Random House Inc.

This «New York Times» bestseller begins as the ultimate voyage of discovery, which becomes dark chapter of Jedi history — the thrilling story of a legendary, and doomed, Jedi mission prior to the Clone Wars. Includes a bonus short story, RMist Encounter.

When a spunky mouse invites a passing bird to see whats inside a People House, chaos ensues while beginning readers learn the names of 65 common household items in this super simple, delightfully silly introduction to objects around the house.

In this dazzling work of biography, cultural history, and musical insight, Gould explores the 1960s in England and America through the prism of the Beatles.

In this stunning debut, author Scott Lynch delivers the wonderfully thrilling tale of an audacious criminal and his band of confidence tricksters. Set in a fantastic city pulsing with the lives of decadent nobles and daring thieves, here is a story of adventure, loyalty, and survival that is one part Robin Hood, one part Ocean's Eleven, and entirely enthralling... An orphan's life is harsh-and often short-in the island city of Camorr, built on the ruins of a mysterious alien race. But born with a quick wit and a gift for thieving, Locke Lamora has dodged both death and slavery, only to fall into the hands of an eyeless priest known as Chains-a man who is neither blind nor a priest. A con artist of extraordinary talent, Chains passes his skills on to his carefully selected family of orphans-a group known as the Gentlemen Bastards. Under his tutelage, Locke grows to lead the Bastards, delightedly pulling off one outrageous confidence game after another. Soon he is infamous as the Thorn of Camorr, and no wealthy noble is safe from his sting. Passing themselves off as petty thieves, the brilliant Locke and his tightly knit band of light-fingered brothers have fooled even the criminal underworld's most feared ruler, Capa Barsavi. But there is someone in the shadows more powerful-and more ambitious-than Locke has yet imagined. Known as the Gray King, he is slowly killing Capa Barsavi's most trusted men-and using Locke as a pawn in his plot to take control of Camorr's underworld. With a bloody coup under way threatening to destroy everyone and everything that holds meaning in his mercenary life, Locke vows to beat the Gray King at his own brutal game-or die trying...

He watches her from across the crowded dance club, a sensual black-haired stranger who stirs Gabrielle Maxwell's deepest fantasies. But nothing about this night — or this man — is what it seems. For when Gabrielle witnesses a murder outside the club, reality shifts into something dark and deadly. In that shattering instant she is thrust into a realm she never knew existed — a realm where vampires stalk the shadows and a blood war is set to ignite. Lucan Thorne despises the violence carried out by his lawless brethren. A vampire himself, Lucan is a Breed warrior, sworn to protect his kind — and the unwitting humans existing alongside them — from the mounting threat of the Rogues. Lucan cannot risk binding himself to a mortal woman, but when Gabrielle is targeted by his enemies, he has no choice but to bring her into the dark underworld he commands. Here, in the arms of the Breed's formidable leader, Gabrielle will confront an extraordinary destiny of danger, seduction, and the darkest pleasures of all...

He comes to her more dead than alive, a towering black-clad stranger riddled with bullets and rapidly losing blood. As she struggles to save him, veterinarian Tess Culver is unaware that the man calling himself Dante is no man at all, but one of the Breed, vampire warriors engaged in a desperate battle. In a single erotically charged moment Tess is plunged into his world — a shifting, shadowed place where bands of Rogue vampires stalk the night, cutting a swath of terror. Haunted by visions of a dark future, Dante lives and fights like there is no tomorrow. Tess is a complication he does not need — but now, with his brethren under attack, he must shield Tess from a growing threat that includes Dante himself. For with one reckless, irresistible kiss, she has become an inextricable part of his underworld realm... and his touch awakens her to hidden gifts, desires, and hungers she never knew she possessed. Bonded by blood, Dante and Tess must work together to thwart deadly enemies, even as they discover a passion that transcends the boundaries of life itself...

Black Dogs is built around a brilliant short story, a memerically slow-motion encounter with two terrifying dogs by an English couple who are honeymooning just after the war in a French mountain village.

Shoot all the bluejays you want, if you can hit 'em, but remember it's a sin to kill a mockingbird. This is a lawyer's advice to his children as he defends the real mockingbird of this story — a black man charged with raping a white girl in the Deep South of the 1930s.

