A revolver shot rings through a Whitehall office one hot afternoon in the middle of an English summer. A Government official has apparently shot himself, but the circumstances are questionable – prompting Octavian Gray, head of the department in which the dead man worked, to investigate. Lawyer John Ducane is charged with the task, interviewing other civil servants by day, and by night attempting repeatedly — and unsuccessfully — to break up with his mistress. When Ducane travels to Gray’s Dorset home everything becomes even more mysterious and nothing is quite as it seems.

Plagued by nightmarish memories of the trenches where he saw his brother die, Nick's grandfather Gordie lays dying as Nick struggles to keep the peace in his increasingly fractious home. As Nick's suburban family loses control over their world, Nick begins to learn his grandfather's buried secrets and comes to understand the power of old wounds to leak into the present. As a study of the power of memory and loss, Another World conveys with extraordinary intensity the ways in which the violent past returns to haunt and distort the present.

Puck rhymes with f*ck for a reason... And I intended to fully explore that reason, as soon as he finished rescuing me, along with the other women I had been kidnapped with. One of whom was a sassy, saucy woman named Layla. I tried to convince her, and myself, that Puck Lawson wasn't my type. She just laughed. "Honey, Puck isn't anyone's type," she told me. "You don't go looking for guys like Puck. They find you, and somehow, you're never quite able to walk away after that." Although, I had a feeling I might be unable to walk at all by the time he was finished with me...

In his compelling new work of fiction, Aravind Adiga has imagined the small Indian city of Kittur, an everytown nestling on the coast south of Goa and north of Calicut. Through the myriad and distinctive voices of its inhabitants, an entire Indian world comes vividly and unforgettably to life. From a middle-aged Communist to an Islamic terrorist; from the young children of a Tamil building-site worker to a privileged and alienated schoolboy; from an idealistic journalist to a Brahmin housemaid, Adiga has produced a microcosm of Indian life in the 80s, the years between the assassinations of Indira Gandhi and her son Rajiv. Muslim, Christian and Hindu, high-caste and low-caste, rich and poor: all of Indian life - the 'sorrowful parade of humanity' - is here. Journeying through Kittur's streets and schoolyards, bedrooms and businesses, its inner workings and outer limits, Adiga conjures a remarkable fictional landscape. Sizzling with acid observations, and textured with wicked humour and gentle humanity, Between the Assassinations is a triumph of voice and imagination.

A new title from the author of The Flea Palace, shortlisted for the Independent Prize for Foreign Fiction and chosen for Waterstone’s 2005 Summer Reading promotion. In her prize-wining novel, The Gaze, Shafak explores the subject of body image and desirability. An overweight woman and her lover, a dwarf, are sick of being stared at wherever they go, and decide to reverse roles. The man goes out wearing make up, and the woman draws a moustache on her face. The couple deal with the gaze of passers by in different ways. The woman wants to hide away from the world, while the man meets them head on, even compiling his own ‘Dictionary of the Gaze’ to show the powerful effects a simple look can have. The narrative of The Gaze is intertwined with the dwarf’s dictionary entries and the story of a bizarre freak-show organized in Istanbul in the 1880s as Shafak explores the damage which can be done by our simple desire to look at other people.

From New York Times Bestseller, Mimi Jean Pamfiloff, Comes OH, HENRY, Book Two of the Ohellno Series. (Stand Alone Story w/ Teaser for Next Book.) SHE’S GOT ME BY THE FOOTBALLS… My name is Henry Walton, and though I’ve been called many things throughout my life—tree trunk, moose, walrus—I am now six foot five, solid muscle, and the hottest defensive end in the NFL college draft. This is the moment I’ve been waiting for: fame, women, and glory. Just one problem: I’m suddenly in a bad slump. And it started the moment I got dumped by Elle, the nerdy goddess with thick glasses, a smokin’ hot body, and a genius IQ. So what gives? We only dated for a few weeks, and it’s not like I’ve missed her. (Much.) Regardless, all the facts point to one conclusion. Elle is my lucky nerd-charm. Call me superstitious, but I have to get her back before I lose everything. Even if she’s the last girl I should want and she now hates my guts.

