A brutal killing has taken place on Scotland's most remote island. Detective Fin Macleod is sent from Edinburgh to investigate. For Lewis-born Macleod, the case represents a journey both home and into his past.

Interweaving real and fictional elements, The American Boy is a major new literary historical crime novel in the tradition of An Instance of the Fingerpost and Possession. England 1819: Thomas Shield, a new master at a school just outside London, is tutor to a young American boy and the boy’s sensitive best friend, Charles Frant. Drawn to Frant’s beautiful, unhappy mother, Thomas becomes caught up in her family’s...

Scott Adams provides an inside view of bosses, meetings, management fads and other workplace afflictions, through his cartoon character, Dilbert. The topics include swearing your way to success, humiliation as a management tool, and selling bad products to stupid people.

Adopted into the household of her uncle, Sir Thomas Bertram, Fanny Price grows up a meek outsider among her cousins in the unaccustomed elegance of Mansfield Park. Soon after Sir Thomas absents himself on estate business in Antigua (the family's investment in slavery and sugar is considered in the Introduction in a new, post-colonial light), Mary Crawford and her brother Henry arrive at Mansfield, bringing with them...

Shardlake goes to war... Summer, 1545. England is at war. Henry VIII's invasion of France has gone badly wrong, and a massive French fleet is preparing to sail across the Channel . . .Meanwhile, Matthew Shardlake is given an intriguing legal case by an old servant of Queen Catherine Parr. Asked to investigate claims of ‘monstrous wrongs' committed against his young ward, Hugh Curteys, by...

Master of the spy novel' John le Carre's ingenious and gripping espionage thrillers have had his legion of fans on the edge of their seat for the last half-century making him one of the greatest British writers of today. His works have all been international bestsellers, with many being adapted into...

Jane Eyre, one of the most widely read English novels, has extraordinary emotional and narrative power. It introduces a new type of hero and heroine with an unconventional love story. Jane, a penniless orphan who survives the miseries of a charitable school, is employed at Thornfield Hall as a governess to...

C. S. Lewis was one of the twentieth century’s best-known authors. The Narnia Chronicles, The Screwtape Letters and Mere Christianity are among his most loved works. Shadowlands tells the unique story of Lewis’s tragic love. In Joy Davidman he truly found love and was drawn out of his shell. But only briefly...

The Sunday Times bestseller, Aftermath, is the twelfth novel in Peter Robinson's Inspector Banks series, following on from Cold is the Grave. Number 35 The Hill is an ordinary house in an ordinary street. But it is about to become infamous. When two police constables are sent to the house following a report of a...

Left unfinished after Dickens died in 1870, The Mystery of Edwin Drood centres on Edwin Droods uncle, John Jasper, and his love for Rosa Bud, Edwins fiancée. Set in the dark, fictional cathedral city of Cloisterham, the novel is awash with guilt, disguise and mystery. Naxos

2040-2045: In the years after the cataclysmic Yellowstone eruption there is massive economic dislocation as populations flee Datum Earth to myriad Long Earth worlds. Sally, Joshua, and Lobsang are all involved in this perilous work when, out of the blue, Sally is contacted by her long-vanished father and...

Winner of the Man Booker Prize 2007, Anne Enright's fourth novel is both sophisticated and unflinching. The timeless themes of love, death and human weakness are explored in Enright's characteristically subtle, beautiful prose.

Machiavellian adj. elaborately cunning; scheming, unscrupulous. Machiavellianism n. (N. dei Machiavello, Florentine statesman and political writer d. 1527, who advocated resort to morally questionable methods in the interests of the State). How remarkable that an Italian living in the 15th and 16th centuries should lend his name to a word still in common usage in the English language today. The Prince has remained...

A never-before-heard collection of archive recordings of the wit and wisdom of Linda Smith - a "national treasure" of Radio 4 and BBC TV. (Links are narrated by Hattie Hayridge.) In this brilliant anthology Linda's fans can now hear original recordings of her live performances, never before heard by the public, compiled and edited by her partner of...

From the author of Company of Liars, hailed as “a jewel of a medieval mystery”* and “an atmospheric tale of treachery and magic,”** comes a magnificent new novel of an embattled village and a group of courageous women who are set on a collision course—in an unforgettable storm of secrets, lust, and rage.

