The year is 1859 and Hero Hollis, beautiful and headstrong niece of the American consul, arrives in Zanzibar. It is an earthly paradise; it is also the last outpost of the Slave Trade. A passionate opponent of slavery, Hero is swept into a turmoil of royal intrigue, abduction, piracy, smuggling and a virulent cholera epidemic. There in Zanzibar, th...

Who would sever the tongue of a living person? Or kill a pathetic, homeless old man? Or frighten a young doctor into silence? The questions are piling up, and Doug McHarg can't stop asking them - especially when he's warned off by his boss in the local police, by Scotland Yard, and by increasingly professional death threats. The pattern that emerge...

Germany 1927: the English filmmaker Henry Whitaker is on a desperate pilgrimage to the dying Weimar Republic. The present day: Henry's daughter Miranda is on a quest to understand what happened to her mother, a refugee Henry met and married in Germany at the end of the war. Did Henry - as his mother has always supposed - drive his wife to her death...

The year is 1348 and the first plague victim has reached English shores. Panic erupts around the country and a small band of travellers comes together to outrun the deadly disease, unaware that something far more deadly is - in fact - travelling with them. The ill-assorted company - a scarred trader in holy relics, a conjurer, two musicians, a heal...

Leslie Maitland is an award-winning former New York Times investigative reporter whose mother and grandparents fled Germany in 1938 for France, where, as Jews, they spent four years as refugees-the last two under risk of Nazi deportation. In 1942 they made it onto the last boat to escape France before the Germans sealed the harbours. Then, barred f...

In July 1957, the press descended in droves on Eastbourne. An inquest had just been opened into the suspicious circumstances surrounding the death of Mrs Bobbie Hullett. She died after months of apparent barbiturate abuse - drugs prescribed by Dr John Bodkin Adams. The inquest brought to the surface years of whispered suspicion that had swept throu...

In the dust and blazing heat of Helmand, the young men of 16 Air Assault Brigade find themselves in the most relentless battles faced by British troops in recent history. As the only writer to have unrestricted access to the front line, Sam Kiley is there to bear witness to the most intense challenges of their lives. Desperate Glory is an unflinchi...

A down-to-earth forensics expert has just discovered a crime scene that is out of this world. In criminal forensics they train you to uncover evidence, no matter how brutal or bizarre the murder. But what if one night you encounter a crime scene so terrifying that no one on earth can explain it? It begins deep in the woods of the Pacific Northwest,...

Is it possible to write a sidesplitting novel about the breakup of the perfect marriage? If the writer is Nora Ephron, the answer is a resounding yes. For in this inspired confection of adultery, revenge, group therapy, and pot roast, the creator of Sleepless in Seattle reminds us that comedy depends on anguish as surely as a proper gravy depends o...

In I Am Legend, a terrible plague has decimated the world, and those who were unfortunate enough to survive are transformed into blood-thirsty creatures of the night. Robert Neville is the last living man on earth. Every other man, woman, and child has become a vampire, and they are all hungry for Neville's blood. By day, he is the hunter, stalking...

Jane Rochford was sister-in-law to Anne Boleyn and Lady of the Bedchambers to Catherine Howard, who she followed to the scaffold in 1542. Hers is a life of extraordinary drama as a witness to and participant in the greatest events of Henry VIII's reign. Her supposed part in both Anne Boleyn's and Catherine Howard's downfall has led to her being rev...

1861. Growing up in rural Japan, Sachi has always felt different, her pale skin setting her apart. When she is 11, a princess passes through her village, sweeping her off to the women's palace in Edo, home to 3000 women and only on eman - the young shogun. Sachi is chosen as his concubine. But Japan is changing. As civil war erupts, Sachi flees for...

Paul Craddock is still young when he is invalided out of the army after the Boer War and he discovers the neglected estate of Shallowford in a secluded corner of Devon. It seems remote from the march of progress. But as storm clouds gather over Europe, Paul learns that no part of England, however remote, can escape the challenge of the times.

This is the story of John McGahern's childhood; of his mother's death, his father's anger and bafflement, and his own discovery of literature and his ambition to become a writer. At the heart of the book is an unembarrassed homage by a loving son to a woman who protected him and his sisters from his father's unpredictable moods. His memory of walks...

Five years ago Barbara Holloway gave up practicing law, disillusioned with a profession that put politics before justice. Then she receives a phone call, with a simple message: "I need you". Nell Kendricks's husband Lucas disappeared seven years earlier, abandoning his young family. Nell hasn't seen him since - until the day Lucas Kendricks arrives...

It's July 1976. In London, it hasn't rained for months, gardens are filled with aphids, water comes from a standpipe, and Robert Riordan tells his wife Gretta that he's going round the corner to buy a newspaper. He doesn't come back. The search for Robert brings Gretta's children - two estranged sisters and a brother on the brink of divorce - back...

In Kate Wilhelm's latest crime novel, a small Oregon town is rocked by a wheels-within-wheels case of art, fraud, and murder. Silver Bay, Oregon, a small coastal resort town of under a thousand residents, is home to three generations of women: Marnie, the long-widowed owner of a small gift shop; Van, her granddaughter who is about to graduate fr...

A serial killer is on the loose in Norway. Abducting children and murdering them in an undetectable way that confounds the police, he then returns the child's body to the mother with a note: You Got What You Deserved. Police Superintendent Adam Studo is the unlucky man in charge of the investigation and in desperation he recruits former FBI profile...

Research scientist Dr. Marina Singh is sent to Brazil to track down Dr. Annick Swenson, who has disappeared in the Amazon while working on a valuable new drug. The last person who was sent to find her, Marina's research partner Anders Eckman, died before he could complete his mission. Plagued by trepidation, Marina embarks on an odyssey into the in...

It's the Second World War and the Savoy, the Dorchester and Claridge's teem with those determined not to allow Hitler to impact on their way of life. Spies: Meet Marie-Jacqueline Lancaster, the woman from M15 who has the gravy browning licked from her legs by Dylan Thomas. Royals: Meet Crown Prince Alexander of Yugoslavia, born in a suite at Clarid...

1912-1940. A generation fallen. A country that will never be the same again. Nowhere in England avoids the searing loss of young men during the First World War and the remote Devon village of Shallowford is no exception. Many never return and the lives of those who do come back are changed forever. Paul Craddock must try to rebuild the estate and,...