Random House Inc.

Porterhouse College is world renowned for its gastronomic excellence, the arrogance of its Fellows, its academic mediocrity and the social cachet it confers on the athletic sons of county families. Sir Godber Evans, ex-Cabinet Minister and the new Master, is determined to change all this. Spurred on by his politically angular wife, Lady Mary, he challenges the established order and provokes the wrath of the Dean, the Senior Tutor, the Bursar and, most intransigent of all, Skullion the Head Porter — with hilarious and catastrophic results.

Fenella McCabe works alone in the archive section of Trust Art, housed in one of the corridors of the Tate Gallery. She is hoping to trace a piece of art stolen in the 1930s and simultaneously trying to decide between two men.

On the hottest day of the summer of 1934, thirteen-year-old Briony Tallis sees her sister Cecilia strip off her clothes and plunge into the fountain in the garden of their country house. Watching her is Robbie Turner, her childhood friend who, like Cecilia, has recently come down from Cambridge. By the end of that day, the lives of all three will have been changed for ever. Robbie and Cecilia will have crossed a boundary they had not even imagined at its start, and will have become victims of the younger girl's imagination. Briony will have witnessed mysteries, and committed a crime for which she will spend the rest of her life trying to atone.

Ethan and Jorie, the perfect couple, have been married for 13 years, and are still very much in love. But 13 years ago, Ethan committed a brutal rape and murder. A young girl's phone call exposes him, and nothing will ever be the same for them again.

The administrative professional's guide to the modern office. This revised and updated Third Edition provides the office worker with practical advice on how to survive and thrive in today's fast-paced business environment. Written by business specialists, it has detailed information on standard office practices, with special emphasis on electronic communications and information technology. • Produced under the sponsorship and direct supervision of IAAP, International Association of Administrative Professionals • Provides up-to-date information on the electronic office, simplifying complex tasks and procedures • Indispensable for office personnel at every level; self-employed workers; consultants; and entrepreneurs.

The scene is Ireland. The time, 1916, is the eve of the famous, tragic Easter Rebellion in Dublin, which startled Europe even in the midst of the First World War. A single Anglo Irish family provides the extremely diverse characters. Pat Dumay is a Catholic and an Irish patriot. His relentlessly pious mother pursues her own private war with his step father, a man sunk in religious speculation and drink. Pat's English bred Protestant cousin and rival, Andrew Chase White, an officer in King Edward's Horse, puzzles out his complex emotions about Ireland and Frances, the girl he loves, against a background of the fear of death, while France's father, Christopher Bellman, scholar and cynic, finds the love of Ireland a more passionate matter than he had bargained for. Weaving these people together into a tragic comic pattern moves Millie Kinnard: fast, feminist, and only just respectable.

Carel is rector of a non-existent City church (it was destroyed in the war). In the rectory live his daughter, Muriel, his beautiful invalid ward, Elizabeth, and their West Indian servant, Patti. Here too are Eugene, a Russian emigre, and his delinquent son, Leo. Carel's brother, Marcus, co-guardian with him of Elizabeth, tires to make contact with Carel but is constantly rebuffed. These seven characters go through a dance of attraction and repulsion, misunderstanding and revelation, the centre of which is the enigmatic Carel himself — a priest who believes that, God being dead, His angels are released. At the end, Muriel finds herself with the power of life and death over her father.

A collection of five heart-stopping stories from the master thriller writer. A miracle in war-torn Siena that begins with the persecution of a young nun in the turbulent days of the sixteenth century and culminates in the bitter German retreat from Italy; a drug smuggling heist on an international flight where the Knock pit their wits against the smugglers; a brural urban murder, where a brilliant QC decides to defend the killers, resulting in a startling justice; an incandescent art scam at a famous London auction house, and a brilliantly plotted revenge that shatters the elegant world of the Old Masters — each story is a remarkable tour de force. And above all here is a brilliant novella, 'Whispering Wind', which begins with the single survivor of Custer's Last Stand at the battle of Little Big Horn. Then follows the rescue from rape and murder of a Cheyenne girl and a flight across the mountains and forests of the West, ending in a savage present-day manhunt in the wild lands of Montana.

