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A young Englishman goes to Cold War Leipzig for a weekend with a group of student actors and, during his brief visit beyond the Iron Curtain, falls for an East German girl who is just beginning to be aware of the horrendous way her country is governed. Her misery touches him, her love excites him, but he is too frightened to help. He spends 19 years suppressing the strength of his feelings for the girl he knew only by her nickname 'Snowleg' — until one day, with Germany by now united, he decides to go back and look for her. But who is she now, how will his having once abandoned her have affected her life, and how will he find her? «Snowleg» is the story of more than one sundered love, of both broken dreams and damaged families. The central figure of the novel, who grows up as an Englishman, chooses to live in Berlin. He is a senior doctor; but his life is a startling mixture of romantic, of erratic, of dissolute behaviour. For long years, he nurses the secret of Snowleg and his longing for a love he had the chance to grasp but failed to take.

A man is found murdered in his Reykjavik flat. There are no obvious clues apart from a cryptic note left on the body and a photograph of a young girl's grave. Detective Erlendur is forced to use all the forensic resources available to find any leads at all. Delving into the dead man's life he discovers that forty years ago he was accused of an appalling crime. Did his past come back to haunt him? Finally, Erlendur's search leads him to Iceland's Genetic Research Centre in order to find the disturbing answers to the mystery. This prizewinning international bestseller is the first in a new series of crime novels set in Iceland.

At a time when journalism is under attack as never before, «Tell Me No Lies» could not be more timely. It is a celebration of the very best investigative journalism, and some of the greatest practitioners of the craft: Seymour Hersh on the My Lai massacre; Paul Foot on the Lockerbie cover-up; Wilfred Burchett, the first Westerner to enter Hiroshima following the atomic bombing; Israeli journalist Amira Hass, reporting from the Gaza Strip in the 1990s; Gunter Wallraff, the great German undercover reporter; Jessica Mitford on 'The American Way of Death'; and, Martha Gelhorn on the liberation of the death camp at Dachau. The book, a selection of articles, broadcasts, and books extracts that revealed important and disturbing truths, ranges from across many of the critical events, scandals and struggles of the past fifty years. Along the way it bears witness to epic injustices committed against the peoples of Vietnam, Cambodia, East Timor, and Palestine. John Pilger sets each piece of reporting in its context and introduces the collection with a passionate essay arguing that the kind of journalism he celebrates here is being subverted by the very forces that ought to be its enemy. Taken as a whole, the book tells an extraordinary 'secret history' of the modern era. It is also a call to arms to journalists everywhere — before it is too late.

A classic Rendellian loner, Mix Cellini is superstitious about the number 13. Living in a decaying house in Notting Hill, Mix is obsessed with 10 Rillington Place, where the notorious Christie committed a series of foul murders. He is also infatuated with a beautiful model who lives nearby — a woman who would not look at him twice. Mix's landlady, Gwendolen Chawcer is equally reclusive — living her life through her library of books. Both landlady and lodger inhabit weird worlds of their own. But when reality intrudes into Mix's life, a long pent-up violence explodes.

This extraordinary, magical novel is the story of Clare and Henry who have known each other since Clare was six and Henry was thirty-six, and were married when Clare was twenty-two and Henry thirty. Impossible but true, because Henry is one of the first people diagnosed with Chrono-Displacement Disorder: periodically his genetic clock resets and he finds himself pulled suddenly into his past or future. His disappearances are spontaneous and his experiences are alternately harrowing and amusing. The Time Traveler's Wife depicts the effects of time travel on Henry and Clare's passionate love for each other with grace and humour. Their struggle to lead normal lives in the face of a force they can neither prevent nor control is intensely moving and entirely unforgettable.

John Malcolm is barely 30, a high school football hero and Princeton graduate, he controls a hedge fund worth $50m. He made his millions back in the early '90's, a time when dozens of elite young American graduates made their fortunes in hedge funds in the Far East, beating the Japanese at their own game, riding the crashing waves of the Asian markets and winning. Failure meant not only bankruptcy and disgrace a la Nick Leeson, but potentially even death — at the hands of the Japanese Yakuza. «Ugly Americans» tells Malcolm's story, and that of others like him, in a cross between Mezrich's own best-selling «Bringing Down the House» and Michael Lewis' «Liar's Poker».

In this unique and compelling anthology, Sebastian Faulks has collected the best fiction about war in the 20th century. Ranging from the First World War to the Gulf War, these stories depict a soldier's experience from call-up, battle and comradeship, to leave, hospital and trauma in later life. Truly international in scope, this anthology includes stories by Erich Maria Remarque and Pat Barker, Isaac Babel and Ernest Hemingway, Heinrich Boll and Norman Mailer, JG Ballard and Tim O'Brien, Julian Barnes and Louis de Bernieres. Together, they form a powerful and moving evocation of the horrors of war.