Ray Atlee is a professor of law at the university of Virginia who is forty-three and newly single. He has a father, a very sick old man who lives alone in the ancestral home in Clanton, Mississippi; a beloved and powerful official who has towered over local law and politics for many years and is now a recluse. With the end in sight, Judge Atlee issues a summons to Ray to return home to Clanton, to discuss the details of his estate. Ray reluctantly heads south. But the meeting does not take place. The Judge dies too soon, and in doing so leaves behind a shocking secret known only to Ray. And perhaps someone else.

Exposing high-level governmental corruption, conspiracy, and murder has garnered plenty of attention for Christian Gillette, the young dynamo chairman of the famous New York private equity firm Everest Capital. Now the reputation he has built taking Everest to the top has been noticed beyond the boardrooms of high finance-by powerful people with potentially devastating agendas. Christian's own attention is on Las Vegas, where he means to stake out a piece of the action by opening a new casino and launching an NFL franchise. But Sin City didn't get its nickname for nothing, and the mob soon makes it clear that Christian's company will have to pay if it wants to play in the nation's gaming capital. Christian has already taken on corporate pirates and cold-blooded assassins and lived to tell about it, but crossing the underworld could do more than just kill his brilliant career. It could crush his chance to fulfill his late father's political legacy. Dynamic U.S. senator Jesse Ford is the odds-on favorite to make history as the first black president. And the man he wants beside him in the red-hot race for the White House is Christian Gillette. But Samuel Hewitt, a Texas mogul with billions to burn, has another fate in mind for Christian: to be part of a shadow organization, powered by wealth and bound by dark secrets that has manipulated the course of American history for generations. As the pieces of Hewitt's plot fall into place, and a twisted chain of intrigue, treachery, blackmail, and death gets tighter and tighter, Christian realizes-maybe too late-that in a grudge match between kingmakers hell-bent on victory at all costs, he may be the last pawn sacrificed. With ThePower Broker, bestselling author Stephen Frey unleashes an ever-accelerating thriller that breaks the suspense barrier-and never stops.

I'm Tracy Beaker, the great inventor of extremely outrageous dares — and I dare you to read a more brilliant story than this! I've bought a big fat purple notebook for writing down all my mega-manic ultra-scary stories in. But especially for my own story, of how my foster-mum, Cam, has turned out to be a real meanie; no designer clothes, when I really need them; a pokey flat, and a horrible new school. No wonder I bunk off... Still, it will have to do until my real mum comes and gets me. And until then, no-one is going to be better at the Dare Game than Tracy Beaker!

Can the future ever erase the past? Rose has a Cross mother and a nought father in a society where the pale-skinned noughts are treated as inferiors and those with dual heritage face a life-long battle against deep-rooted prejudices. Sephy, her mother, has told Rose virtually nothing about her father, but as Rose grows into a young adult, she unexpectedly discovers the truth about her parentage, and becomes determined to find out more, to honour both sides of her heritage. But her father's family has a complicated history — one tied up with the fight for equality for the nought population. And as Rose takes her first steps away from Sephy and into this world, she finds herself drawn inexorably into more and more danger. Suddenly, it's a game of very high stakes that can only have one winner...

Sephy is a Cross — a member of the dark-skinned ruling class. Callum is a nought — a colourless member of the underclass who were once slaves to the Crosses. Against a background of prejudice and distrust, highlighted by violent terrorist activity by Noughts, a romance builds between them — a romance that is to lead both of them into danger.

Evacuated from Blitz-battered London, shy and genteel Elizabeth White is sent to stay with the boisterous O'Connors in Kilgarret, Ireland. It is the beginning of an unshakable bond between Elizabeth and Aisling O'Connor, a friendship which will endure through twenty turbulent years of change and chaos, joy and sorrow, soaring dreams and searing betrayals. Writing with warmth, wit and great compassion, Maeve Binchy tells a magnificent story of the lives and loves of two women, bound together in a friendship that nothing could tear asunder — not even the man who threatened to come between them forever.

