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A young boy, Victor, is collected from school by a stranger in a bowler hat — the stranger says he has won Victor in a game of backgammon with Victor's father. The stranger, known as the Captain, takes Victor to live with the sweet but withdrawn Lisa, where he serves as her conduit to the outside world. From mysterious beginnings, Graham Greene's final novel becomes a twisting thriller of smuggling, jewel theft and international espionage which culminates in a dramatic showdown in Panama.

Enderby — poet, social critic, comrade and Catholic — is endlessly hounded by women. He may be found hiding in the lavatory where much of his best work is composed, or perhaps in Rome, brainwashed into respectability by a glamorous wife, aftershave and the dolce vita. But whether he is pursuing revenge and inspiration in Morocco, expounding on his notorious sex film on a TV chat show, or writing a hit musical based on the life and work of Shakespeare, Enderby emerges triumphant.

To many, medieval castles are the essence of Britain and Ireland's fascinating past. Immersed in history and centuries old, each one tells a story of Kings, Queens and feuding lords; war and bloody conflict; treason, revenge and murder. In Castles of Britain and Ireland, Rodney Castleden weaves a fascinating and detailed narrative of 115 of the grandest and most historically significant castles in the British Isles, including Balmoral in Scotland, Bunratty in Ireland, Caernarfon in Wales and St Michael's Mount in England. As well as the details of the construction, function, and often the destruction of these magnificent buildings, each chapter also tells the human stories behind these ancient walls, with fascinating details of everyday life within.

Rice, best known for her «Vampire Chronicles» and «Lives of the Mayfair Witches» novels, has taken a new direction in her writing.

Rod Stewart was born working-class son of a Scottish plumber in North London. He was never, as some stories later had it, a professional footballer or a gravedigger, though he did become a bit of a singer — and a fairly good one at that. This book tells the story of a guy with one hell of a voice and one hell of a head of hair.

In 1999 His Holiness The Dalai Lama published the bestselling Ancient Wisdom: Modern World, which addressed the question of ethics for the new millennium. A decade later, His Holiness enters the contemporary debate about religion vs atheism, and returns to the theme of ethics with a major new work: Beyond Religion: Ethics For A Whole World. In this thought-provoking new book he argues that religion is not a necessity for pursuing a spiritual life. Rather, focusing on tolerance and understanding between religions, as well as tolerance and understanding between believers (of any faith) and non-believers is the way forward. The way to achieve such an approach, he proposes, is through a system of secular ethics grounded in a deep appreciation of our common humanity. Aimed particularly at the general reader, Beyond Religion: Ethics For A Whole World is a modern-day polemic which outlines those ethics he believes should be central to our lives.

Saleem Sinai is born at the stroke of midnight on August 15, 1947, the very moment of India's independence. Greeted by fireworks displays, cheering crowds, and Prime Minister Nehru himself, Saleem grows up to learn the ominous consequences of this coincidence. His every act is mirrored and magnified in events that sway the course of national affairs; his health and well-being are inextricably bound to those of his nation; his life is inseparable, at times indistinguishable, from the history of his country. Perhaps most remarkable are the telepathic powers linking him with India's 1,000 other midnight's children, all born in that initial hour and endowed with magical gifts. This novel is at once a fascinating family saga and an astonishing evocation of a vast land and its people-a brilliant incarnation of the universal human comedy. Twenty-five years after its publication, Midnight's Children stands apart as both an epochal work of fiction and a brilliant performance by one of the great literary voices of our time.

It's spring 1868, and the population of Boston is being terrorised by technological attacks: first a magnetic storm causes ships in the harbour to collide in flames, then in another bizarre catastrophe every piece of glass in the financial district spontaneously melts — clocks, windows, eyeglasses. Nothing in nature can do this: these are man-made disasters. Someone has unleashed the destructive potential of science on an innocent population. The city's fate relies on four young students of the recently founded Massachusetts Institute of Technology: Marcus Mansfield, a Civil War veteran determined to repay MIT's founder for taking a chance on him, brash Bob Richards, meticulous Edwin Hoyt and the eccentric but brilliant Ellen Swallow, the first woman at MIT, who experiments secretly in a basement laboratory. Together, they are The Technologists. In a climate of rising hysteria, these four courageous individuals must unite against the forces of darkness to uncover the mastermind before he can stage his greatest outrage.