A seductive and evocative epic on an intimate scale, that tells the extraordinary story of a geisha girl. Summoning up more than twenty years of Japan's most dramatic history, it uncovers a hidden world of eroticism and enchantment, exploitation and degradation. From a small fishing village in 1929, the tale moves to the glamorous and decadent heart of Kyoto in the 1930s, where a young peasant girl is sold as servant and apprentice to a renowned geisha house. She tells her story many years later from the Waldorf Astoria in New York; it exquisitely evokes another culture, a different time and the details of an extraordinary way of life. It conjures up the perfection and the ugliness of life behind rice-paper screens, where young girls learn the arts of geisha — dancing and singing, how to wind the kimono, how to walk and pour tea, and how to beguile the most powerful men.

Seymour 'Swede' Levov — a legendary high school athlete, a devoted family man, a hard worker, the prosperous inheritor of his father's Newark glove factory — comes of age in thriving, triumphant post-war America. But everything he loves is lost when the country begins to run amok in the turbulent 1960s. American Pastoral is the story of a fortunate American's rise and fall — of a strong, confident master of social equilibrium overwhelmed by the forces of social disorder.

At forty, the writer Nathan Zuckerman comes down with a mysterious affliction — pure pain, beginning in his neck and shoulders, invading his torso, and taking possession of his spirit. Zuckerman, whose work was his life, is unable to write a line. Now his work is trekking from one doctor to another, but none can find a cause for the pain and nobody can assuage it. Zuckerman himself wonders if the pain can have been caused by his own books. And while he is wondering, his dependence on painkillers extends to an addiction to vodka and marijuana. The third volume of the trilogy and epilogue Zuckerman Bound, The Anatomy Lesson is a great comedy of illness and provides some of the funniest scenes in all of Roth's fiction as well as some of the fiercest.

Peter Fortune is a daydreamer. He's a quiet ten year old who can't help himself from dropping out of reality and into the amazing world of his vivid imagination. His daydreams are fantastic and fascinating — only in the bizarre and disturbing world of dreams can he swop bodies with the family cat and his baby cousin, Kenneth, or wipe out his entire family with vanishing cream.

Radio actor Iron Rinn is a big Newark roughneck lighted by a brutal personal secret from which he is perpetually in flight. An idealistic Communist, an uneducated ditchdigger turned popular performer, a six-foot, six-inch Abe Lincoln look-alike, he emerges from serving in WW2 passionately committed to making the world a better place and winds up instead blacklisted and unemployable, his life in ruins. I Married a Communist is the story of Iron Rinn's denunciation and disgrace. It is also a story of cruelty, humiliation, betrayal and revenge — an American tragedy as only Philip Roth can conceive one — fierce and funny, eloquently rendered and deadly accurate.

Viktor — last seen in Death and the Penguin fleeing Mafia vengeance on an Antarctica-bound flight booked for Penguin Misha — seizes a heaven-sent opportunity to return to Kiev with a new identity. Clear now as to the enormity of abandoning Misha, then convalescent from a heart-transplant, Viktor determines to make amends. Viktor falls in with a Mafia boss who engages him to help in his election campaign, then introduces him to men who might further his search for Misha, said to be in a private zoo in Chechnya. What ensues is for Viktor both a quest and an odyssey of atonement, and, for the reader, an experience as rich, topical and illuminating as Death and the Penguin.

Brilliantly written and bitingly funny, Tom Sharpe's indefatigable hero is pitted against the vices of an aristocratic pervert, the merciless greed of a politician's wife and the seedy underbelly of Britain's medical facilities, deftly exposing the farcical realities of small-town England and America.

In «The Crack in Space», a repairman discovers that a hole in a faulty Jifi-scuttler leads to a parallel world. Jim Briskin, campaigning to be the first black president of the United States, thinks alter-Earth is the solution to the chronic overpopulation that has seventy million people cryogenically frozen; Tito Cravelli, a shadowy private detective, wants to know why Dr Lurton Sands is hiding his mistress on the planet; billionaire mutant George Walt wants to make the empty world all his own. But when the other earth turns out to be inhabited, everything changes. Winner of both the Hugo and John W. Campbell awards for best novel, widely regarded as the premiere science fiction writer of his day, and the object of cult-like adoration from his legions of fans, Philip K. Dick has come to be seen in a literary light that defies classification in much the same way as Borges and Calvino. With breathtaking insight, he utilizes vividly unfamiliar worlds to evoke the hauntingly and hilariously familiar in our society and ourselves.