A collection of the classic Russian folk and fairy tales. Nearly 200 characteristic and colourful traditional folk and fairy tales, full of action, magical and human, are brought together in the only comprehensive edition available in English.

From New York Times bestseller Lisa Gardner, author of Alone and The Killing Hour, comes a thriller that goes from heartbreaking to heartstopping in the blink of an eye. When someone you love vanishes without a trace, how far would you go to get them back? For ex-FBI profiler Pierce Quincy, it’s the beginning of his worst nightmare: a car abandoned on a desolate stretch of Oregon highway, engine running, purse on the driver’s seat. And his estranged wife, Rainie Conner, gone, leaving no clue to her fate. Did one of the ghosts from Rainie’s troubled past finally catch up with her? Or could her disappearance be the result of one of the cases they’d been working-a particularly vicious double homicide or the possible abuse of a deeply disturbed child Rainie took too close to heart? Together with his daughter, FBI agent Kimberly Quincy, Pierce is battling the local authorities, racing against time, and frantically searching for answers to all the questions he’s been afraid to ask. One man knows what happened that night. Adopting the alias of a killer caught eighty years before, he has already contacted the press. His terms are clear: he wants money, he wants power, he wants celebrity. And if he doesn’t get what he wants, Rainie will be gone for good. Sometimes, no matter how much you love someone, it’s still not enough. As the clock winds down on a terrifying deadline, Pierce plunges headlong into the most desperate hunt of his life, into the shattering search for a killer, a lethal truth, and for the love of his life, who may forever be...gone.

What’s a round-the-world honeymoon if you can’t buy the odd souvenir to ship back home? Like the twenty silk dressing gowns Becky found in Hong Kong...the hand-carved dining table (and ten chairs) from Sri Lanka...the, um, huge wooden giraffes from Malawi (that her husband Luke expressly forbade her to buy)... Only now Becky and Luke have returned home to London and Luke is furious. Two truckloads of those souvenirs have cluttered up their loft, and the bills for them are outrageous. Luke insists Becky go on a budget. And worse: her beloved best friend Suze has found a new best friend while Becky was away. Becky’s feeling rather blue-when her parents deliver some incredible news. She has a long-lost sister! Becky is thrilled! She’s convinced her sister will be a true soulmate. They’ll go shopping together, have manicures together... Until she meets Jessica for the first time and gets the shock of her life. Surely Becky Bloomwood’s sister can’t...hate shopping? Sophie Kinsella is a former financial journalist and the author of the bestselling novels Confessions of a Shopaholic, Shopaholic Takes Manhattan, Shopaholic Ties the Knot, Can You Keep a Secret?, and The Undomestic Goddess.

Bhupinder 'Puppy' Singh Johal — handsome, rakish and spiritually disenfranchised — has left behind the immigrant neighbourhood of Southall to mix with the elite of metropolitan London society. When sloaney rich-girl Sophie, falls for him, he grabs the chance to escape his past and pursue the woman of his dreams, the voluptuous sophisticate Sarupa, who happens to be engaged to Sophie's cousin. Using whatever and whoever he can, Puppy explores the grit and glamour of a city seething with the possibilities and politics of money, race and sex: an incendiary cocktail that explodes, changing him and those closest to him forever... Set in the long hot summer of 2002, Tourism is a filthy, unflinching and politically incorrect take on modern Britain.

Engineers of the Soul is the riveting story of how authors were forced to write in service of the Soviet Union's Communist ideology. Stalin first used the expression 'engineers of the soul' to refer to Soviet writers in 1932. It would become a well-known phrase and a feared concept. Together with the actual engineers, these engineers of the soul were supposed to contribute to the definitive establishment of the Communist paradise: by changing the appearance of the country with ambitious waterworks — Moscow Seaport — and by playing upon the souls of its inhabitants in books in such a way that the New Man would rise up. Combining investigative journalism with literary history, Westerman, himself once a student of hydraulic engineering, undertook two spectacular journeys: the first was to the Gulf of Kara Bogaz, now a muddy bay in the Caspian Sea but once described as a marvel of hydraulic engineering, and the second through the books — and the lives — of other Soviet writers including Maxim Gorki, Andrei Platonov and Isaak Babel.

