See larger image Random (Paperback) By (author) Craig Robertson List Price: 6.99 GBP New From: 0.01 In Stock Used from: 0.01 In Stock

Random, by Craig Robertson

Glasgow is being terrorised by a serial killer the media have nicknamed The Cutter. The murders have left the police baffled as the only connection between the killings is that all the victims’ little fingers of their right hands have been severed. But as the police begin to close in on The Cutter, his carefully-laid plans threaten to unravel – with horrifying consequences.

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See larger image The Terror of Living (Paperback) By (author) Urban Waite List Price: 12.99 GBP New From: 0.01 In Stock Used from: 0.01 In Stock

The Terror of Living, by Urban Waite

Hunt, an ex-convict, has spent the past twenty years on a small ranch with his wife, supplementing his income with the odd drug smuggling job. Drake, a deputy sheriff, is newly married and has almost escaped the shadow of his father, who was also a sheriff — and no stranger to the drug trade himself…

Drake is on Hunt’s trail when a big drug deal in the mountains goes awry and so begins a terrifying race against time. Although Hunt evades Drake’s attempts at capture the traffickers soon unleash a merciless hired killer to reclaim what’s theirs. As the chase closes in and loyalties are tested, Drake’s quest for justice contends with a hitman’s quest for blood, and Hunt must face a terrible choice…

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See larger image Old Enemies (Paperback) By (author) Michael Dobbs List Price: 12.99 GBP New From: 0.01 In Stock Used from: 0.01 In Stock

Old Enemies, by Michael Dobbs

In the Swiss Alps a teenage girl is thrown from a helicopter and her boyfriend is brutally abducted to Trieste, a city filled with undercurrents of past hatreds.

Ruari, son of Irish media owner J J Breslin, is in desperate danger, at the mercy of ruthless kidnappers making impossible demands. His terrified mother contacts the only person she knows can help her son: Harry Jones, her former lover, who she walked out on many years ago. Now memories of their passionate affair, the guilt, hurt, anger and humiliation, come flooding back.

Time is running out for Ruari and Harry, torn between his loyalties, is quickly drawn into a political game played for high stakes. Far higher than he realizes…

See larger image Lasting Damage (Hardcover) By (author) Sophie Hannah List Price: 12.99 GBP New From: 2.43 In Stock Used from: 0.01 In Stock Release date February 17, 2011.

Lasting Damage, by Sophie Hannah

It’s 1.15 a.m. Connie Bowskill should be asleep. Instead, she’s logging on to a property website in search of a particular house: 11 Bentley Grove, Cambridge. She knows it’s for sale; she saw the estate agent’s board in the front garden less than six hours ago.

Soon Connie is clicking on the ‘Virtual Tour’ button, keen to see the inside of 11 Bentley Grove and put her mind at rest once and for all. She finds herself looking at a scene from a nightmare: in the living room, in the middle of the carpet, there’s a woman lying face down in a huge pool of blood. In shock, Connie wakes her husband Kit. But when Kit sits down at the computer to take a look, he sees no dead body, only a pristine beige carpet in a perfectly ordinary room…

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See larger image The Red Coffin (Paperback) By (author) Sam Eastland List Price: 12.99 GBP New From: 1.69 In Stock Used from: 0.01 In Stock

The Red Coffin, by Sam Eastland

Russia On the Brink of War – Stalin’s Secret Weapon Sabotaged …

It is 1939. In the Soviet Union, years of revolution, fear and persecution have left the country unprepared to face the onslaught of Nazi Germany. For the coming battles, Stalin has placed his hopes on the F-34 tank – a thirty-ton steel monster known as the ‘Red Coffin’ to those men who will soon be using it.

But the design is not yet complete. And when Colonel Nagorski, the weapon’s secretive and eccentric architect, is found murdered, Stalin sends for Pekkala, his most trusted investigator. Once the favourite of the tsar, Pekkala is now in the service of the man who was once his greatest enemy.

A Detective Whose Loyalty is Torn Between the Present and the Past …

Pekkala is not the only one whose loyalty is divided. A sinister group calling itself the White Guild, made up of former soldiers of the tsar, may be behind the death of Colonel Nagorski.

While Soviet engineers struggle to complete the design of the tank, Pekkala must track down the White Guild and expose their plans to propel Germany and Russia into conflict.

Russia’s Most Famous Detective is Pitted Against its Most Formidable Adversary Yet …

See larger image Two For Sorrow (Josephine Tey Mystery 3) (Paperback) By (author) Nicola Upson List Price: 7.99 GBP New From: 1.06 In Stock Used from: 0.01 In Stock

Two for Sorrow, by Nicola Upson

London, 1903. Two women are hanged in Holloway Prison for killing babies. More than thirty years later, their crimes resurface with shocking consequences.

When Josephine Tey sets out to write a novel about Amelia Sach and Annie Walters, the notorious Finchley baby farmers, she can have little idea that the research for her book will be needed to help solve a modern-day killing – the sadistic murder of a young seamstress, found dead in the Motley sisters’ studio, amid preparations for a star-studded charity gala.

The girl’s death seems to be the result of a long-standing domestic feud, but Josephine’s friend, Inspector Archie Penrose, is unconvinced; and when a second young woman is involved in an horrific accident soon afterwards, the search begins for a vicious killer who will stop at nothing to keep the past where it belongs.

Moving between the decadence and glamour of a private women’s club, the bleak surroundings of Holloway prison, and the deprivation of London’s slums, Two for Sorrow is a dark and unsettling exploration of the way in which the crimes of the past destroy those left behind – long after justice is done.

See larger image American Assassin (Paperback) By (author) Vince Flynn List Price: 12.99 GBP New From: 0.01 In Stock Used from: 0.01 In Stock

American Assassin, by Vince Flynn

Before he was considered a CIA-super agent, before he was thought of as a terrorist’s worst nightmare, and before he was both loathed and admired by politicians on Capitol Hill, Mitch Rapp was a star college athlete with an untapped instinct for violence.

Tensions in the Middle East are simmering when Central Intelligence Angency Director Irene Kennedy pays a visit to Syracuse University, where she hopes to recruit none other than Mitch Rapp, a student who has quickly climbed up the academic and athletic ranks. At first glance, he appears like any other smart, good-looking American college kid. Under the surface, however, a tempest rages. Tragedy entered Mitch’s life a year before when 35 of his classmates, including his girlfriend, perished on Pan Am flight 103. Since then, Mitch has grieved their senseless deaths and has felt helpless in his desire for revenge. When Kennedy arrives on campus, his career path is suddenly laid out for him.

Nine months later, after gruelling training, Mitch finds himself in Istanbul on his first assignment, which is to assassinate the Turkish arms dealer who sold the explosives used in the Pan Am attack. Mitch hits his target but quickly sees, for the first time, what revenge means to the enemy. When Mitch’s mentor and a fellow recruit are kidnapped and tortured by a dangerous group of Islamic jihadists, he must stop at nothing to save them.

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See larger image The Company of Shadows (Paperback) By (author) Ruth Newman List Price: 7.99 GBP New From: 0.01 In Stock Used from: 0.01 In Stock

Company of Shadows, by Ruth Newman

Flicking through her friends’ holiday snaps, Kate Benson receives a sudden shock. For there in the background is her husband, Charlie. Dark hair, blue eyes, familiar smile: there’s no mistaking him. But that’s impossible. Because Charlie died exactly a year ago.

Determined to track down the man in the photograph, Kate follows the trail from Miami to Sicily, where her husband drowned in mysterious circumstances. But when she discovers serious discrepancies in the original investigation, Kate starts to question whether she ever really knew the man she loved so much.

Was Charlie murdered? Was their marriage as perfect as Kate remembers? Who are the people following her? Who can she trust? And is Kate herself to be trusted? Because there are secrets in her past too . . .

See larger image The Oath (Knights Templar Mysteries 29) (Paperback) By (author) Michael Jecks List Price: 7.99 GBP New From: 0.01 In Stock Used from: 0.01 In Stock

Oath, by Michael Jecks

1326. In an England riven with conflict, knight and peasant alike find their lives turned upside down by the warring factions of Edward II, with his hated favourite, Hugh le Despenser, and Edward’s estranged queen Isabella and her lover, Sir Roger Mortimer. Yet even in such times the brutal slaughter of an entire family, right down to a babe in arms, still has the power to shock. Three further murders follow, and bailiff Simon Puttock is drawn into a web of intrigue, vengeance, power and greed as Roger Mortimer charges him to investigate the killings.

Michael Jecks brilliantly evokes the turmoil of fourteenth-century England, as his well-loved characters Simon Puttock and Sir Baldwin de Furnshill strive to maintain the principles of loyalty and truth.

See larger image The Spellmans Strike Again (Spellman Mysteries 4) (Paperback) By (author) Lisa Lutz List Price: 6.99 GBP New From: 0.01 In Stock Used from: 0.01 In Stock

The Spellmans Strike Again, by Lisa Lutz

At the ripe old age of thirty-two, former wild child Isabel “Izzy” Spellman has finally agreed to take over the family detective business. The transition won’t be smooth.

First among her priorities as head of Spellman Investigations is to dig up some dirt on the competition, slippery ex-cop Rick Harkey. Next, faced with a puzzling missing-person’s case she recruits an actor friend, Len, to infiltrate the home of an ageing millionaire as an undercover butler.

Meanwhile, Izzy is being blackmailed by her mother to commit to regular blind dates with promising professionals – an arrangement that doesn’t thrill Connor, Izzy’s soon to become Ex-boyfriend No. 12.

