The youngest captain in His Majesty's Navy, with a reputation for landing impossible assignments, Lord Ramage is dispatched to the Caribbean islands of Martinique and Diamond Rock. The mission seems humdrum: barricade the French within Fort Royal. But sent to sea in the Juno with a crew grown restless and undisciplined under the prior commmand of a drunk, Ramage realizes his vssel may not be up to battle with the French.

Anyone who has read J.D. Salinger's New Yorker stories ? particularly A Perfect Day for Bananafish, Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut, The Laughing Man, and For Esme ? With Love and Squalor, will not be surprised by the fact that his first novel is fully of children. The hero-narrator of THE CATCHER IN THE RYE is an ancient child of sixteen, a native New Yorker named Holden Caulfield. Through circumstances that tend to preclude adult, secondhand description, he leaves his prep school in Pennsylvania and goes underground in New York City for three days. The boy himself is at once too simple and too complex for us to make any final comment about him or his story. Perhaps the safest thing we can say about Holden is that he was born in the world not just strongly attracted to beauty but, almost, hopelessly impaled on it. There are many voices in this novel: children's voices, adult voices, underground voices-but Holden's voice is the most eloquent of all. Transcending his own vernacular, yet remaining marvelously faithful to it, he issues a perfectly articulated cry of mixed pain and pleasure. However, like most lovers and clowns and poets of the higher orders, he keeps most of the pain to, and for, himself. The pleasure he gives away, or sets aside, with all his heart. It is there for the reader who can handle it to keep.

In Education of a Felon, the reigning champion of prison novelists finally tells his own story. The son of an alcoholic stagehand father and a Busby Berkeley chorus girl, Bunker was--at seventeen--the youngest inmate ever in San Quentin. His hard-won experiences on L.A.'s meanest streets and in and out of prison gave him the material to write some of the grittiest and most affecting novels of our time.
From smoking a joint in the gas chamber to leaving fingerprints on a knife connected to a serial kiler, from Hollywood's steamy undersde to swimming in the Neptune pool at San Simeon, Bunker delivers a memoir as colorful as any of his novels and as compelling as the life he's lead.

"Mr. Vidal demonstrates a political imagination and insider's sagacity equaled by no other practicing fiction writer I can think of. And like the earlier novels in his historical cycle, Empire is a wonderfully vivid documentary drama." —The New York Times Book Review

In this extraordinarily powerful epic Gore Vidal recreates America's Gilded Age—a period of promise and possibility, of empire-building and fierce political rivalries. In a vivid and beathtaking work of fiction, where the fortunes of a sister and brother intertwine with the fates of the generation, their country, and some of the greatest names of their day, including President McKinley, Theodore Roosevelt, William Jennings Bryan, William and Henry James, the Astors, the Vanderbilts, and the Whitneys, Gore Vidal sweeps us from the nineteenth century into the twentieth, from the salvaged republic of Lincoln to a nation boldly reaching for the world.


From the Paperback edition.

February 1806: Vice-Admiral Sir Richard Bolitho carries the news of Trafalgar to southern Africa, where he is to aid British ground forces in any way he can to retake Cape Town from the Dutch. Impatient to be home, Bolitho decides yet again that the boldest measures are best, and proves to the army that brave men do not die in vain.

The beguiling story of a past rekindled, and one of Haruki Murakami’s most touching novels.

Hajime has arrived at middle age with a loving family and an enviable career, yet he feels incomplete. When a childhood friend, now a beautiful woman, shows up with a secret from which she is unable to escape, the fault lines of doubt in Hajime’s quotidian existence begin to give way. Rich, mysterious, and quietly dazzling, in South of the Border, West of the Sun the simple arc of one man’s life becomes the exquisite literary terrain of Murakami’s remarkable genius.

Most significant of the Russian novelist's early stories (1846) offers a straight-faced treatment of a hallucinatory theme. Golyadkin senior is a powerless target of persecution by Golyadkin junior, his double in almost every respect. Familiar Dostoyevskan themes of helplessness, victimization, scandal--beautifully handled in small masterpiece.

Stella Brentwood, a former anthropologist, has retired to a small Somerset village. She tries to adjust to her new surroundings and sinister neighbours whilst assessing the relationships and explorations which have defined the spiderweb of her life.

An astonishingly imaginative detective story, an account of a disintegrating marriage, and an excavation of the buried secrets from Japan’s forgotten campaign in Manchuria during World War II. Now with a new introduction by the author.