S, M, L, XL presents a selection of the remarkable visionary design work produced by the Dutch firm Office for Metropolitan Architecture (O.M.A.) and its acclaimed founder, Rem Koolhaas, in its first twenty years, along with a variety of insightful, often poetic writings. The inventive collaboration between Koolhaas and designer Bruce Mau is a graphic overture that weaves together architectural projects, photos and sketches, diary excerpts, personal travelogues, fairy tales, and fables, as well as critical essays on contemporary architecture and society. The book's title is also its framework: projects and essays are arranged according to scale. While Small and Medium address issues ranging from the domestic to the public, Large focuses on what Koolhaas calls the architecture of Bigness. Extra-Large features projects at the urban scale, along with the important essay What Ever Happened to Urbanism and other studies of the contemporary city. Running throughout the book is a dictionary of an adventurous new Koolhaasian language — definitions, commentaries, and quotes from hundreds of literary, cultural, artistic, and architectural sources.

From the writer Patricia Cornwell calls the most brilliant mystery novelist of our times comes a typically astute and suspenseful tale of what happens when a taste for dangerous heights becomes a way of life.

Announcing the new revised edition of the classic industry reference! Landscape Graphics is the architect's ultimate guide to all the basic graphics techniques used in landscape design and landscape architecture. Progressing from the basics into more sophisticated techniques, this guide offers clear instruction on graphic language and the design process, the basics of drafting, lettering, freehand drawing and conceptual diagramming, perspective drawing, section elevations and more. It also features carefully sequenced exercises, a complete file of graphic symbols for sections and perspectives, and a handy appendix of conversions and equivalents.

Seconds before the Earth is demolished for a galactic freeway, Arthur Dent is saved by Ford Prefect, a researcher for the revised Guide. Together they stick out their thumbs to the stars and begin a wild journey through time and space.

In these stories whose lives come into focus through single events or sudden memories which bring the past bubbling to the surface. The past, as her characters discover, is made up not only of what is remembered, but also what isn't. The past is there, just out of the picture, but if memories haven't been savoured, recalled in the mind and boxed away, it's as if they have never been until a moment when the pieces of the jigsaw re-form suddenly, sometimes pleasurably but more often painfully. Women look back at their young selves, at first marriages made when they were naive and trusting, at husbands and their difficult, demanding little ways. There is in this new collection an underlying heartbreak, a sense of regret in her characters for what might have been, for a fork in the road not taken, a memory suppressed in an act of prudent emotional housekeeping. But at the same time there is hope, there are second changes her are people who reinvent themselves, seize life by the throat, who have moved on and can dare to conjure up the hidden memories, daring to go beyond what is remembered.

Little Wilson and Big God, the first part of Anthony Burgess's two-volume autobiography, tells the story of a disaffected Manchester Catholic from his birth in 1917 up to the commencement, in 1959, of his career as a professional writer. Born Jack Wilson, the son of Catholic Irish and Lancashire parents, Burgess grew up in one of the toughest areas of Manchester, with a burgeoning awareness of an artistic talent which for a long time could not find its proper outlet. It deals also with an unending struggle to reconcile a Catholic conscience with the prematurely discovered pleasures of sex. It details his tempestuous first marriage, an army career more comic than heroic, and his years as an education officer in Malaya and Borneo. It was in the Far East, at the age of thirty-seven, his marriage in trouble, drinking heavily, that Burgess began to write the first of the novels that were to make his name.

'I remember, too, the light on the slopes, long shadows in tufts and hollows, with cattle, brilliant as painted china, treading their echoing shapes' Cider With Rosie is a wonderfully vivid memoir of Laurie Lee's childhood and youth in a remote Cotswold village. From the moment he is set down in the long grass, 'thick as a forest and alive with grasshoppers', he depicts a word that is both tangibly real yet belonging to a now distant past.

In this enchanting and comprehensive collection, the lullabies we all were rocked to sleep with, such as Rock-a-Bye Baby and Hush Little Baby, Don't You Cry, mingle with traditional lullabies from around the world. Here are beautiful lyrics to sing or read to little ones, from Shakespeare's lullaby for the fairy queen, Titania, to Brahms's Lullaby; and from Gershwin's Summertime to Langston Hughes's lovely lullaby for a night black baby. Here, too, are poems for children that range from tender to nonsensical, from quiet to raucous — from Walter de la Mare to T. S. Eliot to Lewis Carroll, Edward Lear, and Ogden Nash. Whether the intent is to soothe or to amuse, there's something here for every mood, every child, and the child in every adult. A delightful, gift-perfect collection.