At Spellman headquarters, it’s business as unusual. Doorknobs and light fixtures are disappearing every day, Mom’s been spotted crying in the pantry and just when it looks like things can’t go more haywire, little sister Rae’s internship researching pro bono legal cases leads the youngest Spellman to launch a campaign that could spring an innocent man from jail – or land Rae in it.

It just goes to show, however many Spellman Family Rules are put in place in an attempt to hold the family together, Izzy will never be able to follow Rule No. 1: Act Normal.

See larger image The Shadow of Your Smile (Paperback) By (author) Mary Higgins Clark List Price: 7.99 GBP New From: 0.01 In Stock Used from: 0.01 In Stock

The Shadow of Your Smile, by Mary Higgins Clark

At age eighty-three and in failing health, Olivia Morrow knows she has little time left. The last of her line, she faces a momentous choice: expose a long-held family secret, or take it with her to her grave.

Olivia has in her possession letters from her deceased cousin Catherine, a nun, now being considered for beatification by the Catholic Church. These letters reveal that, at the age of seventeen, Catherine gave birth to a son and gave him up for adoption and they identify the father as Alex Gannon, a world-famous doctor, scientist and inventor of medical patents.

Now, two generations later, thirty-one year old paediatrician, Dr. Monica Farrell, Catherine’s granddaughter, stands as the rightful heir to what remains of the Gannon family fortune. But in telling Monica who she really is and getting what is lawfully hers, Olivia would have to betray Catherine’s wishes and reveal the story behind Monica’s ancestry. As the pressure of Olivia’s impending choice weighs down on her, little does she realize that Alex Gannon’s grand-nephews – who are currently exploiting the Gannon inheritance to fund their profligate lifestyles – will stop at nothing to silence Olivia and prevent Monica from learning the secret, even murder.

See larger image The Obelisk (Paperback) By (author) Howard Gordon List Price: 12.99 GBP New From: 0.01 In Stock Used from: 0.01 In Stock

The Obelisk, by Howard Gordon

Gideon Davis, whose behind-the-scenes negotiating skills have earned him the role of peacemaker in conflicts around the globe, knows more about hush-hush discussions in Capitol corridors than he does about hand-to-hand combat. But his more practical, tactical skills become vital when he’s called upon by family friend and government big-wig Earl Parker to bring in a rogue agent – Gideon’s own brother Tillman.

Gideon is transported from a DC awards dinner to the jungles of the oil-rich nation of Mohan, where Tillman has promised to give himself up. But on his arrival the plan goes immediately awry. Gideon must evade hostile locals to make his way to The Obelisk – a multi-million-dollar, state-of-the-art oil rig that has been seized by terrorists. Both Tillman, who doesn’t seem to have surrender in mind, and Earl Parker are aboard the ill-fated rig – Tillman working undercover and Parker as a hostage. As tensions rise, Gideon launches a hazardous one-man rescue.

See larger image Cabal (Aurelio Zen 03) (Paperback) By (author) Michael Dibdin List Price: 7.99 GBP New From: 0.01 In Stock Used from: 0.01 In Stock

Cabal, by Michael Dibdin

When, one dark night in November, Prince Ludovico Ruspanti fell a hundred and fifty feet to his death in the chapel at St. Peter’s, Rome, there were a number of questions to be answered. Inspector Aurelio Zen finds that getting the answers isn’t easy, as witness after witness is mysteriously silenced – by violent death. To crack the secret of the Vatican, Zen must penetrate the most secret place of all: the Cabal.

See larger image Vendetta (Aurelio Zen 02) (Paperback) By (author) Michael Dibdin List Price: 7.99 GBP New From: 3.47 In Stock Used from: 0.01 In Stock

Vendetta, by Michael Dibdin

Inspector Zen has a problem: an impossible murder, recorded on the closed-circuit video of Oscar Burolo’s top-security Sardinian fortress. As Zen gets to work, he is once again plunged into a menacing and violent world where his own life is soon at risk.

See larger image Ratking (Aurelio Zen 01) (Paperback) By (author) Michael Dibdin List Price: 7.99 GBP New From: 0.59 In Stock Used from: 0.01 In Stock

Ratking, by Michael Dibdin

Police Commissioner Aurelio Zen had crossed swords with the establishment before – and lost. But from the depths of a mundane desk job in Rome he is unexpectedly transferred to Perugia to take over an explosive kidnapping case involving one of Italy’s most powerful families.

‘Tremendously exciting. This novel is both subtle and horrific.’ Ruth Rendell

See larger image All He Saw Was The Girl (Paperback) By (author) Peter Leonard List Price: 12.99 GBP New From: 5.46 In Stock Used from: 0.70 In Stock

All He Saw Was The Girl, by Peter Leonard

Rome: McCabe and Chip, two American exchange students, are about to become embroiled with a violent street gang, a beautiful Italian girl and a flawed kidnapping plan.

Detroit: Sharon Vanelli’s affair with Joey Palermo, a Mafia enforcer, is about to be discovered by her husband, Ray, a secret service agent.

Brilliantly plotted and shot through with wry humour, All He Saw Was the Girl takes place as these two narratives converge in the backstreets of Italy’s oldest city. A thrilling ride, it once again displays Peter Leonard’s genius for exploring the wrong turns that life can take.

See larger image Orchid Blue (Paperback) By (author) Eoin McNamee List Price: 12.99 GBP New From: 4.71 In Stock Used from: 0.01 In Stock

Orchid Blue, by Eoin McNamee

January 1961, and the beaten, stabbed and strangled body of a nineteen-year-old Pearl Gambol is discovered, after a dance the previous night at the Newry Orange Hall. Returning from London to investigate the case, Detective Eddie McCrink soon suspects that there may be people wielding influence over affairs, and that the accused, the enigmatic Robert McGladdery, may struggle to get a fair hearing. Presiding over the case is Lord Justice Curran, a man who nine years previously had found his own family in the news, following the murder of his nineteen-year-old daughter, Patricia.

In a spectacular return to the territory of his acclaimed, Booker-longlisted The Blue Tango, Eoin McNamee’s new novel explores and dissects this notorious murder case which led to the final hanging on Northern Irish soil.

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See larger image The Spot (Hardcover) By (author) David Means List Price: 16.99 GBP New From: 3.45 In Stock Used from: 4.28 In Stock

The Spot, by David Means

The Spot is an old blacksmith shed in which a gang of men tweeze apart the intricacies of a botched bank robbery.

The Spot is a place deep in Riverside Park, along the Hudson River, where two lovers walk with a keen sense that their adultery is about to come to an end.

The Spot is at the bottom of Niagara Falls, where the body of a young girl floats as if caught in the tangled currents of her own tragic story.

The Spot is a place in a young father’s mind where love, fear and responsibility merge in the struggle with his son’s potentially devastating diagnosis.

The Spot lies in the eardrum of a madman plagued by a noisy upstairs neighbour on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.

This highly anticipated collection by internationally acclaimed short story master David Means is exceptional not only in its language but also in the diversity of the narratives, as he searches out with delicate precision the intricate relationship between immortality and grace.

See larger image Sunset Park (Hardcover) By (author) Paul Auster List Price: 16.99 GBP New From: 5.30 In Stock Used from: 2.15 In Stock

Sunset Park, by Paul Auster

In the sprawling flatlands of Florida, 28-year-old Miles is photographing the last lingering traces of families who have abandoned their houses due to debt or foreclosure.

Miles is haunted by guilt for having inadvertently caused the death of his step-brother, a situation that caused him to flee his father and step-mother in New York seven years ago.

What keeps him in Florida is his relationship with a teenage high-school girl, Pilar, but when her family threatens to expose their relationship, Miles decides to protect Pilar by going back to Brooklyn, where he settles in a squat to prepare himself to face the inevitable confrontation with his father that he has been avoiding for years.

Pulsing with the energy of Auster’s previous novel, Invisible, Sunset Park is as mythic as it is contemporary, as in love with baseball as it is with literature. It is above all, a story about love and forgiveness – not only among men and women, but also between fathers and sons.

See larger image Pereira Maintains (Hardcover) By (author) Antonio Tabucchi List Price: 14.99 GBP New From: 11.71 In Stock Used from: 3.99 In Stock

Pereira Maintains, by Antonio Tabucchi

Dr. Peirera, an editor at a second-rate Lisbon newspaper, wants nothing to do with European politics. He’s happy to translate 19th-century French stories. His closest confidante is a photograph of his late wife. All this changes when he meets Francesco Monteiro Rossi, an oddly charismatic young man. Pereira gives Rossi work, and continues to pay him, even after discovering that he is using the money to recruit for the anti-Franco International Brigade. Pereira Maintains chronicles Pereira’s ascent to consciousness, culminating in a devastating and reckless act of rebellion.

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See larger image Never Let Me Go (Paperback) By (author) Kazuo Ishiguro List Price: 7.99 GBP New From: 0.34 In Stock Used from: 0.01 In Stock

Never Let Me Go, by Kazuo Ishiguro

In one of the most acclaimed and original novels of recent years, Kazuo Ishiguro imagines the lives of a group of students growing up in a darkly skewered version of contemporary England.

Narrated by Kathy, now 31, Never Let Me Go hauntingly dramatises her attempts to come to terms with her childhood at the seemingly idyllic Hailsham School, and with the fate that has always awaited her and her closest friends in the wider world. A story of love, friendship and memory, Never Let Me Go is charged throughout with a sense of the fragility of life.

Now a major movie starring Keira Knightley, Carey Mulligan and Andrew Garfield.

