Smiley's People is one of John le Carré's classic Cold War novels and George Smiley one of his most acclaimed characters. Into a shadowy, violent and intricate world steeped in moral ambivalence steps George Smiley, sometime acting Chief of the Circus, as the Secret Service is known.

I could see that still no one had been able to get out from the cockpit. It must have been at this moment that I thought I was going to die because I became remarkably calm.' Trapped inside a burning Lancaster bomber, 20,000 feet above Berlin, airman John Martin consigned himself to his fate and turned his...

Fusing Keatsian mists and mellow fruitfulness with the vitality, the immediacy and the colour-hit of Pop Art - via a bit of skulduggery - Autumn is a witty excavation of the present by the past. Autumn is a take on popular culture and a meditation in a world growing ever more bordered; what constitutes...

Dick Dunster and Philip Progmire have been friends since their days at school. They have also been adversaries. Progmire's thespian longings, nurtured since he was a university actor, are now submerged in his work as an accountant with Megapolis Television. Dunster is also at Megapolis, engaged on an exposé...

No matter what you see, no matter what you’ve heard, assume nothing. Adam and Sophie Warner and their three-year-old daughter are vacationing in Washington State’s Hood Canal for Memorial Day weekend. It’s the perfect getaway to unplug—and to calm an uneasy marriage. But on Adam’s first day out...

So you lot want to be pilots? Bloody hell, Stalin’s had it now!' were the withering words of the corporal as he eyed his young National Service recruits for the first time. This autobiographical account, written 60 years later, tells of 'the most exciting years' of James Stevenson’s life when, aged 18, he learnt to be a jet...

I was anxious to fight. Hitler was the bastard who had started all this and he needed sorting out. We were under threat. Everything we stood for: our country, our families and our way of life was being attacked by this maniac. He could not be allowed to win. So for me and many, many others like me, there was no...

This is the story of Kitty Fane, the adulterous wife of a bacteriologist stationed in Hong Kong. When her husband discovers her deception, he exacts a terrible vengeance: Kitty must accompany him to the heart of a cholera epidemic in China. The Painted Veil was recently made into a feature film starring Edward...

Charles Henstock, vicar of Thrush Green, is living in his new vicarage after the old one burned down. In its place are eight retirement homes, but there's heated debate in the village about the new residents. How to choose who will live there? How will they get on together? And how will they accommodate all...

Doctor Thorne, the third novel in Anthony Trollope's Chronicles of Barsetshire, steers away from the church politics featured in the first two novels and move towards the scandals and prejudice of the upper tiers of Victorian era aristocracies. Frank Gresham, only son of a bankrupt landowner, falls in love with the...

In the late seventies, an extraordinary document came to light which for fifty years had been held on deposit by the bankers of the deceased John Herbert Watson MD - better known to devotees of Conan Doyle as Dr Watson. A continuous narrative in the doctor's own hand, the story opens in the East End of...

When Beck Holiday lost her father in the North Tower on 9/11, she also lost her memories of him. Eighteen years later, she’s a tough New York City cop burdened with a damaging secret, suspended for misconduct, and struggling to get her life in order. Meanwhile, a mysterious letter arrives informing her...

In Volume II of the Flashman Papers, Flashman tangles with femme fatale Lola Montez and the dastardly Otto Von Bismarck in a battle of wits which will decide the destiny of a continent. In this volume of The Flashman Papers, Flashman, the arch-cad and toady, matches his wits, his talents for deceit and...

When a Japanese-American is charged with the murder of a local fisherman, more than one man’s guilt is at stake. Soon to be a major film starring Ethan Hawke, directed by Scott Hicks (Shine). San Piedro Island in Puget Sound is a place so isolated that no one who lives there can afford to make enemies.

In 1966 England won the World Cup at Wembley. Sir Bobby Charlton, England's greatest ever player, was there on the pitch. Now, 50 years on, Sir Bobby looks back on the most glorious moment of his life and England's greatest sporting achievement. In 1966 he takes us through the buildup to the tournament and...

A harrowing debut novel of a tragic disappearance and one sister’s journey through the trauma that has shaped her life. For eleven-year-old Esme, ballet is everything - until her four-year-old sister, Lily, vanishes without a trace and nothing is certain anymore. People Esme has known her whole life suddenly...

Enver Eleven is twenty-five years old and ready for adventure. He’s the Agency’s newest recruit, eager to leap through his first gate into an unfamiliar time. In Enver’s home city of Johannesburg, fair-skinned people are a rarity and have been for centuries. The people of Johannesburg were spared the ravages of...