Anatta is the Buddhist teaching on the nonexistence of a permanent, independent self. It's a notoriously puzzling and elusive concept, usually leading to such questions as, "If I don't have a self, who's reading this sentence?" It's not that there's no self there, says Rodney Smith. It's just that the self that is reading ...

An atmospheric BBC Radio 4 full-cast dramatisation based on C. J. Sansom's best-selling Tudor crime novel featuring hunchback lawyer detective Matthew Shardlake. Autumn, 1541. King Henry VIII has set out on a spectacular Royal Progress to York, aiming to strike fear and awe into his rebellious northern subjects. Shardlake and his assistant, Barak, arrive in the city a day ahead of the...

A magisterial, single volume history of the greatest conflict the world has ever known, by our foremost military historian. The Second World War began in August 1939 on the edge of Manchuria and ended there exactly six years later with the Soviet invasion of northern China.

The Romanovs were the most successful dynasty of modern times, ruling a sixth of the world's surface. How did one family turn a war-ruined principality into the world's greatest empire? And how did they lose it all? This is the intimate story of twenty tsars and tsarinas, some touched by genius, some by madness, but all inspired ...

The Sunday Times Bestseller Honest and soul-searching' - Sunday Express From much-loved documentary maker Louis Theroux comes a funny, heartfelt and entertaining account of his life and weird times in TV. In 1994 fledgling journalist Louis Theroux was given a one-off gig on Michael Moore’s TV Nation...

Helen Rappaport's masterful telling of the outbreak of the Russian Revolution through eyewitness accounts left by foreign nationals who saw the drama unfold. Between the first revolution in February 1917 and Lenin's Bolshevik coup in October, Petrograd was in turmoil - felt nowhere more keenly than on the fashionable Nevsky Prospekt, where the foreign visitors and diplomats who filled hotels, clubs, bars...

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLING MASTERPIECE OF THE ROMANTIC SUSPENSE GENRE The effect is powerful: here is naked obsession, sulfurous, total, scarcely possible to live with' FINANCIAL TIMES The reader looks on with mingled shock and fascination. A tour de force' NEW YORK TIMES A taut, sinister tale of erotic obsession' VANITY FAIR Damaged people are dangerous. They know they can survive.'

They destroy plant diseases. They break down toxins. They plough the earth. They transform forests. They’ve survived two mass extinctions, including the one that wiped out the dinosaur. Not bad for a creature that’s deaf, blind, and spineless. Who knew that earthworms were one of our planet’s most important caretakers? Or that Charles Darwin devoted his last years to studying their remarkable achievements?

Now in audiobook for the first time ever! Read by Neil Gaiman and Simon Jones, the original Arthur Dent, and written by #1 New York Times bestselling author Neil Gaiman, Don't Panic is the definitive chronicle of all things Hitchhiker. First published in 1986 and updated several times since, Don’t Panic is in an in-depth exploration of Douglas Adams's cultural phenomenon The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, from...

At last, one of the world’s greatest works of science fiction is available - just as author Stanislaw Lem intended it. To mark the 50th anniversary of the publication of Solaris, Audible, in cooperation with the Lem Estate, has commissioned a brand-new translation, unabridged for the first time, and the first ever direct translation from the original Polish to English. Beautifully narrated by Alessandro Juliani...

In 2004, bad boy Billy Fingers Cohen, a homeless small-time drug dealer and addict in a state of drug induced euphoria ran into a busy intersection and was killed instantly by a speeding automobile. He left behind a grieving sister. For weeks she struggled with grief and tried to make sense of Billy's seemingly wasted life and tragic death. A few weeks after his death, William Cohen, aka Billy Fingers, woke his sister Annie...

On a peaceful summer day in 1952, ten monks on horseback arrived at a traditional nomad tent in northeastern Tibet where they offered the parents of a precocious toddler their white handloomed scarves and congratulations for having given birth to a holy child—and future spiritual leader. Surviving the Dragon is the remarkable life story of Arjia Rinpoche, who was ordained as a reincarnate lama at the age of two...

In the ninth instalment of the series, C.S. Forester transports us to the quaint village of Smallbridge. Predictably restless and eager to embark on his next adventure, Horatio Hornblower dreams of returning to the seas and commanding his next ship. Now happily married to Lady Barbara Leighton and widely celebrated for his recent successes with the navy, Hornblower has been knighted and appointed a commodore.