See larger image Catherine of Aragon: Henry's Spanish Queen (Hardcover) By (author) Giles Tremlett List Price: 20.00 GBP New From: 2.34 In Stock Used from: 0.85 In Stock

Catherine of Aragon, by Giles Tremlett

The image of Catherine of Aragon has always suffered in comparison to the vivacious eroticism of Anne Boleyn. But when Henry VIII married Catherine, she was an auburn-haired beauty in her 20s with a passion she had inherited from her parents, Isabella and Ferdinand, the joint-rulers of Spain who had driven the Moors from their country.

This daughter of conquistadors showed the same steel and sense of command when organising the defeat of the Scots at the Battle of Flodden and Henry was to learn, to his cost, that he had not met a tougher opponent on or off the battlefield when he tried to divorce her.

Henry introduced four remarkable women into the tumultuous flow of England’s history; Catherine of Aragon and her daughter ‘Bloody’ Queen Mary; and Anne Boleyn and her daughter, the Virgin Queen Elizabeth. ‘From this contest, between two mothers and two daughters, was born the religious passion and violence that inflamed England for centuries,’ says David Starkey.

Reformation, revolution and Tudor history would all have been vastly different without Catherine of Aragon.

Giles Tremlett’s new biography is the first in more than four decades to be dedicated entirely and uniquely to the tenacious woman whose marriage lasted twice as long as those of Henry’s five other wives put together. It draws on fresh material from Spain to trace the dramatic events of her life through Catherine of Aragon’s own eyes.

See larger image Why Are You So Fat?: The TalkSPORT Book of Cricket's Best Ever Sledges (Hardcover) By (author) talkSPORT, Gershon Portnoi List Price: 9.99 GBP New From: 1.20 In Stock Used from: 0.01 In Stock

Why Are You So Fat?, by Gerson Portnoi

When hefty Zimbabwean chicken farmer Eddo Brandes kept on playing and missing to an increasingly frustrated Glenn McGrath, the Australian had had enough and decided a bit of verbals were called for: ‘Oi, Brandes, why the hell are you so fat?’ Quick as a flash, the answer came back: ‘Because every time I shag your missus, she gives me a biscuit.’

Few games have such a rich history of sledging as cricket, with the Australians famed masters of the art. This collection, featuring contributions from talkSPORT’s own Darren Gough and Ronnie Irani as well as many other cricket stars, brings together the best examples from around the world. To be effective, sometimes the sledge can be funny, as when Andrew Flintoff urged Tino Best, who was struggling to lay a bat on the ball, to ‘mind the windows’ at Lord’s. Best immediately charged down the pitch to attack Ashley Giles’ next ball and was stumped. But sometimes an element of real menace can do the trick, as when Malcolm Marshall commented to a struggling David Boon: ‘Now are you going to get out or am I going to have to bowl round the wicket and kill you?’

See larger image Working the Room: Essays (Hardcover) By (author) Geoff Dyer List Price: 20.00 GBP New From: 7.20 In Stock Used from: 4.47 In Stock

Working the Room, by Geoff Dyer

Alive with insight, delight and Dyer’s characteristic irreverence, this book offers a guide around the cultural maze, mapping a route through the worlds of literature, art, photography, music. Across ten years’ worth of essays, Working the Room spans the photography of Martin Parr and the paintings of Turner, the writing of Scott Fitzgerald and the criticism of Susan Sontag, and includes extensive personal pieces – ‘On Being an Only Child’, ‘Sacked’ and ‘Reader’s Block’ among many others. Dyer’s breadth of vision and generosity of spirit combine to form a manual for ways of being in – and seeing – the world today.

See larger image Enough is Enough: How to Build a New Republic (Paperback) By (author) Fintan O'Toole List Price: 12.99 GBP New From: 3.80 In Stock Used from: 0.01 In Stock

Enough is Enough, by Fintan O’Toole

The Republic of Ireland, which declared itself in 1949, allowed the Catholic Church to dominate its civil society and education system. Investment by American and European companies, and a welcoming tax regime, created the ‘Celtic Tiger’ of the 1990s. That brief burst of good fortune was destroyed by a corrupt political class which encouraged a wild property boom, leaving the country almost bankrupt.

What Ireland needs now is a programme of real change. It needs to become a fully modern republic in fact as well as name. This disastrous economic collapse also allows us to think through the kind of multiculturalism that Ireland needs, and to build institutions that can accommodate the sudden influx of migrants who have come to Ireland in the past 15 years. The State should take over the entire education system, for which it pays already, and make it fit for the 21st century. The political system is dysfunctional and is one of the main causes of the debacle we have just experienced. Ireland needs constitutional reform.

Politicians have been let get away with murder, and there is a fatalistic sense that nothing can change. The country needs to encourage participation in, and oversight and knowledge of politics, to make people feel that they have a right to challenge the old party machines and to make a difference. It is their country, after all.

See larger image Answer Me This (Paperback) By (author) Helen Zaltzman, Olly Mann List Price: 9.99 GBP New From: 1.22 In Stock Used from: 0.01 In Stock

Answer Me This, by Helen Zaltzman & Olly Mann

Answer Me This! is a weekly interactive comedy podcast, presented by Helen Zaltzman and Olly Mann. In each show Helen and Olly answer listener-submitted questions, as diverse and fantastical as ‘Why does golf bring out the worst in people?’, ‘Who invented the scotch egg?’ and ‘Why do all girls hate me?’

In the Answer Me This! Question Compendium, Helen and Olly bring their trademark irreverence to the page for the first time in an inventive and witty spin on the classic Q & A format.

Since its debut in January 2007, Answer Me This! has been chosen as an iTunes Podcast of the Year in 2008, and in 2009 became the first independently produced podcast to be nominated for a Sony Radio Academy Award. With listeners all over the world, and more than 1.5 million downloads per year, the show is now one of the most popular comedy podcasts in Britain.

See larger image Chasing the Sun: The Epic Story of the Star That Gives Us Life (Hardcover) By (author) Richard Cohen List Price: 30.00 GBP New From: 2.50 In Stock Used from: 0.94 In Stock

Chasing the Sun, by Richard Cohen

The Sun is so powerful, so much bigger than us, that it is a terrifying subject. Yet though we depend on it, we take it for granted. Amazingly the first book of its kind, Chasing the Sun is a cultural and scientific history of our relationship with the star that gives us life.

Richard Cohen, applying the same mix of wide-ranging reference and intimate detail that won outstanding reviews for By the Sword, travels from the ancient Greek astronomers to modern-day solar scientists, from Stonehenge to Antarctica (site of the solar eclipse of 2003, when penguins were said to sing), Mexico’s Aztecs to the Norwegian city of Tromso, where for two months of the year there is no Sun at all. He introduces us to the crucial ‘sunspot cycle’ in modern economics, the religious dances of Indian tribesmen, the histories of sundials and calendars, the plight of migrating birds, the latest theories of global warming, and Galileo recording his discoveries in code, for fear of persecution.

And throughout, there is the rich Sun literature – from the writings of Homer through Dante and Nietzsche to Keats, Shelley and beyond. Blindingly impressive and hugely readable, this is a tour de force of narrative non-fiction.

See larger image The Thick of It: The Missing DoSAC Files (Paperback) By (author) Armando Iannucci, Jesse Armstrong, Simon Blackwell, Ian Martin, Tony Roche List Price: 12.99 GBP New From: 1.47 In Stock Used from: 0.01 In Stock

The Thick Of It: The Missing DoSAC Files, by Armando Iannucci et al

In case of loss, please return to Malcolm Tucker pretty fucking sharpish.

During the course of his reign, Malcolm Tucker – bard of spin, Communications Director for Number 10 and tough shoot-first-then-shoot-again-later professional bastard – has collected incriminating, humiliating and potentially career-destroying papers from the DoSAC team and their opposition. These include Ollie Reeder’s piss-poor smear file on Peter Mannion, Nicola Murray’s gargantuanly fanciful policy ideas, Terri Coverley’s pant-wettingly pathetic Waitrose appraisal form and Malcolm’s utterly insightful dos and don’ts for politicians appearing on TV.

Should it all go manboobs up at the election, this dossier of private failures, career cul-de-sacs and inept social disfunction is his insurance policy.

So when it goes missing, Malcolm is angry. Apo-fucking-pleptically angry.

Bulging with never seen before personnel files, policy drafts, letters, emails, transcripts of phone calls and mood boards, The Missing DoSAC Files is a hilarious, profane and all-too-accurate glimpse into public life from the writers of the award-winning The Thick of It and In the Loop.

See larger image Unbearable Lightness: A Story of Loss and Gain (Hardcover) By (author) Portia de Rossi List Price: 17.99 GBP New From: 3.98 In Stock Used from: 3.55 In Stock

Unbearable Lightness, by Portia De Rossi

“I didn’t decide to become anorexic. It snuck up on me disguised as a healthy diet, a professional attitude. Although there was a certain glamour to anorexics, I didn’t want to be one. I just wanted to excel in dieting. And weighing in at 80 pounds on 300 calories a day, I was the best little dieter there ever was.”

In scalding prose, Portia de Rossi reveals the pain and illness that haunted her for decades. She alternately starved herself and binged, putting her life in danger and lying to herself and everyone around her about the depth of her illness. From her lowest point, Portia began the painful climb back to health and happiness, ultimately falling head over heels in love with Ellen DeGeneres. In this remarkable and landmark book, she tells a story that inspires hope and nourishes the spirit.

See larger image Hung Together: The 2010 Election and the Coalition Government (Hardcover) By (author) Adam Boulton, Joey Jones List Price: 18.99 GBP New From: 0.01 In Stock Used from: 0.01 In Stock Release date November 8, 2010.

