Anasuya's father--a notorious financier and arms dealer--has disappeared. Has he been kidnapped--or murdered--or just plain dropped out of sight? His daughter claims a complete lack of interest in her father's fate. But why is she hiding on a Greek island with her mother's second husband (now her own lover), and writing obsessively in her notebooks about her father and the other members of her family? Slowly her diary starts to make sense of the disappearance--or, at least it appears to. But all is not what it seems, and Anasuya may not be the most reliable of witnesses. As much a study of strange family interactions as it is a thriller, THE BOMB-MONGER'S DAUGHTER is absolutely compulsive reading. As Mary Lord has said: " This] is an exceptionally well-written and -crafted novel] for intelligent readers who enjoy a good story just for the hell of it."

In the year 4004 AD, the entire universe of habitable worlds has been filled with human beings, thanks to an ancient teleport network and unlimited growth. Humans live on more than a hundred quadrillion terraformed planets, all woven into a bureaucratic and restrictive Empire. VALENCIES tracks a frustrated group of libertarian anarchists on the marginal planet Victoria. Kael, son of three gay doctors, and Theri, daughter of a man and woman bound by maniacal doctrinal tenets, are a young couple in a cosmos of complacent immortals. Ben and Anla the clone rage and passionately make up in a cycle of dominance and submission as old as history or myth. And slipping like a mad trickster between the four is Catsize, former commander, terrible poet crazed by two millennia of thwarted revolutions, hilarious prankster, an instigator of mischief and healer of souls. VALENCIES tells with pathos and humor a richly detailed portrait of the struggle against an Empire that's prepared to obliterate an entire world. Brian W. Aldiss said about this book: "One of the most playful SF novels of recent years."

Earth, the fantasy: the green, storied world where mankind originated. Earth, the reality: the junk planet, a dirty, dangerous place filled with detention camps, gangs and gangsters, flop houses, body parts factories, and a lawless immigrant community of aliens and humans. Ned believes the refugees from outer space have been interbreeding with cockroaches the size of dinosaurs. Em, pretty and slim, is seeking asylum; she thinks that Earth is unbelievably primitive. Space Junk is a coming-of-age tale in which true love and survival don't always walk hand-in-hand!

In the tradition of the old "Ace Doubles" (flip one book over to read the second title)--here is the sixth Wildside Double. ALIEN STARSWARM, by Robert Sheckley Salvatore commands the battleship Endymion. He's seen his share of battles and fought them bravely, too. So he doesn't hesitate when beautiful Princess Hatari pleads for his help. She wants to regain her throne, but it may be more than Salvatore can accomplish, for the deadly race known as the Balderdash has taken over the planet Melchior--and now, even his own men have turned against him HUMAN'S BURDEN, by Damien Broderick and Rory Barnes Poor Jack Wong is a clueless cadet at the Unified Space Academy when his pod is stranded on a planet of disgusting aliens. All he wants to do, other than escape, is to fulfill his proud duty to advance Earth Culture's Primary Heuristic: "Wherever possible, find the weak spot in an alien civilization and interfere as much as possible for the benefit of humanity." It's the Human's Burden But everything comes unstuck, made worse by his irritating Machiavellian AI. And that's just the start of Jack's troubles in space and time....

Jenny Kane loves weird science--but it's gone way, WAY out of control. Her mother's moved out, her dad's still moping around, and she's not sure how to cope any longer. And she keeps getting these weird phone calls from a scientist named Rod who's...where?...when?--another time zone? Another time altogether? Another reality? But that'd be crazy, wouldn't it? She also has the strangest feeling that she's done all this before. Who's this odd boy she just crashed into--this Tristan? How does she even know his name--or the fact that he can perform parlor-type "magic" tricks? Hilarious, exciting, touching, ZONES is a classic adventure of time travel: a great SF adventure that grabs you with its opening lines--and then never lets you go

"This is a comic, crazy, original crime novel. You won't find another one like it this year, or, more likely, ever." Bill Crider R. Doubting Thomas Perdue, tough Aussie former P.I. and jailbird, is in trouble, and it can only get worse. Tom's *Feng shui* consultancy implodes when some bastard drives a Mack truck through his heritage office. Fatal things keep happening to his phones. And who's been blabbing about his racehorse-doping past? The love of his life has made a ten-year vow of celibacy to the Virgin Mary. Tom's Goth daughter's girlfriend's obese sister has vanished, extremely foul play suspected. Meanwhile, an unusual racing camel named Nile Fever has become an animal of interest to the Australian Federal Police, and Tom is up to his neck in the middle of the mess. I'm Dying Here is a darkly comic crime caper that leaves no taboo, or cell phone, unviolated.

"My father is the Rev. Daimon Keith. At the age of twenty, he was abducted near a school playground by small gray aliens. Indeed, Daimon was taken up into UFOs not just that once, but from infancy, and over and again. It caused him to devote his middle years to the establishment of the Church of Jesus Christ, Time Traveler, and later Scionetics."

Rosa "Flake" Rosch is a postmodern orphan. She's forgotten her mother, and her notorious abductee father Deems has vanished--again. "Dark Gray" is Rosa's unreliable memoir of her father's zany life, from his hapless prankster youth in Australia to apotheosis as a UFO guru in the 21st century. It's the story of Rosa's indomitable mother, her weird quasi-brother Ben, Zelda the horsewife, and our whole tormented era, as we blast into hyperreality.

"Tilted on the hard slab, he knows the heavy stink of the place. What awful crap do they suck up with those lipless little mouths? The gray doctor touches his forehead with a needle--sharp, glinting--and pushes it hard into his skull."

"That life may simultaneously reduce the living to both laughter and despair is a subject few novelists tackle in one bite. Damien Broderick and Rory Barnes succeed in the near-impossible task. "Dark Gray" stands as one of the two great realist novels to tackle the notoriously non-realist theme of contact with extraterrestrials. It resides on the same (astral) plane as Alison Lurie's magisterial "Imaginary Friends."... A quite brilliant achievement."
--Rosaleen Love, author of "The Total Devotion Machine"

Finalist for the Aurealis Award and the Ditmar Award.

Wal is a dreamer: he imagines escaping from his parents by building a raft. His friend Billy is more practical. Together, they construct a makeshift craft, and sail it along the local sea coast. But Wal still dreams of adventure, and one dark night he sails into the teeth of a growing storm. In the wild hours that follow, he must find the strength to persevere--and survive! A great tale of storm and sea!

Pocket Sci-Fi is part of Pocket Reads, a superb collection of quality books that really capture children's imaginations! Pocket Reads have fantastic breadth and variety of genre, with Pocket Facts, Pocket Tales and Pocket Chillers making up the rest of the collection of independent readers. The fiction books are beautifully illustrated and are guaranteed to appeal to even the most reluctant of readers. The non-fiction readers are equally as stunning and will captivate and excite children with fascinating facts. The 105 pocket-sized fiction and non-fiction readers have each been carefully levelled to the National Curriculum and Book-Banded to ensure children make progression. You can therefore be assured that every reading experience is one that counts.