1956, the Scottish Highlands: Aaron and Robbie, a schoolmaster's son and a farmer's boy, are fast friends with a shared passion for diving, but very divergent ideas of what they will do with their lives. Meanwhile, Mark and Ally, bright pupils at Edinburgh's grandest private school, are aspiring to make change in the world - one through high finance, the other on the political stage. And Joseph, heir to an Aberdeen trawler-fishing dynasty, is brooding over whether his true ambitions are set higher than his father's succession plan. For each of them, the discovery of oil under the North Sea will make their dreams achievable. But behind the promise and temptation of 'black gold,' there is a price to be paid; and they will discover that oil can overthrow relationships, turn friends into foes, and even put lives in peril.

Franz Kafka's Metamorphosis - arguably the greatest, most famous and most unnerving short work of literary fiction ever written - is a hundred years old in 2015. This centenary edition offers the first complete English translation of Kafka's text (by A. L. Lloyd from 1937) plus a richly detailed new introduction to the story by novelist Richard T. Kelly, describing its genesis and the life of its creator. In The Metamorphosis' unforgettable opening sentence we meet travelling salesman Gregor Samsa - on a rare overnight stay in the apartment he shares with his family, paid for by his ceaseless labour - who awakes one morning 'from a troubled dream' to find himself 'changed in his bed to some kind of monstrous vermin'. 'There is nothing which The Metamorphosis could be surpassed by - one of the few great, perfect poetic works of this century.' Elias Canetti 'My greatest masterpieces of twentieth-century prose are, in this order, Joyce's Ulysses, Kafka's [Metamorphosis], Bely's Petersburg and the first half of Proust's fairy tale In Search of Lost Time.' Vladimir Nabokov

As Home Secretary, David Blaylock oversees the police, border control and the struggle against domestic terrorism. Some say the job is impossible; Blaylock insists he is tough enough. Constantly in his mind is the threat of an attack on Britain's streets. But over the course of one autumn, Blaylock finds that the danger is much more personal . . .