Hung Together, by Adam Boulton and Joey Jones

Hung Together tells the story of a year that made political history as told by the protagonists and as witnessed by two journalists with unrivalled access to events. Adam Boulton and Joey Jones were at the heart of the action of the past extraordinary months and are able to draw on detailed interviews with all the key players to build up the most complete and intimate picture of how things unfolded.

Hung Together begins by looking at the election campaign and the pivotal events of the weeks running up to polling day – including the televised Leaders Debates (one of which Boulton chaired). The book then follows the campaign trail – Joey Jones, the only senior journalist permitted to follow David Cameron day in, day out reveals a glimpse of the stresses the future PM found himself under during his gruelling weeks on the road – and the coalition negotiations; a hothouse of discussion and give and take, the consequences of which are only just sinking in. Westminster has rarely witnessed such drama and yet much of what went on has not so far been told.

Whether on the stump, while broadcasting live, or during tense discussions deep in the bowels ofWhitehall, the authors witnessed every event themselves or know someone who did. And in Hung Together they unveil a complete picture of what really went on, a story that is at present shrouded in rumour and secrecy.

See larger image The World According to Vice (Hardcover) By (author) Vice List Price: 20.00 GBP New From: 6.00 In Stock Used from: 7.00 In Stock

The World According to Vice, by Vice Magazine

Since it was founded in Montreal in 1994, Vice magazine has brought its uniquely irreverent and informative brand of journalism to a worldwide audience with offices all over the world and the highly successful Vice Land and VBS.TV websites. This book is a stake in the ground, a marker of where Vice has been, where it is and where it might be going, welcoming back its fans and a whole new slew of readers. What started as a filthy newsprint punk zine has blossomed into a multimedia empire with the highest quality dispatches from the cultural frontline: irreverent commentary, photo-journalism, interviews, commissioned literature, blogs and photography. Forget what you thought you knew about it and immerse yourself in the world of Vice. It might not be easy to swallow and it might not be pretty, but it’s never less than real, and always essential.

See larger image The Wild Zone (Paperback) By (author) Joy Fielding List Price: 7.99 GBP New From: 1.78 In Stock Used from: 1.03 In Stock

The Wild Zone, by Joy Fielding

This is how it starts. With a joke.

Two brothers, Will and Jeff, and their friend, Tom, are out one night at their favourite bar when they decide to make a bet on who can be the first to seduce a mysterious young woman drinking by herself. Pretty, dark-haired Suzy has an innocent, girlnext-door appeal. ‘Just waiting for Prince Charming to hit on her,’ jokes Jeff. Little do they know the secrets she hides from the outside world, particularly those having to do with the daily horror she experiences under the watchful eye of her abusive husband. Little do they know she wants him killed. Little do they know another bet is on: who’s man enough to slay the villain and rescue the damsel in distress?

Another challenge is born, only this one proves to be lethal . . .

See larger image Cold Heart (Paperback) By (author) Lynda La Plante List Price: 7.99 GBP New From: 0.01 In Stock Used from: 0.01 In Stock

Cold Heart, by Lynda La Plante

Movie mogul Harry Nathan’s lonely death in a Beverley Hills swimming pool is the beginning of a trail of lust and conspiracy leading to the darkest corners of the international art world.

Private investigator Lorraine Page faces her toughest fight ever as she takes on the case for fading starlet Cindy Nathan, Harry’s third wife. Lorraine believes the grieving widow’s story. Unlike her ex-colleagues in the police department who have already charged Cindy with murder…

See larger image Orchid Blue (Paperback) By (author) Eoin McNamee List Price: 12.99 GBP New From: 4.71 In Stock Used from: 0.01 In Stock

Orchid Blue, by Eoin McNamee

January 1961, and the beaten, stabbed and strangled body of a nineteen-year-old Pearl Gambol is discovered, after a dance the previous night at the Newry Orange Hall. Returning from London to investigate the case, Detective Eddie McCrink soon suspects that there may be people wielding influence over affairs, and that the accused, the enigmatic Robert McGladdery, may struggle to get a fair hearing. Presiding over the case is Lord Justice Curran, a man who nine years previously had found his own family in the news, following the murder of his nineteen-year-old daughter, Patricia.

In a spectacular return to the territory of his acclaimed, Booker-longlisted The Blue Tango, Eoin McNamee’s new novel explores and dissects this notorious murder case which led to the final hanging on Northern Irish soil.

See larger image The Maul and the Pear Tree: The Ratcliffe Highway Murders 1811 (Paperback) By (author) Baroness P. D. James List Price: 7.99 GBP New From: 1.51 In Stock Used from: 0.01 In Stock

The Maul and the Pear Tree, by P. D. James and T. A. Critchley

In 1811 John Williams was buried with a stake in his heart. Was he the notorious East End killer or his eighth victim in the bizarre and shocking Ratcliffe Highway Murders? In this vivid and gripping reconstruction P. D. James and T. A. Critchley draw on public records, newspaper clippings and hitherto unpublished sources, expertly sifting the evidence to shed new light on this infamous Wapping mystery.

‘James and Critchley evoke the horror of a dark, wintry London where ill-prepared authorities struggle to bring a major murder case to its conclusion.’ Crime Times

‘A model demonstration of how to assess fragmentary and often tantalising evidence … It makes an enthralling story.’ New York Times

See larger image Foster (Paperback) By (author) Claire Keegan List Price: 6.99 GBP New From: 0.98 In Stock Used from: 0.13 In Stock

Foster, by Claire Keegan

A small girl is sent to live with foster parents on a farm in rural Ireland, without knowing when she will return home. In the strangers’ house, she finds a warmth and affection she has not known before and slowly begins to blossom in their care. And then a secret is revealed and suddenly, she realizes how fragile her idyll is.

Winner of the Davy Byrnes Memorial Prize, Foster is now published in a revised and expanded version. Beautiful, sad and eerie, it is a story of astonishing emotional depth, showcasing Claire Keegan’s great accomplishment and talent.

See larger image Lights Out in Wonderland (Paperback) By (author) DBC Pierre List Price: 12.99 GBP New From: 0.69 In Stock Used from: 0.01 In Stock

Lights Out in Wonderland, by DBC Pierre

Gabriel Brockwell, aesthete, poet, philosopher, disaffected twenty-something decadent, is thinking terminal. His philosophical enquiries, the abstractions he indulges, and how these relate to a life lived, all point in the same direction. His destination is Wonderland. The nature and style of the journey is all that’s to be decided.

Taking in London, Tokyo, Berlin and the Galapagos Islands, Lights Out In Wonderland documents Gabriel Brockwell’s remarkable global odyssey. Committed to the pursuit of pleasure and in search of the Bacchanal to obliterate all previous parties, Gabriel’s adventure takes in a spell in rehab, a near-death experience with fugu ovaries, a sexual encounter with an octopus, and finally an orgiastic feast in the bowels of Berlin’s majestic Tempelhof Airport. Along the way we see a character disintegrate and re-shape before our eyes.

Lights Out In Wonderland carries you through its many corridors of delight and horror on the back of Gabriel’s voice, which is at once skeptical, idealistic, broken and optimistic. An allegorical banquet and a sly commentary on these End Times and the march towards insensate banality, DBC Pierre’s third novel completes a loose trilogy of fictions, each of which stands alone as a joyful expression of the human spirit.

• DBC Pierre on Lights Out in Wonderland

See larger image The Museum of Innocence (Paperback) By (author) Orhan Pamuk List Price: 7.99 GBP New From: 0.69 In Stock Used from: 0.01 In Stock

The Museum of Innocence, by Orhan Pamuk

‘It was the happiest moment of my life, though I didn’t know it.’

And so begins the new novel from the universally acclaimed author of Snow and My Name is Red , his first since winning the Nobel Prize.

It is a perfect Spring in 1975, Istanbul. Kemal, heir to one of the town’s wealthiest families, is about to become engaged to Sibel, from another aristocratic family, when he encounters Füsun, a beautiful shopgirl, and a distant relation.

As they break the taboo of virginity, a rift opens between Kemal and his lovingly described world of the westernized families of Istanbul with their opulent parties and clubs, society gossip, dining-room rituals, picnics, their mansions on the Bosphorus infused with the melancholy of decay.

For nine years Kemal will find excuses to visit the other Istanbul, a house in the impoverished backstreets that Füsun shares with her parents, enjoying the consolations of middle-class life at a dinner table in front of the television. His love for his distant relative will take him to the seedy film circles of Istanbul, cheap bars, sad hotels, a society of small men with big dreams and bitter failures.

It will make Kemal a compulsive collector of objects that chronicle his love story and his obsessive heart’s reactions: his anger and impatience, his remorse and humiliation, his miscalculated hopes of recovery, and his daydreams that transform his Istanbul into a city of signs and spectres of his beloved with whom he can only exchange meaning-laden glances, stolen kisses in cars, movie houses and park shadows.

All that will remain to him, certainly and eternally, is the museum he creates, a map of a society’s rituals and mores, and of one man’s broken heart.

A stirring exploration of the nature of romantic attachment, and of the mysterious allure of collecting, The Museum of Innocence plumbs the depths of an Istanbul half western and half traditional – its rituals, its morality, its vast cultural history. This is Orhan Pamuk’s greatest achievement.

