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As their holiday unfolds, Colin and Maria are locked into their own intimacy. They groom themselves meticulously, as though there waits someone who cares deeply about how they appear. Then, they meet a man with a disturbing story to tell and become drawn into a fantasy of violence and obsession.

»C» follows the short, intense life of Serge Carrefax, a man who — as his name suggests — surges into the electric modernity of the early twentieth century, transfixed by the technologies that will obliterate him. Born to the sound of one of the very earliest experimental wireless stations, Serge finds himself steeped in a weird world of transmissions, whose very air seems filled with cryptic and poetic signals of all kinds. When personal loss strikes him in his adolescence, this world takes on a darker and more morbid aspect. What follows is a stunning tour de force in which the eerily idyllic settings of pre-war Europe give way to the exhilarating flight-paths of the frontline aeroplane radio operator, then the prison camps of Germany, the drug-fuelled London of the roaring twenties and, finally, the ancient tombs of Egypt.

The People of Sparks picks up where The City of Ember leaves off. Lina and Doon have emerged from the underground city to the exciting new world above, and it isn't long before they are followed by the other inhabitants of Ember. The Emberites soon come across a town where they are welcomed, fed, and given places to sleep. But the town's resources are limited and it isn't long before resentment begins to grow between the two groups. When anonymous acts of vandalism push them toward violence, it's up to Lina and Doon to discover who's behind the vandalism and why, before it's too late. From the Hardcover edition.

The Cold War... was a fight to the death, notes Thomas C. Reed, fought with bayonets, napalm, and high-tech weaponry of every sort — save one. It was not fought with nuclear weapons. With global powers now engaged in cataclysmic encounters, there is no more important time for this essential, epic account of the past half century, the tense years when the world trembled At the Abyss, Written by an author who rose from military officer to administration insider, this is a vivid, unvarnished view of America's fight against Communism, from the end of WWII to the closing of the Strategic Air Command, a work as full of human interest as history, rich characters as bloody conflict. Among the unforgettable figures who devised weaponry, dictated policy, or deviously spied and subverted: Whittaker Chambers — the translator whose book, Witness, started the hunt for bigger game: Communists in our government; Lavrenti Beria — the head of the Soviet nuclear weapons program who apparently killed Joseph Stalin; Col. Ed Hall — the leader of America's advanced missile system, whose own brother was a Soviet spy; Adm. James Stockwell — the prisoner of war and eventual vice presidential candidate who kept his terrible secret from the Vietnamese for eight long years; Nancy Reagan — the Queen of Hearts, who was both loving wife and instigator of palace intrigue in her husband's White House. From Eisenhower's decision to beat the Russians at their own game, to the Missile Gap of the Kennedy Era, to Reagan's vow to lean on the Soviets until they go broke — all the pivotal events of the period are portrayed in new and stunning detail with information only someone on the front lines and inbackrooms could know. Yet At the Abyss is more than a riveting and comprehensive recounting. It is a cautionary tale for our time, a revelation of how, those years... came to be known as the Cold War, not World War III. From the Hardcover edition.

Coco Chanel, high priestess of couture, created the look of the chic modern woman. For more than half a century, Chanel's life from 1941 to 1954 has been shrouded in rumour. This title pieces together Chanel's hidden years, from the Nazi occupation of Paris to the aftermath of the Liberation. It uncovers the truth of Chanel's anti-Semitism.