In a Tokyo suburb, a young man named Toru Okada searches for his wife’s missing cat—and then for his wife as well—in a netherworld beneath the city’s placid surface. As these searches intersect, he encounters a bizarre group of allies and antagonists. Gripping, prophetic, and suffused with comedy and menace, this is one of Haruki Murakami’s most acclaimed and beloved novels.

'A landmark, not in the West Indian, but in the contemporary novel.' C. L. R. James 'First-class talent.' The Voice Calvary Hill - poverty stricken, pot-holed and rubbish-strewn - is home to an ignored community who get to flaunt their personas in masquerade during the yearly town Carnival. Aldrick, the dashing "king of the hill" lives for Carnival and his chance to play the powerful dragon. But as his friends and neighbours strive for a better life, for Aldrick it will take one more masquerade - this time involving guns and hostages - for the illusion of power to become reality.

The first ever selection of her stories, from her earliest published work in 1968 to her latest in 1994. Her star is in the ascendant - winner of the 1994 W.H. Smith Award, shortlisted for the second time in 1995 for the Irish Times International Fiction Award. This wonderful selection of the greatest stories will demonstrate her genius, her versatility, her extraordinary humanity, and will delight new readers as well as her fans.

'The Thirteen Gun Salute' opens with Jack Aubrey reinstated to his command and sailing on a secret mission with a hand-picked crew, most of them shipmates from the adventures and lucrative voyages of earlier years. Patrick O'Brian's resourcefulness is a sure warrant that things will not turn out as his readers or his characters expect. Twists and turns, sub-plots, echoes from the past, these are the only certainties in this astonishing 'roman fleuve'. Distant waters, exotic scenes, flora and fauna to satisfy Aubrey's old friend Stephen Maturin's innocent curiosity, as well as the scope for his cloak and dagger work, enrich its flow. The ending of the book leaves the reader more than usually impatient for its successor.

'Patrick O'Brian is one of the most compelling and brilliant novelists of his time with a huge band of admirers in all manner of places. Beyond his superbly elegant writing, wit and originality, he showed an understanding of the nature of a floating world at the mercy of the wind and the sea which has never been surpassed.

'Jane Austen, 'sur mer''
Bob Doe, 'Times Educational Supplement'

'If you've missed Laymon, you've missed a treat' Stephen King When Sam's ex-girlfriend Cat arrives at his door, he can't believe his eyes. It's been a long time, but he's never forgotten her. But before the night is over, Cat will be lying face down on the bed, acting as bait, and Sam will be hiding in the wardrobe with a hammer in one hard and a wooden stake in the other. They won't have long to wait. The vampire is coming.

In this sequel to "Rabbit, Run, " John Updike resumes the spiritual quest of his anxious Everyman, Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom. Ten years have passed; the impulsive former athlete has become a paunchy thirty-six-year-old conservative, and Eisenhower's becalmed America has become 1969's lurid turmoil of technology, fantasy, drugs, and violence. Rabbit is abandoned by his family, his home invaded by a runaway and a radical, his past reduced to a ruined inner landscape; still he clings to semblances of decency and responsibility, and yearns to belong and to believe.

As a sportswriter, Frank Bascombe makes his living studying people--men, mostly--who live entirely within themselves. This is a condition that Frank himself aspires to. But at thirty-eight, he suffers from incurable dreaminess, occasional pounding of the heart, and the not-too-distant losses of a career, a son, and a marriage. In the course of the Easter week in which Ford's moving novel transpires, Bascombe will end up losing the remnants of his familiar life, though with his spirits soaring.

In the tales that make up The Elephant Vanishes, the imaginative genius that has made Haruki Murakami an international superstar is on full display.

In these stories, a man sees his favorite elephant vanish into thin air; a newlywed couple suffers attacks of hunger that drive them to hold up a McDonald’s in the middle of the night; and a young woman discovers that she has become irresistible to a little green monster who burrows up through her backyard. By turns haunting and hilarious, in The Elephant Vanishes Murakami crosses the border between separate realities—and comes back bearing remarkable treasures.

Includes the story "Barn Burning," which is the basis for the major motion picture Burning.

A relentlessly inventive novel that dives deep into the very nature of consciousness.

Across two parallel narratives, Murakami draws readers into a mind-bending universe in which Lauren Bacall, Bob Dylan, a split-brained data processor, a deranged scientist, his shockingly undemure granddaughter, and various thugs, librarians, and subterranean monsters collide to dazzling effect. What emerges is a hyperkinetic novel that is at once hilariously funny and a deeply serious meditation on the nature and uses of the mind.

