Random House Inc.

Michael Beard is a Nobel prize-winning physicist whose best work is behind him. Trading on his reputation, he speaks for enormous fees, lends his name to the letterheads of renowned scientific institutions and half-heartedly heads a government-backed initiative tackling global warming. A compulsive womaniser, Beard finds his fifth marriage floundering. But this time it is different: she is having the affair, and he is still in love with her. When Beard's professional and personal worlds collide in a freak accident, an opportunity presents itself for Beard to extricate himself from his marital mess, reinvigorate his career and save the world from environmental disaster. Ranging from the Arctic Circle to the deserts of New Mexico, Solar is a serious and darkly satirical novel, showing human frailty struggling with the most pressing and complex problem of our time. A story of one man's greed and self-deception, it is a profound and stylish new work from one of the world's great writers.

All's quiet in the small town of Holliswood — television sets, computers, and portable devices aglow in every home, classroom, and store. But everything is not as perfect as it may seem. An evil is lurking, just out of sight, behind the screen. From the darkest depths of imagination flickers the most terrifying enemy Daniel X is yet to face. A villain with more ambition than the world can withstand, dead set on throwing the sleepy neighbourhood into chaos and documenting the destruction of every person in it, including Daniel, his friends, and his family. Daniel X is the only person who can stop this devilish director. But, as the super-villain assembles an all-star team of his own creation, not even Daniel can imagine the enormity of his plans. Can Daniel X stop this deranged outlaw before he stages the most spectacular finale the world has ever seen? Or will Daniel find himself on the cutting room floor?

The inexorable rise of Communism was the most momentous political phenomenon of the first half of the twentieth century. Its demise in Europe and its decline elsewhere have produced the most profound political changes of the last few decades. In this illuminating book, based on forty years of study and a wealth of new sources, Archie Brown provides a comprehensive history as well as an original and compelling analysis of an ideology that has shaped the world. Tracing the story of Communism from its nineteenth-century roots, the book shows how the political movement Karl Marx described as a 'spectre haunting Europe' expanded throughout the world during the twentieth century, and how the principles and precepts of this revolutionary system became a living reality for many millions of ordinary people. Even today, although Communism has been widely discredited in the West, a quarter of humanity — in Asia and Latin America — still lives under its rule. Archie Brown explores the appeal of Communism to its adherents, its resounding successes and its catastrophic failures. In the 1950s and '60s, as tensions mounted within Eastern Europe, internal struggles came to dominate party politics, and fresh challenges from the West exerted increasing pressure on the Communist states to reform. The book considers why so many of these apparently invincible regimes collapsed when they did, often extremely suddenly, changing the lives of so many overnight. A groundbreaking work from an internationally renowned specialist, «The Rise and Fall of Communism» is the definitive study of the most remarkable political and human story of our times.

John Stone, a man so wealthy that in the years before World War One he was able to manipulate markets, industries and indeed whole countries and continents, has been found dead in mysterious circumstances. His beautiful young widow commissions a journalist to carry out an unusual bequest in his will but as he begins his research he soon discovers a story far more complex than he could have ever imagined... As the story moves backwards through time, from London in 1909 to Paris in 1809, before concluding in Venice in 1867, the mystery of John Stone's life and loves begins to unravel. The result is a spellbinding novel that is both a quest for the truth, a love story that spans decades and a compelling murder mystery.

Jeremy Paxman's unique portrait of the Victorian world takes readers on an exciting journey through the birth of modern Britain. Using the paintings of the era as a starting point, he tells us stories of urban life, family, faith, industry and empire that helped define the Victorian spirit and imagination. To Paxman, these paintings were the television of their day, and his exploration of Victorian art and society shows how these artists were chronicling a world changing before their eyes. This enthralling history is Paxman at his best — opinionated, informed, witty, surprising — and a glorious reminder of how the Victorians made us who we are today.

