Cooley is a golden-curled child film star, the idol of American motherhood. Reginald, Third Earl of Havershot, is a boxing blue on a mission to save his wayward cousin from the fleshpots of Hollywood. Both are under anaesthetic at the dentists when something strange happens – and their identities are swapped in the ether. Suddenly Joey can use his six-foot frame to get his own back on his Hollywood persecutors. But Reggie has to endure everything Joey had to put up with in the horrible life of a child star – including kidnap. «Laughing Gas» is Wodehouse’s brilliantly funny take on the ‘If I were you’ theme – a wry look at the dangers of getting what you wish for in the movie business and beyond.

Lady Maud, the spirited young daughter of the Earl of Marshmoreton, is confined to her home, Belpher Castle in Hampshire, under aunt’s orders because of an unfortunate infatuation. Enter our hero, George Bevan, an American who writes songs for musicals and is so smitten with Maud that he descends on Hampshire’s rolling acres to see off his rival and claim her heart. Meanwhile, in the great Wodehousian tradition, the Earl of Marshmoreton just wants a quiet life pottering in his garden, supported by his portly butler Keggs and free from the demands of his bossy sister and his silly-ass son. In a sunny story which involves chorus-girls, the theatre and a ball at the castle during a two-week house-party, Wodehouse deftly unties all the knots which he had so cleverly tied around his characters in the first place.

A P.G. Wodehouse novel It’s America during Prohibition and shy young George Finch is setting out as an artist – without the encumbrance of a shred of talent. George falls in love with Molly, whose imperious stepmother Mrs Waddington insists he’s not the man to marry the stepdaughter of one of New York’s most fashionable hostesses. Poor George – he doesn’t seem to stand a chance. How George eventually triumphs over the bossy Mrs Waddington makes for a dizzying plot featuring some of Wodehouse’s most appealing minor characters – Mullett the butler and his light-fingered girlfriend Fanny, J. Hamilton Beamish, author of the dynamic Beamish Booklets, Officer Garroway the poetic policeman, and Sigsbee H. Waddington, the hen-pecked husband who longs for the wide open spaces of the West. Oh, and does Prohibition mean there’s no booze? Watch this space…

Château Blissac, on its hill above St Roque, is in a setting where every prospect pleases. But it doesn’t please its current occupier, J. Wellington Gedge. Mr Gedge wants none of it – and particularly none of the domineering Mrs Gedge’s imperious wish that he should become American Ambassador to Paris. Instead he pines for the simpler life of California, where men are men and filling stations stand tall. Mrs Gedge has powerful allies – including the prohibitionist Senator Opal. But will she get her way? And will the Senator’s delightful daughter Jane get her man? In a plot which involves safe-blowers, con men, jewel-thieves and even a Bloomsbury novelist, few are quite as they seem. But the heady atmosphere of France in the 1930s makes for one of Wodehouse’s most delightful comedies.

Poor Sir Buckstone Abbott, Bart! Not only does he own in Walsingford Hall one of the least attractive stately homes in the country, but he has to take in paying guests to keep it upright. So when it seems a rich (if not very nice) continental princess might buy it, he’s overjoyed – particularly as he’s being rooked by the publisher of his sporting memoirs. His daughter Jane comes up trumps in the company of the playwright Joe – but not before engagements are broken and fortunes lost and made.In a sunny story which involves chorus-girls, the theatre and a ball at the castle during a two-week house-party, Wodehouse deftly unties all the knots which he had so cleverly tied around his characters in the first place.

