Transworld Publishers

Toys — from teddy bears to Barbie dolls to train sets — define our image of childhood innocence. But the truth is that toys represent a $21 billion a year industry, and with so much money at stake, the toy business is anything but child's play. In «The Real Toy Story», investigative journalist Eric Clark exposes the startling truths behind Britain's favourite toys. Drawing on interviews with over 200 industry insiders, Clark names and shames the corporations spending millions on research into the best way to manipulate their target audience while manufacturing products in China under virtual slave labour conditions. In a world of cut-throat competition and cold-blooded marketing, toy companies are increasingly willing to sacrifice our children in the rush for profits. And as more children forsake cuddly play things for Ipods and cell phones, companies are using even more extreme tactics — unashamedly using sex and violence to sell dolls and action men to children as young as three — to make sure that their toy is the one that children want to have. «The Real Toy Story» is essential reading for the millions of adults who care about the toys they choose for the children in their lives.

You're about to turn thirty, all your friends are getting engaged and pregnant — and your body-clock is ticking. Then you get an offer to move to New York. So you take a chance and break up with your boyfriend — only to land yourself in the singles capital of the world. When Bridget Harrison arrived in Manhattan to work for America's most famous tabloid, the «New York Post», she was in at the deep end from day one. Dispatched by day to cover murders and muggings in the roughest corners of New York, by night she began to write a column about her search for love in a dating shark tank. So far so Sex and the City — until she realised the one man she was falling for also happened to be her boss (and unfortunately this wasn't fiction). The highs are: being sent out to cover your first breaking news story; having the chance to go on a new blind date every week; and realizing you love your editor. The lows are: finding no-one you interview can understand your accent; going on a new blind date every week; and realizing you love your editor.

San Francisco, 1976. A naive young secretary, fresh out of Cleveland, tumbles headlong into a brave new world of laundromat Lotharios, pot-growing landladies, cut throat debutantes, and Jockey Shorts dance contests. The saga that ensues is manic, romantic, tawdry, touching, and outrageous — unmistakably the handwork of Armistead Maupin.

In the course of their investigations into Leonardo da Vinci and the Turin Shroud, Lynn Picknett and Clive Prince found clues in the work of the great Renaissance artist that pointed to the existence of a secret underground religion. More clues were found in a twentieth-century London church. These were the beginnings of a quest through time and space that led the authors into the mysterious world of secret societies and such bodies as the Freemasons, the Knights Templar and the Cathars and finally back to the ideas and beliefs of the first century AD and a devastating new view of the real character and motives of the founder of Christianity and the roles of John the Baptist and Mary Magdalene. They reveal nothing less than a secret history, preserved through the centuries but encoded in works of art and even in the great Gothic cathedrals, whose revelation could shake the foundations of the Church.

»The Wit and Wisdom of Discworld» is a collection of the wittiest, pithiest and wisest quotations from this extraordinary universe, dealing one-by-one with each book in the canon. Guaranteed to transport you back to your favourite or forgotten Discworld moments it is the perfect book for die-hard Pratchett fans, as well as anyone coming to the Discworld for the first time.

What started out as an innocent board game inspired Rich Smith to undertake a daring crime spree across the United States — a journey to break the dumbest American laws on the statute books. In the Land of the Free, it is illegal to: lie down and fall asleep in a cheese factory (South Dakota); play a trumpet with the intention of luring someone to a store (California); and, catch a fish with a lasso (Tennessee). Rich's first problem was narrowing down the huge choice of laws to just twenty-five. The second was persuading his mate Bateman to come along, to do some of the driving — and possibly provide bail money. The third was finding someone who was willing to help him break his first law: one of San Francisco's oldest statutes, which related to oral sex. No, Bateman couldn't help with that one. Join Rich as he attempts his one-man crime wave — almost as difficult as a one-man Mexican wave.