See larger image A Place of Secrets (Paperback) By (author) Rachel Hore List Price: 6.99 GBP New From: 0.01 In Stock Used from: 0.01 In Stock

A Place of Secrets, by Rachel Hore

The night before it all begins, Jude has the dream again …Can dreams be passed down through families? As a child Jude suffered a recurrent nightmare: running through a dark forest, crying for her mother. Now her six-year-old niece, Summer, is having the same dream, and Jude is frightened for her. A successful auctioneer, Jude is struggling to come to terms with the death of her husband. When she’s asked to value a collection of scientific instruments and manuscripts belonging to Anthony Wickham, a lonely 18th century astronomer, she leaps at the chance to escape London for the untamed beauty of Norfolk, where she grew up. As Jude untangles Wickham’s tragic story, she discovers threatening links to the present. What have Summer’s nightmares to do with Starbrough folly, the eerie crumbling tower in the forest from which Wickham and his adopted daughter Esther once viewed the night sky? With the help of Euan, a local naturalist, Jude searches for answers in the wild, haunting splendour of the Norfolk woods. Dare she leave behind the sadness in her own life, and learn to love again?

• Rachel Hore introduces her bestselling novel

See larger image The Lost Kings (Hardcover) By (author) Bruno Hare List Price: 16.99 GBP New From: 0.15 In Stock Used from: 0.12 In Stock

The Lost Kings, by Bruno Hare

London, 1893. Mild-mannered watchmaker Cyril King harbours a secret wish to be an explorer. When he acquires a mysterious timepiece from a notorious criminal, Cyril gets his heart’s desire, the clues he finds propelling him halfway around the world on the trail of a fabulous treasure. On the borders of India and Afghanistan, Cyril meets a real-life adventurer who seems to be everything he aspires to. But high in the Karakoram mountains there are lessons to be learned, as nothing is quite what Cyril expects: neither the treasure, nor his companion, nor the life of discovery and excitement which he imagined — and certainly not the deadly peril into which he stumbles with all the insouciance of the innocent abroad. Meanwhile, intercut with Cyril’s account of his 1893 adventures are the letters of famous explorer Sir Paul Linley-Small, written to Cyril from various points of the compass fifteen years later, as Small pursues a rare, perhaps mythical, creature. And as Small’s tale grows ever more fantastic, the way in which the two narratives link with one another reflects on the nature of truth and the lives which we envisage for ourselves.

• Author Bruno Hare introduces his first action-packed novel

See larger image The Clinton Tapes: Wrestling History in the White House (Paperback) By (author) Taylor Branch List Price: 9.99 GBP New From: 0.01 In Stock Used from: 0.01 In Stock

The Clinton Tapes, by Tayler Branch

The Clinton Tapes was a secret project, initiated by Clinton, to preserve for future historians an unfiltered record of presidential experience. During his eight years in office, Clinton met with Taylor Branch in the White House, usually late at night, to answer questions and tell stories. Branch recorded seventy-nine of their dialogues to compile a trove of raw information about a presidency as it happened. Branch then recorded his own detailed recollections immediately after each session, covering not only the subjects discussed but also the look and feel of each evening with the president. Their discussions were unpredictable, intense, and candid. At any given moment the president could leap from memories to a current crisis or problems with his daughter’s homework. The resultant text captures Clinton from many angles. Branch’s firsthand narrative is confessional, unsparing, and personal. What should an objective prompter say when the President of the United States seeks advice, argues facts, or lodges complaints against the press? The relationship that emerges from these interviews is dynamic, both affectionate and charged, with flashes of anger and humor. President Clinton drives the history, but this story is also about two friends.

See larger image The Big Questions: Tackling the Problems of Philosophy with Ideas from Mathematics, Economics and Physics (Paperback) By (author) Steven E. Landsburg List Price: 7.99 GBP New From: 0.01 In Stock Used from: 2.69 In Stock

The Big Questions, by Steven E. Landsburg

What’s wrong with stealing? What’s the best way to blood test a pot-bellied pig? Should we tolerate intolerance? In the wake of his enormously popular books, The Armchair Economist and More Sex is Safer Sex, Steven Landsburg uses concepts from maths, economics and physics to address the big questions in philosophy: Where does knowledge come from? What’s the difference between right and wrong? Do our beliefs matter? Is it possible to know everything? Provocative, utterly entertaining and always surprising, The Big Questions challenges readers to re-evaluate their most fundamental beliefs and reveals the relationship between the loftiest philosophical quests and our everyday lives.

See larger image Callsign Hades (Hardcover) By (author) Patrick Bury List Price: 16.99 GBP New From: 2.99 In Stock Used from: 0.86 In Stock

Callsign Hades, by Patrick Bury

In summer 2006 Helmand Province erupted into violence as NATO forces struggled to crush Taliban strongholds. For six weeks the Royal Irish Regiment and the Paras defended Sangin in the face of ever-mounting attacks. At this point young officer Patrick Bury was learning the trade of the infantry in the Brecon Beacons. Paddy had always wanted to be a soldier – a desire fraught with the contradictions of a complex history overridden by a ‘warrior calling’. When he arrived in Afghanistan with 1st Royal Irish, he was surrounded by men oozing bloody combat experience. This was not Sandhurst. It was extreme violence and killing. Hades Four One was his callsign and the infantry mantra rang in his ears: ‘To close and kill the enemy, in all weather conditions, in all terrain, by day or night.’ Over six months, Paddy and his company dealt with over a hundred IEDs, of which 60 exploded on them, killing his comrades in the most vicious of ways and fuelling a sense of ever-growing dissatisfaction in the young captain. This powerful and thoughful first-hand account about the ‘eternal truths of military life’ places the reader in Paddy’s boots, sharing every thought, ache, smell and taste of life on the frontline in Afghanistan. He describes modern warfare in a way that creates an understanding of the myriad complexities soldiers are faced with, the conditions in which they operate and the moral and emotional challenges they endure.

See larger image How to See Your Angels: A Guide to Attracting Heavenly Beings That Heal, Help and Inspire (Paperback) By (author) Theresa Cheung List Price: 10.99 GBP New From: 3.19 In Stock Used from: 8.27 In Stock

How to See Your Angels, by Theresa Cheung

The lives of an increasing number of people are being touched by angels and/or belief in angels, but what exactly are angels, these ‘beings of light’ that are comforting, healing and inspiring people all over the world? Why are they making themselves known now as never before? How exactly are they revealing themselves? How do you see or hear your angel or even know which angel to call on? In short, how can you recognise the presence of angels in your life, today? In this ultimate guide, angel expert Theresa Cheung provides answers to all these questions and more. Along with a collection of hundreds of specific angels from traditions and belief systems all over the world, the book brings everything bang up to date with advice on how to recognise the presence of angels in everyday life and how to understand angelic messages to guide your life choices. Alongside information on guardian angels, archangels, spirits and departed loved ones, readers will also learn about the nature and purpose of angels, what they can and can’t do and how to call upon them in times of need. From those new to the angel phenomenon to those with a sound belief in and experience of angels, anyone seeking spiritual nourishment will treasure this one-stop reference guide to invoking the power, wonder and magic of angels into their life, today and everyday.

See larger image The German Genius: Europe's Third Renaissance, the Second Scientific Revolution and the Twentieth Century (Hardcover) By (author) Peter Watson List Price: 30.00 GBP New From: 9.25 In Stock Used from: 6.05 In Stock

The German Genius, by Peter Watson

From the end of the Baroque age and the death of Bach in 1750 to the rise of Hitler in 1933, Germany was transformed from a poor relation among western nations into a dominant intellectual and cultural force more influential than France, Britain, Italy, Holland, and the United States. In the early decades of the 20th century, German artists, writers, philosophers, scientists, and engineers were leading their freshly-unified country to new and undreamed of heights, and by 1933, they had won more Nobel prizes than anyone else and more than the British and Americans combined. But this genius was cut down in its prime with the rise and subsequent fall of Adolf Hitler and his fascist Third Reich-a legacy of evil that has overshadowed the nation’s contributions ever since. Yet how did the Germans achieve their pre-eminence beginning in the mid-18th century? In this fascinating cultural history, Peter Watson goes back through time to explore the origins of the German genius, how it flourished and shaped our lives, and, most importantly, to reveal how it continues to shape our world. As he convincingly demonstarates, while we may hold other European cultures in higher esteem, it was German thinking-from Bach to Nietzsche to Freud-that actually shaped modern America and Britain in ways that resonate today.

See larger image My Father's Fortune: A Life (Hardcover) By (author) Michael Frayn List Price: 16.99 GBP New From: 5.68 In Stock Used from: 2.17 In Stock

My Father’s Fortune, by Michael Frayn

‘An unknown place.’ This was what Michael Frayn’s children called the shadowy landscape of the past from which their family had emerged. In this book he sets out to rediscover that lost land before all trace of it finally disappears beyond recall. As he tries to see it through the eyes of its inhabitants – his parents and some of the others who shaped his life – he comes to realise how little he himself ever knew or understood about them.

This is above all the story of his father, the quick-witted boy from a poor and struggling family, who overcame so many disadvantages and shouldered so many burdens to make a go of his life; who found happiness, had it snatched away from him in a single instant, and in the end, after many difficulties, perhaps found it again.

Father and son were in some odd ways ridiculously alike, in others ridiculously different; and the journey back down the corridors of time is sometimes comic, sometimes painful, as Michael Frayn comes to see how much he has inherited from his father – and makes one or two surprising discoveries about both of them along the way.

See larger image Travels with a Typewriter: A Reporter at Large (Hardcover) By (author) Michael Frayn List Price: 15.99 GBP New From: 2.72 In Stock Used from: 0.01 In Stock

Travels with a Typewriter, by Michael Frayn

A hugely entertaining collection of Michael Frayn’s travel writing from the sixties and seventies, including pieces on Germany, Cuba, Israel, Japan and Russia.