The bestselling author who made mincemeat of political correctness in “Thank You for Smoking”, conspiracy theories in “Little Green Men”, and Presidential indiscretions “No Way to Treat a First Lady” now takes on the hottest topic in the entire world–Arab-American relations – in a blistering comic novel sure to offend the few it doesn’t delight. Appalled by the punishment of her rebellious friend Nazrah, youngest and most petulant wife of Prince Bawad of Wasabia, Florence Farfarletti decides to draw a line in the sand. As Deputy to the deputy assistant secretary for Near East Affairs, Florence invents a far-reaching, wide-ranging plan for female emancipation in that part of the world. The U.S. government, of course, tells her to forget it. Publicly, that is. Privately, she’s enlisted in a top-secret mission to impose equal rights for the sexes on the small emirate of Matar (pronounced “Mutter”), the “Switzerland of the Persian Gulf”. Her crack team: a CIA killer, a snappy PR man, and a brilliant but frustrated gay bureaucrat. Her weapon: TV shows. The lineup on TV Matar includes “A Thousand and One Mornings”, a daytime talk show that features self-defense tips to be used against boyfriends during Ramadan; an addictive soap opera featuring strangely familiar members of the Matar royal family; and a sitcom about an inept but ruthless squad of religious police, pitched as “Friends from Hell”. The result: the first deadly car bombs in the country since 1936, a fatwa against the station’s entire staff, a struggle for control of the kingdom, and, of course, interference from the French. And that’s only the beginning. A merciless dismantling of both American ineptitude and Arabic intolerance, “Florence of Arabia” is Christopher Buckley’s funniest and most serious novel yet, a biting satire of how U.S. good intentions can cause the Shiite to hit the fan.

During the Nuremberg trials, Dr. Leon Goldensohn – a psychiatrist for the U.S. Army – monitored the mental health of two dozen German leaders charged with carrying out genocide. These recorded conversations have gone largely unexamined for more than fifty years, until Robert Gellately – one of the premier historians of Nazi Germany – made them available to the public in this remarkable collection. Here are interviews with the likes of Hans Frank, Hermann Goering, Ernst Kaltenbrunner, and Joachim von Ribbentrop – the highest ranking Nazi officials in the Nuremberg jails. Here too are interviews with lesser-known officials essential to the inner workings of the Third Reich. Candid and often shockingly truthful, «The Nuremberg Interviews» is a profound addition to our understanding of the Nazi mind and mission.

Merciless attacks by an invincible alien force have left the New Republic reeling. Dozens of worlds have succumbed to occupation or annihilation, and even the Jedi Knights have tasted defeat. In these darkest of times, the noble Chewbacca is laid to rest, having died as heroically as he lived — and a grief-stricken Han Solo is left to fit the pieces of his shattered soul back together before he loses everything: friends, family, and faith. Refusing help from Leia or Luke, Han becomes the loner he once was, seeking to escape the pain of his partner's death in adventure... and revenge. When he learns that an old friend from his smuggling days is operating as a mercenary for the enemy, he sets out to expose the traitor. But Han's investigation uncovers an even greater evil: a sinister conspiracy aimed at the very heart of the New Republic's will and ability to fight — the Jedi. Now Han must face down his inner demons and, with the help of a new and unexpected ally, honor Chewbacca's sacrifice in the only way that matters — by being worthy of it.

Raven is an ugly man dedicated to ugly deeds. His cold-blooded killingof the Minister of War is an act of violence with chillingrepercussions, not just for Raven himself but for the nation as awhole. The money he receives in payment for the murder is madeup of stolen notes. When the first of these is traced, Raven is a manon the run. As he tracks down the agent who has been double-crossinghim and attempts to elude the police, he becomes both hunter andhunted: an unwitting weapon of a strange kind of social justice.

On a chilly February day two old friends meet in the throng outside a crematorium to pay their last respects to Molly Lane. Both Clive Linley and Vernon Halliday had been Molly's lovers in the days before they reached their current eminence, Clive as Britain's most successful modern composer, Vernon as editor of the quality broadsheet, The Judge. Gorgeous, feisty Molly had had other lovers too, notably Julian Garmony, Foreign Secretary, a notorious right-winger tipped to be the next prime minister. In the days that follow Molly's funeral Clive and Vernon will make a pact that will have consequences neither has foreseen. Each will make a disastrous moral decision, their friendship will be tested to its limits and Julian Garmony will be fighting for his political life. A contemporary morality tale that is as profound as it is witty, this short novel is perhaps the most purely enjoyable fiction Ian McEwan has ever written. And why Amsterdam? What happens there to Clive and Vernon is the most delicious shock in a novel brimming with surprises.