After nearly two decades in England, the world's best-loved travel writer returned to live in the country he had left as a youth. Of course there were things Bryson missed about Blighty, but any sense of loss was countered by the joy of rediscovering some of the forgotten treasures of his childhood. So, gathered here, are eighteen months' worth of his popular columns from the Mail on Sunday's Night & Day...

A perfect village. A perfect crime. When two young girls disappear from their primary school, the village of Heighington is put on high alert—and not for the first time. Called in to investigate, Detective Karen Hart is sure that parallels with a previous disappearance are anything but coincidental. DS Hart is still reeling from a case she tried and failed to solve eighteen months ago, when a young woman vanished without a trace.

From the moment that Jim and his best friend Charlie bug the staffroom and overhear two of their teachers speaking to each other in a secret language, they know there's an adventure on its way. But what does "spudvetch" mean, and why do Mr Kidd's eyes flicker with fluorescent blue light when Charlie says it to him? Perhaps Kidd and Pearce are bank robbers talking in code. Perhaps they're spies. Perhaps they're aliens.

Internationally renowned theoretical physicist and bestselling author Lawrence Krauss offers provocative, revelatory answers to the biggest philosophical questions: Where did our universe come from? Why does anything exist? And how is it all going to end? 'Why is there something rather than nothing?' is the question atheists and scientists are always asked,and until now there has not been a satisfying scientific answer.

From the creator of the international hit BBC1 crime series Luther Meet Detective Chief Inspector John Luther. He's a murder detective. He's brilliant; he's intense; he's instinctive. And yet there are rumours that DCI Luther is bad - not corrupt, but tormented. The first in a new series of novels featuring DCI John Luther takes us into Luther's past and into his mind. It is the story of the case that tore his personal and...

At thirty-three, Rodeo cowboy Brody Creed is a restless bad boy. He likes life on the move, but a chance encounter with his long-estranged twin brother brings him "home" to Lonesome for the first time in years. There, a secret past haunts him as he tries to make plans for his future. Carolyn Simmons is looking for Mr. Right as the tick-tock of her biological clock gets ever louder. Then she falls for gorgeous...

No-one thought she had the courage… Those looking in from the outside think Lucy Lovejoy’s life is like any other, but at the centre of her family there is a big empty hole where all the love and warmth should be. Over the years, her children have watched while their father chipped away at Lucy’s self-confidence. Now the children are following their own paths, and Lucy has never felt more alone. When tragedy strikes at...

Kenneth Horne, Kenneth Williams, Betty Marsden and Hugh Paddick star in 20 episodes of the anarchic 1960s radio comedy. Round the Horne arrived on BBC radio in 1965, bringing laughter to Sunday lunchtimes throughout the land. It carved a niche in the history of broadcast comedy, a sketch show which prodded the boundaries of propriety and innuendo. At its heart was the suave and upstanding Kenneth Horne...

Michael Palin is off again, this time to the seemingly desolate Sahara Desert. There's no easy way across, as he and his team discover on their most challenging expedition yet. From a starting point in Gibralter, Michael makes his way to Morocco, then over the Atlas Mountains to the little-known countries of Mauritania, Mali, and Chad. He travels on the longest train in the world, meets with the Paris-Dakar Rally in...

After the success of his first assignment from the UNICORNE agency, fourteen-year-old Michael Malone is given another unexplained mystery to solve. When UNICORNE detect strange goings-on in a comic book shop, Michael is sent to investigate - a task which is made all the more difficult by allies he can no longer trust, and an enemy he can't actually see .

61 Hours ended with maverick loner Jack Reacher trapped in a desperate situation from which escape seemed impossible. Even for him. But Reacher has done the impossible before. Now there's deadly trouble in the wilds of Nebraska...and Reacher walks right into it. First he falls foul of the Duncans, a local clan that has terrified an entire county into submission. But it's the unsolved case of a missing eight-year-old girl...

Tom, Mia, and Oliver are the victims of a gang of bullies, who waylay them on the way home from school. It's not at school, so the teachers wouldn't be able to help, and they don't want to tell their parents, so there's only one option: to pay up. At first. But as the pressure builds more and more, a terrible suspicion begins to surface: could one of the three friends be helping the bullies? And if so, just who is...the traitor?