THE EISNER AWARD-WINNING, NATIONALLY BEST-SELLING MYTHOLOGY IS HERE IN PAPERBACK, IN AN EXPANDED EDITION WITH 32 NEW PAGES. Mythology returns, in a newly expanded paperback edition of the book Entertainment Weekly awarded a grade of A, saying: Alex Ross brings to his work an unparalleled sense of the real. His heroes-both super and mortal — have weight; they exist in space, and that space is affected by them in ways never before seen on the page. And so here they are, the incomparable cast of the DC Comics universe: Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, the Flash, Aquaman, the Green Lantern, and the rest of the Justice League as you've never seen them before. Mythology brings together the best loved comic characters in the world, brought to life by Alex Ross, one of the most astonishing young artists working in the medium today. The award-winning designer/writer Chip Kidd and photographer Geoff Spear have teamed up to create a book like no other, with an introduction by M. Night Shyamalan, the acclaimed director of The Village and The Sixth Sense, Ross has often been called the Norman Rockwell of comics, and this book reveals not only his lifelong love of these classic superheroes but also his vision: Mythology takes you into the studio for a behind-the-scenes look at his fascinating creative process. The combination of Ross's dynamic art and Kidd's kinetic design makes images from his most memorable stories-including Kingdom Come, Superman: Peace on Earth, Batman: War on Crime, and Uncle Sam-soar off the more than 300 pages. The new material centers on Ross's startling new comic book series, Justice, including sketches, preliminary art, prototype figures, andmore. Mythology is a book in which every page explodes with the power of the icons it celebrates.

Sephy is a Cross, one of the privileged in a society where the ruling Crosses treat the pale-skinned noughts as inferiors. But her baby daughter has a nought father — Callum. Eaten up with bitterness, Callum's brother Jude, blames Sephy for the terrible losses his family has suffered. Now Jude's life rests on a knife edge. Will Sephy be forced, once again, to take sides?

Neal Stephenson continues his extraordinary Baroque Cycle in this sequel to his bestselling «Quicksilver», bringing to life a cast of unforgettable characters in a time of breathtaking genius and discovery. It is the late 1600s on the high seas. A group of Barbary galley slaves plot as they ply the oars of a pirate ship, hatching a daring scheme to find an enormous cache of Spanish gold. Amazingly, they succeed — leaving some very unhappy men behind who vow to hunt down the vagabonds and bring them to justice, no matter the cost. Meanwhile, back in France, the beautiful Eliza — toast of Versailles and spy extraordinaire — attempts to return to London with her baby, a child whose paternity is shrouded in mystery. Making her way home, her ship is stopped by a French privateer and she is returned to the Sun King's court. Thrown back into a web of international intrigue, Eliza must contend with all manner of characters, including buccaneers, poisoners, Jesuits, financial manipulators, and even a stray cryptographer or two...

Deftly combining the sacred and the profane — the unmistakable hallmark of her fiction over the past decade — Susan Howatch gives us a spellbinding, suspenseful and psychologically intense new novel. The financial heart of London — the City — is an adrenaline-charged square mile deep in recession in the 1990s, a place where sex is just another commodity to be bought and sold in the marketplace. And the City is where the life of Gavin Blake, who sells sex to high flyers, is finally about to unravel.In the center of the City is St. Benet's, a church that ministers to the casualties of this affluent but amoral society. Carta Graham, the St. Benet's fundraiser, is at once attracted to Gavin when they meet through a mutual friend, but slowly she realizes that she has entered a relationship far more complex than she could ever have imagined. Gavin is desperate to escape from his world of prostitution, pornography and violence, but as his involvement with Carta and St. Benet's deepens, the dangers that encircle him escalate until his life itself is on the line. Carta is determined to help him — but will their mysterious journey together be lifesaving or soul-destroying? All she can do is fight her hardest to help Gavin survive. Consistently surprising and powerfully moving, «The Heartbreaker» is Susan Howatch's most gripping novel yet. «From the Hardcover edition.»

After just a year of close, loving marriage, Ruth has been widowed. Her beloved husband, Ben, has been killed in a tragic accident and Ruth is left, suddenly and totally bereft. Unable to share her sorrow and grief with Ben's family, who are dealing with their pain in their own way, Ruth becomes increasingly isolated, burying herself in her cottage in the countryside as the seasons change around her. Only Ben's young brother Jo, is able to reach out beyond his own grief, to offer Ruth the compassion which might reclaim her from her own devastating unhappiness. The result is a moving, lyrical exploration of love and loss, of grief and mourning, from a masterful writer.