'You're stale, tired of having to be tough. You want a change. You've seen too much death' In Fleming's seventh 007 novel, a private assignment sets Bond on the trail of a criminal mastermind — Auric Goldfinger. But greed and power have created a deadly opponent who will stop at nothing to get what he wants.

'We are here to find a target who will fulfil our requirements. Someone who is admired and whose ignominious destruction would cause dismay' A beautiful Soviet spy. A brand-new Spektor cipher machine. Smersh has set an irresistible trap that threatens the entire Secret Service. In Fleming's fifth 007 novel Bond finds himself enmeshed in a deadly game of cross and double cross.

In these nine stories, Salman Rushdie looks at what happens when East meets West, at the forces that pull his characters first in one direction, then the other. Fantasy and realism collide as a rickshaw driver writes letters describing his film star career in Bombay; a mispronunciation leads to romance and an unusual courtship in sixties London; two childhood friends turned diplomats live out in a violent world fantasies hatched by Star Trek; and Christopher Columbus dreams of consummating his relationship with Queen Isabella. The stories in East, West show the extraordinary range and power of Salman Rushdie's writing.

The twentieth century looked out at him from the piece of newsprint and bared its teeth in a sneer From the diamond mines of Sierra Leone to the jewellers of Hatton Garden, from race track to casino... Bond must infiltrate and destroy the criminal network of the Spangled Mob in Fleming's fourth 007 adventure.

You start to die the moment you are born. Live and Let Die, Ian Fleming's second 007 novel, takes Bond from Harlem to Jamaica in a frenzied hunt for the deadly gangster Mr Big and his macabre network of associates.

When dream husband Xan Meo is vengefully assaulted in the garden of a London pub, he suffers head-injury, and personality-change. Like a spiritual convert, the familial paragon becomes an anti-husband, an anti-father. He submits to an alien moral system — one among many to be found in these pages. We are introduced to the inverted worlds of the yellow journalist, Clint Smoker; the high priest of hardmen, Joseph Andrews; the porno tycoon, Cora Susan; and Royce Traynor, the corpse in the hold of the stricken airliner, apparently determined, even in death, to bring down the plane that carries his spouse. Meanwhile, we explore the entanglements of Henry England: his incapacitated wife, Pamela; his Chinese mistress, He Zizhen; his fifteen-year-old daughter, Victoria, the victim of a filmed intrusion which rivets the world — because she is the future Queen of England, and her father, Henry IX, is its King.

Summer 1970 — a long, hot summer. In a castle in Italy, half a dozen young lives are afloat on the sea of change, trapped inside the history of the sexual revolution. The girls are acting like boys, and the boys are going on acting like boys, and Keith Nearing — twenty years old, a literature student all clogged up with the English novel — is struggling to twist feminism and the rise of women towards his own ends. The sexual revolution may have been a velvet revolution (in at least two senses), but it wasn't bloodless — and now, in the twenty-first century, the year 1970 finally catches up with Keith Nearing. The Pregnant Widow is a comedy of manners and a nightmare, brilliant, haunting and gloriously risque. It is the most eagerly anticipated novel of the year and Martin Amis at his fearless best.

Angel's glamour days are behind her, she's happily married to Cal and hoping to have another baby. But, as ever, drama is just around the corner, when Angel meets her half sister Tiffany for the first time...

Five Men. One Robbery. A deadly game of greed, revenge and betrayal is about to begin. Fresh out of the SAS, Matt Browning is down on his luck. He owes — 500,000. If he doesn't get the money soon, he dies. From nowhere, he is offered a lifeline. A hit on al-Queda, sanctioned and helped by MI5. Matt gathers a small team of former SAS men to steal $10 million in gold and diamonds from the world's most deadly terrorist organisation. MI5 will give them all the equipment and information they need. No charges will ever be pressed. Matt thinks it's the perfect crime. Safe, quick, and patriotic. But after the money is stolen, the killing starts. Someone is taking down the members of the team one by one. A silent, expert assassin is stalking the team, gruesomely murdering both them and their families. And Matt knows that he's next. An explosive story of what happens when terrorism, money, love and jealously combust.

The city and the nation are in the depths of the Great Depression. The crime families of New York have prospered in this time, but with the coming end of Prohibition, a battle is looming that will determine which organisations will rise... and which will face a violent end. For Vito Corleone, nothing is more important than his family's future.