Lincoln and Amelia are recruited to track down a cargo ship carrying two dozen illegal Chinese immigrants, as well as the notorious human smuggler and killer known as the Ghost. But when the capture goes disastrously wrong, Lincoln and Amelia find themselves in a race to stop the Ghost before he can track down and murder the two surviving families who have vanished deep into the labyrinthine world of...

Raskolnikov, a destitute and desperate former student, wanders through the slums of St Petersburg and commits a random murder without remorse. He imagines himself to be a great man, a Napoleon: beyond conventional moral law. But as he embarks on a dangerous game of cat and mouse with a suspicious police investigator, Raskolnikov is pursued by the growing voice of his conscience and finds the noose of...

On a freezing morning four drunken students stumble upon the body of a woman in the snow. Rosie has been raped, stabbed and left for dead in a cemetery. The only suspects are the four young men now stained with her blood. Twenty-five years later the police mount a cold-case review of Rosie’s unsolved murder, and the four are still suspects. But when two of them die in suspicious circumstances, it seems...

Is someone else's problem your problem? If, like so many others, you've lost sight of your own life in the drama of tending to someone else's, you may be codependent--and you may find yourself in this book. The healing touchstone of millions, this modern classic by one of America's best-loved and most inspirational authors holds the key to understanding codependency and to unlocking its stultifying hold on your life.

With two years experience behind him, James Herriot still feels privileged working on the beautiful Yorkshire moors as assistant vet at the Darrowby practice. Time to meet yet more unwilling patients and a rich cast of supporting owners. Full of hilarious tales of his unpredictable boss Siegfreid Farnon, his charming student brother Tristan, the joys of spring lambing, a vicious cat called Boris and James' jinxed courtship of...

The relationship between those who wield power and those whose job it is to tell us what they are doing has always been fraught with tension. Politicians now expect to be on camera and facing aggressive questions from the moment they open their front door to the moment they return home at night. Everything they say and do is instantly broadcast and dissected on 24-hour news channels, blogs, and Twitter.

One seagull and four pieces of bread decide the course of one person's life. But is the rest just coincidence? A new novel from Costa Award shortlisted author J. W. Ironmonger. Have you ever experienced a coincidence that seems too strange to be true? And is there such a thing as fate? The Coincidence Authority is a novel about love in a random universe, about two lost souls each with a quest to understand...

A gritty, emotional tale of 1930s Blackpool from bestselling saga author Mary Wood, writing as Maggie MasonBlackpool, 1932. When Grace's Ma passes away and her Da's * sinks with all hands, Grace is utterly alone in the world. She's sent to an orphanage in Blackpool, but the master has an eye for a pretty young lass. Grace won't be his victim, so she runs, destitute, into the night.In Blackpool, she finds a home with...

Britain's national icon, Michael Parkinson reads his long-awaited autobiography. From prize-winning journalist to chat show king on a show voted one of the top 10 British TV programmes of all time, Michael Parkinson's starry career spans over four decades. Now an international celebrity himself, the man from a humble but colourful Yorkshire mining family who can tease out the secrets of even the most reticent...

From the bestselling author of Fatherland and Munich comes a WWII thriller about a German rocket engineer, a former actress turned British spy, and the Nazi rocket program. The first rocket will take five minutes to hit London. You have six minutes to stop the second. Rudi Graf is an engineer who always dreamed of sending rockets to the moon. But instead, he finds himself working alongside Wernher von Braun...

When Jacqueline Hyde finds the little glass bottle in Grandma's attic her life suddenly changes. Goodbye clean, good Jacqueline. Hello cheeky, loud Jacqueline Bad. It's fun at first. Exciting. But then Jacqueline Bad gets into serious trouble. And although she keeps trying to be her old self, the bad side just won't let go... A darkly addictive fable, truly absorbing.

A SPELLBINDING NOVEL FROM SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLING AUTHOR, PHILIPPA GREGORY There is only one bond that I trust: between a woman and her sisters. We never take our eyes off each other. In love and in rivalry, we always think of each other.' When Katherine of Aragon is brought to the Tudor court as a young bride, the oldest princess, Margaret, takes her measure. With one look, each knows the other for a....

Kate O'Brien is 30 and has very little to think about except trying to keep her balance as she totters up London's media-land ladder. Fiona O'Brien is Kate's responsible older sister - with a husband, twin boys, a dog, and now - a life-changing problem. It's a problem that means Kate going back to Dublin. Pronto. There she finds herself stepping into Fiona's shoes - and discovering that she's definitely not cut out to be a...