At a dinner party given by his parents-in-law, Commissario Brunetti meets Franca Marinello, the wife of a prosperous Venetian businessman. He's charmed — perhaps too charmed, suggests his wife Paola — by her love of Virgil and Cicero, but shocked by her appearance. A few days later, Brunetti is visited by Carabinieri Maggior Filippo Guarino from the nearby city of Marghera. As part of a wider investigation into Mafia takeovers of businesses in the region, Guarino wants information about the owner of a trucking company who was found murdered in his office. He believes the man's death is connected to the illegal transportation of refuse — and more sinister material — in his company's trucks. No stranger to mutual suspicion and competition between rival Italian police departments, Brunetti is nevertheless puzzled by the younger man's paranoid behaviour. Eventually Guarino agrees to email a photo of his suspect, but by the time the photograph arrives, he himself is dead. Was he killed because he got too close? And why is it that Franca Marinello has often been seen in company of the suspect, a vulgar man with Mafia connections and a violent past? Donna Leon's new novel is as subtle, gripping and topical as ever, bringing the sights, sounds and smells of Venice flooding to life.

Nicholas Flamel was born in Paris on 28 September 1330. Nearly seven hundred years later, he is acknowledged as the greatest Alchemyst of his day. It is said that he discovered the secret of eternal life. The records show that he died in 1418. But his tomb is empty and Nicholas Flamel lives. The secret of eternal life is hidden within the book he protects — the Book of Abraham the Mage. It's the most powerful book that has ever existed. In the wrong hands, it will destroy the world. And that's exactly what Dr. John Dee plans to do when he steals it. Humankind won't know what's happening until it's too late. And if the prophecy is right, Sophie and Josh Newman are the only ones with the power to save the world as we know it. Sometimes legends are true. And Sophie and Josh Newman are about to find themselves in the middle of the greatest legend of all time.

One boring summer afternoon, Alice, a bright and inquisitive child, follows a white rabbit down a rabbit-hole. At the bottom she finds herself in a bizarre world full of strange creatures, and attends a very odd tea party and croquet match. Lewis Carroll's beloved and witty story was made into an animated film by Disney in 1951. It is also the inspiration for Tim Burton's 2010 film, where an adult Alice returns to the peculiar world she discovered as a child. The film features Johnny Depp, Helena Bonham Carter and Anne Hathaway among a cast of British stars.

At the centre: Toby O'Dare — Lucky the Fox — a contract killer of underground fame. A soulless soul, a dead man walking... He's fallen far from grace, and lives under a series of aliases. Lucky takes his orders from someone he calls 'The Right Man', someone whose name and allegiances he doesn't know. When the novel opens, the time is the present. The place is Riverside, California, the Mission Inn. For Lucky, it is his place of solace; he can be there without disguise. This time, he's been sent on an assignment to kill. Into his nightmarish world of lone and lethal missions, comes a mysterious stranger, a seraph, who offers him a chance to save lives, rather than destroy them. Lucky, who grew up in a New Orleans, son of an alcoholic mother and a murdered father, long ago dreamt of being a priest, craving rituals, taking refuge in history, books and lute music — but instead came to embody danger and violence — now seizes his chance. He is lifted in (angel) time and carried back through the ages to thirteenth-century England, to a dangerous world, where Jews live an uneasy existence, their money coveted and protected by the crown for their function as money-lenders, unjustly despised by the rest. Into this primitive, treacherous setting, where accusations of ritual murder have been made against innocent Jews, and children have been found dead or missing, O'Dare begins a journey of salvation that leads him from the medieval villages of England to the cities of London and Paris as his quest becomes a story of danger and flight, loyalty and betrayal, selflessness and love.

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.

Sherman McCoy is a WASP, bond trader and self-appointed 'Master of the Universe'. He has a fashionable wife, a Park Avenue apartment and a Southern mistress. His spectacular fall begins the moment he is involved in a hit-and-run accident in the Bronx. Prosecutors, newspaper hacks, politicians and clergy close in on him, determined to bring him down. «The Bonfire of the Vanities» is a caustic satire on the money-feverish Eighties. This exuberant novel cemented Wolfe's reputation as the foremost chronicler of his age.

This title includes an introduction by J.M. Coetzee. A gang war is raging through the dark underworld of Brighton. Seventeen-year-old Pinkie, malign and ruthless, has killed a man. Believing he can escape retribution, he is unprepared for the courageous, life-embracing Ida Arnold. Graham Greene's gripping thriller was adapted into a British film noir in 1947 starring Richard Attenborough as the razor-wielding Pinkie.

