Random House Inc.

A brutal struggle in the cutthroat computer industry... A shattering psychological game of cat and mouse... A shocking accusation that threatens to derail a brilliant career... These are the electrifying elements of the novel by the author of The Lost World and Jurassic Park. It is Michael Crichton at his galvanizing best. An up-and-coming executive at the computer firm DigiCom, Tom Sanders is a man whose corporate future is certain. But after a closed-door meeting with his new boss — a woman who is his former lover and has been promoted to the position he expected to have — Sanders finds himself caught in a nightmarish web of deceit in which he is branded the villain. As Sanders scrambles to defend himself, he uncovers an electronic trail into the company's secrets — and begins to grasp that a cynical and manipulative scheme has been devised to bring him down...

This mosaic of tales featuring a Byronic officer is the first major prose novel in Russian literature. Set in the rugged Caucasus, Lermontov's 1840 psychological masterwork follows the cynical Pechorin as he charges through an exotic land of mountain horse-men, society women, and smugglers, leaving a trail of damaged egos and broken hearts. This Modern Library Paperback Classic also features a glossary and a map of the Caucasus.

The latest bestselling novel by the prolific John Grisham is now available in mass market paperback. This searing thriller is the story of a public defender in Washington, D.C., who digs into the background of his client — charged with a random street killing — and stumbles into a conspiracy too horrible to believe.

A landmark collaboration between a thirty-year veteran of the CIA and a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist, The Main Enemy is the dramatic inside story of the CIA-KGB spy wars, told through the actions of the men who fought them. Based on hundreds of interviews with operatives from both sides, The Main Enemy puts us inside the heads of CIA officers as they dodge surveillance and walk into violent ambushes in Moscow. This is the story of the generation of spies who came of age in the shadow of the Cuban missile crisis and rose through the ranks to run the CIA and KGB in the last days of the Cold War. The clandestine operations they masterminded took them from the sewers of Moscow to the back streets of Baghdad, from Cairo and Havana to Prague and Berlin, but the action centers on Washington, starting in the infamous «Year of the Spy»--when, one by one, the CIA’s agents in Moscow began to be killed, up through to the very last man. Behind the scenes with the CIA's covert operations in Afghanistan, Milt Bearden led America to victory in the secret war against the Soviets, and for the first time he reveals here what he did and whom America backed, and why. Bearden was called back to Washington after the Soviets withdrew from Afghanistan and was made chief of the Soviet/East Euro-pean Division—just in time to witness the fall of the Berlin Wall, the revolutions that swept across Eastern Europe, and the implosion of the Soviet Union. Laced with startling revelations--about fail-safe top-secret back channels between the CIA and KGB, double and triple agents, covert operations in Berlin and Prague, and the fateful autumn of 1989--The Main Enemy is history at its action-packed best.

An elderly journalist decides to celebrate 90th year in a grand way, giving himself a present that will make him feel like he's still alive: a young virgin. In the brothel of a picturesque town, the moment comes where he sees the girl from the back, completely naked, and his life changes radically. Now that he meets her he finds himself close to dying, not of old age, but rather of love. This moving new novel celebrates the joys of being in love and meditates on the misfortunes of old age, radiantly written in Gabriel Garcia Marquez's unparalleled style.

In this «New York Times» bestseller, Koontz delivers a haunting tale of love and terror, suspense and self-discovery. Odd Thomas is an unassuming young man — a gallant sentinel at the crossroads of life and death, who serves as the reluctant confidant of the dead.

The «New York Times» bestselling author explores new territory in the darker landscapes of human relationships in this gripping story of betrayal and devotion, war and remembrance, and love and loss on an isolated island in the English Channel.

The first part of a new Clone Wars duet features a group of embattled medics on the planet Drongar who struggle to save lives in the midst of the devastating conflict around them.

The second installment of a Clone Wars-period duology featuring embattled medics struggling to save lives is set between the events of the films «Episode II: Attack of the Clones» and the upcoming «Episode III».

The Yuuzhan Vong are poised to conquer the galaxy and Luke, Mara, and Jacen are missing in unknown space in this climactic finale of the 19-book New Jedi Order series.

