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Sometimes the truth lies closer than you think. The compelling and heart-rending new novel from the Sunday Times Top Ten bestselling author of Behind Closed Doors.

Jenna and Jack Moore have moved their family to Wales for a fresh start. For vivacious, happy-go-lucky fifteen-year-old Paige the future is full of promise.

But suddenly everything changes. Paige becomes more and more withdrawn. The closeness she once shared with her mother a distant memory.

It then becomes clear that Jack has secrets too. Preoccupied with her younger children, her husband's fidelity and their fledgling publishing company, Jenna doesn't realise the extent of her eldest daughter's unhappiness until the unthinkable happens.

And the nightmare is only just beginning...

Archaeological excavations at Sakkara, the mecropolis of anicent Memphis, have uncovered important new evidence about Egyptian civilization in the first two dynasties 3200-2780 B.C. The origins of the Egypt of the Pharaohs still remain obscure, but the new material discovered shows that the people of the Nile Valley at that remote period enjoyed a far higher degree of culture than has hitherto been recognized.

From Louis XIV to Benjamin Franklin Voltaire to Peter the Great, Casanova to Dr Johnson, Madame de Pompadour to Rousseau, in the French salons or the Russian court or the English Parliament, Sir Harold Nicolson provides us with a dazzling and comprehensive portrait gallery of the eighteenth century.

New Swan Shakespeare is a series designed to help readers understand and enjoy Shakespeare's plays. It assumes no previous knowlegde of the plays, nor of their historical or cultural background. Above all, the series presents each play for its won sake, as drama for the theatre.

Amsterdam is not just any city. Despite its relative size it has stood alongside its larger cousins - Paris, London, Berlin - and has influenced the modern world to a degree that few other cities have. Sweeping across the city's colourful thousand year history, Amsterdam will bring the place to life: its sights and smells; its politics and people. Concentrating on two significant periods - the late 1500s to the mid 1600s and then from the Second World War to the present, Russell Shorto's masterful biography looks at Amsterdam's central preoccupations. Just as fin-de-siecle Vienna was the birthplace of psychoanalysis, seventeenth century Amsterdam was the wellspring of liberalism, and today it is still a city that takes individual freedom very seriously. A wonderfully evocative book that takes Amsterdam's dramatic past and present and populates it with a whole host of colourful characters, Amsterdam is the definitive book on this great city.

In this original anthology, readers can trace Berkeley's longstanding literary legacy through the works of world-class authors such as Jack Kerouac, Maxine Hong Kingston, Allen Ginsburg, Al Young, Frank Norris, Philip K. Dick, Ishmael Reed, Thomas Pynchon, Robert Hass, and Czeslaw Milosz.

You want to get the most from your Bible study. Whether you' re leading a Sunday school class, participating a small group discussion, or investigating a topic of personal importance, you need to find verses that speak to your particular need. This compact Bible concordance helps you do that.

This delightful, thought-provoking collection of quotes from scientists--including Stephen Hawking, Carl Sagan, Margaret Mead, Thomas Edison, Albert Einstein, and others--presents an engaging look at the spiritual side of scientific thought. Nearly 150,000 copies of the Classic Wisdom Collection have now been sold.

An exhilarating journey through the most creative and catastrophic f*ck ups in human history, from our very first ancestor falling out of that tree, to the most spectacular fails of the present day. In the seventy thousand years that modern human beings have walked this earth, we've come a long way. Art, science, culture, trade - on the evolutionary food chain, we're real winners. But, frankly, it's not exactly been plain sailing, and sometimes - just occasionally - we've managed to really, truly, quite unbelievably f*ck things up. From Chairman Mao's Four Pests Campaign, to the American Dustbowl; from the Austrian army attacking itself one drunken night, to the world's leading superpower electing a reality TV mogul as President ... it's pretty safe to say that, as a species, we haven't exactly grown wiser with age. So, next time you think you've really f*cked up, this book will remind you: it could be so much worse ...