Written between 700 and 1000AD, the original 3,000 line poem is sometimes called 'England's national epic'. It recounts the story of a Scandinavian warrior, Beowulf, who pledges to save King Hrothgar's people from the monstrous creature Grendel that has been terrorising his kingdom. In the ensuing fight, Beowulf rips off Grendel's arm and the now-mortally wounded monster flees back to his lair beneath a mysterious lake. But Beowulf's work is not yet done: an even greater threat emerges from beneath the waters — Grendel's mother, bent on avenging the death of her son... One of the great works of English literature, this classic tale of heroism and sacrifice has been transformed into a remarkable film. Directed by Robert Zemeckis from a screenplay by Neil Gaiman and Roger Avary, Warner Bros.' Beowulf boasts a phenomenal cast, including Ray Winstone, John Malkovich, Anthony Hopkins and Angelina Jolie. Employing cutting-edge technologies and dazzling special effects, this ambitious, dark, exciting film reimagines the story for the 21st century and a new generation. Opening in the UK on 16th Nov, the film will do for the story of Beowulf what '300' did for the Battle of Thermopylae. Award-winning dark fantasist Caitlin R. Kiernan's novelisation — with an introduction by Neil Gaiman — is both the perfect companion to the film and a compelling read in its own right.

The God Delusion caused a sensation when it was published in 2006. Within weeks it became the most hotly debated topic, with Dawkins himself branded as either saint or sinner for presenting his hard-hitting, impassioned rebuttal of religion of all types. His argument could hardly be more topical. While Europe is becoming increasingly secularized, the rise of religious fundamentalism, whether in the Middle East or Middle America, is dramatically and dangerously dividing opinion around the world. In America, and elsewhere, a vigorous dispute between ‘intelligent design’ and Darwinism is seriously undermining and restricting the teaching of science. In many countries religious dogma from medieval times still serves to abuse basic human rights such as women’s and gay rights. And all from a belief in a God whose existence lacks evidence of any kind. Dawkins attacks God in all his forms. He eviscerates the major arguments for religion and demonstrates the supreme improbability of a supreme being. He shows how religion fuels war, foments bigotry and abuses children. The God Delusion is a brilliantly argued, fascinating polemic that will be required reading for anyone interested in this most emotional and important subject.

‘Something strange occurs to guests as soon as they check in. Even if in real life they are perfectly well-mannered, decent people with proper balanced relationships, as soon as they spin through the revolving hotel doors the normal rules of behaviour no longer seem to apply.’ All of the following is true.Only the names have been changed to protect the guilty. All the anecdotes, the stories, the characters, the situations, the highs, the lows, the scams, the drugs, the misery, the love, the death and the insanity are exactly as was told by Anonymous — someone who has spent his whole career working in hotels at the heart of London’s luxury hotel industry. However, for legal reasons, the stories now take place in a fictitious hotel known as Hotel Babylon. More than a decade is compressed into a day. Everything else is as it should be. The rich spend money, the hotel makes money and the chambermaids still fight the bellboys over a two-pound coin.It's just another twenty-four hours in an expensive London hotel.

‘ Thousands of people have written to tell me that I am wrong not to believe in God. The most hostile of these communications have come from Christians. This is ironic, as Christians generally imagine that no faith imparts the virtues of love and forgiveness more effectively than their own. The truth is that many who claim to be transformed by Christ’s love are deeply, even murderously, intolerant of criticism. While we may want to ascribe this to human nature, it is clear that such hatred draws considerable support from the Bible. How do I know this? The most disturbed of my correspondents always cite chapter and verse’. So begins Letter to a Christian Nation, Sam Harris’s hard-hitting rebuttal of religious fundamentalism and blind belief. With deceptively simple arguments, he demolishes the myths on which Christianity was built, challenges believers to open their eyes to the contradictions of their faith and warns us of the dangers of America’s ever increasing unification of Church and State.

English society beauty Genevieve Shelby King parties to the utmost with the Anglo-American artists and writers of Montparnasse. She has a rich husband, a glamorous apartment and an enormous shoe collection. But there is something hollow at the centre of Genevieve's charmed life. When she spots a pair of unique and exquisite shoes on the feet of an arch rival one night, her whole collection — indeed everything she has — seems suddenly worthless. The exclusive designer Paolo Zachari, renowned for his fabulous shoes and eccentric behaviour, hand-picks his clients according to whim. And he has determined to say no to Genevieve. As her desire for the pair of unobtainable shoes develops into an obsession with their creator, Genevieve's elaborately designed life comes under threat, and she is forced to confront the emptiness at its heart.