When Frank Behr’s friend and mentor is murdered without any apparent motive, he thirsts for answers and retaliation. But before he can make headway in the dead-end investigation, a private firm approaches him with a delicate proposition: two of its detectives have gone missing, and the firm wants Behr to find out what happened to them. The search for the missing detectives takes Behr into the recesses of Indianapolis’s underworld, a place rife with brutality and vice where Behr uncovers a shocking thread connecting the missing detectives to his friend’s brutal murder, and, in the process, an ominous, deadly new breed of crime family.

These are exciting times for the world's most romantic city. Traditionally a global centre for the arts, fashion, film, gastronomy, architecture, shopping and sport, the French capital has been transformed by incumbent mayor Bertrand Delanoe. Recent public initiatives have included Paris-Plage, creating inner-city beaches and outdoor leisure activities along the Seine for a month in summer, and Nuit Blanche, all-night museum openings in October. Paris is also in pole position to host the Olympic Games of 2012, and a positive decision in July 2005 would be a further boost to the city's global status. Without breaking with tradition — all major sights, museums and monuments are covered in-depth — the guide takes detours into the city's revolutionary history, modern architectural development and present-day cultural mix.

In May 2003, the body of nineteen-year-old Jessica Kate Williams was found by a railway track in Portland Oregon: beaten, broken and horribly burnt. But the terrible chain of events that led to her death had been put in place almost a decade before. James Daniel Nelson first hit the streets as a teenager in 1992, joining a clutch of runaways and misfits who camped out together in a squat under a Portland bridge. Within a few months, the group — they called themselves a 'family' — was arrested for a string of violent murders. While Nelson sat in prison, the society he had helped form grew into a phenomenon. Street families spread to every city in America from New York to San Francisco, and to many small towns in between, bringing violence with them. In 2003, almost eleven years after his original murder, Nelson, now called 'Thantos', got out of prison, returned to Portland, created a new street family, and was ready to kill again. In this dark and compelling portrait of one of America's most frightening sub-cultures, Rene Denfeld draws on material gathered over a decade spent with the 'families', revealing the extremes to which desperate teenagers (the majority of whom hail from loving middle-class homes) will go in their search for a sense of a belonging.

Hal Treherne is a young and dedicated soldier on the brink of a brilliant career. Impatient to see action, his other deep commitment is to Clara, his beautiful 'red, white and blue girl', who sustains him as he rises through the ranks. When Hal is transferred to the Mediterranean, Clara, now his wife, and their baby daughters join him. But Cyprus is no 'sunshine posting', and the island is in the heat of the Emergency: the British are defending the colony against Cypriots — schoolboys and armed guerrillas alike — battling for enosis, union with Greece. The skirmishes are far from glorious and operations often rough and bloody. Still, in serving his country and leading his men, Hal has a taste of triumph. Clara shares his sense of duty. She must settle down, make no fuss, smile. But action changes Hal, and Clara becomes fearful — of the lethal tit-for-tat beyond the army base, and her increasingly distant husband. The atrocities Hal is drawn into take him further from Clara; a betrayal that is only part of the shocking personal crisis to come. The prizewinning and bestselling author of The Outcast returns with an emotionally powerful portrait of a marriage in extremis and a world-view in question. Sadie Jones has produced a passionate, gut-wrenching and brilliantly researched depiction of a 'small war' with devastating consequences; and in doing so, raises important questions that resonate profoundly today.