Ray Fearson plays Othello with Anastasia Hille as Desdemona in Shakespeare's powerful play of passion, jealousy and bitter rage. Includes a scene by scene synopsis, brief biographies and an interpretation by the producer of the play.

The tide is turning, but on the home front, the battle is far from over for the Campions… Autumn 1944, the allies are invading Italy. At home in Britain, along with everyone else, the Campion family are doing their bit – working tirelessly in the hope that the end of the war is now in sight. Lou, separated from her twin Sasha, is spreading her wings quite literally in her new role as a member of the Air Transport Auxiliary...

Michel Thomas materials have been phenomenally successful since they were first published some six years ago. The brand new Review courses are a major new offering. For the first time, the student can quickly and easily review the entire teaching contents of the main course, to establish which areas need to be revisited or to consolidate learning. The Reviews can be used in many ways: when the student reaches the...

Having now paid his dues as midshipman, Horatio Hornblower returns as a newly promoted Lieutenant, in the second instalment of C.S. Forester's beloved naval series. In this new adventure, Hornblower is overjoyed to discover his next task is to serve aboard the mighty HMS Renown. After witnessing some unsettling scenes however, he soon finds himself struggling to serve under the captain, James Sawyer...

The essential account of R. Kelly's actions and their consequences, a reckoning two decades in the making In November 2000, Chicago journalist and music critic Jim DeRogatis received an anonymous fax that alleged R. Kelly had a problem with “young girls”. Weeks later, DeRogatis broke the shocking story, publishing allegations that the R&B superstar and local hero had groomed girls, sexually abused them, and...

A novel of love, war and kindness, inspired by a true story of medical genius and betrayal. Sydney, 1948. Brilliant German surgeon, Hugo Winter, is dead, and his protégé, Lucy Brynne, is tasked with sorting his papers. Among them, Lucy finds glimpses of Hugo's past that paint a disturbing picture of war and prejudice - a portrait of Australia she can barely recognise. Days later, an intriguing patient comes into her care...

Comedian and best-selling author Tony Hawks is embarking on his greatest adventure yet - moving from city life in London to deepest Devon in the West Country. You can take the man out of the city, but is the countryside ready for him? Comedian and born-and-bred townie Tony Hawks is not afraid of a challenge - or indeed a good bet. He's hitchhiked round Ireland with a fridge and taken on the Moldovan football...

She took her gabardine raincoat from the hallstand. Put her head round the kitchen door. So many memories. Scarf wound about her neck, wriggling her fingers into her gloves. As she bent to pick up the case, her eyes stopped on the lino where her mum had died. No, she mustn't think like that. She picked up the case and her umbrella as it looked like rain, and let herself out of the front door. A new life. She mustn't look...

Invited to a Private View of the work of controversial artist Denzil Willoughby, the good citizens of Fethering are not quite sure what to expect. And it certainly turns out to be a lively affair, culminating in a confrontation between Willoughby and his ex-lover, followed by a heated argument with the gallery owner and a rival artist. But what no one could have anticipated was that the evening would end in...

DI Sally Parker has a serial killer on her patch. One thing that sets this killer apart from the others she's hunted before: his willingness to leave DNA at each of the crime scenes. It's up to Sally and her partner, DS Jack Blackman, to find out why before the body count rises to double figures. While Sally is engrossed in the investigation, her ex-husband, Darryl, pays a surprise visit to her new home. His actions not...

A Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, and Amazon Charts bestseller. From New York Times bestselling author Catherine Bybee comes a new First Wives novel about wanting a family...and finding love. Shannon Wentworth’s biological clock is ticking, and she isn’t going to let her single status keep her from having a baby. When her wedding-photography business takes her to Mexico, she has every intention of finding...

When jockey Martin Stukely dies following a fall in a steeplechase at Cheltenham races, he accidentally embroils his friend Gerard Logan in a perilous search for a stolen videotape. Gerard Logan is a glass-blower on the verge of widespread acclaim for his work. He has long been accustomed to the frightful dangers inherent in molten glass and maintaining a glass-making furnace, but now he is suddenly faced with a series...

“A bear on Paddington Station?” said Mrs Brown in amazement. “Don’t be silly – there can’t be.”
But there certainly is, and it’s not long before the Browns realise just how much chaos one small bear can cause for a family! Whether it’s shopping, having a bath, or a trip to the seaside, Paddington always finds himself involved in the most extraordinary goings-on without even trying!

