Random House Inc.

'You have an enemy, Dr Brennan. It is in your interest to learn who placed that call.' A routine case turns sinister when Dr Temperance Brennan is accused of mishandling the autopsy of a missing heiress. Someone has made an incriminating accusation that she missed or concealed crucial evidence. Before Tempe can get to the one man with information, he turns up dead. The heiress isn't the only elderly female to have appeared on Tempe's gurney recently. Back in Montreal, three more women have died, their bodies brutally discarded. Tempe is convinced there's a link between their deaths and that of the heiress. But what — or who — connects them? Tempe struggles with the clues, but nothing adds up. Has she made grave errors or is some unknown foe sabotaging her? It soon becomes frighteningly clear. It's not simply Tempe's career at risk. Her life is at stake too.

When a rock star, a fashion designer, a software tycoon and a millionaire heiress are all murdered in mysterious circumstances, Detective Lindsay Boxer is quickly assigned to the high-profile investigation. Few people are as interested when a local hero, Bagman Jesus, is found brutally executed. Reporter Cindy Thomas, however, becomes fascinated by his story. He was loved by so many — who would want to kill him? Could the down-and-out Samaritan have been hiding a dark secret? Both Lindsay and Cindy need the help of their fellow members of the Women's Murder Club to crack these complicated cases; but with tensions running high, will the friends be strong enough to stick together, or will the strain tear them apart?

Struck with Parkinson's — a debilitating, degenerative disease — at the height of his fame, Fox has taken what some people might consider cause for depression and turned it into a beacon of hope for millions. Now, in Always Looking Up, he writes about the personal philosophy that carried him through his darkest hours, and speaks with others who have emerged from difficult periods with optimism to spare. With the humour and wit that dazzled fans and reviewers alike in his bestselling memoir, Lucky Man, Fox shows how he became a happier, more satisfied person by recognising the gifts of everyday life.

A shocking truth lies within the pages of an ancient library, locked inside a high-security complex deep beneath the Nevada desert. And the US government will stop at nothing to keep it classified. But now a shadowy group of ex-employees want the world to know — however terrifying the disclosure might prove to be. And when a single volume missing from the original collection mysteriously surfaces at a London auction house, they persuade former FBI agent Will Piper to help them obtain it and unlock the ultimate secret of the library, once and for all. Travelling to England, Will discovers the text contains a sonnet that holds a series of clues — clues that reveal the book has had a profound effect on the history of mankind. But all the time he is being watched. And as he gets nearer to the final revelation, he and his young family become a direct target for a deadly group of men whose duty it is to guard the library's secret — whatever it takes. However, the truth is too powerful to keep hidden...

Olive Wellwood is a famous writer, interviewed with her children gathered at her knee. For each of them she writes a separate private book, bound in different colours and placed on a shelf. In their rambling house near Romney Marsh they play in a story-book world — but their lives, and those of their rich cousins, children of a city stockbroker, and their friends, the son and daughter of a curator at the new Victoria and Albert Museum, are already inscribed with mystery. Each family carries their own secrets. Into their world comes a young stranger, a working-class boy from the potteries, drawn by the beauty of the Museum's treasures. And in midsummer a German puppeteer arrives, bringing dark dramas. The world seems full of promise but the calm is already rocked by political differences, by Fabian arguments about class and free love, by the idealism of anarchists from Russia and Germany. The sons rebel against their parents' plans; the girls dream of independent futures, becoming doctors or fighting for the vote. This vivid, rich and moving saga is played out against the great, rippling tides of the day, taking us from the Kent marshes to Paris and Munich and the trenches of the Somme. Born at the end of the Victorian era, growing up in the golden summers of Edwardian times, a whole generation were heading for the darkness ahead; in their innocence, they were betrayed unintentionally by the adults who loved them. In a profound sense, this novel is indeed the children's book.

Conspirator is the compelling story of Lenin's exile: the years in which he and his political collaborators plotted a revolution that would change 20th-century history. It tells the story of Lenin in the long and difficult years leading up to the Russian Revolution — years that were spent constantly on the move in and around Europe in the company of his loyal and longsuffering wife Nadezhda Krupskaya. Conspirator strips away the arid politics of Lenin's official life and reveals the real man, as well as describing his many conflicts — personal and political — with those who shared his exile. It presents in researched detail an accessible side to the traditional story which puts his personal struggle for change in Russia into the wider context of the movement as a whole. It also looks at the loyal circle of women who unquestioningly supported Lenin, at Russian emigre lives in the enclaves of the cities in they lived and the risks taken in support of Lenin's vision by the wider network of Russian revolutionaries in the underground movement, both at home and abroad.

