Random House Inc.

Sparkling with comic genius and narrative exuberance, I Served the King of England is a story of how the unbelievable came true. Its remarkable hero, Ditie, is a hotel waiter who rises to become a millionaire and then loses it all again against the backdrop of events in Prague from the German invasion to the victory of Communism. Ditie's fantastic journey intertwines the political and the personal in a narrative that both enlightens and entertains.

When a powerful government official scheduled to speak to a group of millionaires turns up dead, the business world clamors for a solution, and Nero Wolfe takes the case.

Moscow, 2013. Bunin, the Ukrainian President, has joined other heads of state in an open air swimming pool to drink vodka and celebrate with Putin. During his rise to power Bunin has juggled with formidable and eccentric political and personal challenges. His troubles with his family and his women combine with his difficulties with corrupt businessmen and demanding international allies, but it is his recent heart transplant that worries him most. Since the operation he has started to develop freckles, and his heart donor's mysterious widow seems to have moved in with him...Spanning forty years, «The President's Last Love» is a hilarious satire on love, lies and life before and after the Iron Curtain.

Gorgeously written and with characters, who will stay with us for the rest of our lives – the eagerly awaited novel by the author of «The English Patient» and «Anil’s Ghost».

There are some people you’d do anything for… For Fran that list would include her husband, Max, her daughter, and her best friend, Alison. Only Alison is now desperately ill and she needs Fran’s help. She wants to find her husband a new wife, and leave her young daughter with a new mother. Fran finds the whole idea deeply uncomfortable, but it’s hard to refuse your closest friend at the best of times, let alone ignore her dying wishes. So Fran reluctantly logs on to an internet dating site, where she stumbles across a startlingly familiar profile. ‘Footloose’ describes himself as divorced, but his photo looks exactly like Fran’s husband, Max. What’s a wife to do when she suspects her husband’s cheating and can’t bear to confront him outright? Posing as ‘Sassy’, Fran sends a reply to ‘Footloose’ and sets out to date her own husband… But this increasingly crazy plan leads Max to start to have doubts of his own. Torn between suspicion and love, life for Fran just got very complicated – can her marriage survive?

Edgar Allan Poe served as a soldier and began his literary career composing verses modelled on Byron; soon he was trying out his 'prose-tales' — often horror melodramas such as The Fall of the House of Usher. As editor of the Literary Messenger he was influential among critics and writers of the American South. His versatile writings — including, for example, The Murders in the Rue Morgue and The Raven — continue to resonate down the centuries. Peter Ackroyd's biography of Poe opens with his end, his final days – no one knows what happened between the time when friends saw him off on the steam-boat to Baltimore and his discovery six days later dying in a tavern. This mystery sets the scene for a short life packed with drama and tragedy (drink and poverty) combined with extraordinary brilliance. Poe has been claimed as the forerunner of modern fantasy, and credited with the invention of psychological dramas (long before Freud), science fiction (before H.G. Wells and Jules Verne) and the detective story (before Arthur Conan Doyle). Tennyson described him as 'the most original genius that America has produced'. He influenced European romanticism and was the harbinger of both Symbolism and Surrealism. Peter Ackroyd, who places significance on Poe's childhood (his travelling actor parents were miserably poor, his mother had TB and he was orphaned), claims that Poe found his family among writers — writers not only of his time but of the future generations who were influenced by the power of his imagination.

Herod Antipas rules Galilee, Pontius Pilate is the new Roman governor of Judea, and the Roman Empire rules the world. These are turbulent times for Israel, a troubled land of turmoil and insurrection. Now in his thirtieth year, Jesus and his tight-knit family endure a long, dusty winter of disruption and chaos. Whispers of his virgin birth still persist, and while he struggles with the demands of his family and the weight of his great destiny, those around him wait for some sign of the path he will take. But this quiet man of Nazareth is instead called upon to found a ministry which will utterly transform an unsuspecting world …

On the first day of the New Year, no one dies. This understandably causes great consternation amongst religious leaders – if there’s no death, there can be no resurrection and therefore no reason for religion – and what will be the effect on pensions, the social services, hospitals? Funeral directors are reduced to arranging funerals for dogs, cats, hamsters and parrots. Life insurance policies become meaningless. Amid the general public, on the other hand, there is initially celebration: flags are hung out on balconies and people dance in the streets. They have achieved the great goal of humanity – eternal life. But will death’s disappearance benefit the human race, or will this sudden abeyance backfire? How long can families cope with malingering elderly relatives who scratch at death’s door while the portal remains firmly shut? Then, seven months later, death returns, heralded by purple envelopes informing the recipients that their time is up. Death herself is now writing personal notes giving one week's notice. However, when an envelope is unexpectedly returned to her, death begins to experience strange, almost human emotions. In his new novel José Saramago again turns the world on its head – an everyday event is snatched away, and humankind is left to make of it what it will.

