Description: Set against the backdrop of the contested US election of 2000, THE BROOKLYN FOLLIES tells the story of Nathan and Tom, an uncle and nephew double-act. One in remission from lung cancer, divorced, and estranged from his only daughter, the other hiding away from his once promising academic career, and life in general. Auster's remarkable new novel takes the tragedy at the heart of his two most recent works - THE BOOK OF ILLUSIONS and ORACLE NIGHT - and fashions it into a love story told with humour and warmth that will appeal to Auster fans and new readers alike.

			to Shopping Basket
to My Catalogue

Description: In the mould of novels of E.M.Forster, and filled with crackling dialogue, broad comedy and an exceedingly warm heart, ON BEAUTY takes us from East Coast USA to London, from the trauma of adolescence to mid-life crisis, and from the irritations of family life to the power of beauty.

Howard Belsey, a Rembrandt scholar who doesn’t like Rembrandt, is an Englishman abroad and a long-suffering Professor at Wellington, a New England Liberal Arts college. He has been married for thirty years to Kiki, an American woman who no longer resembles the sexy activist she once was.

Their three children passionately pursue their own paths; Levi quests after authentic blackness, Zora believes that intellectuals can redeem everybody, and Jerome struggles to be a believer in a family of strict atheists. Faced with the oppressive enthusiasms of his children, Howard feels that the first two acts of his life are over and he has no clear plans for the finale. Or the encore.

Then Jerome, Howard’s oldest son, falls for Victoria, the stunning daughter of the right-wing icon Monty Kipps. Increasingly, the two families find themselves thrown together in a beautiful corner of America, enacting a cultural and personal war against the background of real wars that they barely register. An infidelity, a death, then an unexpected legacy set in motion a chain of events which sees all parties forced to examine the unarticulated assumptions that underpin their lives. How do you choose the work on which to spend your life? Why do you love the people you love? Do you really believe what you claim to? And what are the really beautiful things in life - and how far will you go to get them?

			to Shopping Basket
to My Catalogue

Description: The brilliant first novel from the author of The Da Vinci Code.

When the National Security Agency's invincible code-breaking machine encounters a mysterious code it cannot break, the agency calls in its head cryptographer, Susan Fletcher, a brilliant, beautiful mathematician. What she uncovers sends shock waves through the corridors of power. The NSA is being held hostage - not by guns or bombs, but by a code so complex that if released would cripple U.S. intelligence.


Caught in an accelerating tempest of secrecy and lies, Fletcher battles to save the agency she believes in. Betrayed on all sides, she finds herself fighting not only for her country but for her life, and in the end, for the life of the man she loves.

			to Shopping Basket
to My Catalogue

Description: Three stories on the nature of identity. In the first a detective writer is drawn into a curious and baffling investigation, in the second a man is set up in an apartment to spy on someone, and the third concerns the disappearance of a man whose childhood friend is left as his literary executor.

			to Shopping Basket
to My Catalogue

Description: Precious Ramotswe, traditionally-built proprietor of Botswana's No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency, is now known to millions around the world as the heroine of Alexander McCall Smith's bestselling series of books. In the latest instalment, Mma Ramotswe contemplates the two sorts of problems that we all face in life: the major ones (such as drought), about which very little can be done, and the other sort - which people make for themselves through human weakness and an inability to resist temptation. Like the inability to resist cake, for instance. That had led to several problems for Mr J.L.B. Matekoni, especially when the cake was made by Mma Potokwane, matron of the Orphan Farm. But it is Mma Ramotswe's role in life to deal with the problems of others and provide some solution to their difficulties - a role she fulfils with her usual style in this latest bestseller.

			to Shopping Basket
to My Catalogue

Description: Several months into his recovery from a near-fatal illness, novelist Sidney Orr enters a Brooklyn stationery shop and buys a blue notebook. It is September 18th, 1982, and for the next nine days Orr will live under the spell of this blank book, within a world of eerie premonitions.

			to Shopping Basket
to My Catalogue

Description: When the new teacher first arrives, Barbara immediately senses that this woman will be different from the rest of her staff-room colleagues. But Barbara is not the only one to feel that Sheba Hart is special, and before too long Sheba is involved in an illicit affair with a pupil. Barbara finds the relationship abhorrent, of course, but she is the only adult in whom Sheba can properly confide. So when the liaison is found out and Sheba's life falls apart, Barbara is there...

			to Shopping Basket
to My Catalogue

Description: Baltimore, 1849. The body of Edgar Allan Poe has been buried in an unmarked grave. The public, the press, even Poe’s family and friends accept the conclusion that Poe was a second-rate writer who died a drunkard. But none of this deters a young Baltimore lawyer named Quentin Clark, an ardent admirer who risks his own career and reputation in a passionate crusade to salvage Poe’s. Clark discovers that Poe’s last days are riddled with vital unanswered questions. The police, it seems, may be concealing things. But just when Poe’s death looks destined to remain a mystery Quentin realises he must find the one person who can solve this strange case: the real-life model for Poe’s brilliant fictional detective character, C. Auguste Dupin, the hero of ingenious tales of crime and detection. Clark successfully recruits the man he believes to have inspired Poe’s Dupin only to be confronted by another claiming to be the true model and a dangerous race between the two master detectives begins, each seeking to prove he is the real ‘Dupin’ by solving the mystery of Poe’s death. In short order, Clark finds himself enmeshed in sinister machinations involving international political agents, a female assassin, the corrupt Baltimore slave trade and the lost secrets of Poe’s final hours. With his own future hanging in the balance, he must turn master investigator himself to unchain his now imperiled fate from that of Poe. The Poe Shadow is a beautifully detailed, ingeniously plotted tale of suspense which opens a thrilling new window on the truth behind Poe’s demise, literary history’s most persistent enigma.

			to Shopping Basket
to My Catalogue

Description: This is a wonderful, beautiful epic of a novel. Set in Afghanistan and the United States between the 1970s to the present day, it is a heartbreaking tale of a young boy, Amir, and his best friend who are torn apart. This is a classic word-of-mouth novel and is sure to become as universally loved as The God of Small Things and The Glass Palace.

			to Shopping Basket
to My Catalogue

Description: Restless is yet another tour de force from William Boyd. Exploring the devastating consequences of duplicity and betrayal it is a thrilling novel that captures the drama of the Second World War and a remarkable portrait of a female spy. Full of suspense, emotion and history, this is storytelling at its very finest.
What happens to your life when everything you thought you knew about your mother turns out to be an elaborate lie? Ruth Gilmartin discovers the strange and haunting truth about her mother, Sally, during the long hot summer of 1976.
For Sally Gilmartin is really Eva Delectorskaya, a Russian émigré. In 1939 Eva is a beautiful twenty-eight year old living in Paris. As war breaks out, she is recruited for the British Secret Service by Lucas Romer, a mysterious, patrician Englishman. Under his tutelage she learns to become the perfect spy: to be keen, quick, alert, and most importantly to trust no one, not even the people she most loves. Danger is everywhere.

			to Shopping Basket
to My Catalogue

Description: The story of an old man's tragic fishing-trip, following the original publication of which Hemingway was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954.

			to Shopping Basket
to My Catalogue

Description: Rob is a music junkie who owns record shop in Islington. Unable to make his relationship with Laura work, he seeks refuge in the company of the two hopeless guys, and in a one night stand, only to find that life with Laura has its unexpected attractions.

			to Shopping Basket
to My Catalogue