Two sisters ... two very different lives. Alison's American dream is in tatters. Her highflying career is on the skids and her Upper East Side apartment is now way beyond her means. But pride prevents her from telling her family back home just how bad things are. Olivia is fraught trying to juggle family, career, preparations for Christmas and orga...

A young man enters the culverted remains of an ancient Glasgow stream, looking for thrills. Deep below the city, it is decaying and claustrophobic and gets more so with every step. As the ceiling lowers to no more than a couple of feet above the ground, the man finds his path blocked by another person. Someone with his throat cut. As DS Rachel Nare...

Welcome to Castle Kidbury - a pretty town in a green West Country valley. A microcosm of the wider world, it's home to all sorts of people, with all the stresses and joys of modern life, but with a floral clock and a proper butcher's. It also has, for our purposes, a rash of gory murders ... Jess Castle is running away. Again. This time she's runni...

If your boss was the hottest rock star on the planet, would you mix business with pleasure? Celebrity PA to wild boy of rock Johnny Jefferson, Meg Stiles's glam new life in sun-drenched LA is a whirlwind of showbiz parties and backstage passes. Cool, calm Christian, in town to write his famous friend's biography, helps keep Meg's feet firmly on the...

Will Elliott is out of a job. The lighthouse he's been manning on Prince Albert Rock, off the wild Cornish coast, is about to become automated. So Will decides to fulfil his lifelong ambition - to sail round the coastline of Britain. Determined to continue his solitary existence, Will begins his preparations for his epic voyage. But before he has t...

You can run from your past but you can never hide from yourself... When John Callum arrives on the wild and desolate Faroe Islands, he vows to sever all ties with his previous life. He desperately wants to make a new start, and is surprised by how quickly he is welcomed into the close-knit community. But still, the terrifying, debilitating nightmar...

Benjamin Zephaniah, who has travelled the world for his art and his humanitarianism, now tells the one story that encompasses it all: the story of his life. In the early 1980s when punks and Rastas were on the streets protesting about unemployment, homelessness and the National Front, Benjamin's poetry could be heard at demonstrations, outside poli...

Behind every successful man is a busy assistant and Tina's boss is very successful. But Tina is tired of being overworked and underpaid. She's bored of her damp flat and her mounting debts. Then a blip in the expenses system sends Tina a cheque. She's a good person. But she's desperate. This isn't stealing. It's an administrative error...

Twoflower was a tourist, the first ever seen on the Discworld. Tourist, Rincewind decided, meant idiot. Somewhere on the frontier between thought and reality exists the Discworld, a parallel time and place which might sound and smell very much like our own, but which looks completely different. It plays by different rules. Certainly it refuses to s...

You never know what's happening on the other side of the wall. Your neighbour told you that she didn't want your six-month-old daughter at the dinner party. Nothing personal, she just couldn't stand her crying. Your husband said it would be fine. After all, you only live next door. You'll have the baby monitor and you'll take it in turns to go back...

Introducing Luke Carlton - ex-Special Boat Service commando, and now under contract to MI6 for some of its most dangerous missions. Sent into the steaming Colombian jungle to investigate the murder of a British intelligence officer, Luke finds himself caught up in the coils of a plot that has terrifying international dimensions. Hunted down, cap...

It's 1979: Dallas is enthralling the nation on TV, Mrs Thatcher has just become prime minister, Abba is top of the pops, and in the small Yorkshire village of Ragley-on-the-Forest, Jack Sheffield returns for his third year as headmaster of the village school. Jack and his staff struggle to keep a semblance of normality throughout the turbulence...

They say that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, but it is not one half so bad as a lot of ignorance. There are some situations where the correct response is to display the sort of ignorance which happily and wilfully flies in the face of the facts. In this case, the birth of a baby girl, born a wizard - by mistake. Everybody knows that there...

Eric is the Discworld's only demonology hacker. Pity he's not very good at it. All he wants is his three wishes granted.Nothing fancy - to be immortal, rule the world, have the most beautiful woman in the world fall madly in love with him, the usual stuff. But instead of a tractable demon, he calls up Rincewind, probably the most incompetent wizard...

'England invented football, codified it, became champions of the world in 1966 but humiliatingly then forgot how to play the greatest game of all. England took their eye off a ball they arrogantly thought they owned, allowing other nations to run off with it.' It has been Fifty Years of Hurt since Bobby Moore lifted the World Cup trophy at Wembl...

Farouk's country has been torn apart by war. Lampy's heart has been laid waste by Chloe. John's past torments him as he nears his end. The refugee. The dreamer. The penitent. From war-torn Syria to small-town Ireland, three men, scarred by all they have loved and lost, are searching for some version of home. Each is drawn towards a powerfu...

'A foot on the neck is nine points of the law' There are many who say that the art of diplomacy is an intricate and complex dance between two informed partners, determined by an elaborate set of elegant and unwritten rules. There are others who maintain that it's merely a matter of who carries the biggest stick. Like when a large, heavily fortified...

In January 2006, a month or two after my father died, I thought I saw him again - a momentary impression of an old man, a little stooped, setting off for a walk in his characteristic fawn corduroys and shabby quilted jacket. After teenage rifts it was walking that brought us closer as father and son; and this 'ghost' of Dad has been walking at my e...

Marie-Laure has been blind since the age of six. Her father builds a miniature version of their neighbourhood so she can memorise it. But when the Nazis invade, they flee with a dangerous secret. Werner is a German orphan destined to labour in the mines, until he discovers a knack for engineering. As Europe is engulfed by war and lives collide unpr...

Jefferson Winter is no ordinary investigator. The son of one of America's most renowned serial killers, Winter has spent his life trying to distance himself from his father's legacy. When he accepts a particularly disturbing case in London, Winter arrives to find a psychopath on the loose who likes abducting and lobotomising young women. Winter mus...

One cold January morning, two young sets of eyes... One pair belongs to smartly dressed Lavinia Waterhouse, whose mother clings to the traditional values she sees slipping away; the other to Maude Coleman, whose mother longs to escape the grip of Victorian society. Thrust together by the girls' friendship, these two very different families embark o...