The peaceful slumber of the Worcester village of Rudge-in-the-Vale is about to be rudely disrupted. First there’s a bitter feud between peppery Colonel Wyvern and the Squire of Rudge Hall, rich but miserly Lester Carmody. Second, that arch-villain Chimp Twist has opened a health farm – and he and Soapy and Dolly Molloy are planning a fake burglary so Lester can diddle his insurance company. After the knockout drops are served, things get a little complicated. But will Lester’s nephew John win over his true love, Colonel Wyvern’s daughter Pat, and restore tranquillity to the idyll? It’s a close-run thing…

A P.G. Wodehouse novel Young Jerry West has a few problems. His uncle Crispin is broke and employs a butler who isn’t all he seems. His other uncle Willoughby is rich but won’t hand over any of his inheritance. And to cap it all, although already engaged, Jerry has just fallen in love with the wonderful Jane Hunnicutt, whom he’s just met on jury service. But she’s an heiress, and that’s a problem too – because even if he can extricate himself from his grasping fiancée Jerry can’t be a gold-digger. Enter «The Girl in Blue» – a Gainsborough miniature which someone has stolen from Uncle Willoughby. Jerry sets out on a mission to find her – and somehow hilariously in the process everything comes right.

Two cases have pushed Detective Lindsay Boxer to the limit. The hunt for a deranged murderer with a taste for fire, and a devastating new lead in the high profile disappearance of the governor’s son combine in an electrifying series of stunning twists and emotional surprises. With the help of her friends and fellow members of the Women's Murder Club — Yuki, an attorney feeling the strain of a high profile court case; Claire, a medical examiner trying to balance her career and her pregnancy and Cindy, crime reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle — Lindsay must race to find the suspects and stop the cold-blooded killers, fast.

Below the radar, off the grid, and behind enemy lines, CIA agent John Wells plays a deadly game of risk... As a covert CIA special operative, John Wells knows the odds are always stacked against him. For every atrocity foiled, another deadly catastrophe awaits. So when it emerges that four of the world's most dangerous states are plotting together to unleash the ultimate nuclear threat, Wells realises that his odds on stopping them ranges from zero...to none. But that's never stopped him before. And it isn't going to stop him now...

All the sorrows of Evan Shepard's loutish adolescence were redeemed at seventeen, in 1935, when he fell in love with automobiles... In the small suburban town of Cold Spring Harbor, Evan Shephard and his young bride Rachel yearn to escape the mistakes of their parents. But as they discover, families exert a hold as tight as fate, and every way out only ends up back home.

John Wilder is in his mid-thirties, a successful salesman with a place in the country, an adoring wife and a ten-year-old son. But something is wrong. His family no longer interests him, his infidelities are leading him nowhere and he has begun to drink too much. Then one night, something inside John snaps and he calls his wife to tell her that he isn't coming home.

Even as little girls, Sarah and Emily are very different from each other. Emily looks up to her wiser and more stable older sister and is jealous of her relationship with their absent father, and later her seemingly golden marriage. The path she chooses for herself is less safe and conventional and her love affairs never really satisfy her. Although the bond between them endures, gradually the distance between the two women grows, until a tragic event throws their relationship into focus one last time. Richard Yates's masterful novel follows the two sisters from their childhood in the 1920s through the challenges of their adult choices, and depicts the different ways they seek to escape from their tarnished family past.

First published in 1962, a year after «Revolutionary Road», this sublime collection of stories seems even more powerful today. Out of the lives of Manhattan office workers, a cab driver seeking immortality, frustrated would-be novelists, suburban men and their yearning, neglected women, Richard Yates creates a haunting mosaic of the 1950s, the era when the American dream was finally coming true — and just beginning to ring a little hollow.

With his second collection of short stories, Richard Yates continues to extend his range as a writer of stunning power and eloquence. «Liars in Love» is concerned with troubled relations and the elusive nature of truth: Hope, dread, disorder, and a nervous entangling of separate lives in Greenwich Village during the Depression, as seen by a child, in 'Oh, Joseph, I’m So Tired'. The volatile, perilous course of events set in motion when two divorced mothers agree to “pool their resources” and live together, with their children in 'Trying Out for the Race'. A young American soldier’s too-abrupt postwar reunion, on foreign soil, with the lovely, dismayingly grown-up sister he hasn’t seen since he was eleven and she was ten, in 'A Compassionate Leave'. The seven stories in this collection showcase Yates's extraordinary gift for observation and description. The last and longest of them, a rich, lucid, and compelling piece called 'Saying Goodbye to Sally', achieves a fitting conclusion for the book – and a resonant final statement of its theme.