From the bestselling author of «Between Husbands and Friends» and «An Act of Love» comes a wise, wonderful, and delightfully witty «coming of age» novel about four intrepid women who discover themselves as they were truly meant to be: passionate, alive, and ready to face the best years of their lives. Meet Faye, Marilyn, Alice, and Shirley. Four women with skills, smarts, and secrets — all feeling over the hill and out of the race. But in a moment of delicious serendipity, they meet and realize they share more than raging hormones and lost dreams. Now as the Hot Flash Club, where the topics of motherhood, sex, and men are discussed with double servings of chocolate cake, they vow to help each other... and themselves. Faye, the artist. A determinedly cheerful widow and connoisseur of control-top pantyhose, she's struggling with creative block and an empty, lonely house. Now she's got a tricky problem to bring to the club's table: how can they catch her perfect son-in-law cheating on her only daughter Laura? Shirley, the healer. Though her yoga-slender body belie her years, decades of dating losers and the strain of being broke make her «feel «her age. Shirley has a secret dream: a wellness spa that nurtures body and soul. But first she needs to believe in herself, in her abilities, and in her friends at the club. Marilyn, the brain. A paleontologist who has spent so many years looking at dried-up fossils, she's almost become one herself. Worried that her brilliant but nerdy son is about to marry the «very» wrong woman, she gets some help from the HFC, who transform her from a caterpillar to a butterfly, with amazing results. Alice, the executive. Black and regal, she soared to the top of the corporate ladder. Now her shoes are murder on her arthritic back and the younger jackals are circling in for the kill. But as the inspiration behind the HFC, she's about to discover something extraordinary: contentment. For Faye, Shirley, Marilyn, and Alice, the time has come to use it or lose it — be it their bodies, their brains, their spirits, and their sense of fun. Together they realize that they «can» have it all, perhaps for the first time in their lives. And though what sags may never rise again, feeling sexy has no expiration date — and best of all, with a little help from her friends, a woman can always start over... and never, ever, give up what matters most. «From the Hardcover edition.»

The epic Eberron trilogy The Lost Mark continues! The dark and mysterious world of Eberron continues to expand through RPG products and novels. This is the sixth novel set in the Eberron world. Matt Forbeck has written and designed games for more than 14 years, for which he has garnered several awards. His most recent title for Wizards of the Coast, Inc. was Marked for Death, the kickoff novel for The Lost Mark trilogy.

Byzantium Endures, one of the first of the Pyat series of novels, Introduces one of Michael Moorcock's most magnificent creations — Maxim Arturovitch Pyatnitski. Born in Kiev on the cusp of the twentieth century he discovers the pleasures of sex and cocaine and glimpses a sophisticated world beyond his horizons before the storm of the October Revolution breaks. Still a student at St Petersburg, he is deflected into more immediate concerns, caught up in the rip-tide of history.

Young Twig lives in the Deepwoods, among the woodtrolls, but he isn't one of them. In a brave attempt to find out where he truly belongs, Twig wanders into the mysterious, fascinating and sometimes hazardous world beyond the Deepwoods. In his travels he encounters myriad peculiar creatures, like his wise guardian, the caterbird; the slaughterers, a peaceful race who butcher animals for their livelihood; and the vicious, bile-swilling rotsucker. Always mindful of the Gloamglozer, whose presence haunts the thoughts of all the inhabitants of the Edge, Twig pursues his quest until he discovers his roots, not among the trees, but in the skies. With his new allies, the sky pirates, Twig prepares to embark on his next adventure.

Floss's parents split up when she was younger and she now divides up her week, spending five days with her mum, her mum's new boyfriend and her new baby half-brother. The other two days Floss spends with her dad, helping him to run his greasy spoon cafe. But then their simple arrangement is thrown into disarray when Floss's mum decides to move to Australia for six months. Floss has to choose whether to go with her or stay with her dad. She picks her dad and they muddle along happily together, surviving on chip butties and enjoying visits to the local funfair. But then disaster strikes, Dad's money troubles catch up with him and they have to move out of the cafe. They're homeless — but can their new fairground friends help out? This is another gripping and emotionally involving slice of family life from the award-winning, bestselling author, Jacqueline Wilson.