It has never occurred to Precious Ramotswe that there might be disadvantages to being the best-known lady detective in Botswana. But when she receives a threatening anonymous letter, she is compelled to reconsider her unconquerable belief in a kind world and good neighbours. While she ponders the identity of the letter-writer Mma Ramotswe has a further set of problems to solve, both professional and personal. There is an adopted child's poignant search for her true family, and Mr J. L. B. Matekoni's pursuit of an expensive miracle for their own foster daughter Motholeli. With these latest developments on Tlokweng Road, Alexander McCall Smith reveals with all his brilliant storytelling skill that there are very few troubles that cannot be solved with kindness, and very few dry seasons that do not end with welcome rain.

Beginning with his bestselling debut, Flight of the Old Dog, ex-Air Force captain Dale Brown has redefined the modern military thriller. Now, in his New York Times bestseller Storming Heaven, Brown brings back the heroic Coast Guard admiral Ian Hardcastle in a tale of covert warfare that will leave reader hanging on the edge of their seats.

The acclaimed story of a timeless place that one day wakes up to find itself in the jaws of history: An exuberant mixture of history and romance, written with a wit that is incandescent (Los Angeles Times Book Review).

The place is the Greek island of Cephallonia, where gods once dabbled in the affairs of men and the local saint periodically rises from his sarcophagus to cure the mad. Then the tide of World War II rolls onto the island's shores in the form of the conquering Italian army.

Caught in the occupation are Pelagia, a willful, beautiful young woman, and the two suitors vying for her love: Mandras, a gentle fisherman turned ruthless guerilla, and the charming, mandolin-playing Captain Corelli, a reluctant officer of the Italian garrison on the island. Rich with loyalties and betrayals, and set against a landscape where the factual blends seamlessly with the fantastic, Corelli's Mandolin is a passionate novel as rich in ideas as it is genuinely moving.

The epic finale of the Latin American trilogy following The War of Don Emmanuel's Nether Parts and Senior Vivo and the Coca Lord

While the economy of his small South American country collapses, President Veracruz joins his improbable populace of ex-soldiers, former guerrillas, unfrocked priests and reformed - though by no means inactive - whores, in a bizarre search for sexual fulfillment.

But for Cardinal Guzman, a man tormented by his own private daemons, their stupendous, hedonistic fiestas represent the epicentre of all heresies.Heresies that must be challenged with a horrifying new inquisition destined to climax in a spectacular confrontation...

An extraordinary feat of imagination... a sensuous, often farcical and ultimately optimistic argument for spiritual sanity - Time Out

with 50 illustrations

A broken kitchen appliance leads Bobbie Kaplowitz -- a single mother of a six-year-old son -- to a new understanding of love and life in the title story of In Case We're Separated, Alice Mattison's family chronicle of interrelated stories.

Spanning the twentieth century, In Case We're Separated looks at a family of Jewish immigrants in the 1920s and 1930s, and follows their children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren as they all lead urban, emotionally turbulent lives against the backdrop of political assassinations, the Vietnam War, and the AIDS epidemic.

The title story, which appeared in Best American Short Stories 2002, begins with Bobbie in 1954 Brooklyn. Subsequent stories deal with Bobbie's son, Bradley, a gay man living outside Boston with his partner and playing detective after a cousin's girlfriend is assaulted at knifepoint.

Other stories concern two sisters: one is an editor, always trying to figure out just how Jewish she is, always trying to get through to her troubled sister. The sister, a would-be suicide during the 1960s and 1970s, reappears as a shaky Prozac miracle, helping others and scrambling to hold on to happiness in her middle-aged life. The sisters keep looking for the right man, and the next-to-the-last story includes a midlife wedding and the gathering of what remains of this varied clan.

The sisters' aunt Sylvia appears and reappears throughout the book. She's a schoolteacher who always knows what's best for everyone; later, she's a middle-aged woman still trying to hold on to hope -- and looking for her next affair -- despite an aging mother, an unhappy son, and the election of Ronald Reagan. Later still, with failing eyesight, she hangs on to dignity in her own old age, not wanting to ask her busy, professional daughter whether her shoes match.

