In the hilarious tradition of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Rob Reid takes you on a headlong journey through the outer reaches of the universe-and the inner workings of our absurdly dysfunctional music industry. Low-level entertainment lawyer Nick Carter thinks it's a prank, not an alien encounter, when a redheaded mullah and a curvaceous n...

The new novel from David Baddiel, comedian, columnist and author of the critically-praised The Secret Purposes. In New York's Mt. Sinai hospital, the world's greatest living writer, Eli Gold, is dying. Witnessing his death are his precocious 8-year-old daughter by his present (fifth) wife, his anxiety-ridden 44-year-old son from his third marriage,...

Peter Grant is learning magic fast. And its just as well - he's already had run ins with the deadly supernatural children of the Thames and a terrifying killer in Soho. Progression in the Police Force is less easy. Especially when you work in a department of two. A department that doesn't even officially exist. A department that if you did describe...

A mutilated body in Crawley. Another killer on the loose. The prime suspect is one Robert Weil - an associate of the twisted magician known as the Faceless Man? Or just a common garden serial killer? Before PC Peter Grant can get his head round the case, a town planner going under a tube train and a stolen grimoire are adding to his case-load. So f...

Six weeks before she is due to take up her position as the first female head of MI6, Amelia Levene vanishes without a trace. Her disappearance is the gravest crisis MI6 has faced for more than a decade. There has been no ransom demand, no word from foreign intelligence services, no hint of a defection. Should news of Levene's disappearance leak out...

Jack Henderson, estranged from his ex-wife and grown-up daughters, is involved in a horrific accident. His younger brother Douglas begins an affair with a woman he barely knows, risking everything. And Angus, the eldest of the Henderson boys, finds himself suddenly in freefall having unexpectedly been laid off from his job. As the three brothers he...

September 1919: twenty-one-year-old Tristan Sadler takes a train from London to Norwich to deliver some letters to Marian Bancroft. Tristan fought alongside Marian's brother Will during the Great War, but in 1917 Will laid down his guns on the battlefield, declared himself a conscientious objector and was shot as a traitor, an act which has brought...

Emily is a traumatised burns victim, Arta a Kosovan refugee recovering from a rape. David Temple is a longterm depressive, while the Rt Hon Ralph Hall MP lives in terror of his drink problem being exposed. Very different Londoners, but they share one thing: every week they spend an hour at the Prince Regent hospital, revealing the secrets of their...

On a moonlit night in 1943 an Indian princess was parachuted in to occupied France to join the Resistance as a radio operator code-named Aurora. Daughter of a Sufi mystic, she had declined the Special Operations Executive firearms training because she did not want to kill anyone - yet she landed in Brittany knowing that she had a 50 per cent chance...

"I do not think I want to be married at all. I want to be rich. Very rich..." When Henrietta Bascombe opens a confectionary shop in order to turn her pittance of an inheritance into a fortune, her friends are shocked to hear of such a well-bred lady going into trade. The Earl of Carrisdown is both drawn to and repelled by her shopgirl status. Undau...

Veterinary surgeon Clara Benning is young and intelligent, but practically a recluse. Disfigured by a childhood accident, she lives alone and shies away from human contact wherever possible. But when a man dies following a supposed snake bite, the victim's post mortem shows a higher concentration of venom than could ever be found in a single snake....

It's two fifteen a.m., you're in bed alone and you're woken by the phone. Your eyes are wide and your body tense before it has completed so much as a single ring. And as you wake, in the tiny moment between sleep and consciousness, you know already that something is wrong. Only someone bad would call at such an hour. Or someone good, but with bad n...

NOW YOU SEE HER... Gillian is haunted by the disappearance of her little girl two years ago. A devastating fire burned down their home, but she remains convinced her daughter survived. NOW YOU DON'T... Ten-year-old Tom lives by the town's neglected churchyard. Is he the only one who sees the strange, solitary child playing there? And what is she tr...

Peter is 44, prosperous, childless, a player in the NY contemporary art dealing scene. He has been married to Rebecca for close on 20 years. Their marriage is sound. But when Mizzy, Rebecca's brother, comes to stay, his world is turned upside down. Returning to their flat, Peter sees Rebecca's outline in the shower. But when he opens the shower doo...

Meet Vish Puri, India's most private investigator. Portly, persistent and unmistakably Punjabi, he cuts a determined swathe through modern India's swindlers, cheats and murderers. In hot and dusty Delhi, where call centres and malls are changing the ancient fabric of Indian life, Puri's main work comes from screening prospective marriage partners,...

Tom Sedley's idyllic summer vacation in a leafy post war suburb of north London came to an abrupt and shocking end on the 14th September, 1948 when his sister was brutally murdered in woodland near his house. A tramp was arrested for the crime but for the young boy it was the end of childhood and the beginning of a lifelong search to discover what...

On they went singing 'Eternal Memory', and whenever they stopped, the sound of their feet, the horses and the gusts of wind seemed to carry on their singing-Doctor Zhivago is the epic novel of Russia in the throes of revolution and one of the greatest love stories ever told. Yuri Zhivago, physician and poet, wrestles with the new order and confront...

New York's Lombardo's Steak House is famous for three reasons - the menu, the clientele, and now the gruesome murder of an infamous mob lawyer. Effortlessly, the assassin slips through the police's fingers, and his absence sparks a blaze of accusations about who ordered the hit. Seated at a nearby table, reporter Nick Daniels is conducting a once-i...

Ruby and Grace had grown up in the slums of Middle Court, the poorest place in Hull. Friends since early childhood, they had supported each other in bad times and good. Ruby's ma, Bess, addicted to the opium which dulled the pain of her miserable existence, tried hard to be a good mother, but without too much success, while Grace's parents, Bob and...

After twenty years of marriage, Nina had offloaded serial philanderer Joe and was happy enough, thank you, coping alone with their two demanding daughters and her own hectic life. It felt like freedom, not having to wonder constantly where Joe was, who with and up to what. But into Nina's new, carefree life some disturbing elements began to appear....

A lovely widow plans to marry a French count in this historical romance by bestselling author Marion Chesney. It was true. The lovely young widow Lady Charteris-Delphine to her friends-had agreed to abide by her parents' wishes and marry the Comte Saint-Pierre. Delphine's parents had long since died in the Terror, but when she learned of their wish...