With the ink still wet on his diploma, the twenty-five-year-old Dr Mikhail Bulgakov was flung into the depths of rural Russia which, in 1916-17, was still largely unaffected by such novelties as the motor car, the telephone or electric light. How his alter-ego copes (or fails to cope) with the new and often appalling responsibilities of a lone doctor in a vast country practice — on the eve of Revolution — is described in Bulgakov's delightful blend of candid realism and imaginative exuberance.

The five, irreverent, satirical and imaginative stories contained in Diaboliad caused an uproar upon the book's first publication in 1925. Full of invention, they display Bulgakov's breathtaking stylistic range, moving at dizzying speed from grotesque satire to science fiction, from the plainest realism to the most madcap fantasy. Diaboliad is a wonderful introduction to literature's most uncategorisable and subversive genius.

Thirty years after his death, private correspondence between Albert Einstein and his first wife, the Serbian mathematician Mileva Maric, was opened to public scrutiny for the first time. It revealed glimpses of a tragedy at the heart of their troubled marriage: a secret they went to extraordinary lengths to keep hidden from the world, and which, in spite of their divorce, they carried to the grave. Two months before Adolf Hitler's rise to power, a beautiful young woman is found half naked and near death in the woods outside Berlin. When she finally emerges from a coma, she can remember nothing, not even her own name. The only clue to her identity is a handbill found nearby, advertising a public lecture by Albert Einstein: 'On the Present State of Quantum Theory'. Psychiatrist Martin Kirsch little knows that this will be his last case. Searching for the truth about his celebrated patient, he finds professional fascination turning to love. His investigations lead him to a remote corner of Serbia via a psychiatric hospital in Zurich, where the inheritor of Einstein's genius — his youngest son, Eduard — is writing a book that will destroy his illustrious father and, in the process, change the world. Intricately researched and relentlessly compelling, The Einstein Girl is a mystery about love and the lust for knowledge; a dark journey into the psychological hinterland of the twentieth century's greatest mind, culminating in an astonishing quantum twist.

John Grisham takes you into the heart of America's Deep South with a collection of stories connected by the life and crimes of Ford County: a place of harsh beauty where broken dreams and final wishes converge. From a hard-drinking, downtrodden divorce lawyer looking for paydirt, to a manipulative death row inmate with one last plea, Ford County features a vivid cast of attorneys, crooks, hustlers, and convicts. Through their stories he paints a unique picture of lives lived and lost in Mississippi. Completely gripping, frequently moving and always entertaining, Ford County brims with the same page-turning quality and heart-stopping drama of his previous bestsellers.

It's early 2008 and the credit crunch is starting to bite. Sam and Laura Diamond — and their friends — are circling forty and all feeling a lot less certain about life than when they first met in their twenties. Laura wants to work part-time and have a third child — an appalling prospect for her husband Sam, whose secret ambition is to give up his job as a struggling scriptwriter and have a vasectomy. Life's no more straightforward for wild child turned corporate lawyer Janey Dart. Having finally given up on Patrick, the love of her life, she finds herself unexpectedly pregnant and hastily married to a wealthy hedge fund manager who loathes her friends. And Sam's oldest friend, trendy restaurant owner Jonathan Sleet, is about to hit the big time with a TV series and cookbook, but can't control his roving eye. So it's no surprise that back on their organic farm in Suffolk, his once glamorous wife Hannah is finding distractions of her own. Determined to reunite the group, Jonathan brings everyone together for a holiday to celebrate his fortieth birthday. But six friends, two decades of tangled fortunes and an explosive secret from the past make for an unforgettable week.

Three and a half years ago former Grant County medical examiner Sara Linton moved to Atlanta hoping to leave her tragic past behind her. Now working as a doctor in Atlanta's Grady Hospital she is starting to piece her life together. But when a severely wounded young woman is brought in to the emergency room, she finds herself drawn back into a world of violence and terror. The woman has been hit by a car but, naked and brutalised, it's clear that she has been the prey of a twisted mind. When Special Agent Will Trent of the Criminal Investigation Team returns to the scene of the accident, he stumbles on a torture chamber buried deep beneath the earth. And this hidden house of horror reveals a ghastly truth — Sara's patient is just the first victim of a sick, sadistic killer. Wrestling the case away from the local police chief, Will and his partner Faith Mitchell find themselves at the centre of a grisly murder hunt. And Sara, Will and Faith — each with their own wounds and their own secrets — are all that stand between a madman and his next crime...

