Random House Inc.

No one has a better perspective on life on both sides of the channel than Julian Barnes. In these exquisitely crafted stories spanning several centuries, he takes as his universal theme the British in France; from the last days of a reclusive English composer, the beef consuming 'navvies' labouring on the Paris-Rouen railway to a lonely woman mourning the death of her brother on the battlefields of the Somme. Clever, wise, reflective and imaginative, these stories are permeated with understanding of what it has meant for generations from these islands to cross the Channel.

When Detective Alex Cross is called to investigate a massacre-style murder scene, he is shocked to find that one of the victims is an old friend. Angry, grieving, and more determined than ever, Cross begins the hunt for the perpetrators of this vicious crime. He is drawn into a dangerous underworld right in the heart of Washington DC that leads him on a life-threatening journey to the Niger Delta, where heroin dealing, slave trading and corruption are rife. At the centre of this terrifying world, Cross finds the Tiger the psychopathic leader of a fearsome gang of killers who are not what they seem. As Cross tracks the elusive Tiger through Africa, he must battle against conspiracy and untold violence. Alex Cross is in a heart-stopping chase that takes him across a vast and uncompromising landscape and finds him not only hunting for a horrific killer, but also fighting for his own survival.

Richard Attenborough and Diana Hawkins have been friends and colleagues for nearly 50 years. They have now teamed up to write this frank and funny account of their unlikely partnership and his extraordinary life. Together, laughing and squabbling, they have travelled the world, meeting people and making films. Among the eclectic cast of characters who appear in this two-handed memoir are Steve McQueen, Mother Teresa, Charlie Chaplin, Robert Mugabe, Edward G Robinson, Ronald Reagan, David Lean, Margaret Thatcher, John Mills, Steven Spielberg, Noel Coward, Indira Gandhi, Gordon Brown and Nelson Mandela. Prompted by his adventures in the movie business, Attenborough reflects on the highs and lows of a long life, both in and out of the public gaze. He writes revealingly of his passion for football and politics, of his avuncular relationship with Princess Diana and finally about the tsunami tragedy which engulfed his family in December 2004.

What if the person you were meant to be with could never be yours? 17-year-old Lucinda falls in love with a gorgeous, intelligent boy, Daniel, at her new school, the grim, foreboding Sword & Cross...only to find out that Daniel is a fallen angel, and that they have spent lifetimes finding and losing one another as good & evil forces plot to keep them apart. Get ready to fall...

'We are a family', Alexander told his children. 'And the loyalty of the family must come before everything and everyone else. We must learn from each other, protect each other, and be bound first and foremost to each other. For if we honor that commitment, we will never be vanquished — but if we falter in that loyalty, we will all be condemned'. In a tale of brutality and betrayal that crowns Mario Puzo's remarkable career, he brings us the story of the greatest crime family in Italian history — the Borgias.

Fatherland is set in an alternative world where Hitler has won the Second World War. It is April 1964 and one week before Hitler's 75th birthday. Xavier March, a detective of the Kriminalpolizei, is called out to investigate the discovery of a dead body in a lake near Berlin's most prestigious suburb. As March discovers the identity of the body, he uncovers signs of a conspiracy that could go to the very top of the German Reich. And, with the Gestapo just one step behind, March, together with an American journalist, is caught up in a race to discover and reveal the truth — a truth that has already killed, a truth that could topple governments, a truth that will change history.

Inspector Kurt Wallander is home from an idyllic holiday in Rome, full of energy and plans for the future. Autumn settles in, and Wallander prays the winter will be peaceful. But when he investigates the disappearance of an elderly birdwatcher he discovers a gruesome and meticulously planned murder — a body impaled in a trap of sharpened bamboo poles. Then another man is reported missing. And once again Wallander's life is on hold as he and his team work tirelessly to find a link between the series of vicious murders.

Flaubert's Parrot is a massive lumber room of detail about the great man: in it we learn an enormous amount about his life, family, lovers, thought processes, health and obsessions. But the voice that tells us all of this is gradually revealed to be itself in the grip of an obsession. The voice is that Geoffrey Braithwaite, a retired doctor with a nagging need to rationalize his wife's suicide and a more obscure compulsion to anatomize the processes of human identity.