Now in paperback — a thrilling, classic, stand-alone novel by the bestselling «Star Wars» author of all time. Luke and Mara Jade Skywalker come face to face with a shocking past on a mission to salvage a piece of Jedi history.

On a crucial mission, Han and Leia Solo face fortune-hunting marauders, Imperial enemies, and dark secrets about Leia's father on Tatooine.

The monumental novel considered one of the greatest ever written is an epic of the Napoleonic Wars, a philosophical study, and a celebration of the Russian spirit.

Sayo Masuda's story is an extraordinary portrait of rural life in Japan and an illuminating contrast to the fictionalised lives of glamorous geishas. At the age of six masuda's poverty-stricken family sent her to work as a nursemaid. At the age of twelve, she was indentured to a geisha house. In «Autobiography of A Geisha», Masuda chronicles a harsh world in which young women faced the realities of sex for sale and were deprived of their freedom and identity. She also tells of her life after leaving the geisha house, painting a vivid panorama of the grinding poverty of rural life in wartime Japan. Many years later Masuda decided to tell her story. Although she could barely read or write she was determined to tell the truth about life as a geisha and explode the myths surrounding their secret world. Remarkable frank and incredibly moving, this is the record of one woman's survival on the margins of Japanese society.

With his first book, John King has written a cult classic for our times: telling, for once, the truth about soccer violence. Forget the armchair nostalgia of «Fever Pitch» of the transatlantic reportage of «Among the Thugs» — this is a book that gets inside. A collection of linked stories, «The Football Factory» centres on Vince Matthews, a seasoned Chelsea hooligan who represents a disaffected society operating by appalling rules. From first-hand experience, we are shown the usual mix of social degradation, unemployment, racism, excessive drink, bad sex and casual violence — the facts of life — but also how they fall into a political context of surveillance, media manipulation and division. Football violence has not been eradicated, it has simply been moved out of the grounds and beyond the cameras. Like the slaughter of Iraqi conscripts in the Gulf War, hooligans and what they do have been pushed under the carpet: out of sight, out of mind. This is what «The Football Factory» is about.

Of all John Fowles' novels The French Lieutenant's Woman received the most universal acclaim and today holds a very special place in the canon of post-war English literature. From the god-like stance of the nineteenth-century novelist that he both assumes and gently mocks, to the last detail of dress, idiom and manners, his book is an immaculate recreation of Victorian England. Not only is it the epic love story of two people of insight and imagination seeking escape from the cant and tyranny of their age, The French Lieutenant's Woman is also a brilliantly sustained allegory of the decline of the twentieth-century passion for freedom.

Whether for the loo or bedside entertainment or as a work of reference or self-improvement The Funniest Thing You Never Said is the biggest and best humorous quotation book there is — a complete one-stop shop of witty one liners. Quotations are ordered not by A-Z, but by thematic categories: love; business; religion; celebrity, you name it, every category is covered. The collection includes all the classics from Oscar Wilde to Winston Churchill, Dorothy Parker to Groucho Marx but also mines many new hidden gems from lesser lights and includes many contemporary quotes by everyone from Jilly Cooper to Jonathan Ross. A standard companion for new collectors, and a fresh perspective for serious quotation addicts.

Cold-blooded murder just isn't Thomas Lang's cup of tea. Offered a tidy sum to assassinate an American industrialist, he opts to warn the intended victim instead — a good deed that soon takes a bad turn. Quicker than he can down a shot of his favourite whiskey, Lang is bashing heads with a Buddha statue, matching wits with evil billionaires, and putting his life (among other things) in the hands of a bevy of femmes fatales. Up against rogue CIA agents, wanna-be terrorists, and an arms dealer looking to make a high-tech killing, Lang's out to save the leggy lady he has come to love...and prevent an international bloodbath to boot.