DON`T GO TO FRANCE WITHOUT READING THIS BOOK!

A controversial artist is found dead in her own art installation inside a riverside gallery with locked doors and windows — the only witness is a small boy who insists the murderer was a masked man on a horse. A television presenter is struck by lightning while indoors… Two seemingly impossible crimes that only Arthur Bryant and John May of the Met's Peculiar Crimes Unit might be able to solve. But Bryant has lost his nerve following a disastrous public appearance, and May is fighting to keep the unit from closure. Worse still, the case of the Leicester Square Vampire, an unsolved mystery from the past that changed both their lives, has returned to haunt them. With a sinister modern-day highwayman bringing terror to the London streets in a series of crimes each more puzzling than the last, the elderly detectives track their suspect to an exclusive private school and a deprived housing estate. But just when they need all the help they can get to uncover a new breed of criminal, the highwayman is hailed a national hero, and the public turns against them… Bryant & May are back on the case in an adventure that explores the dark side of celebrity, the conflicts of youth, age and class, and the peculiar myths of old London.

The little cat Deric Longden saw sitting forlornly on an upturned bucket belonged to the neighbours, but somehow when it began to rain it seemed only natural to bring him inside. Once there he slipped so easily into Deric and Aileen's lives that there was an unspoken agreement that he had found his real home. Little did he know that he had entered the Longden world, in which the unexpected (almost) always happens... Aileen being Aileen, it was probably inevitable that sooner or later the kitten would be trapped in the refrigerator. And Deric being Deric, the obvious way to thaw him back to life was to make a little coat for him out of a shrunken thermal vest. Thus the cat who came in from the cold got his name — Thermal — and joined the wonderful cast of characters in the ongoing Longden saga.

Late at night, in a New York cafe, Jack Reacher orders coffee in a cup made of foam, not china. So he can move on at a moment's notice. He owns nothing, carries less. He has never met a woman who said no or a case he couldn't solve. But now Reacher faces a new case so disturbing that the truth eludes him. He has to sweat the details and work the clues. Doing it the hard way, until what started on a busy New York street explodes three thousand miles away, in the sleepy English countryside. With Reacher striding alone in the shadows, armed and dangerous.

When Masterharper Zist takes over as Harper for Natalon's coal-mining camp, he takes with him his apprentice, the orphaned Pellar, and Pellar's fire-lizard Chitter. Pellar has become a gifted tracker and Zist gives him his own mission — to find out if the thefts of coal are the work of the criminals condemned to a life of wandering and hardship.

This is a stunning action thriller from a real-life hero. Kevin Dodds leads a dull, uneventful life. He has a steady job at the bank, a nice house and car. His wife goes to Bingo on a Saturday night, but he usually stays in to save money. But Kevin has spent enough quiet nights in watching TV and decides he'd like a night out himself. And he's not talking about a pint and a packet of peanuts down at the local. He's going to attempt to pull off a daring bank robbery single handed. Kevin is about to take a heart-thumping step into the unknown. For once, he's going to stop being the grey man...

'Neighbours... hah. People'd live for ages side by side, nodding at one another amicably on their way to work, and then some trivial thing would happen and someone would be having a garden fork removed from their ear.' Throughout history, there's always been a perfectly good reason to start a war. Never more so if it is over a 'strategic' piece of old rock in the middle of nowhere. It is after all every citizen's right to bear arms to defend what they consider to be their own. Even if it isn't. And in such pressing circumstances, you really shouldn't let small details like the absence of an army or indeed the money to finance one get in the way of a righteous fight with all the attendant benefits of out-and-out nationalism...

