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When it was published in 1955, Lolita immediately became a cause celebre because of the freedom and sophistication with which it handled the unusual erotic predilections of its protagonist. But Vladimir Nabokov's wise, ironic, elegant masterpiece owes its stature as one of the twentieth century's novels of record not to the controversy its material aroused but to its author's use of that material to tell a love story almost shocking in its beauty and tenderness. Awe and exhilaration — along with heartbreak and mordant wit — abound in this account of the aging Humbert Humbert's obsessive, devouring, and doomed passion for the nymphet Dolores Haze. Lolita is also the story of a hypercivilized European colliding with the cheerful barbarism of postwar America, but most of all, it is a meditation on love — love as outrage and hallucination, madness and transformation.

In the realm of psychological suspense, Thomas Harris stands alone. Exploring both the nature of human evil and the nerve-racking anatomy of a forensic investigation, Harris unleashes a frightening vision of the dark side of our well-lighted world. In this extraordinary novel, which preceded The Silence of the Lambs and Hannibal, Harris introduced the unforgettable character Dr. Hannibal Lecter. And in it, Will Graham — the FBI man who hunted Lecter down — risks his sanity and his life to duel a killer called the...Red Dragon

Michael was in a hurry. He was scrambling up the ladder at Drake & Sweeney, a giant D.C. firm with eight hundred lawyers. The money was good and getting better; a partnership was three years away. He was a rising star with no time to waste, no time to stop, no time to toss a few coins into the cups of panhandlers. No time for a conscience. But a violent encounter with a homeless man stopped him cold. Michael survived; his assailant did not. Who was this man? Michael did some digging, and learned that he was a mentally ill veteran who'd been in and out of shelters for many years. Then Michael dug a little deeper, and found a dirty secret, and the secret involved Drake & Sweeney. The fast track derailed; the ladder collapsed. Michael bolted from the firm and took a top-secret file with him. He landed in the streets, an advocate for the homeless, a street lawyer. And a thief.

Jaime Astarloa is a master-fencer of the old school, priding himself on the precision, dignity and honour of his ancient art. It is 1868; Spain teeters on the brink of revolution, his friends spend their days in cafe's discussing plots at court, but Jaime's obsession is to perfect the irresistible sword thrust. Then, Adela de Otero, violet-eyed and enigmatic, appears at his door. When Jaime takes her on as a pupil, he finds himself embroiled in dark political intrigues against which his old-fashioned values are no protection.

With the festive season almost upon him, Detective Sergeant Bruce Robertson is winding down at work and gearing up socially — kicking off Christmas with a week of sex and drugs in Amsterdam. Irvine Welsh has here created one of the most corrupt characters in contemporary fiction.

This book is a retelling of the Gospel following the life of Christ from his conception to his crucifixion. A naive Jesus is the son not of God, but of Joseph. In the desert it is not Satan, but God that Christ tussles with, an autocrat with whom he has an unbalanced and unsettled relationship.

In this first of a series, David Talbot, vampire survivor of «Memnoch the Devil», calls forth Pandora, last seen in «Queen of the Damned», to tell her own extraordinary tale. Once a mortal girl in ancient Rome, she was given immortality by Marius, her lover and the dark genius of the Lestat novels.

Tom Ripley is a man who wants money, success, the good life — and is willing to kill for it. To avoid charges of forgery, the Buckmaster Gallery must produce the British painter, Derwatt. But he is dead. Tom Ripley is called in to work miracles, and will stop at nothing to protect himself.

Tom Ripley detests murder — unless it is absolutely necessary. If possible he prefers someone else to do the dirty work; in this case, a victim of a fatal disease, with no criminal record, who will murder for a reward, in order to provide for his young widow and child.

Ripley wanted out. He wanted money, success, the good life — and he was willing to kill for it. This is the first novel to feature Patricia Highsmith's anti-hero, Tom Ripley.

Troy Phelan is a self-made billionaire, one of the richest men in the United States. He is also eccentric, reclusive, confined to a wheelchair, and looking for a way to die, His heirs, to no one's surprise especially Troy's — are circling like vultures. Nate O'Riley is a high-octane Washington litigator who's lived too hard, too fast, for too long. His second marriage in a shambles, he is emerging from his fourth stay in rehab armed with little more than his fragile sobriety, good intentions, and resilient sense of humour. Returning to the real world is always difficult, but this time it's going to be murder. Rachel Lane is a young woman who chose to give her life to God, who walked away from the modern world with all its strivings and trapping and encumbrances, and went to live and work with a primitive tribe of Indians in the deepest jungles of Brazil. In a story that mixes legal suspense with a remarkable adventure, their lives are forever altered by the startling secret of the Testament.

Toru Okada's cat has disappeared and this has unsettled his wife, who is herself growing more distant every day. Then there are the increasingly explicit telephone calls he has started receiving. As this compelling story unfolds, the tidy suburban realities of Okada's vague and blameless life, spent cooking, reading, listening to jazz and opera and drinking beer at the kitchen table, are turned inside out, and he embarks on a bizarre journey, guided (however obscurely) by a succession of characters, each with a tale to tell.