In mid-career, Frayn took up his old trade of journalism, and wrote a series of occasional articles for the Observer about some of the places in the world that interested him. He wanted to describe ‘not the extraordinary but the ordinary, the typical, the everyday’, and his accounts became the starting point for some of the novels and plays he wrote later. From a kibbutz in Israel to summer rains in Japan, bicycles in Cambridge to Notting Hill at the end of the 1950s, they are glimpses of a world which sometimes seems tantalisingly familar, sometimes vanished forever.

See larger image Sean Connery: The measure of a man (Hardcover) By (author) Christopher Bray List Price: 20.00 GBP New From: 3.45 In Stock Used from: 2.80 In Stock

Sean Connery, by Christopher Bray

For almost fifty years, men around the world have been measuring themselves against our age’s definition of masculinity: Sean Connery. An unschooled no-hoper from the tenements of Edinburgh, Connery has taught generations of admirers how to present themselves to the world.

His portrayal of secret agent James Bond invigorated Britain and its cinema, allowing a cash-strapped, morale-sapped country in decline to fancy itself still a player on the world stage. But while Bond would make Connery the first actor to command a million dollar-plus fee, the man himself was forever pouring scorn on the fantasies audiences found it increasingly hard to separate him from.

Undaunted, Connery quit the Bond beat, going on to prove himself one of cinema’s most relaxed and assured stars and a guaranteed box-office draw. Moulding and remoulding his image to fit the contours of the age, Connery has gone from Sadeian sixties sex symbol to the sagacious magus figure to which today’s young stars are forever turning.

But what did it do to a humble Scots lad to become a figure of universal desire? How did a former coffin-polisher-cum-milkman handle being ‘the man every man wants to be and every woman wants between her sheets’? How can such worship not play havoc with one’s soul – especially a soul as painfully unprepared for the pressures of stardom as Connery’s?

Spirited, argumentative and sardonically celebratory, Christopher Bray’s Sean Connery is both a biography of a star and an investigation of what can happen to a man when the images he creates take over his life. It’s the story of an actor learning his craft on the job, of a man pressing his stardom into the service of his burgeoning political awareness. And it’s an analysis of what it means to be star-struck – a critical tribute to a secular icon who has shaped so many dreams.

See larger image The Bedwetter: Stories of Courage, Redemption, and Pee (Hardcover) By (author) Sarah Silverman List Price: 12.99 GBP New From: 1.36 In Stock Used from: 0.40 In Stock

The Bedwetter, by Sarah Silverman

Sarah Silverman’s father taught her to curse – at the age of three. She was a chronic bedwetter – until she was old enough to drive. She lost her virginity at age 19 – but didn’t really know it.

These are just a few of the outrageous true tales that Silverman shares in her alternately hilarious and moving collection of autobiographical essays. With her signature taboo-breaking humour, Silverman writes on everything from her epic struggle with hairy arms (‘there wasn’t enough wax in the world’) to the death of her infant brother (‘it was Nana’s fault’) and always leaves the reader with a smile. Mixed in among the essays are scores of embarrassing photos, mortifying childhood diary entries, and truly humiliating e-mails to and from her comedian friends.

See larger image William Golding: The Man who Wrote Lord of the Flies (Paperback) By (author) John Carey List Price: 10.99 GBP New From: 1.63 In Stock Used from: 1.42 In Stock

William Golding, by John Carey

The first biography of Nobel Prize-winning novelist William Golding by celebrated writer and critic, John Carey.

In 1953, William Golding was a provincial schoolteacher, writing books in his breaks, lunch hours and holidays. His work had been rejected by every publisher he sent it to – until an editor at Faber pulled his manuscript off the rejection pile. This was to become Lord of the Flies, a book that would sell in its millions and bring Golding worldwide recognition.

Drawing almost entirely on materials that have never before been made public, John Carey sheds new light on Golding. Through hundreds of letters, unpublished works and Golding’s intimate journals, Carey draws a revelatory and definitive portrait of an extraordinary man. In an absorbing and compelling narrative, he reveals a many-sided figure: a war-hero, a reclusive depressive who considered himself a ‘monster’, a family man, a victim of fears and phobias who battled against alcoholism, and a writer who trusted the imagination above all things.

See larger image Vendetta (Zen) (Paperback) By (author) Michael Dibdin List Price: 6.99 GBP New From: 37.97 In Stock Used from: 0.01 In Stock

Vendetta, by Michael Dibdin

Inspector Zen has a problem: an impossible murder, recorded on the closed-circuit video of Oscar Burolo’s top-security Sardinian fortress. As Zen gets to work, he is once again plunged into a menacing and violent world where his own life is soon at risk.

‘This is to the ordinary crime pot-boiler as a Ferrari to a Mini. He writes and plots like a dream.’ The Scotsman

See larger image Cabal (Zen) (Paperback) By (author) Michael Dibdin List Price: 6.99 GBP New From: 2.07 In Stock Used from: 0.01 In Stock

Ratking, by Michael Dibdin

Police Commissioner Aurelio Zen had crossed swords with the establishment before – and lost. But from the depths of a mundane desk job in Rome he is unexpectedly transferred to Perugia to take over an explosive kidnapping case involving one of Italy’s most powerful families.

‘Tremendously exciting. This novel is both subtle and horrific.’ Ruth Rendell

See larger image Ratking (Zen) (Paperback) By (author) Michael Dibdin List Price: 6.99 GBP Used from: 0.01 In Stock

Cabal, by Michael Dibdin

When, one dark night in November, Prince Ludovico Ruspanti fell a hundred and fifty feet to his death in the chapel at St. Peter’s, Rome, there were a number of questions to be answered. Inspector Aurelio Zen finds that getting the answers isn’t easy, as witness after witness is mysteriously silenced – by violent death. To crack the secret of the Vatican, Zen must penetrate the most secret place of all: the Cabal.

See larger image Blind Fury (Paperback) By (author) Lynda La Plante List Price: 12.99 GBP New From: 0.01 In Stock Used from: 0.01 In Stock Release date August 2, 2010.

Blind Fury, by Lynda La Plante

A motorway service station on the M1: dimly lit, run down, poorly supervised, flickering lights, dark corners; a favourite stopover for long-distance lorry drivers on their way up north from London. Behind it, a body is found in a ditch, that of a girl barely out of her teens. She appears to have no family, no friends, no connections anywhere. Other girls have gone missing in the vicinity and no one has stepped forward to claim them. Anna Travis is assigned to the case. Her blood runs cold when she receives a letter from a lifer — someone she was responsible for arresting in the past — who writes to her from prison, asking her to visit him urgently. For he claims he knows who the killer is…

See larger image The Reluctant Hero (Paperback) By (author) Michael Dobbs List Price: 12.99 GBP New From: 0.01 In Stock Used from: 0.01 In Stock

The Reluctant Hero, by Michael Dobbs

When Harry Jones discovers that former friend Zac Kravitz’s life is in danger, a debt of honour sends him on a perilous rescue mission to Kargistan, a mountainous and landlocked former Soviet republic bordering Russia, China and Afghanistan. Muscling his way onto a delegation of MPs who happen to be paying the state a visit, Harry finds an unlikely ally in the stubbornly independent Martha and together they devise a plan to break Zac out of the grim prison Bodima. But when the attempt backfires and he finds himself stuck in prison in Zac’s place, little by little Harry realises that all is not as it seemed and that he has been lured into a web of international conspiracy.

See larger image Cold Shoulder (Paperback) By (author) Lynda La Plante List Price: 7.99 GBP New From: 0.33 In Stock Used from: 0.01 In Stock

Cold Shoulder, by Lynda La Plante

Lieutenant Lorraine Page had everything — a devoted husband, two beautiful daughters and an impressive career with the Homicide Squad. It’s impossible to believe that she could be thrown out of the police force and end up on Skid Row. Lorraine’s ex-colleagues soon forget her, as the hunt for a nightmare serial killer spirals into an all-out search for a missing witness: a victim who escaped. Lorraine Page is that witness. Against her will she is drawn into the investigation, and forced to face her past and her overwhelming guilt…

See larger image Cold Kiss (Paperback) By (author) John Rector List Price: 7.99 GBP New From: 0.01 In Stock Used from: 0.01 In Stock

Cold Kiss, by John Rector

Nate and Sara are broke — and on the run from the past. When a shady hitchhiker offers them cold hard cash for a lift, they can’t afford to say no. But very soon they’ll be wishing they had. Because picking him up is about to become the biggest mistake they ever made — and the price they’ll have to pay will be greater than they could ever have imagined…

See larger image Rough Country (Virgil Flowers 3) (Paperback) By (author) John Sandford List Price: 6.99 GBP New From: 1.70 In Stock Used from: 0.01 In Stock

Rough Country, by John Sandford

Virgil Flowers heads north to solve a puzzling murder — and finds that the country is very rough indeed. While competing in a fishing tournament in a remote area of northern Minnesota, Flowers gets a call asking him to investigate a murder at a nearby resort, where a woman has been shot while kayaking. The resort is for women only: a place to relax, get fit, recover from plastic surgery and commune with nature. And the more Flowers digs, the more he discovers it to be a hotbed of jealousy, blackmail, greed, anger and fear. Then he discovers that this is not the first murder, that there was a second, seemingly unrelated killing the year before. And that there’s about to be a third, definitely related one, any time now. And as for the fourth …well, Virgil had better hope he can catch the killer before that happens. Because it could be his own.