High summer in Cuba, 1953, and Havana gleams with possibility. Flush with booming casinos, sex and drugs, Havana is a lucrative paradise for everyone from the Mafia and United Fruit to pimps, porn-makers, and anyone looking to grab a piece of the action — including the Cuban government, which naturally honours the interests of its old ally, the USA. Of course, where there's paradise, trouble can't be far behind. Trouble, in this case, makes its entrance in the terrifically charismatic and silver-tongued form of a young revolutionary named Fidel Castro. The Caribbean is fast becoming a strategic Cold War hub, and Soviet intelligence has taken Castro under its wing. The CIA's response is to send the one man capable of eliminating Castro: the legendary gunfighter and ex-Marine hero Earl Swagger, who proved his lethal talent in Stephen Hunter's previous novels. In Cuba, Earl finds himself up to his neck in treacherous ambiguity, where the old rules about honour and duty don't apply, and where Earl's target seems to have more guts and good luck than anyone else in Cuba.

Ted Wallace is an old, sour, womanising, cantankerous, whisky-sodden beast of a failed poet and drama critic, but he has his faults too. Fired from his newspaper, months behind on his alimony payments and disgusted with a world that undervalues him, Ted seeks a few months repose and free drink at Swafford Hall, the country mansion of his old friend Lord Logan. But strange things have been going on at Swafford. Miracles. Healings. Phenomena beyond the comprehension of a mud-caked hippopotamus like Ted...

Once again, the setting d Piemburgem, the deceptively peaceful-looking capital of Zululand, where Kommondant van Heerden, Konstabel Els and Luitenant Vekramp continue to terrorise true Englishman and even truer Zulus in their relentless search for a perfect South Africa. While that great Anglophile, Kommondant van Heerden, gropes his way towards attaining true 'Englishness' in the company of the eccentric Dornford Yates Club, Luitenant Vekramp, whose hatred of all things English is surpassed only by his fear of sex, sets in motion an experiment in mass chastity, with the help of the redoubtable lady psychiatrist, Dr. Von Bliminstein, which has remarkable and quite unforseen results. The Kommondant, hunting the fox in the Aardvark Mountains, succumbs to the bizarre charms of Mrs Heathcote-Kilkoon, as Luitenant Verkramp's essays in counter espionage backfire in a bird sanctuary. Once more, Konstable Els, homicidal to the last, saves the day — or what's left of it — in one of the most savage hunts ever chronicled in fiction.

Mad Madge designed her own clothes and her coach was black with silver decoration. As John Evelyn wrote, gentlemen visitors were 'much pleased by the extraordinary fanciful habit, garb and discourse of the Duchess'. Born into an East Anglian royalist family in 1623, young Margaret Lucas went into Court service, accompanying the Queen, Henrietta Maria, to Oxford during the Civil War and sharing her hair-raising escape to France in 1644. In Paris, she met and married William Cavendish, Marquis of Newcastle, a great horseman. They lived together in exile for 10 years, as part of the migr-royalist circle that included aristocrats and the intellectual giants of the day, such as Descartes and Hobbes. Margaret had always loved poetry and philosophy — and now she became a writer. Plays, short fiction, fantasies, 'science fiction' and verse, orations, letters, essays, an autobiography and a biography, six philosophical treatises and one utopia — She made her mark as one of the most determined and prolific of female writers in an age when less than one per cent of published work was by women and society was shocked that she dared to publish under her own name.

On a remote Greek Island, Nicholas Urfe finds himself embroiled in the deceptions of a master trickster. As reality and illusion intertwine, Urfe is caught up in the darkest of psychological games...John Fowles expertly unfolds a tale that is lush with over-powering imagery in a spellbinding exploration of the complexities of the human mind. By turns disturbing, thrilling and seductive, The Magus is a cerebral feast.

Michael Young is convinced his brilliant history thesis will win him a doctorate, a pleasant academic post, a venerable academic publisher and his beloved girlfriend Jane. A historian should know better than to imagine that he can predict the future. Leo Zuckerman is an ageing physicist obsessed with the darkest period in human history, utterly driven by his fanatical hatred of one man. A lover's childish revenge and the breaking of a rotten clasp cause the two men to meet in a blizzard of swirling pages. Pages of history. When they come together nothing — past, present or future — will ever be the same again.