Winner of both the National Book Award for Arts and Letters and the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism, Paul Fussell's The Great War and Modern Memory was one of the most original and gripping volumes ever written about the First World War. Frank Kermode, in The New York Times Book Review, hailed it as "an important contribution to our understanding of how we came to make World War I part of our minds," and Lionel Trilling called it simply "one of the most deeply moving books I have read in a long time." In its panaramic scope and poetic intensity, it illuminated a war that changed a generation and revolutionized the way we see the world.Now, in Wartime, Fussell turns to the Second World War, the conflict he himself fought in, to weave a narrative that is both more intensely personal and more wide-ranging. Whereas his former book focused primarily on literary figures, on the image of the Great War in literature, here Fussell examines the immediate impact of the war on common soldiers and civilians. He describes the psychological and emotional atmosphere of World War II. He analyzes the euphemisms people needed to deal with unacceptable reality (the early belief, for instance, that the war could be won by "precision bombing," that is, by long distance); he describes the abnormally intense frustration of desire and some of the means by which desire was satisfied; and, most important, he emphasizes the damage the war did to intellect, discrimination, honesty, individuality, complexity, ambiguity and wit. Of course, no Fussell book would be complete without some serious discussion of the literature of the time. He examines, for instance, how the great privations of wartime (when oranges would be raffled off as valued prizes) resulted in roccoco prose styles that dwelt longingly on lavish dinners, and how the "high-mindedness" of the era and the almost pathological need to "accentuate the positive" led to the downfall of the acerbic H.L. Mencken and the ascent of E.B. White. He also offers astute commentary on Edmund Wilson's argument with Archibald MacLeish, Cyril Connolly's Horizon magazine, the war poetry of Randall Jarrell and Louis Simpson, and many other aspects of the wartime literary world.Fussell conveys the essence of that wartime as no other writer before him. For the past fifty years, the Allied War has been sanitized and romanticized almost beyond recognition by "the sentimental, the loony patriotic, the ignorant, and the bloodthirsty." Americans, he says, have never understood what the Second World War was really like. In this stunning volume, he offers such an understanding.

Samuel Pepys, with his insatiable curiosity, his sociable disposition, and the ample opportunities provided by his office, was ideally equipped to explore the London in which he lived.

It was small by modern standards, and we can see it through his own eyes, as he never intended us to see it.

His diary, written in a shorthand that is almost a secret code, is both a guide to a London that was scarcely more than a big village, and a self-portrait of an outstanding man.

He was a first-class administrator, one of the makers of the Royal Navy

He was a sociable man-about-town, a founder-member of the Royal Society, a bibliophile and amateur musician, and a connoisseur of pretty wenches.

Pepys’s life spanned seven of the most eventful decades of English history.

As a young man of sixteen he saw Charles I beheaded.

Near the end of Pepys life, William of Orange landed in Devon.

In the years between he lived through the Restoration of the monarchy, the Plague and the Great Fire of London.

In the pages of his diary we meet characters as varied as King Charles II (‘he runs in debt every day’), Nell Gwyn (‘even prettier than I thought’), his patron and cousin Mountagu (‘my lord’), and above all his young, attractive, exasperating wife Elizabeth.

With many quotations from the best-known and best-loved diary in English literature, Geoffrey Trease brings Pepys the man, and Restoration London, vividly to life.

Geoffrey Trease (1909-1998) was the author of more than one hundred books, including children’s books. He revolutionised children’s literature and was one of the first authors to deliberately appeal to both boys and girls through strong leading characters of both genders. In 1966 Trease won the New York Herald Tribune Book Award This is Your Century.

Anthony Powell's brilliant twelve novel sequence chronicles the lives of over three hundred characters, and is a unique evocation of life in twentieth-century England. It is unrivalled for its scope, its humour and the enormous pleasure it has given to generations.

Volume 1 contains the first three novels in the sequence: A Question of Upbringing - A Buyer's Market' The Acceptance World

Five of Saul Bellow’s most moving, richly textured, and exquisitely plotted short stories make up this volume, each providing a history of personality and self-awakening. The title story, “Him with His Foot in His Mouth,” follows a musicologist narrator who for years has scattered wounding witticisms “from the depths of my nature, that hoard of strange formulations.” As the story unfolds he tries to discover what led him into a “deep legal-financial hole,” while he awaits extradition from a refuge in British Columbia. “What Kind of Day Did You Have?” follows a divorced suburban woman and her lovers—would-be and actual—through a frantic day in their lives. Their needs and passions, as well as their comic conflicts, are matters of life and death. In “Zetland: By a Character Witness” and in “A Silver Dish,” Bellow returns, with his unequaled command of eloquent recollected detail, to a bygone Chicago, “Zetland” is a brilliant portrait of an artist as a young boy and a man, precocious and eccentric; “A Silver Dish” is a memorable story of a raffish, willful father and his affectionate son. “Cousins,” the final story in the volume, explores the mysteries of family feeling, mysteries that defy both logic and the worthiness of their objects, as Ijah Brodsky, successful in the larger world, is drawn into an encounter with criminal and naively idealistic forces. This collection represents a turning point in the bountiful career of Saul Bellow, a felicitous rendering of the human condition in all its absurd complexity.