Avoiding shellfish was easy. The stoning of adulterers proved a little more difficult — and potentially controversial. Was it enough to walk up to an adulterer and gently touch them with a stone? Even that could be grounds for accusations of assault, especially with female adulterers in Manhattan. So what's a good Bible-reading boy to do? Raised in a secular family but increasingly interested in the relevance of faith in our modern world, A.J. Jacobs decides to dive in head first and attempt to obey the hundreds of less-publicized rules. The resulting spiritual journey is at once funny and profound, reverent and irreverent, personal and universal, and will make you see history's most influential book with new eyes.

'Finally I was forced to admit that I work in a corrupted profession'. When award-winning journalist Nick Davies decided to break Fleet Street's unwritten rule by investigating his own colleagues, he found that the business of reporting the truth had been slowly subverted by the mass production of ignorance. Working with a network of off-the-record sources, Davies uncovered the story of the prestigious Sunday newspaper which allowed the CIA and MI6 to plant fiction in its columns; the newsroom which routinely rejects stories about black people; the respected paper that hired a professional fraudster to set up a front company to entrap senior political figures; the newspapers which support law and order while paying cash bribes to bent detectives. Davies names and exposes the national stories which turn out to be pseudo events manufactured by the PR industry, and the global news stories which prove to be fiction generated by a new machinery of international propaganda. He shows the impact of this on a world where consumers believe a mass of stories which, in truth, are as false as the idea that the Earth is flat — from the millennium bug to the WMD in Iraq — tainting government policy, perverting popular belief. He presents a new model for understanding news. With the help of researchers from Cardiff University, who ran a ground-breaking analysis of our daily news, Davies found most reporters, most of the time, are not allowed to dig up stories or check their facts — a profession corrupted at the core. Read All About It. The news will never look the same again.

Hailed as a masterpiece from the moment of its first publication, «Revolutionary Road» is the story of Frank and April Wheeler, a bright, beautiful, and talented couple whose empty suburban life is held together by the dream that greatness is only just round the corner. With heartbreaking compassion and clarity, Richard Yates shows how Frank and April mortgage their hopes and ideals, betraying in the end not only each other, but their own best selves.

The Jorgmund Pipe is the backbone of the world, and it’s on fire. Gonzo Lubitsch, professional hero and troubleshooter, is hired to put it out – but there’s more to the fire, and the Pipe itself, than meets the eye. The job will take Gonzo and his best friend, our narrator, back to their own beginnings and into the dark heart of the Jorgmund Company itself. Equal parts raucous adventure, comic odyssey and Romantic Epic, «The Gone-Away World» is a story of – among other things – love and loss; of ninjas, pirates, politics; of curious heroism in strange and dangerous places; and of a friendship stretched beyond its limits. But it also the story of a world, not unlike our own, in desperate need of heroes – however unlikely they may seem.

They were born to the scent of success. Now they stand to lose it all ... Fame, fashion and scandal, the Trevellyan heiresses are the height of success, glamour and style. But when it comes to … … WEALTH: Jemima's indulgent lifestyle knows no limits; Tara’s one purpose in life, no matter the sacrifice, is to be financially independent of her family and husband; and Poppy wants to escape its trappings without losing the comfort their family money brings. … LUST: Jemima's obsession relieves the boredom of her marriage; while Tara’s seemingly ‘perfect’ life doesn’t allow for such indulgences; and Poppy, spoiled by attention and love throughout her life, has yet to expose herself to the thrill of really living and loving dangerously. … FAMILY: it's all they’ve ever known, and now the legacy of their parents, a vast and ailing perfume empire, has been left in their trust. But will they be able to turn their passion into profit? And in making a fresh start, can they face their family’s past?