Pushkin was the first Russian writer of European stature, and he is among the very few artists — such as Homer and Shakespeare — to have shaped the consciousness and history of an entire nation and its language, thereby affecting the world at large. Eugene Onegin is not merely the greatest poem in the Russian language by its most influential poet: it is a global culture, social and political icon of the highest order. The historical power of this work — a novel in verse — is made all the more extraordinary by the simplicity of its subject. Eugene Onegin is a story of disappointed love. Tatyana falls for the handsome Eugene to whom she daringly makes advances. He cooly rejects her, then flirts with her sister, Olga. When challenged by Olga's fiance, Lensky kills him in a duel, seemingly indifferrent to the grief he causes. (Ironically, Puskhin himself was to be killed in similar circumstances in 1937, some seven years after he completed the work). Onegin leaves the district. When he returns four years later, Tatyana has married another man and it is her turn to reject his advances. But it turns out that Onegin's hauteur is affected: he has always loved her passionately. She loves him too and both reflect painfully on what might have been.

An autobiographical volume covering Nabokov's first 40 years up to his departure from Europe for America at the outset of World War II, telling of his emergence as a writer, his early loves and his marriage, his passion for butterflies and his lost homeland.

The story of one mans obsessive pursuit of a beautiful woman and his equally passionate search for enlightenment, «The Temple Of Dawn» powerfully dramatises the Japanese experience form the eve of World War II through the postwar era. Honda, a brilliant lawyer and man of reason, is called to Bangkok on legal business, where he is granted an audience with a young Thai princess — an encounter that radically alters the course of his life. In spite of all reason, he is convinced she is a reincarnated spirit, and undertakes a long, arduous pilgrimage to the holy places of India, where, in the climatic scene, he encounters her once more, only to have his newfound beliefs shattered and his life bereft of all meaning.

The second book in Mishima's landmark «The Sea of Fertility» sequence, this is the chronicle of a conspiracy, a novel about the roots and nature of Japanese fanaticism in the years that led to war.

Anne Rice, creator of the Vampire Lestat, the Mayfair witches and the amazing worlds they inhabit, now gives us the first in a new series of novels linked together by the fledgling vampire David Talbot, who has set out to become a chronicler of his fellow Undead. The novel opens in present-day Paris in a crowded café, where David meets Pandora. She is two thousand years old, a Child of the Millennia, the first vampire ever made by the great Marius. David persuades her to tell the story of her life. Pandora begins, reluctantly at first and then with increasing passion, to recount her mesmerizing tale, which takes us through the ages, from Imperial Rome to eighteenth-century France to twentieth-century Paris and New Orleans. She carries us back to her mortal girlhood in the world of Caesar Augustus, a world chronicled by Ovid and Petronius. This is where Pandora meets and falls in love with the handsome, charismatic, lighthearted, still-mortal Marius. This is the Rome she is forced to flee in fear of assassination by conspirators plotting to take over the city. And we follow her to the exotic port of Antioch, where she is destined to be reunited with Marius, now immortal and haunted by his vampire nature, who will bestow on her the Dark Gift as they set out on the fraught and fantastic adventure of their two turbulent centuries together.

The FBI doesn't believe it. The Governor wants the problem to disappear. But agent Judy Maddox knows the threat is real: an extreme group of eco-terrorists has the means and the know-how to set off a massive earthquake of epic proportions. For California, time is running out. Now Maddox is scrambling to hunt down a petty criminal turned cult leader turned homicidal mastermind. Because Judy knows that the dying has already begun. And soon, the earth will violently shift, bolt, and shake down to its very core...

There are no rules in the dark, no place to feel safe, no escape from the shadows. But to save the day, you must...Seize the Night. At no time does Moonlight Bay look more beautiful than at night. Yet it is precisely then that the secluded little town reveals its menace. Now children are disappearing. From their homes. From the streets. And there's nothing their families can do about it. Because in Moonlight Bay, the police work their hardest to conceal crimes and silence victims. No matter what happens in the night, their job is to ensure that nothing disturbs the peace and quiet of Moonlight Bay.... Christopher Snow isn't afraid of the dark. Forced to live in the shadows because of a rare genetic disorder, he knows the night world better than anyone. He believes the lost children are still alive and that their disappearance is connected to the town's most carefully kept, most ominous secret — a secret only he can uncover, a secret that will force him to confront an adversary at one with the most dangerous darkness of all. The darkness inside the human heart.

Robert Forester didn't look like the kind of man to be a prowler. His ex-wife had told the police he was erratic, liable to violence, had even fired a gun at her. Maybe he was psychopathic murderer...

The first book of Mishima's landmark «The Sea of Fertility» sequence, this novel is set in Tokyo in 1912, when the hermetic world of the ancient aristocracy is being breached for the first time by outsiders.

When historian Fluke Kelso learns of the existence of a secret notebook belonging to Josef Stalin he is determined to track it down, whatever the consequences. From the violent political intrigue and decadence of modern Moscow he heads north — to the vast forests surrounding the White Sea port of Archangel, and a terrifying encounter with Russia's unburied past.

This third novel in the trilogy that began with The Football Factory looks at notions of what it means to be English abroad. King explores stereotypes of language and nationalism, as he writes about sex and violence abroad, under the Union Jack.

»A fast-moving, fairytale set on Halloween night. Eight costumed boys running to meet their friend Pipkin at the haunted house outside town encounter instead the huge and cadaverous Mr. Moundshroud. As Pipkin scrambles to join them, he is swept away by a dark Something, and Moundshroud leads the boys on the tail of a kite through time and space to search the past for their friend and the meaning of Halloween. After witnessing a funeral procession in ancient Egypt, cavemen discovering fire, Druid rites, the persecution of witches in the Dark Ages, and the gargoyles of Notre Dame, they catch up with the elusive Pipkin in the catacombs of Mexico, where each boy gives one year from the end of his life to save Pipkin's. Enhanced by appropriately haunting black-and-white drawings.»