This collection includes four full cast dramatisations - Maigret: A Man's Head, Maigret: The Bar on the Seine, My Friend Maigret and Madame Maigret's Own Case.

After her mother's suicide, Abbie Myers returns home to the Lake District with her young child - and no wedding ring. Estranged from her turbulent family for many years, Abbie is heartbroken when she hears that they blame her for this tragedy. Determined to uncover her mother's past, Abbie approaches her beloved grandmother, Millie, in search of answers. The old woman reveals the story of how she travelled to Russia in 1911 as a young governess and became...

More than just a straight audiobook, this pack offers a unique introduction to the world of philosophy. In a series of structured discussions our panel of four leading experts will guide you through all the key areas of interest, including the philosophy of science, religion, politics and the mind.

DS Wesley Peterson, newly arrived in the West Country town of Tradmouth, has his hands full when a child goes missing and a young woman is brutally murdered on a lonely cliff path. Then his old friend, archaeologist Neil Watson, unearths the skeletons of a strangled woman and a newborn baby in the...

When Kit Fielding, champion steeplechase jockey, finds out that his chief patron, Princess Casilia, is facing an increasingly serious threat, he goes unhesitatingly to her aid. Neither realises that his instinctive support is the first step towards a frightening battle involving violent risk, with the honour of the princess's family as the prize and Kit's own...

The house was stripped bare of all its treasures. Gone was the furniture, the family silver, the paintings and the antique china. And if that was a shock for Charles Todd, painter of horses, how much more harrowing was the trauma for his cousin Donald, whose house it was and whose young wife lay on the sitting room floor, bloody and dead... A coincidental meeting with a middle-aged widow sends Charles off to Australia...

Henry Grey had a bad disposition. Or so his sister, his co-workers, and just about everyone else said. But Henry knew a different job was all he needed. His present career as an office worker and part-time amateur jockey would never do.

British investigator David Cleveland hadn't come to Oslo dressed for the Norwegian weather. But he didn't know what cold really was until someone tried to drown him in a fjord. Of course, it could have been an accident that the speedboat cut David's dinghy to ribbons. Just as it could have been a coincidence that champion jockey Robert Sherman had disappeared from Norway right before his wife was due to give birth...

Sid Halley had one good hand and another made of metal. Five hundred pounds of horse had landed on him, directly ending his career as a brilliant jockey – and indirectly ending his marriage to the woman he loved. He had become a private investigator, quite a good one, though his new life could never erase the haunting memories of his...

Four intriguing cases from the files of the famous French detective, Jules Maigret: "Maigret goes to School", "Maigret and the Old Lady", "Maigret Hesitates" and "The Patience of Maigret". These full-cast dramatizations have been specially adapted for the radio from Simenon's original novels.

Inspector Jules Maigret differs from his English counterparts of the 1930s and 40s in that he is a respectable, bourgeois member of the police force - archetypally "French". In this reissued collection of dramatized short stories, Maigret and Simenon look back over four of their greatest cases.

Four intriguing cases from the files of the famous French detective, Jules Maigret: "Maigret goes Home", "Maigret Sets a Trap", "Maigret at the Crossroads" and "Maigret has doubts". These full-cast dramatizations have been specially adapted for the radio from Simenon's original novels.

A novel set in Cornwall at the time of Charles II, which tells the story of the relationship between a beautiful and capricious lady and a dangerous but attractive French pirate.

An exclusive hotel on a tiny picturesque island seems to be the ideal retreat from the stresses of criminal detection for Hercule Poirot. But with the appearance of the beautiful Arlena Stuart, the quiet and peaceful atmosphere becomes charged with an indefinable erotic tension. And when she is found...

This set brings together the 24 stories comprising the first volume of Dr Watson's Sherlock Holmes reports - The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes.

Laurence Sterne's most famous novel is a biting satire of literary conventions and contemporary eighteenth-century values. Renowned for its parody of established narrative techniques, Tristram Shandy is commonly regarded as the forerunner of avant-garde fiction. Tristram's characteristic digressions on...

James Norman Hall (1887–1951) was an American author best known for the novel Mutiny on the Bounty with co-author Charles Bernard Nordhoff (1887–1947) an English-born American novelist and traveler.

