Literature

"The Red Notebook" brings together in one volume all of Paul Auster's short, true-life stories--a remarkable collection of tales that documents the curious, miraculous, and sometimes catastrophic turns of everyday reality.

The discovery of a long-lost airliner . . . A modern-day kidnapping . . . And the return of the most terrifying evil the world has ever seen. When a kidnapping captures the attention of treasure-hunting team Sam and Remi Fargo, they find themselves on the trail of the legendary Romanov Ransom - a Russian fortune stolen by the Nazis during World War II. Hunting a neo-Nazi faction across Europe, North Africa and South America is their greatest quest yet. They must prevent the rise of a Fourth Reich, or witness the resurgence of the greatest evil of the modern world. From the finest adventure writer alive, Clive Cussler's dark and thrilling mystery will keep you turning the pages late into the night.

Soldier. Farmer. Felon.

Writer. Father. Lover.

One man, many lives. Born in 1799, Cashel Greville Ross experiences myriad lives: joyous and devastating, years of luck and unexpected loss. Moving from County Cork to London, from Waterloo to Zanzibar, Cashel seeks his fortune across continents in war and in peace.

He faces a terrible moral choice in a village in Sri Lanka as part of the East Indian Army. He enters the world of the Romantic Poets in Pisa. In Ravenna he meets a woman who will live in his heart for the rest of his days.

As he travels the world as a soldier, a farmer, a felon, a writer, a father, a lover, he experiences all the vicissitudes of life and, through the accelerating turbulence of the nineteenth century, he discovers who he truly is. This is the romance of life itself, and the beating heart of The Romantic. From one of Britain's best-loved and bestselling writers comes an intimate yet panoramic novel set across the nineteenth century.

'Picaresque, big-hearted and moving, this is Boyd at the top of his game' Guardian'There are few reading pleasures as great as giving in to a William Boyd novel' Sunday Times'One of our best contemporary storytellers' Spectator'Simply the best realistic storyteller of his generation' Sebastian Faulks

A captivating novel of love and intrigue. Everyone expected Isabella Charteris, beautiful, sheltered and aristocratic, to marry her cousin Rupert when he came back from the War. It would have been such a suitable marriage. How strange then that John Gabriel, an ambitious and ruthless war hero, should appear in her life. For Isabella, the price of love would mean abandoning her dreams of home and happiness forever. For Gabriel, it would destroy his chance of a career and all his ambitions... Famous for her ingenious crime books and plays, Agatha Christie also wrote about crimes of the heart, six bittersweet and very personal novels, as compelling and memorable as the best of her work.

A brilliant display of pyrotechnics, a compelling tour de force ... by a master jeweller of polished prose' The New York TimesA private detective is hired to find a missing person, but nothing is normal about this case. Why has the beautiful, alcoholic wife of the vanished salesman waited over half a year to search for him? Why are the only clues a photo and a matchbox? As the investigator's ever-more puzzling hunt takes him into the labyrinthine depths of the urban underworld, he begins to wonder if it is in fact he who is lost. An intoxicating blend of noir thriller and surreal dream, The Ruined Map questions identity itself. 'An exciting, imaginative and entertaining novel' San Francisco Chronicle

1339. A dark and difficult time. Romania is rent by disputes among warring royal houses striving for ascendancy. Knights errant, blood-thirsty nobles, scheming courtiers and mysterious travelers in the night play leading parts in a bloody game of supremacy. The monk Dimitris Spartino, one of the last survivors of the patrician Spartinos family, is forced to flee when a man of royal descent slays his brother and tries to murder him as well. As ha and his retinue are trying to make their ay to Constantinople, he encounters an enigmatic creature that is worshipped as a god, the sacred child. From that moment on, fate unites them in a terrible secret.

The epic Viking Age stories that inspired J. R. R. Tolkien and Wagner's Ring cycleWritten in thirteenth-century Iceland but based on ancient Norse poetry cycles, The Saga of the Volsungs combines mythology, legend and sheer human drama. It tells of the cursed treasure of the Rhine, a sword reforged and a magic ring of power, and at its heart are the heroic deeds of Sigurd the dragon slayer, who acquires magical knowledge from one of Odin's Valkyries. One of the great books of world literature, the saga is an unforgettable tale of princely jealousy, unrequited love, greed, vengeance and the downfall of a dynasty. Translated with an Introduction by Jesse L. Byock

A band of savage thirteen-year-old boys reject the adult world as illusory, hypocritical, and sentimental, and train themselves in a brutal callousness they call 'objectivity'. When the mother of one of them begins an affair with a ship's officer, he and his friends idealise the man at first; but it is not long before they conclude that he is in fact soft and romantic. They regard this disallusionment as an act of betrayal on his part - and the retribution is deliberate and horrifying.