The Wit and Wisdom of the Master – all compacted into 128 pithy pages! Tony Ring, the president of the Wodehouse Association and author of the 600,000-word Millennium Wodehouse Concordance, has drawn on his extensive knowledge and even more wonderful enthusiasm to compile an absolutely cracking anthology, which answers all our Christmas present problems in one volume. Here are not only witty epigrams we all know and love (and perhaps lots we don’t!) but also longer humorous extracts which are full of wisdom. Evelyn Waugh has written that Wodehouse produced three wholly original similes on every page he wrote – which, even allowing for exaggeration, must make this one of the most original gift books ever! It will certainly be one of the funniest…

With a baby on the way and a need to make the world safe for infant-kind, an unassuming film-maker from West Virginia employs his complete lack of experience, knowledge and expertise to find the most wanted and dangerous man on earth. Beginning his epic quest in New York City, he zigzags the globe in search of the bearded man: to Britain, France, Egypt, Morocco, Israel, Palestine, Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan, drawing ever closer to the heart of darkness in the tribal regions of Pakistan. Along the way he interviews experts and imams, breaks the Ramadan fast with Muslim families, identifies the surprising similarities between Osama bin Laden and Keyser Soze, helps disarm bombs with an Israeli squad, accompanies the British and US Armies in Afghanistan, and much, much more ... all in an attempt to understand the Muslim world and the roots of the conflict overshadowing the globe today. He emerges with a much deeper knowledge of the world into which his child will be born, and of the roots of fundamentalism and the ‘war on terror’. «Where In The World Is Osama bin Laden?» is both universal and personal, and a hugely entertaining guide to our times.

On the night of 10 February 1567 an explosion devastated the Edinburgh residence of Henry Stewart, Lord Darnley, second husband of Mary, Queen of Scots. The noise was heard as far away as Holyrood Palace, where Queen Mary was attending a wedding masque. Those arriving at the scene of devastation found, in the garden, the naked corpses of Darnley and his valet. Neither had died in the explosion, but both bodies bore marks of strangulation. It was clear that they had been murdered and the house destroyed in an attempt to obliterate the evidence. Darnley was not a popular king-consort, but he was regarded by many as having a valid claim to the English throne. For this reason Elizabeth I had opposed his family's longstanding wish to marry him to Mary Stuart, who herself claimed to be the rightful queen of England. Alison Weir's investigation of Darnley's murder is set against one of the most dramatic periods in British history. Her conclusions will shed a brilliant new light on the actions and motives of the conspirators and, in particular, the extent of Mary's own involvement.

This is an omnibus of wonderful Jeeves and Wooster stories, specially selected and introduced by Wodehouse himself, who was struck by the size of his selection and described it as almost the ideal paperweight. As he wrote: ‘I find it curious, now that I have written so much about him, to recall how softly and undramatically Jeeves first entered my little world. Characteristically, he did not thrust himself forward. On that occasion, he spoke just two lines. The first was: “Mrs Gregson to see you, sir.” The second: “Very good, sir, which suit will you wear?” It was only some time later that the man’s qualities dawned upon me. I still blush to think of the off-hand way I treated him at our first encounter…’. This omnibus contains «Carry On, Jeeves», «The Inimitable Jeeves», «Very Good, Jeeves» and the short stories «Jeeves Makes an Omelette» and «Jeeves and the Greasy Bird».

A driver waiting at the traffic lights goes blind. An opthamologist tries to diagnose his distinctive white blindness, but is affected before he can read the textbooks. It becomes a contagion, spreading throughout the city. Trying to stem the epidemic, the authorities herd the afflicted into a mental asylum where the wards are terrorised by blind thugs. And when fire destroys the asylum, the inmates burst forth and the last links with a supposedly civilised society are snapped. No food, no water, no government, no obligation, no order. This is not anarchy, this is blindness.