One of the greatest science fiction novels ever published, Stranger in a Strange Land's original manuscript had 50,000 words cut. Now they have been reinstated for this special 30th anniversary trade edition. A Mars-born earthling arrives on this planet for the first time as an adult, and the sensation he creates teaches Earth some unforgettable lessons. "A brilliant mind-bender".--Kurt Vonnegut.

The novel on which the major 1985 film was based. Sometimes Molina and Valentin talk all night long in the still darkness of their cell. Each has always been alone and in danger of betrayal, but in Cell 7 each surrenders to the other something of himself that he has never surrendered before.

Hollywood. The city where dreams are made.

On the losing side of a bloody East Coast crime war, Danny Ryan is now on the run. The Mafia, the cops, the FBI all want him dead or in prison. With his little boy, his elderly father and the tattered remnants of his loyal crew of soldiers, he makes the classic American migration to California to start a new life.

But the Feds track him down and want Danny to do them a favor that could make him a fortune or kill him. And when Hollywood starts shooting a film of his former life, Danny demands a piece of the action and begins to rebuild his criminal empire.

Then he falls in love. With a beautiful movie star who has a dark past of her own. As their worlds collide in an explosion that could destroy them both, Danny Ryan has to fight for his life in a city where dreams are born. Or where they go to die.

From the shores of Rhode Island to the deserts of California where bodies disappear, from the power corridors of Washington where the real criminals operate to the fabled movie studios of Hollywood where the real money is made, City of Dreams is a sweeping saga of family, love, revenge, survival and the fierce reality behind the dream.

'Razor-sharp' Zadie Smith An electrifying, prizewinning short story collection from the Booker-shortlisted author of Eileen and My Year of Rest and Relaxation. There's something eerily unsettling about Ottessa Moshfegh's stories, something almost dangerous while also being delightful - and often even weirdly hilarious. Her characters are all unsteady on their feet; all yearning for connection and betterment, in very different ways, but each of them seems destined to be tripped up by their own baser impulses. The flesh is weak; the timber is crooked; people are cruel to each other, and stupid, and hurtful, but beauty comes from strange sources, and the dark energy surging through these stories is oddly and powerfully invigorating. One of the most gifted and exciting young writers in America, she shows us uncomfortable things, and makes us look at them forensically - until we find, suddenly, that we are really looking at ourselves. 'Moshfegh's writing is cinematic - vivid, immediate' TLS

On the outskirts of Durban, a car is hijacked. The owner, Suzanne Fessey, fights back and kills one thief but the other, wounded, escapes with her baby strapped into the back seat. Called in to pursue the missing vehicle are helicopter tracker pilot Nia Carras, and wildlife researcher Mike Dunn, the only man nearby on the ground who can follow the car. The police have bigger problems; a suicide bomber has killed the visiting American ambassador, and chaos has descended on KwaZulu-Natal. As Mike and Nia track the missing baby through game reserves from Zululand to Zimbabwe, they soon realise that Suzanne is much more than a worried mother, and that the war on terror has erupted in their part of the world.

Six severed arms are discovered buried in a forest clearing. They are arranged in a mysterious circle, and appear to belong to missing girls between the ages of eight and thirteen. But the rest of the bodies are nowhere to be found.

Criminologist Goran Gavila is given the case. A dishevelled, instinctively rebellious man, he is forced to work with young female police officer Mila Vasquez. Lithe, boyish, answering to no one, Mila has a reputation as a specialist in missing children. She also has a tragic history of her own that has left her damaged, unable to feel or to relate to others. Theirs is a fiery but strangely affecting working relationship and as they uncover more secrets about the dark secrets in the forest, their lives are increasingly in each other's hands...

A gripping literary thriller that has taken Italy by storm, The Whisperer has been as sensational a bestseller in Europe as the Stieg Larsson novels. It is that rare creation: a thought-provoking, intelligent literary novel that is also utterly unputdownable.

A los sesenta y tres años, Álvaro Mutis retomó el personaje que había aparecido esporádicamente en su poesía y lo convirtió en la figura central de un ciclo narrativo compuesto por siete novelas, escritas entre 1986 y 1993, a las que el propio autor dio la título general de Empresas y tribulaciones de Maqroll el Gaviero. Esta edición recoge el ciclo ficcional completo de Maqroll el Gaviero, protagonista de siete novelas: La nieve del Almirante, Ilona llega con la lluvia, Un bel morir, La última escala del Tramp Steamer, Amirbar, Abdul Bashur, soñador de navíos , y Tríptico de mar y tierra. Maqroll el Gaviero se ha ganado un lugar como uno de los personajes míticos de la literatura universal. En palabras de Javier Reverte, constituye "un verdadero monumento de la literatura latinoamericana contemporánea."