The second of Richard Hannay's adventures takes him from the trenches of the First World War on a mission of vital importance to the British campaign in the East. In an attempt to manipulate their Turkish allies the Germans have created a religious figurehead, a prophet of a new order to unify the disparate...

John Updike's first collection of new short fiction since the year 2000, My Father's Tears finds the author in a valedictory mood as he mingles narratives of his native Pennsylvania with stories of New England suburbia and of foreign travel. Morocco (Disc 1, Track 1) Personal Archaeology (Disc 1, Track 31)...

The compelling new standalone novel from the Sunday Times No. 1 bestselling author of Unseen and Cop Town. With a missing girl in the news, Claire Scott can’t help but be reminded of her sister, who disappeared twenty years ago in a mystery that was never solved. But when Claire begins to learn the truth...

A natural history of rain, told through a lyrical blend of science, cultural history, and human drama. It is elemental, mysterious, precious, destructive. It is the subject of countless poems and paintings; the top of the weather report; the source of all the world's water. Yet this is the first audiobook to tell the story of...

Eugenia, a baroness divorced from a German prince, and her bohemian brother, Felix, are coming back to America. Raised and cultured in Europe, they are returning destitute to New England to seek out their rich and innocent cousins. Eugenia wins the attentions of Robert Acton, the most appropriate suitor in...

Winner of the Hugo Award "The single most resonant and carefully imagined book of Dick's career." --New York Times It's America in 1962. Slavery is legal once again. The few Jews who still survive hide under assumed names. In San Francisco, the I Ching is as common as the Yellow Pages. All because some...

After her husband disappears, Jenny Lipkin, a magazine editor, is left to take care of her two small young children and has to find the inner resources to cope with her pain and loneliness.

The first book in the million-copy, Wall Street Journal bestselling Kingfountain series from Jeff Wheeler. King Severn Argentine’s fearsome reputation precedes him: usurper of the throne, killer of rightful heirs, ruthless punisher of traitors. Attempting to depose him, the Duke of Kiskaddon gambles...and loses.

Read by two-time Oscar winner Tom Hanks. A collection of 17 wonderful short stories showing that Tom Hanks is as talented a writer as he is an actor. A gentle Eastern European immigrant arrives in New York City after his family and his life have been torn apart by his country's civil war. A man who loves to...

Stephen Fry narrates this BBC Radio 4 full-cast dramatisation of the famous Victorian comic novel. Orphan Becky Sharp and wealthy Amelia Sedley are best friends at Miss Pinkerton's Academy for Young Ladies. On leaving school, ambitious, social-climbing Becky looks for a rich man to support her, while the...

In this Amazon Charts and Washington Post bestseller, a devastating secret is revealed, and a family must finally come to terms with the past. Single mother Maisey Addington has always fallen short of her own mother’s expectations—never married, a bit adrift, wasting her high IQ on dead-end jobs. The only...

She’s given her daughter everything. Now it’s time to give her the truth. Becky’s father is not just absent: he’s a mystery, a gaping hole in her past. He died before she was born and for her mother, Laura, the subject is strictly off-limits. But when Laura books an unexpected trip to Greece, Becky decides to join...

Thomas Hardy's novels about the cruel twists of fate that blight our lives have a timeless power to move us. In The Mayor Casterbridge, a young Michael Henchard makes a rash, alcohol-fuelled decision to sell his wife. Despite abstaining from alcohol from this point forward and living an upstanding life.... Naxos

One of the most successful pop stars of the 80s, his face adorning posters on teenager's walls from Acton to Akron, Adam Ant was a phenomenon.

Now in this frank and revealing autobiography, he tells the full story of his amazing life from his dysfunctional childhood to his key role in the punk movement and creation of a unique musical style that brought him a string of hits (both singles and albums).

Five great American short story writers, dating from the turn of the 19th/20th centuries are represented here. Different in atmosphere and writing style, they nevertheless caught the mood and concerns of the day in a way that was distinctly American. Bierce's An Occurance at Owl Creek Bridge leaves echoes in...

The end of Elson and Cadence Harding's 30-year marriage is complicated by their adult son's reluctance to pursue a promising career and their daughter's mysterious expulsion from college. A first novel by the Pushcart Prize-winning author of the story collection, The Theory of Light and Matter.