Set in the closing months of World War II in an American bomber squadron off the coast of Italy, «Catch-22» is the story of a bombardier named Yossarian who is frantic and furious because thousands of people he has never even met keep trying to kill him.

Gustav von Aschenbach, a successful ageing writer, travels to Venice for a holiday. One day, at dinner in his hotel, Aschenbach notices an exceptionally beautiful young boy. Soon his days begin to revolve around seeing this boy and he is too distracted to pay attention to the ominous rumours that have begun to circulate about disease spreading through the city. Italian director Luchino Visconti also wrote the screenplay for his 1971 adaptation of Mann's novella and travelled all over the world in search of a suitable actor for the role of Tadzio. Dirk Bogarde considered retiring after playing the part of Aschenbach, believing he could never hope to give a better performance in a better film.

'For a few moments this afternoon, it rained on the moon'. An astronaut in full spacesuit appears out of thin air in a busy shopping centre. Maybe it's a publicity stunt. A photo shows a well-dressed woman in a red coat lying dead at the edge of a crater on the dark side of the moon — beside her beloved dog 'Poochie'. Maybe it's a hoax. But as the Doctor and Amy find out, these are just minor events in a sinister plan to take over every human being on earth. The plot centres on a secret military base on the moon — that's where Amy and the TARDIS are. The Doctor is back on Earth, and without the TARDIS there's no way he can get to the moon to save Amy and defeat the aliens. Or is there? The Doctor discovers one last great secret that could save humanity: Apollo 23. This is a thrilling, all new adventure featuring the Doctor and Amy, as played by Matt Smith and Karen Gillan in the spectacular hit series from BBC Television.

'Let me tell you a story. Long ago, in the frozen Arctic wastes, an alien army landed. Only now, 10,000 years later, it isn't a story. And the army is ready to attack'. New York is one of the greatest cities on 21st century Earth... But what's going on in the Museum? And is that really a Woolly Mammoth rampaging down Broadway? An ordinary day becomes a time of terror, as the Doctor and Amy meet a new and deadly enemy. The vicious Army of the Vykoid are armed to the teeth and determined to enslave the human race, even though they're only seven centimetres high. With the Vykoid army swarming across Manhattan and sealing it from the world with a powerful alien force field, Amy has just 24 hours to find the Doctor and save the city. If she doesn't, the people of Manhattan will be taken to work in the doomed asteroid mines of the Vykoid home planet. But as time starts to run out, who can she trust? And how far will she have to go to free New York from the Forgotten Army? This is a thrilling, all new adventure featuring the Doctor and Amy, as played by Matt Smith and Karen Gillan in the spectacular hit series from BBC Television.

'This is the Gyre — the most hostile environment in the galaxy'. 250,000 years' worth of junk is floating in deep space, home to the shipwrecked Sittuun, the carnivorous Sollogs, and worst of all — the Humans. The Doctor and Amy arrive on this terrifying world in the middle of an all-out frontier war between Sittuun and Humans, and the countdown has already started. There's a comet in the sky, and it's on a collision course with the Gyre...When the Doctor is kidnapped, it's up to Amy and 'galaxy-famous swashbuckler' Dirk Slipstream to save the day. But who is Slipstream, exactly? And what is he really doing here? This is a thrilling, all new adventure featuring the Doctor and Amy, as played by Matt Smith and Karen Gillan in the spectacular hit series from BBC Television.

Ethan Blake is seventeen and desperate to escape from his dead-end life. When he sees someone B.A.S.E. jump from the top of his block of flats, it changes the way he sees the world for ever. Soon, Ethan is caught up in the adrenaline-fuelled world of skydiving. He's a natural, so it's no surprise when he's invited to join an elite skydive team, but is he signing up for more than just jumping out of planes? The team's involved in covert military operations — missions that require a special kind of guts, missions so secret even MI5 denies all knowledge.

Every weekend, in basements and parking lots across the country, young men with good white-collar jobs and absent fathers take off their shoes and shirts and fight each other barehanded for as long as they have to. Then they go back to those jobs with blackened eyes and loosened teeth and the sense that they can handle anything. Fight Club is the invention of Tyler Durden, projectionist, waiter and dark, anarchic genius. And it's only the beginning of his plans for revenge on a world where cancer support groups have the corner on human warmth.