This Valentine's day Imogen is going to meet the man of her dreams. If only she can discover who he is... At a gloriously over-the-top house party in the balmy South of France, British trainee chef Imogen finds herself playing blind man's buff with a host of impossibly handsome men. And then one of them kisses her. It's the most perfect kiss she's ever experienced in her short — and frankly, to date romantically disappointing — life. Sweet, sexy and full of promise. Imogen wants more, but by the time she recovers her wits sufficiently to remove her blindfold her mystery kisser has disappeared. Could her Prince Charming be one of her fellow-chefs, Dimitri or Bastien? Both are clearly interested in her. But there's also enigmatic Latino hunk Enzo, good-times-guy DJ Cheyenne, aristocratic Amaury, and the American visitors — Archer and Everett... So many men, so little time. And Imogen can't just keep kissing men until she finds the right one... can she?

A young woman prays at her husband's bedside as he lies in a coma with a bullet in his neck. From outside come the sounds of tanks, gunshots, screaming and, most terrifying of all, silence. Inside, her two frightened daughters call to her from the hallway. As she tries to keep her husband alive, the woman rages against men, war, culture, God. Even as her mind appears to unravel, she becomes intensely clear-sighted. Now is her chance — her first ever — to speak without being censored. Her husband's body reminds her of the legend of the patience stone, a stone that hears all confessions until it explodes, and finally, spurred to new heights of daring, she spills out her most explosive secret.

'What if I were to tell you that a psychopathic arsonist might also be the person most likely to save you from a burning building'? This book is about a special kind of persuasion: 'flipnosis'. It has an incubation period of just seconds, and can instantly disarm even the most discerning mind. Flipnosis is black-belt mind control. It doesn't just turn the tables, it kicks them over. From the malign but fascinating powers of psychopaths, serial killers and con men to the political genius of Winston Churchill — via the grandmasters of martial arts, Buddhist monks, magicians, advertisers, salesmen, CEOs and frogs that mug each other — Kevin Dutton's brilliantly original and revelatory book explores what cutting-edge science can teach us about the techniques of persuasion.

Present day Iraq: A country torn apart by war and anarchy. Thieves roam the streets. People are being killed in broad daylight. Security is non-existent. And now, terrorists have seized a Van Gogh painting worth 25 million from one of Saddam's palaces. They are offering it to the highest bidder. The painting's original owner, a Kuwaiti prince, from whom it was seized during Iraq's occupation of Kuwait in the First Gulf War, has asked for the British Government's help in retrieving it. They owe the Prince a favour for backing them during the Iraq War, so they agree to help. But rather than agreeing to pay the terrorists' ransom — which they fear will be pumped into funding terrorist operations across the world — Her Majesty's Government decides to send in a team of hardened ex-Special Forces, led by ex-SAS hero Mick Kilbride and his sidekick «East End» Eddie. Sent undercover in a deniable operation called Desert Claw, their brief is simple: retrieve the painting and eliminate the terrorists at the earliest possible opportunity. The mission sounds simple enough. But as Mick and his team are drawn into a dark and violent world, things are not always as they seem. And in the final climactic scene, a horrible and shocking truth awaits the men.

In 1878, aspiring entomologist Hans Bengler travels to the Kalahari Desert in hopes of making a name for himself by discovering a previously unknown insect or two. There he encounters a boy named Molo, an orphan whose family has been killed by European colonists. Bengler civilizes the boy by rechristening him Daniel, teaching him to pray to the Christian god, and finally bringing him home to Sweden. The boy is bewildered and awed by the new land, cut off from his culture and the spirits of his family, and Bengler finds that raising a child across a great cultural divide is more difficult than he imagined. A psychological drama of one boy's struggle to find his place in a new land far from home, Daniel is a compelling novel for our modern globalized world.