It's the poky little puppy's first Christmas, and he's not sure what to expect. When he meets an animal friend who's lost his home, Poky's quick to help-and learns all about the spirit of Christmas.

As girls, Nel and Sula shared each other's discoveries and dreams in the poor black mid-West of their childhood. Then Sula ran away to live her dreams and Nel got married. Ten years later Sula returns and no one, least of all Nel, trusts her. SULA is the story of the fear that makes people accept self-pity; the fear that will not countenance escape and that justifies itself through myth and legend. Sula herself is cast as a witch and demon by the people who resent her strength. They attack her with the most pervasive weapon of all, the weapon of language and story. But Sula is a woman of power, a wayward force who challenges the smallness of a world that tries to hold her down.

Made into a successful film starring Jodie Foster, and Anthony Hopkins as the homicidal genius and cannibal, Hannibal Lecter, this is the story of a killer on the loose who knows that beauty is only skin deep, and a trainee investigator who's trying to save her own hide.

In this propulsive novel by the author of Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World and The Elephant Vanishes, one of the most idiosyncratically brilliant writers at work in any language fuses science fiction, the hard-boiled thriller, and white-hot satire into a new element of the literary periodic table. As he searches for a mysteriously vanished girlfriend, Haruki Murakami's protagonist plunges into a wind tunnel of sexual violence and metaphysical dread in which he collides with call girls; plays chaperone to a lovely teenaged psychic; and receives cryptic instructions from a shabby but oracular Sheep Man. Dance Dance Dance is a tense, poignant, and often hilarious ride through the cultural Cuisinart that is contemporary Japan, a place where everything that is not up for sale is up for grabs.

Evelyn Waugh's 1934 novel is a bitingly funny vision of aristocratic decadence in England between the wars. It tells the story of Tony Last, who, to the irritation of his wife, is inordinately obsessed with his Victorian Gothic country house and life. When Lady Brenda Last embarks on an affair with the worthless John Beaver out of boredom with her husband, she sets in motion a sequence of tragicomic disasters that reveal Waugh at his most scathing.

From award-winning translators, a masterful new translation – never before published – of the novel in which Fyodor Dostoevsky set out to portray a truly beautiful soul. Just two years after completing Crime and Punishment, Dostoevsky produced a second novel with a very different man at its center. In The Idiot, the saintly Prince Myshkin returns to Russia from a Swiss sanatorium and finds himself a stranger in a society obsessed with wealth, power, and sexual conquest. He soon becomes entangled in a love triangle with a notorious kept woman, Nastasya, and a beautiful young girl, Aglaya. Extortion and scandal escalate to murder, as Dostoevsky’s “positively beautiful man” clashes with the emptiness of a society that cannot accommodate his innocence and moral idealism. The Idiot is both a powerful indictment of that society and a rich and gripping masterpiece.

Until that September of 1952, Luke Chandler had never kept a secret or told a single lie. But in the long, hot summer of his seventh year, two groups of migrant workers — and two very dangerous men — came through the Arkansas Delta to work the Chandler cotton farm. And suddenly mysteries are flooding Luke's world. A brutal murder leaves the town seething in gossip and suspicion. A beautiful young woman ignites forbidden passions. A fatherless baby is born... and someone has begun furtively painting the bare clapboards of the Chandler farmhouse, slowly, painstakingly, bathing the run-down structure in gleaming white. And as young Luke watches the world around him, he unravels secrets that could shatter lives — and change his family and his town forever...

Imagine a million clever rats. Rats that don’t run. Rats that fight… Maurice, a scruffy tomcat with an eye for the main chance, has the perfect fiddle going. He has a stupid-looking kid for a piper, and he has his very own plague of rats – rats who are strangely educated, so Maurice can no longer think of them as ‘lunch’. And everyone knows the stories about rats and pipers – and is giving him lots of money… Until they try the trick in the far-flung town of Bad Blintz, and the nice little con suddenly goes down the drain. Someone there is playing a different tune. A dark, shadowy tune. Something very, very bad is waiting in the cellars. The rats must learn a new word. Evil. It’s not a game any more. It’s definitely a rat-eat-rat world down there. In fact, that might only be the start… Bestselling novelist Terry Pratchett leads readers from tale to tail in a darkly imaginative and fiendishly entertaining story, the first for younger readers set in the Discworld universe, the setting of his phenomenally successful fantasy novels.