Alice Mattison's recent novel The Wedding of the Two-Headed Woman was called "quietly splendid" by the New York Times. The Los Angeles Times has called her a writer's writer. In In Case We're Separated, Mattison's gift for storytelling and ability to create rich, multidimentional characters prove, once again, that she is a master of her craft.

The hero of the novel is Charles-Victor Peniel, called Night-of-Amber,  whose lonely and angry childhood eventually lands him in Paris at the time of the May '68 riots. There, Charles-Victor becomes involved with a band of dangerous companions, and in a whirlwind situation that spins uncontrollably into sadism and murder.

Over landscapes ranging from northern California and the urban Southwest to the hills of eastern Kentucky and the Caribbean island of St Lucia, Barbara Kingsolver tells stories of hope, momentary joy and powerful endurance. In every setting her characters are bound by a strong sense of place and the compelling ties of love and family history: a child accepts the impossible responsibility of remembering her Cherokee great-grandmother's dying culture; a quietly dissolving couple must fight ghosts of past expectations to reach one another; a tough Mexican American woman finds herself in jail because of her commitment to a family legacy of 'doing the right thing.' With disarming honesty - at times comic but often heartrending - Barbara Kingsolver creates a world of love and possibility into which the reader is irresistibly drawn.

Shortlisted for the Folio Prize 2014

Longlisted for the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction

Reno mounts her motorcycle and sets a collision course for New York.

In 1977 the city is alive with art, sensuality and danger. She falls in with a bohemian clique colonising downtown and the lines between reality and performance begin to bleed.

A passionate affair with the scion of an Italian tyre empire carries Reno to Milan, where she is swept along by the radical left and drawn into a spiral of violence and betrayal.

The Flamethrowers is an audacious novel that explores the perplexing allure of femininity, fakery and fear. In Reno we encounter a heroine like no other.

Best Books of the Year in Guardian, New York Times, The Times, Observer, Financial Times, New Yorker, Telegraph, Slate, Oprah, Vogue, Time, Scotsman and Evening Standard

Shortlisted for the National Book Awards 2013

From the author of The Italian Teacher, this acclaimed debut novel set in Rome follows the topsy-turvy lives of the denizens of an English language newspaper.

NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY 
Janet Maslin, The New York Times • The Economist • NPR • Slate • The Christian Science Monitor • Financial Times • The Plain Dealer • Minneapolis Star Tribune • St. Louis Post-Dispatch • The Kansas City Star • The Globe and Mail • Publishers Weekly
 
Look in the back of the book for a conversation between Tom Rachman and Malcolm Gladwell

Fifty years and many changes have ensued since the paper was founded by an enigmatic millionaire, and now, amid the stained carpeting and dingy office furniture, the staff’s personal dramas seem far more important than the daily headlines. Kathleen, the imperious editor in chief, is smarting from a betrayal in her open marriage; Arthur, the lazy obituary writer, is transformed by a personal tragedy; Abby, the embattled financial officer, discovers that her job cuts and her love life are intertwined in a most unexpected way. Out in the field, a veteran Paris freelancer goes to desperate lengths for his next byline, while the new Cairo stringer is mercilessly manipulated by an outrageous war correspondent with an outsize ego. And in the shadows is the isolated young publisher who pays more attention to his prized basset hound, Schopenhauer, than to the fate of his family’s quirky newspaper.

As the era of print news gives way to the Internet age and this imperfect crew stumbles toward an uncertain future, the paper’s rich history is revealed, including the surprising truth about its founder’s intentions.

Spirited, moving, and highly original, The Imperfectionists will establish Tom Rachman as one of our most perceptive, assured literary talents.