Crossing the boundaries of genre with its unrivalled storytelling, Diana Gabaldon’s new novel is a gift both to her millions of loyal fans and to the lucky readers who have yet to discover her. In the ten years since her extraordinary debut novel, «Outlander», was published, beloved author Diana Gabaldon has entertained scores of readers with her heart-stirring stories and remarkable characters. The four volumes of her bestselling saga, featuring eighteenth-century Scotsman James Fraser and his twentieth-century, time-travelling wife, Claire Randall, boasts nearly 5 million copies in the U.S. The story of «Outlander» begins just after the Second World War, when a British field nurse named Claire Randall walks through a cleft stone in the Scottish highlands and is transported back some two hundred years to 1743. Here, now, is «The Fiery Cross», the eagerly awaited fifth volume in this remarkable, award-winning series of historical novels. The year is 1771, and war is approaching. Jamie Fraser’s wife has told him so. Little as he wishes to, he must believe it, for hers is a gift of dreadful prophecy — a time-traveller’s certain knowledge. To break his oath to the Crown will brand him a traitor; to keep it is certain doom. Jamie Fraser stands in the shadow of the fiery cross — a standard that leads nowhere but to the bloody brink of war.

The acclaimed author of «Emperor: The Gates of Rome» returns to the extraordinary life of Julius Caesar in a new novel that takes us further down the path to glory... as Caesar comes into his own as a man, warrior, senator, husband, and leader. In a sparsely settles region of North Africa, a band of disheveled soldiers turn their eyes toward one man among them: their leader, Julius Caesar. The soldiers are Roman legionaries. And their quarry is a band of pirates who dared to kidnap Julius Caesar for ransom. Now, as Caesar exacts his revenge and builds a legend far from Rome, his friend Marcus Brutus is fighting battles of another sort, rising to power in the wake of the assassination of a dictator. Once Brutus and Caesar were as close as brothers, devoted to the same ideals and attracted to the same forbidden women. Now they will be united again by a shock wave from the north, where a gladiator named Spartacus is building an army of seventy thousand slaves — to fight a cataclysmic battle against Rome itself.

With his acclaimed Emperor novels, author Conn Iggulden brings a dazzling world to life–the rich, complex world of ancient Rome as seen through the eyes of one extraordinary man: Julius Caesar. Now Iggulden returns to the story of Julius Caesar and a realm that stretches from the sands of North Africa to the coast of Britain. Against this magnificent backdrop, Caesar, his first victories under his belt and a series of key alliances in place, makes his move toward power and glory–and commands his famous legions on one of history’s bloodiest and most daring military campaigns. It is the heart of the first century B.C. For Julius Caesar, the time has come to enter the treacherous political battleground that has become Rome. Having proved his valor in the slaves’ revolt, Caesar is strengthened by the love and vision of a beautiful older woman, and by the sword of his loyal friend, Marcus Brutus. And when he is appointed to a new position of power, Caesar manages to do what none of the other great figures of his time could: capture the hearts of the Roman people themselves. Crushing a rebellion, bringing order to the teeming city, Caesar then makes the move that will change history. He leaves Rome for the foothills of the Alps. And with an army made in his own image, he begins a daring charge through Gaul, across the English Channel, and to the wilds of tribal Britain. Here, in a series of cataclysmic clashes, the legend of Julius Caesar will be forged. And while Caesar and Brutus pit their lives–and those of their men–against the armies of the wilderness, their political adversaries in Rome grow at once more fearful and more formidable. So when the fighting at the dominion’s edge is over, the greatest danger to Julius Caesar will await him on the Tiber–with a man who wants Rome himself. From the clash of armies to the heat of a woman’s seduction, from the thunder of battle to the orgies of pleasure and plunder that follow in a warrior’s wake, «Emperor: The Field of Swords» captures in riveting detail a world being shaped by a brilliant civilization. And in this extraordinary novel, the fate of Rome is being driven by the ambitions of a single man. A man with an unmatched genius for power.

When Eragon finds a polished stone in the forest, he thinks it is the lucky discovery of a poor farm boy; perhaps it will buy his family meat for the winter. But when the stone brings a dragon hatchling, Eragon soon realizes he has stumbled upon a legacy nearly as old as the Empire itself. Overnight his simple life is shattered and he is thrust into a perilous new world of destiny, magic and power. With only an ancient sword and the advice of an old storyteller for guidance, Eragon and the fledgling dragon must navigate the dangerous terrain and dark enemies of an Empire ruled by a king whose evil knows no bounds. Can Eragon take up the mantle of the legendary Dragon Riders? The fate of the Empire may rest in his hands...