The stunning new novel from the No. 1 bestselling author of Fatherland; Enigma; Archangel; Pompeii and Imperium. The moment I heard how McAra died I should have walked away. I can see that now. I should have said, 'Rick, I'm sorry, this isn't for me, I don't like the sound of it, ' finished my drink and left. But he was such a good storyteller, Rick — I often thought he should have been the writer and I the agent — that once he'd started talking there was never any question I wouldn't listen, and by the time he had finished, I was done for. After five books set firmly in the past, Robert Harris returns with a contemporary novel that brings the reader face to face with some of the biggest issues of our time — the result is a gripping and genuinely thrilling read.

Why do they hate us? An entire cottage industry has arisen to answer this question. But what no one has really figured out is, who exactly are they? Is it al-Qaeda? Islamic nationalists? The whole Muslim world? How to Win a Cosmic War lays out, for the first time, a comprehensive definition of the movement behind and surrounding al-Qaeda and the like, a global ideology properly termed Jihadism. Contrasting twenty-first-century religious extremism across Christianity, Judaism and Islam with its historical antecedents, Aslan demonstrates that while modern Jihadis may have legitimate social grievances — the suffering of the Palestinians, American support for Arab dictators, the presence of foreign troops in Muslim lands, to name a few — they have no real goals or actual agenda. So, what do the Jihadists want? Aslan's answer is: Nothing. The Jihadists have no earthly agenda; they are fighting a metaphysical conflict, a theological war. And ever since 9/11, we have unfortunately been fighting the same cosmic war, the war they want: the so-called 'War on Terror'. How do we win a Cosmic War? By refusing to fight in one. And in this stunning new work, Aslan reveals surprising conclusions about how we can deal with this predicament.

Drawing from two political and several literary homelands, this collection presents a remarkable series of trenchant essays, demonstrating the full range and force of Salman Rushdie's remarkable imaginative and observational powers. With candour, eloquence and indignation he carefully examines an expanse of topics; including the politics of India and Pakistan, censorship, the Labour Party, Palestinian identity, contemporary film and late-twentieth century race, religion and politics. Elsewhere he trains his eye on literature and fellow writers, from Julian Barnes on love to the politics of George Orwell's Inside the Whale, providing fresh insight on Kipling, V.S. Naipaul, Graham Greene, John le Carre, Raymond Carver, Philip Roth and Thomas Pynchon among others. Profound, passionate and insightful, Imaginary Homelands is a masterful collection from one of the greatest writers working today.

Once a successful surgeon, Frederick Welin now lives in self-imposed exile on an island in the Swedish archipelago. Nearly twelve years have passed since he was disgraced for attempting to cover up a tragic mishap on the operating table. One morning in the depths of winter, he sees a hunched figure struggling towards him across the ice. His past is about to catch up with him. The figure approaching in the freezing cold is Harriet, the only woman he has ever loved, the woman he abandoned in order to go and study in America forty years earlier. She has sought him out in the hope that he will honour a promise made many years ago. Now in the late stages of a terminal illness, she wants to visit a small lake in northern Sweden, a place Welin's father took him once as a boy. He upholds his pledge and drives her to this beautiful pool hidden deep in the forest. On the journey through the desolate snow-covered landscape, Welin reflects on his impoverished childhood and the woman he later left behind. However, once there Welin discovers that Harriet has left the biggest surprise until last. «Italian Shoes» is as compelling as it is disturbing. Through his anti-hero Welin, Mankell tackles ageing and death with sensitivity and acuity, and as with the critically acclaimed Depths, delivers a moving tour-de-force on the frailty of mankind.

Phillida Horsley might have bitten off more than she can chew when she agrees to help organize a literary festival and finds herself going to Ireland to persuade the infamous and reclusive author Dermot Flynn to come out of hiding. From the Hardcover edition.

This book is with an introduction by Will Self. The devil makes a personal appearance in Moscow accompanied by various demons, including a naked girl and a huge black cat. When he leaves, the asylums are full and the forces of law and order in disarray. Only the Master, a man devoted to truth, and Margarita, the woman he loves, can resist the devil's onslaught.