In Fruitful, Roiphe tells the intimate, turbulent, compelling story of raising her own children in the gap between motherhood and feminism - and makes an eloquent plea for a new agenda. Roiphe s life is a perfect microcosm of change in the American family over the past thirty years. Married and a mother in her early twenties, she soon became a divorced single parent, raising her young daughter on her own. Remarriage and new motherhood brought great joy but also the complications of combining families and raising stepchildren. With heartbreaking candor, she details the difficult adaptations and painful rebellions that haunt a parent's conscience. Through it all, Roiphe keenly felt feminism's discomfort with the question of motherhood. Allowing the conservative right to co-opt the issue of family, feminism has sometimes overlooked the very real emotional and economic needs of mother just trying to make it through the day. Here, Roiphe crafts a unique pro-feminist/pro-family position that calls for fruitful dialogue on quality childcare, on including men as full partners in parenting, on defining family in ways that allow everyone to thrive.

Alice, a young editor working in New York, meets Ezra Blazer, a famous, much older writer, and they begin an affair. Yet with nearly fifty years between them, what draws them together, and how does it work. In its provocative, playful, and at times creepy depiction of their relationship, Asymmetry illuminates the attractions of knowledge, of intellectual prowess, of self-assurance; and those of youth, of flowering, of naivety and intellectual promise. Interrupting and interacting with their story is that of Amar, an Iraqi-American economist held at Heathrow on his way to visit his brother in Kurdistan, whose detention gives him cause to reflect on the course of his life. Asymmetry is an extraordinary study of the power plays between young and old, West and Middle East, luck and talent, fairness and injustice, and the personal and the political. It is also an inventive, utterly contemporary and dazzling debut that will charm, delight and disarm.

"A Jury of Her Peers "is an unprecedented literary landmark: the first comprehensive history of American women writers from 1650 to 2000. In a narrative of immense scope and fascination--brimming with Elaine Showalter's characteristic wit and incisive opinions--we are introduced to more than 250 female writers. These include not only famous and expected names (Harriet Beecher Stowe, Willa Cather, Dorothy Parker, Flannery O'Connor, Gwendolyn Brooks, Grace Paley, Toni Morrison, and Jodi Picoult among them), but also many who were once successful and acclaimed yet now are little known, from the early American best-selling novelist Catherine Sedgwick to the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Susan Glaspell. Showalter shows how these writers--both the enduring stars and the ones left behind by the canon--were connected to one another and to their times. She believes it is high time to fully integrate the contributions of women into our American literary heritage, and she undertakes the task with brilliance and flair, making the case for the unfairly overlooked and putting the overrated firmly in their place. Whether or not readers agree with the book's roster of writers, "A Jury of Her Peers "is an irresistible invitation to join the debate, to discover long-lost great writers, and to return to familiar titles with a deeper appreciation. It""is a monumental work that will greatly enrich our understanding of American literary history and culture.

Stella Payne is forty-two, divorced, a high-powered investment analyst, mother of eleven-year-old Quincy- and she does it all. In fact, if she doesn't do it, it doesn't get done, from Little League carpool duty to analyzing portfolios to folding the laundry and bringing home the bacon. She does it all well, too, if her chic house, personal trainer, BMW, and her loving son are any indication. So what if there's been no one to share her bed with lately, let alone rock her world? Stella doesn't mind it too much; she probably wouldn't have the energy for love - and all of love's nasty fallout - anyway.
But when Stella takes a spur-of-the-moment vacation to Jamaica, her world gets rocked to the core - not just by the relaxing effects of the sun and sea and an island full of attractive men, but by one man in particular. He's tall, lean, soft-spoken, Jamaican, smells of citrus and the ocean - and is half her age. The tropics have cast their spell and Stella soon realizes she has come to a cataclysmic juncture: not only must she confront her hopes and fears about love, she must question all of her expectations, passions, and ideas about life and the way she has lived it.
Told in Stella's own exuberant, dead-on, dead honest voice, How Stella Got Her Groove Back is full of Terry McMillan's signature humor, heart, and insight. More than a love story, it is ultimately a novel about how a woman saves her own life - and what she must risk to do it.

With Leap, Terry Tempest Williams, award-winning author of Refuge, offers a sustained meditation on passion, faith, and creativity-based upon her transcendental encounter with Hieronymus Bosch's medieval masterpiece The Garden of Delights.