See larger image A Plague of Heretics (A Crowner John Mystery) (Paperback) By (author) Bernard Knight List Price: 6.99 GBP New From: 1.10 In Stock Used from: 0.01 In Stock

A Plague of Heretics, by Bernard Knight

With the city of Exeter ravaged by an outbreak of the ‘yellow plague’, Sir John de Wolfe, the county coroner, must divide his time between visiting his sick brother, William, who has been struck down by the disease, and dealing with a series of brutal murders which appears to be linked to a revival of heresy in the city. When some of the cathedral canons begin a crusade against this danger to the Church, Sir John finds himself accused of being too sympathetic to the heretics, bringing him into conflict with the ecclesiastic authorities. As the situation worsens, the coroner must seek sanctuary in order to save his skin. Can he survive long enough to unmask the real killer?

See larger image We Die Alone (Paperback) By (author) David Howarth List Price: 8.99 GBP New From: 2.26 In Stock Used from: 2.15 In Stock

We Die Alone, by David Howarth

In March 1943 a team of expatriate Norwegian commandos sailed from the Shetland Islands – the most northerly part of Britain – for Nazi-occupied Norway.Their mission was to organise and support the Norwegian resistance. They were betrayed and only one man survived the ambush by the Nazis. Crippled by frostbite and snow-blind, hunted by the Nazis, Jan Baalstrud managed to find a tiny arctic village. There – delirious, near death – he found villagers willing to risk their own lives to save him. David Howarth narrates his incredible escape in this gripping tale of courage and the resilience of the human spirit.

• Read Andy McNab’s introduction to We Die Alone

See larger image Electric Eden: Unearthing Britain's Visionary Music (Paperback) By (author) Rob Young List Price: 17.99 GBP New From: 7.38 In Stock Used from: 6.04 In Stock

Electric Eden, by Rob Young

In this groundbreaking survey of more than a century of music making in the British Isles, Rob Young investigates how the idea of folk has been handed down and transformed by successive generations – song collectors, composers, Marxist revivalists, folk-rockers, psychedelic voyagers, free festival-goers, experimental pop stars and electronic innovators.

In a sweeping panorama of Albion’s soundscape that takes in the pioneer spirit of Cecil Sharp; the pastoral classicism of Ralph Vaughan Williams and Peter Warlock; the industrial folk revival of Ewan MacColl and A. L. Lloyd; the folk-rock of Fairport Convention, Sandy Denny, Nick Drake, Shirley Collins, John Martyn and Pentangle; the bucolic psychedelia of The Incredible String Band, The Beatles and Pink Floyd; the acid folk of Comus, Forest, Mr Fox and Trees; The Wicker Man and occult folklore; the early Glastonbury and Stonehenge festivals; and the visionary pop of Kate Bush, Julian Cope and Talk Talk, Electric Eden maps out a native British musical voice that reflects the complex relationships between town and country, progress and nostalgia, radicalism and conservatism.

An attempt to isolate the ‘Britishness’ of British music – a wild combination of pagan echoes, spiritual quest, imaginative time-travel, pastoral innocence and electrified creativity – Electric Eden will be treasured by anyone interested in the tangled story of Britain’s folk music and Arcadian dreams.

See larger image How I Escaped My Certain Fate (Paperback) By (author) Stewart Lee List Price: 12.99 GBP New From: 7.77 In Stock Used from: 3.86 In Stock

How I Escaped My Certain Fate, by Stewart Lee

In 2001, after over a decade in the business, Stewart Lee quit stand-up, disillusioned and drained, and went off to direct a loss-making opera about Jerry Springer.

How I Escaped My Certain Fate details his return to live performance, and his cautious creep towards his position as the most critically-acclaimed stand-up in Britain.

Here is a blow-by-blow account of his snail-paced comeback, in the form of annotated transcripts of the three full-length shows that sealed his reputation, and details of his professional trials during the period.

See larger image Samuel Johnson: A Life (Paperback) By (author) David Nokes List Price: 9.99 GBP New From: 0.46 In Stock Used from: 0.46 In Stock

Samuel Johnson, by David Nokes

Johnson, born weak and half-blind, shambolic and poverty-stricken, became the most admired and quoted man in the eighteenth century. Thrown out of Oxford for a lack of funds, he rose to celebrity: author of the Dictionary, a friend to the king, companion of Reynolds, Goldsmith and Garrick. David Nokes looks beyond Johnson’s remarkable public persona and beyond the Johnson that Boswell to some extent created. Nokes looks at his troubled relationship with his first wife, whom he married for money but felt guilty about for the rest of his life; at his family, who haunted his dreams for years; and at his difficult, intimate relationship with Mrs Thrale. He shows a man who gave a quarter of the government pension he received to the poor, filled his home with the blind and destitute, and bequeathed his wealth to Frank Barber, an emancipated black slave brought from Jamaica. Insightful and engaging, Samuel Johnson draws an illuminating portrait of Johnson, his life and world.

See larger image The Kaiser's Holocaust: Germany's Forgotten Genocide and the Colonial Roots of Nazism (Hardcover) By (author) Casper Erichsen, David Olusoga List Price: 20.00 GBP New From: 8.67 In Stock Used from: 7.29 In Stock

The Kaiser’s Holocaust, by David Olusoga and Casper W. Erichsen

On 12 May 1883, the German flag was raised on the coast of South-West Africa, modern Namibia. As settlers began to take over the tribal lands of the indigenous peoples, the Herero and Nama resisted and Germany launched a war of extermination. It ended with the construction of concentration camps, in which prisoners were systematically worked and starved to death.

Years later, the soldiers and bureaucrats who had administered the camps, and the racial theories that had inspired them, would play a role in the formation of Nazism. David Olusoga and Casper W. Erichsen have uncovered extraordinary links between the Nazis and the atrocities committed in Africa under Kaiser Wilhelm. The infamous brown shirts worn by the Nazi storm troopers were colonial uniforms, originally designed as camouflage for the desert sand. The memory of Germany’s African empire was revived as inspiration for the Nazi’s wartime empire in the European East.

Using shocking new archival evidence, The Kaiser’s Holocaust is the definitive account of a genocide that was deliberately concealed for a century – a history that modern Germany has not yet come to terms with.

Today, as the graves of the victims are uncovered in the Namibian deserts, the re-emergence of the Kaiser’s holocaust poses a profound challenge to the notion that Nazi violence was an aberration in European history.

• Author David Olusoga on The Kaiser’s Holocaust

See larger image Red Plenty (Hardcover) By (author) Francis Spufford List Price: 16.99 GBP New From: 2.68 In Stock Used from: 1.76 In Stock

Red Plenty, by Francis Spufford

Strange as it may seem, the grey, oppressive USSR was founded on a fairytale. It was built on the 20th-century magic called ‘the planned economy’, which was going to gush forth an abundance of good things that the lands of capitalism could never match. And just for a little while, in the heady years of the late 1950s, the magic seemed to be working.

Red Plenty is about that moment in history, and how it came, and how it went away; about the brief era when, under the rash leadership of Nikita Khrushchev, the Soviet Union looked forward to a future of rich communists and envious capitalists, when Moscow would out-glitter Manhattan, and every Lada would be better engineered than a Porsche. It’s about the scientists who did their genuinely brilliant best to make the dream come true, to give the tyranny its happy ending. It’s history, it’s fiction. It’s a comedy of ideas, and a novel about the cost of ideas.

By the award-winning (and famously unpredictable) author of The Child That Books Built and Backroom Boys, Red Plenty is as ambitious as Sputnik, as uncompromising as an Aeroflot flight attendant – and as different from what you were expecting as a glass of Soviet champagne.

See larger image The Crusades: The War for the Holy Land (Paperback) By (author) Thomas Asbridge List Price: 9.99 GBP New From: 3.38 In Stock Used from: 3.38 In Stock

The Crusades, by Thomas Asbridge

In the eleventh century, a vast Christian army, summoned to holy war by the pope, rampaged through the Muslim world of the eastern Mediterranean, seizing possession of Jerusalem, a city revered by both faiths. Over the two hundred years that followed this First Crusade, Islam and the West fought for dominion of the Holy Land, clashing in a succession of chillingly brutal wars, both firm in the belief that they were at God’s work. For the first time, this book tells the story of this epic struggle from the perspective of both Christians and Muslims, reconstructing the experiences and attitudes of those on either side of the conflict. Mixing pulsing narrative and piercing insight, it exposes the full horror, passion and barbaric grandeur of the crusading era. One of the world’s foremost authorities on the subject, Thomas Asbridge offers a vivid and penetrating history of the crusades, setting a new standard for modern scholarship. Drawing upon painstaking original research and an intimate knowledge of the Near East, he uncovers what drove Muslims and Christians alike to embrace the ideals of jihad and crusade, revealing how these holy wars reshaped the medieval world and why they continue to echo in human memory to this day.

See larger image City of Sin: London and Its Vices (Hardcover) By (author) Catharine Arnold List Price: 14.99 GBP New From: 0.49 In Stock Used from: 0.01 In Stock

City of Sin, by Catharine Arnold

If Paris is the city of love, then London is the city of lust. For over a thousand years, England’s capital has been associated with desire, avarice and the sins of the flesh. Richard of Devises, a monk writing in 1180, warned that ‘every quarter [of the city] abounds in great obscenities’. As early as the second century AD, London was notorious for its raucous festivities and disorderly houses, and throughout the centuries the bawdy side of life has taken easy root and flourished. In the third book of her fascinating London trilogy, award-winning popular historian Catharine Arnold turns her gaze to the city’s relationship with vice through the ages. From the bath houses and brothels of Roman Londinium, to the stews and Molly houses of the 17th and 18th centuries, London has always traded in the currency of sex. Whether pornographic publishers on Fleet Street, or fancy courtesans parading in Haymarket, its streets have long been witness to colourful sexual behaviour. In her usual accessible and entertaining style, Arnold takes us on a journey through the fleshpots of London from earliest times to present day. Here are buxom strumpets, louche aristocrats, popinjay politicians and Victorian flagellants – all vying for their place in London’s league of licentiousness. From sexual exuberance to moral panic, the city has seen the pendulum swing from Puritanism to hedonism and back again. With latter chapters looking at Victorian London and the sexual underground of the 20th century and beyond, this is a fascinating and vibrant chronicle of London at its most raw and ribald.