'Once upon a time there was a father who, because he had grown old, called together his sons and daughters — four, five, six, eight in number — and finally convinced them, after long hesitation, to do as he wished. Now they are sitting around a table and begin to talk...' In this delightful sequel to Peeling the Onion, Gunter Grass writes in the voices of his eight children as they record memories of their childhoods, of growing up, of their father, who was always at work on a new book, always at the margins of their lives. Memories contradictory, critical, loving, accusatory — they piece together an intimate picture of this most public of men. To say nothing of Marie, Grass' assistant, a family friend of many years, perhaps even a lover, whose snapshots taken with an old-fashioned Agfa box camera provide the author with ideas for his work. But her images offer much more. They reveal a truth beyond the ordinary detail of life, depict the future, tell what might have been, grant the wishes in visual form of those photographed. The children speculate on the nature of this magic: was the enchanted camera a source of inspiration for their father? Did it represent the power of art itself? Was it the eye of God? The Box is an inspired and daring work of fiction. In its candour, wit, and earthiness, it is Grass at his very best.

Lydia Chin and Bill Smith have been hired by one of the most respected figures in New York City's Chinatown, for what appears to be a simple task — deliver a family heirloom to the young grandson of the recently deceased business colleague of Grandfather Gao. Before they can deliver the heirloom, the grandson is kidnapped and two separate ransom demands are made. While the family of the kidnapped boy tries to freeze them out, Lydia and Bill must quickly learn their way around a city where the rules are different, the stakes are high, and the cost of failure is too dire to imagine. Note: this title is originally published as Reflecting the Sky in the US.

Every morning Hakan von Enke takes a walk in the forest near his apartment in Stockholm. However, one winter's day he fails to come home. It seems that the retired naval officer has vanished without trace. Detective Kurt Wallander is not officially involved in the investigation but he has personal reasons for his interest in the case as Hakan's son is engaged to his daughter Linda. A few months earlier, at Hakan's 75th birthday party, Kurt noticed that the old man appeared uneasy and seemed eager to talk about a controversial incident from his past career that remained shrouded in mystery. Could this be connected to his disappearance? When Hakan's wife Louise also goes missing, Wallander is determined to uncover the truth. His search leads him down dark and unexpected avenues involving espionage, betrayal and new information about events during the Cold War that threatens to cause a political scandal on a scale unprecedented in Swedish history. The investigation also forces Kurt to look back over his own past and consider his hopes and regrets, as he comes to the unsettling realisation that even those we love the most can remain strangers to us. And then an even darker cloud appears on the horizon... The return of Kurt Wallander, for his final case, has already caused a sensation around the globe. The Troubled Man confirms Henning Mankell's position as the king of crime writing.

Aimee Bender's stunning debut collection, The Girl in the Flammable Skirt, proved her to be one of the freshest voices in American fiction. Now, in her first novel, she builds on that early promise. Mona Gray was ten when her father contracted a mysterious illness and she became a quitter, abandoning each of her talents just as pleasure became intense. The only thing she can't stop doing is math: She knocks on wood, adds her steps, and multiplies people in the park against one another. When Mona begins teaching math to second-graders, she finds a ready audience. But the difficult and wonderful facts of life keep intruding. She finds herself drawn to the new science teacher, who has an unnerving way of seeing through her intricately built facade. Bender brilliantly directs her characters, giving them unexpected emotional depth and setting them in a calamitous world, both fancifully surreal and startlingly familiar.

It's the year 2044, and the real world has become an ugly place. We're out of oil. We've wrecked the climate. Famine, poverty, and disease are widespread. Like most of humanity, Wade Watts escapes this depressing reality by spending his waking hours jacked into the OASIS, a sprawling virtual utopia where you can be anything you want to be, where you can live and play and fall in love on any of ten thousand planets. And like most of humanity, Wade is obsessed by the ultimate lottery ticket that lies concealed within this alternate reality: OASIS founder James Halliday, who dies with no heir, has promised that control of the OASIS — and his massive fortune — will go to the person who can solve the riddles he has left scattered throughout his creation. For years, millions have struggled fruitlessly to attain this prize, knowing only that the riddles are based in the culture of the late twentieth century. And then Wade stumbles onto the key to the first puzzle. Suddenly, he finds himself pitted against thousands of competitors in a desperate race to claim the ultimate prize, a chase that soon takes on terrifying real-world dimensions — and that will leave both Wade and his world profoundly changed.