It begins by chance: Leo receives emails in error from an unknown woman called Emmi. Being polite he replies, and Emmi writes back. A few brief exchanges are all it takes to spark a mutual interest in each other, and soon Emmi and Leo are sharing their innermost secrets and longings. The erotic tension simmers, and, despite Emmi being happily married it seems only a matter of time before they will meet in person. Will their feelings for each other survive the test of a real-life encounter? And if so, what then? Love Virtually is a funny, fast-paced and absorbing experience, with plenty of twists and turns, about a love affair conducted by email.

The award-winning author of The Yellow Birds returns with an extraordinary debut poetry collection. National Book Award finalist, Iraq war veteran, novelist and poet Kevin Powers creates a deeply affecting portrait of a life shaped by war. Letter Composed During a Lull in the Fighting captures the many moments that comprise a soldier's life: driving down the Texas highway; waiting for the unknown in the dry Iraq heat; writing a love letter; listening to a mother recount her dreams. Written with evocative language and discernment, Powers's poetry strives to make sense of the war and its echoes through human experience. Just as The Yellow Birds was hailed as the "first literary masterpiece produced by the Iraq war," this collection will make its mark as a powerful, enduring work (Los Angeles Times).

With the unpredictable wit and engaging warmth that has won her a loyal following, and the undeniable star quality that has made her television series an instant hit, Ellen DeGeneres brings her unique comic perspective to the page in a book of simple yet brilliant observations, outrageous dreams, and hilarious life stories.

In this retelling of the "Goldilocks, or the Three Bears" fable, Goldilocks must choose between a long walk home on an empty stomach or to throw caution to the wind and enter a strange house that's seemingly empty to find food. This time, however, things are a little different. Will Goldilocks repeat the same actions we all know ahead of time? Will the outcome be the same?The fable "The Story of the Three Bears". better known to modern audiences as "Goldilocks and the Three Bears", is a classic cautionary tale of a young girl's rash impulses getting the better of her and leading to an unfavorable outcome. She trespasses into the bears' cottage, eats all their porridge, sits in their rocking chairs, and finally lays in their beds before getting caught and scared off or eaten by the bears. Its message is clear: don't let your impulses get the better of you and end up getting punished for doing something rash.But what if things were different? What if instead of just being a bored young girl in a forest, Goldilocks was a young girl with an absent father left to her own devices as her mother worked to sustain them? What if she, in her carelessness, had ended up straying too far away to make it home before dark. What if she was hungry from having minimal food with her and hurt from an accident while traveling through the dark and scary woods? Maybe that small cabin in the woods would look even more tempting to her."Goldilocks, or the Three Bears" is a modern-day retelling of the Goldilocks story meant to gear it more towards a middle-school audience and to deconstruct the moral presented in the original work. It also gives more backstory to Goldilocks' actions and makes her a more sympathetic and rounded character. The story is focused more on Goldilocks' thoughts as she moves through the story that's ingrained into our public body of work and throws in a few twists to make it a more fresh experience for a modern audience.

When you read a novel by Rosamunde Pilcher you enter a special world where emotions sing from the heart. A world that lovingly captures the ties that bind us to one another-the joys and sorrows, heartbreaks and misunderstandings, and glad, perfect moments when we are in true harmony. A world filled with evocative, engrossing, and above all, enjoyable portraits of people's lives and loves, tenderly laid open for us... Caroline travels to Scotland, hoping to make contact with a brother she hasn't seen for years, and return in time for her wedding to the man her strong-willed stepmother thought so suitable. Then a sudden snow strands her in an isolated house with a young man recovering from tragedy. Both are on the brink of terrible mistakes, but perhaps they can save each other.