Charles Smithson, a respectable engaged man, meets Sarah Woodruff as she stands on the Cobb at Lyme Regis, staring out to sea. Charles falls in love, but Sarah is a digraced woman, and their romance will defy all the stifling conventions of the Victorian age. Meryl Streep received her third Oscar nomination for her portrayal of Sarah in the 1981 film, which was adapted for the screen by Harold Pinter.

When Kolya moves into a new flat in Kiev, he finds a book hidden within a volume of War and Peace. Intrigued by the annotations that appear on every page, Kolya sets out to discover more about the scribbler. His investigations take him to a graveyard, and more specifically to the coffin of a Ukrainian nationalist who died in mysterious circumstances and was buried with a sealed letter and a manuscript. An exhumation under cover of darkness reveals that an item of great national importance is buried near a fort in Kazakhstan. As nightwatchman at a baby-milk factory, Kolya exposes himself to the attentions of a criminal gang, and so he decides to leave Kiev for a while. Armed with only three cases of baby milk, which have unexpected hallucinogenic properties, he sets off on what turns out to be a very bizarre journey: crossing the Caspian Sea and traversing the deserts of Kazakhstan. He meets a host of unlikely characters on the way, including Bedouins, ex-KGB officers and a spirit-like companion in the form of a chameleon...»The Good Angel of Death» is a classic, first-rate Kurkov yarn which is sure to delight old and new fans alike.

At last — another brilliant, original and moving novel from the author of THE TIME TRAVELERS WIFE. Julia and Valentina Poole are normal American teenagers normal, at least, for identical mirror twins who have no interest in college or jobs or possibly anything outside their cozy suburban home. But everything changes when they receive notice that an aunt whom they didn't know existed has died and left them her flat in an apartment block overlooking Highgate Cemetery in London. They feel that at last their own lives can begin... but have no idea that they've been summoned into a tangle of fraying lives, from the obsessive-compulsive crossword setter who lives above them to their aunts mysterious and elusive lover who lives below them, and even to their aunt herself, who never got over her estrangement from the twins mother and who cant even seem to quite leave her flat... With Highgate Cemetery itself a character and echoes of Henry James and Charles Dickens, HER FEARFUL SYMMETRY is a delicious and deadly twenty-first-century ghost story about Niffeneggers familiar themes of love, loss and identity. It is certain to cement her standing as one of the most singular and remarkable novelists of our time.

It's London, 1876 and Hetty Feather is just a tiny baby when her mother leaves her at the Foundling Hospital. The Hospital cares for abandoned children — but Hetty must first live with a foster family until she is big enough to go to school. Life in the countryside is hard but with her 'brothers' Jem and Gideon, she helps in the fields and plays imaginary games. Together they sneak off to visit the travelling circus and Hetty is mesmerised by the show, especially Madame Adeline and her performing horses. But Hetty's happiness is threatened once more when she is returned to the Foundling Hospital. The new life of awful uniforms and terrible food is a struggle for her. But now she has the chance to find her real mother. Could she really be the wonderful Madame Adeline? Or will Hetty find the truth is even more surprising? Jacqueline Wilson will surprise and delight old fans and new with this utterly original take on a historical novel. Set in Victorian times and featuring a brand new feisty heroine, Hetty Feather, this is a Tracy Beaker-esque tale that will thrill young readers. Warm, moving, funny and totally fascinating, it's the perfect gift for girls of eight and older.

As we tumble headlong into the second decade of the third millennium, we are in an era of unprecedented freedom to be whatever we want to be, in defiance of fusty old gender stereotypes. But while the women revel in ruling the boardroom, the men make magic in the kitchen, and everyone does rather unusual things in the bedroom, all of this freedom does have its downside: without understanding the fundamental differences between the genders, we're in for an era of dire confusion when it comes to living with the other half of humanity. But don't furrow your brow. Jean Hannah Edelstein is here to lead you through the perplexing questions of what it means to be a man or a woman in the twenty-first century. With a spectacular talent for unpicking social trends, Edelstein draws equally on experiential and anecdotal evidence, as well as the latest scientific studies, delivering a witty, edgy and definitive manual to understanding your partner/husband/boyfriend/girlfriend. Welcome a fresh new expert on men and women and the contradictory languages they speak.