‘This magnificent new book is Alison Weir's greatest achievement: a detailed biography of Henry VIII, set against the cultural, social and political background of his court — the most magnificent court ever seen in England — and the splendour of his many sumptuous palaces. Seen from this new perspective, Henry VIII emerges as a fully-rounded and realistic personality, not the two-dimensional caricature of popular misconception. This book is not just an entertaining narrative packed with colourful description and a wealth of anecdotal evidence, but a comprehensive analytical study of the development of both monarch and court during a crucial period in English history. As well as challenging some recent theories, it offers controversial new conclusions based on contemporary evidence that has until now been overlooked. This is a triumph of historical writing which will appeal equally to the general reader and the serious historian.' A glittering evocation of the Tudor Court, its splendour as well as its vulgarity-a responsive, rounded portrait'. — «Daily Telegraph» 'Weir has used colourful, fresh material (much of it from unpublished archives and letters), to recreate early sixteenth-century European life and thought, within which she sets the larger-than-life figure of the king-a compelling, readable account of the life and times of the king who put England firmly on the map of power politics'. — Lisa Jardine, «Literary Review»

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.

'George III is alleged to have married secretly, on 17th April, 1759, a Quakeress called Hannah Lightfoot, daughter of a Wapping shoemaker, who is said to have borne him three children. Documents relating to the alleged marriage, bearing the Prince's signature, were impounded and examined in 1866 by the Attorney General. Learned opinion at the time leaned to the view that these documents were genuine. They were then placed in the Royal Archives at Windsor; in 1910, permission was refused a would-be author who asked to see them. If George III did make such a marriage when he was Prince of Wales, before the passing of the Royal Marriages Act in 1772, then his subsequent marriage to Queen Charlotte was bigamous, and every monarch of Britain since has been a usurper, the rightful heirs of George III being his children by Hannah Lightfoot, if they ever existed'. — From Britain's Royal Families Britain's Royal Families is a unique reference book. It provides, for the first time in one volume, complete genealogical details of all members of the royal houses of England, Scotland and Great Britain — from 800AD to the present. Here is the vital biographical information relating not only to each monarch, but also to every member of their immediate family, from parents to grandchildren. Drawing on countless authorities, both ancient and modern, Alison Weir explores the royal family tree in unprecedented depth and provides a comprehensive guide to the heritage of today's royal family.

The celebrated photographer Annie Leibovitz, author of the New York Times bestselling book A Photographer's Life, provides the stories, and technical description, of how some of her most famous images came to be. Starting in 1974, with her coverage of Nixon's resignation, and culminating with her controversial portraits of Queen Elizabeth II early in 2007, Leibovitz explains what professional photographers do and how they do it. The photographer in this instance is the most highly paid and prolific person in the business. Approximately 90 images are discussed in detail — the circumstances under which they were taken, with specific technical information (what camera, what settings, what lighting, where the images appeared). The Rolling Stones' tour in 1975, the famous nude session with John Lennon and Yoko Ono hours before Lennon was killed, the American Express and Gap campaigns, Whoopi Goldberg in a bathtub of milk, Demi Moore pregnant and naked on the cover of «Vanity Fair», and coverage of the couture collections in Paris with Puff Daddy and Kate Moss are among the subjects of this original and informative work. The photos and stories are arranged chronologically, moving from film to digital. Leibovitz's fans and lovers of great photography will find her stories of how one learns to see — and then how to photograph — inspiring.

»Send»— the classic guide to email for office and home and an instant success upon its original publication — has become indispensable for readers navigating the impersonal, and often overwhelming, world of electronic communication. Filled with real-life email success (and horror) stories and a wealth of entertaining examples, «Send» reveals the hidden minefields and pitfalls of email. It provides clear rules for handling all of today’s thorniest email issues, from salutations and subject lines to bcc’s and emoticons. It explains when you absolutely shouldn’t send an email and what to do when you’ve sent (in anger or in error) a potentially career-ending electronic bombshell. And it offers invaluable strategies to help you both better manage the ever-increasing number of emails you receive and improve the ones you send. In this revised edition, David Shipley and Will Schwalbe have added fresh tales from the digital realm and a new afterword — “How to Keep Email from Taking Over Your Life”, which includes sage advice on handheld etiquette. Send is now more essential than ever, a wise and witty book that every businessperson and professional should read and read again.