Jennifer Hunter is an expert on men. She can tell if they're single, married or lying...She runs a company which specialises in conducting fidelity inspections for those who suspect their loved ones are capable of infidelity. Boyfriend behaving badly? Suspect your husband woof straying? Then Jennifer can supply the ultimate test. Some might call it entrapment but to Jennifer it's business pure and simple. And business is booming. But every success brings inevitable backlash and with each new challenge, Jen finds it harder and harder to stay in 'retirement', despite the promises she has made to her new boyfriend, Jamie to leave the actual 'seductions' to her employees. Unfortunately, Jamie is one of the few men that Jennifer's never been able to 'read'. But after seeing so many men fail the fidelity tests, can Jennifer let herself believe in one good man?

This title is presented with a new introduction by Andrey Kurkov. A rich, successful Moscow professor befriends a stray dog and attempts a scientific first by transplanting into it the testicles and pituitary gland of a recently deceased man. A distinctly worryingly human animal is now on the loose, and the professor's hitherto respectable life becomes a nightmare beyond endurance. An absurd and superbly comic story, this classic novel can also be read as a fierce parable of the Russian Revolution.

In Talking it Over Gillian and Stuart were married until Oliver — witty, feckless Oliver — stole Gillian away. In Love, Etc Julian Barnes revisits the three of them, using the same intimate technique of allowing the characters to speak directly to the reader, to whisper their secrets, to argue for their version of the truth. Darker and deeper than its predecessor, Love, Etc is a compelling exploration of contemporary love and its betrayals.

In a secret world of forbidden knowledge, power comes at a terrible price...Quentin Coldwater's life is changed forever by an apparently chance encounter: when he turns up for his entrance interview to Princeton he finds his interviewer dead — but a strange envelope bearing Quentin's name leads him down a very different path to any he'd ever imagined. The envelope, and the mysterious manuscript it contains, leads to a secret world of obsession and privilege, a world of freedom and power and, for a while, it's a world that seems to answer all Quentin's desires. But the idyll cannot last — and when it's finally shattered, Quentin is drawn into something darker and far more dangerous than anything he could ever have expected...

After killing a man in the line of duty, Inspector Kurt Wallander finds himself spiralling into an alcohol-fuelled depression. He has just decided to leave the police when an old friend approaches him for help investigating his father's suspicious death. Kurt doesn't want to know. But then his friend is found shot dead. Against his better judgment, he returns to work to head what may now have become a double murder case. But while Wallander is on the trail of the killer, somebody is on the trail of Wallander, and closing in fast.

Miles Green wakes up in a mysterious hospital with no idea of how he got there or who he is. He definitely doesn't remember his wife, or his children's names. An impossibly shapely specialist doctor tells him his memory nerve-center is connected to sexual activity, and calls in the even shapelier Nurse Cory to assist with treatment...In the most unorthodox of hospital rooms we eavesdrop on the serious discourse, virulent abuse and hilarious mockery of the erotic guerrilla war that is Mantissa.

Fourteen-year-old Maximum Ride, better known as Max, knows what it's like to soar above the world. She and all the members of the 'Flock' — Fang, Iggy, Nudge, Gasman and Angel — are just like ordinary kids — only they have wings and can fly. It may seem like a dream come true to some, but their lives can morph into a living nightmare at any time — like when Angel, the youngest member of the 'Flock', is kidnapped and taken back to the 'School' where she and the others were genetically engineered by sinister scientists. Her friends brave a journey to blazing hot Death Valley, California, to save Angel, but soon enough, they find themselves in yet another nightmare — this one involving fighting off the half-human, half-wolf 'Erasers' in New York City. Whether in the treetops of Central Park or in the bowels of the Manhattan subway system, Max and her adopted family take the ride of their lives. Along the way Max discovers from her old friend and father-figure Jeb — now her betrayed and greatest enemy — that her purpose is save the world — but can she?

Paris, spring 1968. Christopher is fully occupied reveling in first lust. Just a short Metro ride away from les evenements, as Toni never ceases to remind him. The adolescent Christopher and his soul mate Toni has sneered at the stifling ennui of Metroland, their cosy patch of suburbia on the Metropolitan line. They had longed for life to begin — meaning Sex and Freedom — to travel and choose their own clothes. Then Chris, at thirty, starts to settle comfortably into bourgeois contentment himself. Luckily Toni is around to challenge such backsliding.

Born at the stroke of midnight on August 15, 1947, at the precise moment of India's independence, the infant Saleem Sinai is celebrated in the press and welcomed by Prime Minister Nehru himself. But, this coincidence of birth has consequences Saleem is not prepared for: telepathic powers connect him with 1,000 other 'midnight's children' — all born in the initial hour of India's independence — and an uncanny sense of smell which allows him to sniff out dangers others cannot perceive. Inextricably linked to his nation, Saleem's biography is a whirlwind of disasters and triumphs that mirrors the course of modern India at its most impossible and glorious.