Williams examines this vibrant landscape with unprecedented acuity, recognizing parallels between the artist's prophetic vision and her own personal experiences as a Mormon and a naturalist. Searing in its spiritual, intellectual, and emotional courage, Williams's divine journey enables her to realize the full extent of her faith and through her exquisite imagination opens our eyes to the splendor of the world.

All the stories in Tales of the Night take place on the night of the 19th March 1929. All show different facets of love -love as violence, love as redemption, as suffering, as wisdom. Each has as a theme a particular discipline- mathematics, dance, law, visual arts, medicine, drama and astronomy. A young mathematician is led to an understanding of Europe's 19th century Scramble for Africa by a meeting with a fellow train passenger who reveals himself to be Joseph Conrad. A respected judge confesses his love for a young homosexual who he has convicted of immorality. A small, insular town is ravaged by a smallpox epidemic. Set in the Congo, on a small sailing boat off Lisbon, in the Baltic archipelago and in the author's native Denmark, these intricate and surprising stories, powerfully but wonderfully influenced by the work of Karen Blixen, amount to a rich and rewarding book.

Introduction and Notes by David Blair. University of Kent at Canterbury.

It is 1757. Across north-eastern America the armies of Britain and France struggle for ascendancy. Their conflict, however, overlays older struggles between nations of native Americans for possession of the same lands and between the native peoples and white colonisers. Through these layers of conflict Cooper threads a thrilling narrative, in which Cora and Alice Munro, daughters of a British commander on the front line of the colonial war, attempt to join their father. Thwarted by Magua, the sinister 'Indian runner', they find help in the person of Hawkeye, the white woodsman, and his companions, the Mohican Chingachgook and Uncas, his son, the last of his tribe.

Cooper's novel is full of vivid incident- pursuits through wild terrain, skirmishes, treachery and brutality- but reflects also on the interaction between the colonists and the native peoples. Through the character of Hawkeye, Cooper raises lasting questions about the practises of the American frontier and the eclipse of the indigenous cultures.

Radin's timeless critique of anthropological theory and methods from a humanistic perspective provides an overall assessment of the field of ethnology, its shortcomings, errors, and misdirections.

'No person can be blamed for refusing to read another word of what promises to be a mere imposition upon his credulity.' Julian West, a feckless aristocrat living in fin-de-siècle Boston, plunges into a deep hypnotic sleep in 1887 and wakes up in the year 2000. America has been turned into a rigorously centralized democratic society in which everything is controlled by a humane and efficient state. In little more than a hundred years the horrors of nineteenth-century capitalism have been all but forgotten. The squalid slums of Boston have been replaced by broad streets, and technological inventions have transformed people's everyday lives. Exiled from the past, West excitedly settles into the ideal society of the future, while still fearing that he has dreamt up his experiences as a time traveller. Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward (1888) is a thunderous indictment of industrial capitalism and a resplendent vision of life in a socialist utopia. Matthew Beaumont's lively edition explores the political and psychological peculiarities of this celebrated utopian fiction. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

This is a masterly narrative history of the Seven Years War, in which the British decisively eliminated French power north of the Caribbean, and yet also managed to ignite the slow-burning fuse of the American Revolution.Fred Anderson observes how the war displaced native peoples from their previously central role in an American diplomatic system; how it gave American colonists their first encounters with real live Englishmen; and how Americans were consequently emboldened to rally against the men who were once their masters. Anderson offers a wholly engrossing account of the conflict, interweaving the stories of kings and officers with those of traders, Native Americans, and colonial peoples.

A young woman, assisted by a once famous classical composer, investigates the identity of a fantastically popular but mysteriously incognito rock-and-roll star.

Whilst Sara pores over ancient texts in the Vatican reading room, a brutal murder is taking place in a nearby church. Then suddenly a crazed man enters the Vatican carrying a bloodied bag. He walks up to Sara's desk. He has something he would like her to see. Soon Sara is linked to a series of murders.

A compulsive novel about a young woman hijacked by her own ambition and the blind love of two obsessive men.