Can you forgive the past? It's 1963 and a young German reporter has been assigned the suicide of a holocaust survivor. The news story seems straightforward, this is a tragic insight into one man's suffering. But a long hidden secret is discovered in the pages of the dead man's diary. What follows is life-and-death hunt for a notorious former concentration camp-commander, a man responsible for the deaths of thousands, a man as yet unpunished.

Transform your life. Rewrite your destiny. In his most personal novel to date, Paulo Coelho returns with a remarkable tale of self-discovery. Much like the shepherd boy Santiago in his bestselling novel The Alchemist, Paulo has recently been brought low by a grave crisis of faith. Seeking a path of spiritual renewal and growth, he sets off on a trip via the Trans-Siberian Railway in order to meet new people and revitalize his passion for life. Even so, he never expects to meet Hilal. A gifted young violinist, she is the woman Paulo loved five hundred years before — and the woman he betrayed in an act of cowardice so far reaching that it prevents him from finding real happiness in this life. Together they will initiate a mystical voyage through time, traveling a path that teaches love, forgiveness, and the courage to overcome life’s inevitable challenges. Beautiful and inspiring, Aleph invites us to consider the meaning of our own personal journeys: Are we where we want to be, doing what we want to do? Some books are read. Aleph is lived.

Mark Renton has it all: he's good-looking, young, with a pretty girlfriend and a place at university. But there's no room for him in the 1980s. Thatcher's government is destroying working-class communities across Britain, and the post-war certainties of full employment, educational opportunity and a welfare state are gone. When his family starts to fracture, Mark's life swings out of control and he succumbs to the defeatism which has taken hold in Edinburgh's grimmer areas. The way out is heroin. It's no better for his friends. Spud Murphy is paid off from his job, Tommy Lawrence feels himself being sucked into a life of petty crime and violence — the worlds of the thieving Matty Connell and psychotic Franco Begbie. Only Sick Boy, the supreme manipulator of the opposite sex, seems to ride the current, scamming and hustling his way through it all. Skagboys charts their journey from likely lads to young men addicted to the heroin which has flooded their disintegrating community. This is the 1980s: a time of drugs, poverty, AIDS, violence, political strife and hatred — but a lot of laughs, and maybe just a little love; a decade which changed Britain for ever. The prequel to the world-renowned Trainspotting, this is an exhilarating and moving book, full of the scabrous humour, salty vernacular and appalling behaviour that has made Irvine Welsh a household name.

The past will always find you. A woman is found brutally murdered in a sordid Atlanta apartment. Her blood-soaked body bears a chilling similarity to a woman found dead almsot 40 years earlier. Soon Special Agent Will Trent finds himself returning to the home he grew up in, and a past that could hold the clue to the killings...

Since former US Marine Jack Morgan started Private, it has become the world's most effective investigation firm — sought out by the famous and the powerful to discreetly handle their most intimate problems. Private's investigators are the smartest, the fastest, and the most technologically advanced in the world — and they always uncover the truth. When his former lover is found murdered in Jack's bed, he is instantly the number one suspect. While Jack is under police investigation and fighting to clear his name, the mob strong-arms him into recovering $30 million in stolen pharmaceuticals for them. And the beautiful owner of a chain of luxury hotels persuades him to quietly investigate a string of murders at her high-class establishments. With Jack and his team stretched to breaking point, one of his most trusted colleagues threatens to leave Private, and Jack realises he is facing his biggest challenge yet. With more action, more intrigue, and more twists than ever before, Private: No. 1 Suspect is James Patterson at his unstoppable best.

The Doctor's old friend and fellow Time Lord Professor Chronotis has retired to Cambridge University — where nobody will notice if he lives for centuries. But now he needs help from the Doctor, Romana and K-9. When he left Gallifrey he took with him a few little souvenirs — most of them are harmless. But one of them is extremely dangerous. The Worshipful and Ancient Law of Gallifrey isn't a book for Time Tots. It is one of the Artefacts, dating from the dark days of Rassilon. It must not be allowed to fall into the wrong hands. And the sinister Skagra most definitely has the wrong hands. He wants the book. He wants to discover the truth behind Shada. And he wants the Doctor's mind... Based on the scripts for the original television series by the legendary Douglas Adams, Shada retells an adventure that never made it to the screen.