Max, Fang, Iggy, Gasman, Nudge and Angel are six extraordinary avian hybrids. The result of a cruel Biotech experiment which manipulated their DNA and turned them into recombinant life forms with wings. This flock has endured a turbulent upbringing and they have been continually faced with evil. Evading capture on a daily basis, they have endured torture and been pushed to the very brink of sanity. Hunted all their lives, they've had to fight life-threatening and belief-defying battles pitting their strength against the fearsome force of their shadowy enemies. But as their predators evolved, their unique ability to fly is no longer enough to save them. With their genes mutating to astonishing affect, the flock establishes a new set of skills to unleash as they strive for survival. But just as they struggle to get to grips with these physical changes, emotionally they face new challenges too: life on the fringe of society can be a lonely existence. Driven to the wastelands of Antarctica, each day brings a new threat for the flock. Danger is never far away and while fighting to save their own skin, they have a new mission to undertake – one with devastating global consequences…

From the master of literary mayhem and provocation, a full-frontal Triple-X novel that goes where no work of fiction has gone before. 'Six hundred dudes. One porn queen. A world record for the ages. A must-have movie for every discerning collector of things erotic. Didn't one of us on purpose set out to make a snuff movie'? Cassie Wright, porn priestess, intends to cap her legendary career by breaking the world record for serial fornication. On camera. With six hundred men. Snuff unfolds from the perspectives of Mr 72, Mr 137 and Mr 600, who await their turn on camera in a very crowded green room. This wild, lethally funny and thoroughly researched novel brings the huge yet under acknowledged presence of pornography in contemporary life into the realm of literary fiction at last. Who else but Chuck Palahniuk would dare do such a thing? Who else could do it so well, so unflinchingly and with such an incendiary (you might say) climax?

In the summer of 1812 Napoleon gathered his fearsome Grande Armée, more than half a million strong, on the banks of the Niemen River. He was about to undertake the most daring of all his many campaigns: the invasion of Russia. Meeting only sporadic opposition and defeating it easily along the way, the huge army moved forward, advancing ineluctably on Moscow through the long hot days of summer. On September 14, Napoleon entered the Russian capital, fully anticipating the Czar’s surrender. Instead he encountered an eerily deserted city—and silence. The French army sacked the city, and by October, with Moscow in ruins and his supply lines overextended, and with the Russian winter upon him, Napoleon had no choice but to turn back. One of the greatest military debacles of all time had only just begun. In this famous memoir, Philippe-Paul de Ségur, a young aide-de-camp to Napoleon, tells the story of the unfolding disaster with the keen eye of a crack reporter and an astute grasp of human character. His book, a fundamental inspiration for Tolstoy’s «War and Peace», is a masterpiece of military history that teaches an all-too-timely lesson about imperial hubris and its risks.

This is the story of four of the greatest thespian boozers who ever walked — or staggered — off a film set into a pub. It’s a story of drunken binges of near biblical proportions, parties and orgies, broken marriages, drugs, riots and wanton sexual conquests. They got away with it because of their extraordinary acting talent and because the public loved them. They were truly the last of a breed, the last of the movie hellraisers.

In this powerful and groundbreaking book, Misha Glenny takes us on a journey through the new world of international organised crime. For three years, he has been recording the stories of gun runners in Ukraine, money launderers in Dubai, drug syndicates in Canada, cyber criminals in Brazil, racketeers in Japan and many more.During his investigation of the dark side, he has spoken to countless gangsters, policemen and victims of organised crime while also exploring the ferocious consumer demand for drugs, trafficked women, illegal labour and arms across five continents. The journey begins with an appalling and inexplicable murder in England’s stockbroker belt and continues with stories that are often horrifying, sometimes inspiring, usually bizarre and occasionally funny. But together they build a breathtaking picture of the shadow economy that has grown so fast that it may now account for about 20% of the world's GDP. Usually the preserve of sensationalist reporting in the tabloid press, organised crime has seeped into our lives in so many ways and often without our knowledge. This consistently riveting account unveils the nature of crime in today's world but it also offers profound insights into the pitfalls of a globalisation where the rules dividing the legal from the illegal are often far from clear. McMafia unpicks the nexus of crime, politics and money worldwide which have become entangled and interdependent in entirely novel forms since the 1980s. It argues that conventional policing methods are no longer appropriate to deal with a problem whose roots lie in global poverty and the ever widening divisions between rich and poor.