At 29 I got married to live the life of the perfect wife with the gorgeous children. I did that for ten years, the last four of which I was completely celibate. Then I went online and everything changed. After an online love affair with a man 3,000 miles away, Suzanne Portnoy—mother of two and a top executive in the entertainment industry—begins her sexual reawakening. Embarking on a sensational and prolific series of liaisons, Suzanne beds a top London chef who cooks her a five star meal on the day her husband moves out. An affair with a famous men’s magazine editor quickly ensues, followed by a top cameraman who takes pictures of Suzanne naked. But this is just the beginning. Insatiable, Suzanne dives into the swinging scene and works her way through an entire spectrum of sexual experience, including exhibitionism, group sex, fetish clubs, and a predilection for picking up men in her lunch hour. Suzanne's journey of self-discovery is anything but typical; her attitude towards sex and relationships even more unusual in this story that is shocking and heartwarming in equal measure. Freed from the restraints of marriage and monogamy, Suzanne takes pleasure without commitment and tells her story without a trace of shame. She's not looking for Prince Charming anymore, just for fun—and she finds it.

Musette Belle could lay her hand on a baby`s heart and see his life as he`d already lived it. Angela Belle, a haunting and beautiful siren, lures every man she meets into greatness. This is a story about the strength of community, the might of God, and the ultimate power of extraordinary women.

When wisecracking detectives, Patrick Kenzie and Angie Gennaro agree to protect the son of a prominent psychiatrist who believes she may have angered the Boston Irish Mafia, they soon find bodies are piling up around them — seemingly unconnected with their case. And what's more all the clues point to an unlikely suspect — a serial killer who has been in prison for twenty years, so he can't be killing again, can he? As Angie and Patrick try to find out what kind of human being could perform such horrifying acts of rape, mutilation, torture and dismemberment, they discover that the killer's motive is disturbingly rooted in their own distant past. In a series of heart-stopping climaxes that grow ever more terrifying and bloody, the two work frantically with the Boston cops, the FBI, the local Mafia, and the folks from their old neighbourhood to unearth the killer before they become victims themselves.

Boston private investigators, Patrick Kenzie and Angela Gennaro's relationship has hit the skids — their long-standing professional commitment and growing romance have disintegrated due to seemingly irreparable personal differences. But despite these problems, Prayers for Rain brings them together again to close down a predator whose modus operandi seems to put him beyond the law. This killer's insidious murder weapon is within his victims' minds: no smoking gun, no bloody knife, just merciless manipulation until despair drives his targets to kill themselves. As Patrick and Angie attempt to identify and save his next victim, this sinister force turns on them and thus begins a dangerous battle of wits: a tormenting, life-threatening game of psychological warfare in which simple survival seems a mixed blessing — because not even the winner will emerge unscathed.

Dying billionaire, Trevor Stone hires private detectives, Patrick Kenzie and Angela Gennaro to find his missing daughter. Grief-stricken over the death of her mother and the impending death of her father, Desiree Stone has been missing for three weeks. So has the first investigator, Trevor Stone hired to find her: Jay Becker, Patrick's mentor. As Patrick and Angie begin their search, they are led down a trail of half-truths and corruption into a world in which a therapeutic organization may be fronting for a dangerous cult; a hi-tech private investigation firm may be covering up lethal crimes; and a stolen cache of millions in illegal funds may be tied to both disappearances and a tanker full of heroin. Nothing is remotely what it seems as the detectives travel from the wind-blown streets of Boston to the rum-punch sunsets of Florida's Gulf Coast and back again, searching for a woman and a man who could be saints or sinners, victims or victimizers, alive or dead. And the more Patrick and Angie discover, the more they realize that on this case, any wrong step will certainly be their last.

There are threads in our lives. You pull one, and everything else gets affected. When they were children, Sean Devine, Jimmy Marcus and Dave Boyle were friends. But then a strange car pulled up their street. One boy got in the car, two did not, and something terrible happened — something that ended their friendship and changed all three boys forever. Twenty-five years later, Sean Devine is a homicide detective. Jimmy Marcus is an ex-con who owns a corner store. And Dave Boyle is trying to hold his marriage together and keep his demons at bay — demons that urge him to do horrific things. When Jimmy Marcus' daughter is found murdered, Sean Devine is assigned to the case. His personal life unravelling, he must go back into a world he thought he'd left behind to confront not only the violence of the present but the nightmares of his past. His investigation brings him into conflict with Jimmy Marcus, who finds his old criminal impulses tempt him to solve the crime with brutal justice. And then there is Dave Boyle, who came home the night Jimmy's daughter died covered in someone else's blood...