Nobody said saving the world would be easy. Until now, Max and the flock have lived a lonely existence: hunted down, tortured and pushed to the fringe of society; always on the run they have never been able to live a normal life. But things are changing. The flock have finally found acceptance for their unusual skills. Together, they have taken on new challenges and used their extraordinary powers to fight for the greater good on a global scale. The avian hybrids don't have to hide away any longer, far from it, now everyone wants to see just what they can do. But fame and fortune always come at a price and Max isn't ready for all the glitz and glamour just yet. The action figures and memorabilia can wait, they have more important tasks at hand. Will the flock be able to survive the trappings of a Hollywood lifestyle? When tensions start to run high can the group stick together? Meanwhile sinister forces are plotting their attack, putting more than just the flock in danger. Something deadly is lurking in the depths of the ocean. As the flock uncover a terrible secret set to threaten the world — can they save the day or is this a disaster too tough to tackle, even for them? Max must also come to terms with the fact that none of them is invincible. With her new-found vulnerability comes the realisation of emotions that have been buried deep. The lives of those she holds close to her have been threatened many times before and although they have survived everything that has been thrown at them so far, Max knows that her time will come and her days are numbered. The greatest air and sea battle is about to commence.

'He had never told anyone. The strange relationship, if it could be called that, had gone on for years, decades, and he had never breathed a word about it. He had kept silent because he knew no one would believe him. None of it could be proved, not the stalking, not the stares or the conspiratorial smiles, not the killings, not any of the signs Targo had made because he knew Wexford knew and could do nothing about it.' Wexford had almost made up his mind that he would never again set eyes on Eric Targo's short, muscular figure. And yet there he was, back in Kingsmarkham, still with that cocky, strutting walk. Years earlier, when Wexford was a young police officer, a woman called Elsie Carroll had been found strangled in her bedroom. Although many still had their suspicions that her husband was guilty, no one was convicted. Another woman was strangled shortly afterwards, and every personal and professional instinct told Wexford that the killer was still at large. And it was Eric Targo. A psychopath who would kill again...As the Chief Inspector investigates a new case, Ruth Rendell looks back to the beginning of Wexford's career, even to his courtship of the woman who would become his wife. The past is a haunted place, with clues and passions that leave an indelible imprint on the here and now.

Since 1922, when Howard Carter discovered Tut's 3,000-year-old tomb, most Egyptologists have presumed that the young king died of disease, or perhaps an accident, such as a chariot fall. But what if his fate was actually much more sinister? Now, in The Murder of King Tut, James Patterson and Martin Dugard chronicle their epic quest to find out what happened to the boy-king. The result is a true crime tale of intrigue, betrayal, and usurpation that presents a compelling case that King Tut's death was anything but natural.

This is the story of Precious Jones, a sixteen year old illiterate black girl who has never been out of Harlem. She is pregnant by her own father for the second time, and kicked out of school when that pregnancy becomes obvious. Placed in an alternative teaching programme, she is urged to write down her thoughts in a book. This is Precious' diary, in which she honestly records her relationships and her life. Told with tremendous power, vitality and wit; this is an uncompromising and hugely enjoyable novel.

Agent Number 67, nicknamed Pygmy for his diminutive size, arrives in the United States from his totalitarian homeland (a mash-up of North Korea, Cuba, Communist-era China, and Nazi-era Germany), as an 'exchange student' into the welcoming arms of his Simpsons-spinoff Midwestern host family. Host cow father (he works in the biological weapons complex outside of town), chicken neck mother, pig dog brother, and the disconcertingly self-possessed cat sister introduce Pygmy into the rituals of postmodern American life, which he views with utter contempt. Along with his fellow operatives, all indoctrinated into the mindset of the totalitarian state, he is planning something big, something truly, truly awful, that will bring this big dumb country and its fat, dumb inhabitants to their knees. «Pygmy» is a comedy. It is also Chuck Palahniuk's finest, most ambitious novel since «Fight Club».

After two high-risk missions, CIA special agent John Wells is living on the edge, his nights filled with disturbing dreams. He knows he has no time for rest — and he has made many enemies. But what happens next shocks him to the core. First, he is targeted by assassins sent by a psychotic arms dealer out for revenge. His girlfriend is left for dead. Then, in vengeful pursuit of his assailants in Moscow, he stumbles on a terrifying plot. Terrorists have successfully targeted Russia's nuclear complex and are planning an attack on America's shores. With the clock ticking, Wells realises that to stand a chance of preventing it, he mustn't let a personal vendetta get in his way — the future of the West depends upon him.