When Atlanta housewife Abigail Campano comes home unexpectedly one afternoon, she walks into a nightmare. A broken window, a bloody footprint on the stairs and, most devastating of all, the horrifying sight of her teenage daughter lying dead on the landing, a man standing over her with a bloody knife. The struggle which follows changes Abigail's life forever. When the local police make a misjudgement which not only threatens the investigation but places a young girl's life in danger, the case is handed over to Special Agent Will Trent of the Criminal Apprehension Team — paired with detective Faith Mitchell, a woman who resents him from their first meeting. But in the relentless heat of a Georgia summer, Will and Faith realise that they must work together to find the brutal killer who has targeted one of Atlanta's wealthiest, most privileged communities — before it's too late...

October 27, 1962, a day dubbed Black Saturday in the Kennedy White House. The Cuban missile crisis is at its height, and the world is drawing ever closer to nuclear apocalypse. As the opposing Cold War leaders, John F. Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev, mobilize their forces to fight a nuclear war on land, sea and air, the world watches in terror. In Bobby Kennedy’s words, ‘There was a feeling that the noose was tightening on all of us, on Americans, on mankind, and that the bridges to escape were crumbling.' In One Minute to Midnight Michael Dobbs brings a fresh perspective to this crucial moment in twentieth-century history. Using a wealth of untapped archival material, he tells both the human and the political story of Black Saturday, taking the reader into the White House, the Kremlin and along the entire Cold War battlefront. Dobbs's thrilling narrative features a cast of characters – including Soviet veterans never before interviewed by a western writer – with unique stories to tell, witnesses to one of the greatest mobilizations of men and equipment since the Second World War.

England, 1536. Home to the greatest, most glittering court in English history. But beneath the dazzling façade lies treachery… Elizabeth Tudor is daughter to Henry VIII, the most powerful king England has ever known. She is destined to ascend the throne, and deferred to as the King`s heiress, but that all changes when her mother Anne Boleyn – Henry`s great passion and folly – is executed for treason. Elizabeth ’s life alters in a heartbeat. A pawn in the savage game of Tudor power politics, she is disinherited, declared a bastard, and left with only her quick wits to rely on for her very existence. But Elizabeth is determined to survive, to foil those who want to destroy her, or who are determined to use her as a puppet for their own lethal ambition, and to reclaim her birthright...

Angel Summer looks as if she has found her happy ever after. She’s married to the love of her life, sexy footballer Cal, they have a beautiful baby girl and Angel is Britain’s top glamour model. But all is not as it seems and there is heartache in store. When Cal is transferred to AC Milan, Angel feels isolated being so far away from her family and friends instead of embracing the WAG lifestyle of designer shopping and pampering. Surrounded by beautiful people, will Angel and Cal pull together or will they turn elsewhere to seek comfort? Angel's worst nightmares come to life when an old flame of Cal's comes back on the scene and suddenly Angel is fighting to save her marriage, and herself...

Sarajevo, 2003. Best friends Frito and Bannerman roll into town, still in search of the fortune they missed out on in the dot-com years. For a while it seems that soaking up reconstruction money isn’t the worst plan ever. But then they both meet Clare, a prosecutor with the international war crimes tribunal, and they both realise she is the best person they've has ever met, and that they can’t both have her as much as they would, ideally, like. Meanwhile the city is awash with black marketeers, poker hustlers, intelligence officers, and expat hedonist, and by the time Frito and Bannerman have started bounty hunting men accused of war crimes, their lives have taken on all the risk — but very little of the money — that they’d bargained for...

As Peter Carlyle waves his wife, children and brother-in-law off on a sailing holiday, all they have in mind is lying back and relaxing. But as a violent storm breaks out, an explosion causes the boat to vanish without a trace and the family are lost, presumed dead. Until now. When a message in a bottle is washed up on a shore, it becomes apparent that there must have been at least one survivor. Peter is a broken man, he appears to struggle to contain his grief as he holds a heartfelt TV interview about his loss.But all is not as it seems, beneath the grief lies a more sinister side, Peter is involved with a beautiful — and dangerous — younger woman and it soon transpires that he knows more about his family's disappearance than he is letting on. He seeks to find whatever remains of his family, but is he really looking for a happy reunion? And could it be that it isn't just Peter who is hot on the Dunne family's trail? The race is on to rescue any survivors and discover what happened aboard the luxury yacht.