The new thriller from Michael Crichton, one of the most famous authors in the world, will be the most exciting, anticipated publication of Christmas 2008. Jamaica, in 1665 a lone outpost of British power amid Spanish waters in the sunbaked Caribbean. Its capital, Port Royal, a cuthroat town of taverns, grog...

This is the remarkable and gripping true story of a murderer and his victim, and of the tiny molecule that linked their fates. It is both the history of a science overlaid with human drama and a human tragedy inextricably entwined with science. It is about two lives made and destroyed by DNA--and by each other.

TWO LIVES tells the remarkable story of Seth's great uncle and aunt. His great uncle Shanti left India for medical school in Berlin in the 1930s and lodged with a German Jewish family. In the household was a daughter, Henny, who urged her mother 'not to take the blackie'. But a friendship developed and each...

A brand-new heart-stopping audiobook from Charlie Higson, author of the best-selling Young Bond series, read by Paul Whitehouse - the most exciting thing you'll hear all year. They'll chase you. They'll rip you open. They'll feed on you.... When the sickness came, every parent, policeman, politician - every adult -...

Samuel Beckett, one of the great avant-garde Irish dramatists and writers of the second half of the 20th century, was born on 13 April 1906. He died in 1989. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1969. His centenary will be celebrated throughout 2006 with performances of his major plays, but the most popular...

From the spectacle of gladiatorial combat to the intrigue of the Senate, from the foreign wars that created an empire to the betrayals that almost tore it apart, the Emperor novels tell the remarkable story of the man who would become the greatest Roman of them all: Julius Caesar. The Gates of Rome introduces...

A game of cards leads Flashman from the jungle death-house of Dahomey to the slave state of Mississippi as he dabbles in the slave trade in Volume III of the Flashman Papers When Flashman was inveigled into a game of pontoon with Disraeli and Lord George Bentinck, he was making an unconscious choice...

Buzz Aldrin, one of the three men who took part in the first moon landing in 1969, is a true American hero. "Magnificent Desolation" begins with the story of his voyage into space, which came within seconds of failure, and reveals a fascinating insider's view of the American space programme. But that thrilling...

Having escaped an Irish famine only to become enmeshed in an American war, Eliza Duane Mooney sets out across the country on a mysterious quest. Stunning poetess Lucia-Cruz McLelland denies a host of suitors to cast her fate with James Con O'Keeffe, convict, revolutionary, and Acting Governor of the...

An atmospheric and deeply absorbing literary historical crime classic - featured in The Times ‘Top Ten Crime Novels of the Decade’. England 1819: Thomas Shield, a new master at a school just outside London, is tutor to a young American boy and the child’s sensitive best friend, Charles Frant. Helplessly drawn...

This story is set in London, 1807. William Thornhill, happily wedded to his childhood sweetheart Sal, is a waterman on the River Thames. Life is tough but bearable until William makes a mistake, a bad mistake for which he and his family are made to pay dearly. His sentence: to be transported to New South...

Sir Bobby Charlton is widely acknowledged as the greatest player ever to wear an England shirt. He won a record number of caps and scored a record number of goals. Here, in the second volume of his bestselling autobiography, Sir Bobby talks in detail about his phenomenal career with England.

In the second novel in the Pop Larkin series, the Larkin family descends upon Brittany in France. Like fish out of water, they find that things don't quite turn out their way: the weather is less than ideal, the food is awful and the hotel is in a bad state of repair. But things slowly improve as Pop manages to ...

Throughout their childhood in the dusty cane fields of Saint Michael, Isabel and her older brother Isaias have been inseparable. Life is simple, and for Isabel, happiness is playing by the empty fountain in the village square, or listening to Isaias playing the fiddle. But when Isaias runs away to become a musician...

Renowned gamester and the first to admit that he is entirely void of a romantic disposition, Max Ravenscar regards all eligible females with indifference and unconcern. But when he meets the woman his young cousin Adrian is bent on marrying - the beautiful Deborah Grantham, mistress of her aunt's gaming...

From I, Coriander to Invisible in a Bright Light, Sally Gardner's first middle grade novel in 14 years soars with the imagination of a master story teller. A pitch perfect, haunting story about a crystal chandelier shaped like a galleon that splinters into a thousand pieces, a girl abandoned as a baby on the steps of an...

After being bombed and shipwrecked repeatedly while serving for several wild and war-torn years as a mascot of the World War II Royal Navy Yangtze river gunboats the Gnat and the Grasshopper, Judy ended up in Japanese prisoner of war camps in North Sumatra. Along with locals as slave labor, the American...