A quirky, entertaining and thought-provoking tour of the unexpected connections between words, read by Simon Shepherd. What is the actual connection between disgruntled and gruntled? What links church organs to organised crime, California to the Caliphate, or brackets to codpieces? The Etymologicon springs from Mark Forsyth's Inky Fool blog...

A Genius Performance by Simon Callow, Edward Petherbridge and Prunella Scales! These wonderful BBC Radio 4 productions are of exceptional quality. Includes 2 plays - An Englishman Abroad and A Question of Attribution. Brilliant work by all of the actors!

Following the colossal battle against the Empire's warriors, Eragon and Saphira narrowly escaped with their lives. But more awaits the Rider and his dragon, as Eragon finds himself bound by promises he may not be able to keep, including his oath to cousin Roran to help rescue his beloved Katrina. When unrest claims the rebels and danger strikes, Eragon must make choices that take him across...

Agatha Christie’s most daring crime mystery - an early and particularly brilliant outing of Hercule Poirot, ‘The Murder of Roger Ackroyd’, with its legendary twist, changed the detective fiction genre for ever. Roger Ackroyd knew too much. He knew that the woman he loved had poisoned her brutal first husband.

A Genius Performance by Andrew Sachs! Of all the civilisations existing in the year 1000, that of Western Europe seemed the unlikeliest candidate for future greatness. Compared to the glittering empires of Byzantium or Islam, the splintered kingdoms on the edge of the Atlantic appeared impoverished...

A stunning and moving new novel from Michael Morpurgo, the nation’s favourite storyteller – featuring the bravest dog in all the world. When Hero, a bomb-sniffing spaniel, goes missing in the middle of wartorn Afghanistan, his soldier-owner is devastated. Meanwhile, Hero makes friends with a local Afghan boy, and sees a whole other side of the war. As Christmas draws ever closer, the question...

Tom, Barbara, Jerry and Margo return in the last four episodes of the final series. The Weaver’s Tale (1 May 1977): Barbara isn’t happy when Tom spends all their money on a second-hand loom, and Jerry bravely decides to rein in Margo’s spending - just after she’s been shopping.

Morse had never ceased to wonder why, with the staggering advances in medical science, all pronouncements concerning times of death seemed so disconcertingly vague. The newly appointed member of the Oxford Examinations Syndicate was deaf, provincial and gifted. Now he is dead and his murder...

Set in 1938 Brooklyn, this gripping psychological mystery begins when attractive, level-headed Sylvia Gellburg suddenly loses her ability to walk. The only clue lies in Sylvia's obsession with news accounts from Germany. Safe in Brooklyn, she is terrified by Nazi violence or is it something closer to home?

Two years before Edgar Rice Burroughs became a worldwide celebrity with the publication of Tarzan of the Apes, he published A Princess of Mars. A futuristic sci-fi fantasy romance, A Princess of Mars tells the story of John Carter, a Civil War veteran who inexplicably finds himself held prisoner...

At an apparently respectable dinner party, a vicar is the first to die… Thirteen guests arrived at dinner at the actor’s house. It was to be a particularly unlucky evening for the mild-mannered Reverend Stephen Babbington, who choked on his cocktail, went into convulsions and died. But when his martini glass was...

The new Hercule Poirot novel – another brilliant murder mystery that can only be solved by the eponymous Belgian detective and his ‘little grey cells’. Since the publication of her first book in 1920, Agatha Christie wrote 33 novels, two plays and more than 50 short stories featuring Hercule Poirot. Now, for the...

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...

The first book in an action-packed and rigorously researched new Roman historical series by the acclaimed author of Caligula and Claudius The Roman grip on Britain is weakening. Emperor Nero has turned his face away from this far-flung outpost. The Druids are on the rise, spreading seeds of rebellion among the British tribes.

Kate Atkinson's dazzling Life After Life, one of the top-selling adult books of 2014, explored the possibility of infinite chances, as Ursula Todd lived through the turbulent events of the last century again and again. In A God in Ruins, Atkinson turns her focus on Ursula's beloved younger brother, Teddy - would-be poet...

David Ash, detective of the paranormal, is sent to the mysterious Comraich Castle, secluded deep in the Scottish countryside, to investigate a strange, high-profile case. A man has been found crucified in a locked room. The reports suggest that the cliff-top castle is being haunted.... Who or what is the reclusive hooded figure that Ash has seen from...