See larger image The Year That Changed the World: The Untold Story Behind the Fall of the Berlin Wall (Paperback) By (author) Michael Meyer List Price: 8.99 GBP New From: 1.24 In Stock Used from: 1.03 In Stock

The Year that Changed the World, by Michael Meyer

‘Mr Gorbachev, tear down this wall!’ This declamation by president Ronald Reagan when visiting Berlin in 1987 is widely cited as the clarion call that brought the Cold War to an end. The West had won, so this version of events goes, because the West had stood firm. American and Western European resoluteness had brought an evil empire to its knees. Michael Meyer, in this extraordinarily compelling account of the revolutions that roiled Eastern Europe in 1989, begs to differ. Drawing together breathtakingly vivid, on-the-ground accounts of the rise of Solidarity in Poland, the stealth opening of the Hungarian border, the Velvet Revolution in Prague, and the collapse of the infamous wall in Berlin, Meyer shows that western intransigence was only one of the many factors that provoked such world-shaking change. More important, Meyer contends, were the stands taken by individuals in the thick of the struggle, leaders such as poet and playwright Vaclav Havel in Prague; Lech Walesa; the quiet and determined reform prime minister in Budapest, Miklos Nemeth; and the man who realized his empire was already lost and decided, with courage and intelligence, to let it go in peace, Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev. Michael Meyer captures these heady days in all their rich drama and unpredictability, providing a thrilling chronicle of perhaps the most important year of the 20th century.

See larger image All in the Best Possible Taste: Growing Up Watching Telly in the Eighties (Paperback) By (author) Tom Bromley List Price: 12.99 GBP New From: 0.01 In Stock Used from: 0.01 In Stock

All in the Best Possible Taste, by Tom Bromley

Television past, as LP Hartley might have once said, is another country. And, in the early 1980s it certainly was a different beast. There were still only three channels to watch; the evening’s programmes finished with the playing of the national anthem; and the biggest prize on TV was not Chris Tarrant’s million pounds but a speedboat on Bullseye… But as Tom Bromley suggests in this funny and warming memoir, all that was about to change: The 1980s saw the end of the original golden era of television, and the beginnings of TV as we know it today. In 1982, Channel 4 became the first new terrestrial channel for almost twenty years and by the end of the decade, Rupert Murdoch’s Sky Television was vying to become Britain’s first multi-channel provider. The result of all this was that slowly but surely, British viewers had more choice than ever before and the cost of this choice was the erosion of television as a shared national event. And no-one felt this change more deeply than Tom Bromley. Television played a large part in Tom’s childhood. His first word was ‘two’, as in BBC Two, and his earliest childhood memory is seeing Johnny Ball at a church fete. With great humour and affection, Tom Bromley tells the story of a childhood spent with his three siblings and that other all-important family member; the television set.

See larger image Lowboy (Paperback) By (author) John Wray List Price: 7.99 GBP New From: 0.64 In Stock Used from: 0.01 In Stock

Lowboy, by John Wray

Underground, in the tunnels beneath New York, a young man is missing. Above ground, Ali Lateef of the NYPD is assigned the case. The boy’s mother is reluctant to help and Emily, his girlfriend and only confidante, appears to have vanished too. Can Lateef find Lowboy before it’s too late? An extraordinary chronicle of a desperate young man and the race to find him, Lowboy is a modern masterpiece.

See larger image The Gathering Night (Paperback) By (author) Margaret Elphinstone List Price: 8.99 GBP New From: 3.24 In Stock Used from: 0.01 In Stock

The Gathering Night, by Margaret Elphinstone

Between Grandmother Mountain and the cold sea, Alaia and her family live off the land. But when her brother goes hunting and never returns, the fragile balance of life is upset. Half-starved and maddened with grief, Alaia’s mother follows her visions and goes in search of her lost son.

• Read the author’s afterword

See larger image The Accident (Hardcover) By (author) Ismail Kadare List Price: 16.99 GBP New From: 1.43 In Stock Used from: 0.01 In Stock

The Accident, by Ismail Kadare

On the autobahn in Vienna a taxi leaves the carriageway and strikes the crash barrier, flinging its male and female passengers out of its back doors as it spins through the air. The driver cannot explain why he lost control; he only says that the mysterious couple in the back seat seemed to be about to kiss …Set against the tumultuous backdrop of war and its aftermath in the Balkans, The Accident intimately documents an affair between two people caught in each other’s webs. The investigation into their deaths uncovers a mutually destructive obsession that mirrors the conflicts of the region. A destabilising mixture of vivid hallucination and cold reality, Ismail Kadare’s new novel is a bold and fascinating departure.

See larger image All the Colours of the Town (Paperback) By (author) Liam McIlvanney List Price: 7.99 GBP New From: 0.09 In Stock Used from: 0.01 In Stock

All the Colours of the Town, by Liam McIlvanney

When Glasgow journalist Gerry Conway receives a phone call promising unsavoury information about Scottish Justice Minister Peter Lyons, his instinct is that this apparent scoop won’t warrant space in the Tribune. But as Conway’s curiosity grows and his leads proliferate, his investigation takes him from Scotland to Belfast. Shocked by the sectarian violence of the past, and by the prejudice and hatred he encounters even now, Conway soon grows obsessed with the story of Lyons and all he represents. And as he digs deeper, he comes to understand that there is indeed a story to be uncovered – and that there are people who will go to great lengths to ensure that it remains hidden.

Compelling, vividly written and shocking, All the Colours of the Town is not only the story of an individual and his community, it is also a complex and thrilling enquiry into loyalty, betrayal and duty.

See larger image The Anthologist (Paperback) By (author) Nicholson Baker List Price: 7.99 GBP New From: 0.14 In Stock Used from: 0.01 In Stock

The Anthologist, by Nicholson Baker

The Anthologist, is narrated by Paul Chowder, a poet of some little reknown who is sitting in his barn most of the time trying to write the introduction to a new anthology of poetry called Only Rhyme. He’s having a hard time getting started because his career is falling apart, his girlfriend Roz has recently left him, and he is thinking about the poets throughout history who have suffered far worse and actually deserve to feel sorry for themselves. He has also promised his readers that he will reveal many wonderful secrets and tips and tricks about poetry, and it looks like the introduction will be a little longer than he’d thought. What unfolds is a wholly entertaining and beguiling love story about poetry, among other things; Paul tells us about all of the great poets, from Tennyson, Swinburne, and Yeats to the moderns (Roethke, Bogan, Merwin) to the contemporary scene as well as the editorial staff of The New Yorker’s editorial department. And what he reveals about the rhythm and music of poetry itself is astonishing and makes you realize how incredibly important poetry is to our lives. At the same time, Paul manages just barely to realize all of this himself and what results is a tender, wonderfully romantic, often hilarious, and inspired novel.

See larger image Of Beasts and Beings (Paperback) By (author) Ian Holding List Price: 12.99 GBP New From: 0.01 In Stock Used from: 0.01 In Stock

Of Beasts and Beings, by Ian Holding

Militia seize an innocent captive and subject him to a nightmarish overland journey that feels as though it will never end. Meanwhile, a lonely white schoolteacher wrestles personal demons whilst attempting to overcome the everyday difficulties of a life in which power cuts last for months at a time, homes are left without running water, brawls break out over even the most basic necessities and an atmosphere of fear and intimidation presides. Which of them is in the gravest danger, and does either have the power to escape their fate?

In this highly original, searing and timely new novel, we witness the devastating effects of a country’s economic and moral collapse. In a world where greed, barbarism, anarchy and lawlessness are rife, how do the honest survive? Is it possible to keep a conscience when all those around you have lost theirs?

See larger image Eleven (Paperback) By (author) Mark Watson List Price: 12.99 GBP New From: 0.01 In Stock Used from: 0.01 In Stock

Eleven, by Mark Watson

Xavier Ireland is a radio DJ who by night listens to the hopes, fears and regrets of sleepless Londoners and by day keeps himself very much to himself – until he is brought into the light by a one-of-a-kind cleaning lady and forced to confront his own biggest regret. This is a tale of love, loss, Scrabble and six degrees of separation, asking big questions about life and death, strangers and friends, heartache and comfort, and whether the choices we don’t make affect us just as powerfully as those we do.

• Read an extract from Eleven

See larger image Half Broke Horses (Paperback) By (author) Jeannette Walls List Price: 7.99 GBP New From: 0.69 In Stock Used from: 0.68 In Stock

Half Broke Horses, by Jeanette Wells

A debut novel based on the extraordinary life of Jeannette Walls’ maternal grandmother – a sassy, straight-talking heroine for whom saving lives, taming wild horses and beating ranch hands at poker are all in a day’s work. Born in 1901 in the rolling grassland of West Texas, at the age of 15, with very little formal education, Lily Casey Smith left home to begin teaching in a frontier town, riding 500 miles on her beloved pony, Patch, all alone, to get to her job. She went on, with her husband, to run an 180,000 acre ranch in Arizona and to raise two children, one of whom is Jeannette’s memorable mother, Rosemary Smith Walls. Readers will love and marvel at this intrepid woman, for her fearlessness, her courage, her wicked sense of humour. A true adventurer!