In The Dean's December, the contrasts are between the decaying society of late communist Rumania and the problems of society in contemporary Chicago. The Dean is in Rumania to be with his dying mother-in-law, a formerly powerful party official who has been ostracised for allowing her daughter, an internationally famous astronomer, to emigrate to the west. The Dean, who is a respected journalist, has ruffled powerful feathers in Chicago with a series of pointed articles critical of certain aspects of Chicago society and has also been involved in seeking justice in a case where one of his students has been murdered. In this he is opposed by his radical nephew who thinks that the case is racist because the accused are African Americans of deprived social origins.

Moses Berger's magnificent obsession with the Gursky family leads him to Solomon Gursky, the disdained, disgraced, and dead Gursky brother who figures prominently, but mysteriously, in the annals of Gursky history and finance.

Is keeping a secret from a spouse always an act of infidelity? And what cost does such a secret exact on a family?

The Ryries have suffered a loss: the death of a baby just fifty-seven hours after his birth. Without words to express their grief, the parents, John and Ricky, try to return to their previous lives. Struggling to regain a semblance of normalcy for themselves and for their two older children, they find themselves pretending not only that little has changed, but that their marriage, their family, have always been intact. Yet in the aftermath of the baby's death, long-suppressed uncertainties about their relationship come roiling to the surface. A dreadful secret emerges with reverberations that reach far into their past and threaten their future.

The couple's children, ten-year-old Biscuit and thirteen-year-old Paul, responding to the unnamed tensions around them, begin to act out in exquisitely- perhaps courageously-idiosyncratic ways. But as the four family members scatter into private, isolating grief, an unexpected visitor arrives, and they all find themselves growing more alert to the sadness and burdens of others-to the grief that is part of every human life but that also carries within it the power to draw us together.

Moving, psychologically acute, and gorgeously written, The Grief of Others asks how we balance personal autonomy with the intimacy of relationships, how we balance private decisions with the obligations of belonging to a family, and how we take measure of our own sorrows in a world rife with suffering. This novel shows how one family, by finally allowing itself to experience the shared quality of grief, is able to rekindle tenderness and hope.

Two decades later after Those who Save Us, Karena gets a call from a psychiatric ward in Wichita, Kansas, to come pick up her brother, whom she hasn't seen or spoken to for twenty years. She soon discovers that Charles has lied to the doctors, taken medication that could make him dangerously manic, and disappeared again. Having exhausted every resource to try and track him down, Karena realizes she has only one last chance of finding him: the storms. Wherever the tornadoes are, that's where he'll be. Karena joins a team of professional stormchasers-passionate adventurers who will transform her life and give her a chance at love and redemption--and embarks on an odyssey to find her brother before he reveals the violent secret from their past and does more damage to himself . . . or to someone else.

After a long and heartbreaking journey to Dimitri's birthplace in Siberia, Rose Hathaway has finally returned to St. Vladimir's - and to her best friend, Lissa. It is at long last graduation, and the girls can't wait for their real lives beyond the Academy's iron gates to begin. But Rose's heart still aches for Dimitri, and she knows he's out there, somewhere. She failed to kill him when she had the chance. And now her worst fears are about to come true. Dimitri has tasted her blood, and now he is hunting her. And this time he won't rest until Rose joins him . . .

At the heart of this panoramic, multidimensional narrative is the compelling struggle of a young woman to lift her body and soul out of the gutter. Faber leads readers back to 1870s London, where Sugar, a 19-year-old whore in the brothel of the terrifying Mrs. Castaway, yearns for escape to a better life.

Features anti-personnel mines, Africa, and the journey one woman makes to find the person responsible for the death of her son in Angola. This book is both an examination of what bereavement means to one character and an indictment of the arms trade.

Set in Northern Ireland, this thriller, shortlisted for the Booker Prize 1990, is about a man who faces a dramatic moral choice just when he's looking for happiness. B. Moore won the W.H.Smith Literary Award for Catholics and the J.Tait Black Memorial Prize for The Great Victorian Collection.

The ruins of the Forum in Rome are one of the best known wonders of antiquity and a highpoint of the tourist route round the Eternal City; but the Forum remains for many visitors a baffling and unwelcoming place. In this book, David Watkins discusses this topic.