In order to stay human, Audrey has built a moat around herself; a moat of books, music and dreams. It makes her different from the echoes: the sophisticated, emotionless machines, built to resemble and work for the humans. Daniel is an echo-but he's not like the others. He has feelings he was never designed to have, and cannot explain. And when Aud...

Falling pregnant as a teenager in 1952, Philomena Lee was sent to the convent in Co. Tipperary to be looked after as a fallen woman. She cared for her baby for three years until the Church took him and sold him, like countless others, to America for adoption. She spent the next fifty years secretly searching for him, unaware that he was searching f...

A searing account of George Orwell's observations of working-class life in the bleak industrial heartlands of Yorkshire and Lancashire in the 1930s. Graphically unforgettable descriptions of social injustice, cramped slum housing, dangerous mining conditions, hunger and unemployment are written with unblinking honesty, fury and great humanity. It c...

Everyone thinks that Sophie is an orphan. Found floating in a cello case, she is the only recorded female survivor of a shipwreck on the English Channel. But Sophie remembers seeing her mother wave for help... When the child welfare agency threatens to send Sophie to an orphanage, Sophie and her guardian flee to Paris to find her mother, starting w...

Barney Willow thinks life couldn't get any worse. He's weedy, with sticky-out ears. Horrible Gavin Needle loves tormenting him. And worst of all, Dad has been missing for almost a year, and there's no sign of him ever coming home. Barney just wants to escape, and find another life. Being a cat, for example. A quiet, lazy cat. Things would be so muc...

The accomplished Corinthian Sir Richard Wyndham is wealthy, sophisticated, handsome and supremely bored. Tired of his aristocratic family constantly pressuring him to get married, he determines to run away after meeting the delightful, unconventional heroine Penelope Creed. Penelope, literally, falls into his life late one night as she hangs from t...

Fiery, strong-willed Deb Grantham, who presides over a gaming house with her aunt, is hardly the perfect wife for the young and naive Lord Mablethorpe. His lordship's family are scandalised that he proposes to marry one of 'faro's daughters', and his cousin-the proud, wealthy Max Ravenscar-decides to take the matter in hand. Ravenscar always gets h...

Molly and Jack's relationship is being torn apart by Jack's nightmares. Trapped in a place where he is taunted by eyes in the gloom, it is becoming harder for Molly to pull him free. Realising that he is being driven close to the edge, Jack decides to hunt for answers. It soon becomes clear that he must trace people from his past. But Jack could ne...

After getting a note demanding his presence, Federal Agent Aaron Falk arrives in his hometown for the first time in decades to attend the funeral of his best friend, Luke. Twenty years ago when Falk was accused of murder, Luke was his alibi. Falk and his father fled under a cloud of suspicion, saved from prosecution only because of Luke's steadfast...

Malaya, 1949. After studying law at Cambridge and time spent helping to prosecute Japanese war criminals, Yun Ling Teoh, herself the scarred lone survivor of a brutal Japanese wartime camp, seeks solace among the jungle fringed plantations of Northern Malaya where she grew up as a child. There she discovers Yugiri, the only Japanese garden in Malay...

Malcolm Polstead's Oxford life has been one of routine, ordinary even. He is happiest playing with his daemon, Asta, in their canoe, La Belle Sauvage. But now as the rain builds, the world around Malcolm and Asta is, it seems, set to become increasingly far from ordinary. Finding himself linked to a baby by the name of Lyra Belacqua, Malcolm is for...

Eva and Jim are nineteen and students at Cambridge when their paths first cross in 1958. And then there is David, Eva's then-lover, an ambitious actor who loves Eva deeply. The Versions of Us follows the three different courses their lives could take following this first meeting. Lives filled with love, betrayal, ambition but through it all is a de...

For thirty years, best friends Stephanie and Philippa have been practically inseparable. There's nothing they would not do for one another. Until a few simple words change everything. 'I need you to say that I was with you.' Both women have always believed that friendship is built on mutual selflessness, compromise and trust. Are those beliefs now...

England, 1932: Grace Hamblin, the beekeeper's daughter, knows her place and her future, until her father dies. She's alone, except for one man who she just can't shake from her thoughts. Massachusetts, 1973: Grace's daughter Trixie Valentine is in love. But when he has to go home to England, he promises to come back, if she will wait for him. Both...

For philosophically-minded Isabel Dalhousie, editor of the Review of Applied Ethics, getting through life with a clear conscience requires careful thought. And whilst juggling the arrival of baby Charlie, a passionate relationship with his father Jamie, a truce with her furious niece Cat, and struggles for authority over her son with her formidable...

Men had built cities before, but never such a city as Diaspar; for millennia its protective dome shut out the creeping decay and danger of the world outside. Once, it ruled the stars. But then, as legend had it, the Invaders came, driving humanity into this last refuge. It takes one man, a Unique, to smash the legend and discover the true nature of...

Bestselling author Alexander McCall Smith captures the strange wonderful goings on of the residents and visitors at Corduroy Mansions, Pimlico, from nasty Liberal Democrat MP Oedipus Snark to the newest resident, Pimlico Terrier Freddie de la Hay.

One night, George Duncan is woken by a noise in his garden. Impossibly, a great white crane has tumbled to earth, shot through its wing by an arrow. Unexpectedly moved, George helps the bird, and from the moment he watches it fly off, his life is transformed. The next day, a kind but enigmatic woman walks into George's shop. Suddenly a new world op...

There are four words Ceri D'Altroy never wants to hear: 'I took your advice'. She's all for following your heart and living your dreams, but not because she's told you to do so. Unfortunately, having moved away from London to become a psychology lecturer, all she seems to do is inspire people to change their lives. There's Ed, who's decided to ask...

MI5 Intelligence Officer Liz Carlyle is summoned to a meeting with her boss Charles Wetherby, head of the Service's Counter-Espionage Branch. His counterpart over at MI6 has received alarming intelligence from a high-placed Syrian source. The future of the whole of the Middle East is at stake and the deadline for action is drawing ever closer...

The body of a woman has been discovered inside the gates of MIT, draped in an unusual cloth. An examination reveals that the body is covered in a fine dust that under ultra-violet light fluoresces blood-red, emerald-green and sapphire-blue. As Kay Scarpetta pieces together the evidence, she draws herself and her team deeper into the dark world of d...