A magnum opus for our morally complex times from the author of *Freedom * **Young Pip Tyler doesn't know who she is. She knows that her real name is Purity, that she's saddled with $130,000 in student debt, that she's squatting with anarchists in Oakland, and that her relationship with her mother--her only family--is hazardous. But she doesn't have a clue who her father is, why her mother chose to live as a recluse with an invented name, or how she'll ever have a normal life. Enter the Germans. A glancing encounter with a German peace activist leads Pip to an internship in South America with The Sunlight Project, an organization that traffics in all the secrets of the world--including, Pip hopes, the secret of her origins. TSP is the brainchild of Andreas Wolf, a charismatic provocateur who rose to fame in the chaos following the fall of the Berlin Wall. Now on the lam in Bolivia, Andreas is drawn to Pip for reasons she doesn't understand, and the intensity of her response to him upends her conventional ideas of right and wrong. Purity is a grand story of youthful idealism, extreme fidelity, and murder. The author of The Corrections and Freedom has imagined a world of vividly original characters--Californians and East Germans, good parents and bad parents, journalists and leakers--and he follows their intertwining paths through landscapes as contemporary as the omnipresent Internet and as ancient as the war between the sexes. Purity is the most daring and penetrating book yet by one of the major writers of our time.

"Out of the secret world I once knew, I have tried to make a theatre for the larger worlds we inhabit. First comes the imagining, then the search for reality. Then back to the imagining, and to the desk where I'm sitting now." From his years serving in British Intelligence during the Cold War, to a career as a writer that took him from war-torn Cambodia to Beirut on the cusp of the 1982 Israeli invasion to Russia before and after the collapse of the Berlin Wall, le Carré has always written from the heart of modern times. In this, his first memoir, le Carré is as funny as he is incisive, reading into the events he witnesses the same moral ambiguity with which he imbues his novels. Whether he's writing about the parrot at a Beirut hotel that could perfectly mimic machine gun fire or the opening bars of Beethoven's Fifth, visiting Rwanda's museums of the unburied dead in the aftermath of the genocide, celebrating New Year's Eve 1982 with Yasser Arafat and his high command, interviewing a German woman terrorist in her desert prison in the Negev, listening to the wisdoms of the great physicist, dissident, and Nobel Prize winner Andrei Sakharov, meeting with two former heads of the KGB, watching Alec Guinness prepare for his role as George Smiley in the legendary BBC TV adaptations, or describing the female aid worker who inspired the main character in The Constant Gardener, le Carré endows each happening with vividness and humor, now making us laugh out loud, now inviting us to think anew about events and people we believed we understood. Best of all, le Carré gives us a glimpse of a writer's journey over more than six decades, and his own hunt for the human spark that has given so much life and heart to his fictional characters.

The New York Times bestselling author of Wallbanger and Rusty Nailed is back with Nuts, the first in a brand new series set in New York’s beautiful Hudson Valley. Roxie Callahan is a private chef to some of Hollywood’s wealthiest, and nastiest, calorie-counting wives. After a dairy disaster implodes her carefully crafted career in one fell ploop, she finds herself back home in upstate New York, bailing out her hippie mother and running the family diner. When gorgeous local farmer Leo Maxwell delivers her a lovely bunch of organic walnuts, Roxie wonders if a summer back home isn’t such a bad idea after all. Leo is heavily involved in the sustainable slow food movement, and he likes to take his time. In all things. Roxie is determined to head back to the west coast as soon as summer ends, but will the pull of lazy fireflies and her very own Almanzo Wilder be enough to keep her home for good? Salty. Spicy. Sweet. Nuts. Go on, grab a handful.

One man’s quest for his destiny leads him to the New World and into the heart of the American Revolution   Meet Phillipe Charboneau: the illegitimate son and unrecognized heir of the Duke of Kentland. Upon the Duke’s death, Phillipe is denied his birthright and left to build a life of his own. Seeking all that the New World promises, he leaves London for America, shedding his past and preparing for the future by changing his name to Philip Kent. He arrives at the brink of the American Revolution, which tests his allegiances in ways he never imagined. The first volume of John Jakes’s wildly successful and highly addictive Kent Family Chronicles, The Bastard is a triumph of historical fiction. This ebook features an illustrated biography of John Jakes including rare images from the author’s personal collection.