Part Blackhawk Down, part The Riddle of the Sands, this is an extraordinarily gripping non-fiction thriller, written by a former MI6 officer. Operation Kronstadt not only reveals the early days of Britain's intelligence services but uncovers a truly dramatic story from the Russian Revolution involving a daring rescue attempt and a 'mission impossible' against the best defended naval target in Russia. By May 1919, when the power struggle between former Tsarists and Bolsheviks hangs in the balance, the only British agent in Russia is trapped and in mortal danger. Mansfield Cumming, the first 'C', dreams up an audacious — probably suicidal — plan to rescue him, and a young naval officer is sent with a specially selected team into the jaws of the Soviet fleet. This is the remarkable story of the spy, Paul Dukes, (the only MI6 officer to be knighted for work in the field), and of Gus Agar, whose extraordinary escapade won him the Victoria Cross.

In these pages you can enjoy Christmas dinner with Begbie, and see how warmly Franco greets his sister's boyfriend and the news of their engagement. You will discover, in 'The Rosewell Incident', how aliens addicted to Embassy Regal have Midlothian under surveillance, and plan to install the local casuals as the new governors of Planet Earth. You will not be surprised to read that a televised Hibs v. Hearts game might matter more to one character than the life of his wife, or that two guys fighting over a beautiful girl might agree — on reflection, and after a few pills and many pints of lager — that their friendship is actually more important. And you will be delighted to welcome back 'Juice' Terry Lawson, and to watch what happens when he meets his old nemesis, retired schoolmaster Albert Black, under the strobe-lights of a Miami Beach nightclub. Most of the stories in Reheated Cabbage originally appeared in fugitive form in magazines and long-out-of-print anthologies in the 1990s. Finally collected together, they show all Irvine Welsh's trademark skills — vaulting imagination, a brilliant vernacular ear, dark, scabrous humor and the ability to create some of the most memorable characters in contemporary fiction.

A man who calls himself 'the Teacher' is devising a meticulous plan. Cold-hearted and cunning, it is time for everyone to learn his name as he teaches New York a lesson it will never forget. Intent on exacting revenge and causing mass hysteria, he embarks on the worst killing spree the city has ever seen. The whole New York Police Department is tested to its limits; none more so than Detective Michael Bennett as the Teacher leads him on a terrifying chase that brings danger perilously close to home.

Marion Bishop's life has fallen apart. Her daughter Hope was killed in a hit-and-run accident six months ago, and now Sam, her beloved husband, has walked out. Left alone with her grief, Marion has begun to contemplate the unthinkable. However, even her suicide plans go awry. Firstly, she's all out of pills, and then she's mugged when she goes out to get more. In fact, it's the mugging that wakes her up to the fact that she's perhaps not quite so ready to die as she'd thought: an awkward realisation when you have a knife at your throat. When her mugger's girlfriend intervenes in the attack, an unlikely friendship blossoms between the two women and Marion begins to contemplate a future. And what of Sam? He may have given up on their marriage but he hasn't given up on Marion entirely.

When Andre-Louis witnesses the murder of his best friend by an arrogant and privileged aristocrat he swears to avenge his death. Forced to flee his hometown after stirring up revolutionary fervour in the citizens, he falls in with a travelling theatre company and disguises himself as the character of the wily rogue Scaramouche. His ensuing adventures involve hair-raising duels, romance, treachery and shocking family secrets all handled with brilliance and wit by this extraordinary hero. This title features an introduction by Bernard Cornwell.

Anna Akhmatova is one of the most accomplished and well loved poets Russia has ever produced. Her moving and passionate writing has won her an ardent readership all over the world. This selection, beautifully translated by poet and novelist D.M. Thomas, illustrates her broad scope and brilliant imaginative gifts. It covers both her earlier work and the poems she produced during her persecution by the Russian authorities.

An FBI trainee. A psychopath locked up for unspeakable crimes. And a serial killer getting ever closer to his latest victim...FBI rookie Clarice Starling turns to Dr. Hannibal Lecter, monster cannibal held in a hospital for the criminally insane, for insight into the deadly madman she must find. As Dr. Lecter invites her into the darkest chambers of his mind, he forces her to confront her own childhood demons as the price of understanding, an unspeakable tuition he exacts to teach her how the monster thinks. And time is running out...