December 21, 2012, may be one of the most watched dates in history. Every 26,000 years, earth lines up with the exact center of our galaxy. At 11:11 on December 21, 2012, this event happens again, and the ancient Maya calculated that it would mark the end, not only of this age, but of human consciousness as we know it. But what will actually happen...

A special audiobook of interviews featuring some famous names in the world of Shakespeare performance. Discussing their experience of Shakespeare at school and how they have been inspired to pursue careers that involve his work, this is a lovely resource for students who struggle with the Bard's works.

The Seatons, affluent members of the Protestant gentry, own The Haven, a lush, opulent estate in the Scottish countryside. The Flynns, proud Catholics to the core, spend their working days in the factories and laundry houses of industrial Glasgow. Divided by class, wealth and religion, two families could not live more different lives. However, as t...

As a boy, William Bellman commits one small cruel act that appears to have unforeseen and terrible consequences. The killing of a rook with his catapult is soon forgotten amidst the riot of boyhood games. And by the time he is grown, with a wife and children of his own, he seems indeed, to be a man blessed by fortune. Until tragedy strikes, and the...

A brilliant debut novel that brings to life an abandoned hospital where a tough-minded doctor decides to harbor a hunted young girl, with powerful consequences. In the final days of December 2004, in a small rural village in Chechnya, eight-year-old Havaa hides in the woods when her father is abducted by Russian forces. Fearing for her life, she fl...

Pat Conroy's father, Donald Patrick Conroy, was a towering figure in his son's life. The Marine Corps fighter pilot was often brutal, cruel, and violent; as Pat says, "I hated my father long before I knew there was an English word for 'hate.'" As the oldest of seven children who were dragged from military base to military base across the South, Pat...

Michael Goldfarb looks back to the Europe of the 1930s and asks how artists, writers and film-makers responded to the poverty, mass unemployment and poltical instability of the Great Depression. Through the work of Bertolt Brecht, George Orwell, Jean Renoir and others, Michael charts the devastating impact of the slump as economic crisis impoverish...

Lifelong friends, now in their sixties, James, a teacher, and Hugh, a TV personality, both live with attractive women twenty-five years their junior. But the age difference is a time bomb, ticking away at the heart of both relationships. Kate's hunger for a life more in keeping with her own age threatens to bring her eight years with James to an en...

Jo peered through the panel and saw - nothing. Yet someone had entered the cabin. She could hear hoarse breathing and stealthy padding footsteps. A beaker rose in the air of its own accord, then dropped to the floor...' After pursuing the Daleks through space, Doctor Who lands on the planet of Spiridon, in the midst of a tropical jungle... and find...

DI Kate Simms is on the fast track to nowhere. Five years ago she helped a colleague when she shouldn't have. She's been clawing her way back from a demotion ever since. Professor Nick Fennimore is a failed genetics student, successful gambler, betting agent, crime scene officer, chemistry graduate, toxicology specialist and one-time scientific adv...

Doctor Daniel Jackson wakes up on the floor of his SGC lab, with no memory of what happened or how he got there. With him is Lt. Hunter of SG-12 - the team that should have accompanied SG-1 on their mission to P2K-797. But now, here they are, back on Earth with the whole of Stargate Command incapacitated around them. So what happened? Why can no on...

1920s America was a place of drama, tension and hedonism. It glittered and seduced: jazz, flappers, the birth of Hollywood, and a glamorous gangster-led crime scene flourishing under prohibition, punctuated by momentous events such as the political show trials and the huge Ku Klux Klan march. It also produced a splendid array of writers, musicians...

Recently named the Best Work of American Fiction in the last 25 years by the New York Times Book Review. First published in 1987, and winner of the Pulitzer Prize, BELOVED has become a modern classic, read and re-read by people of all ages and races. Staring unflinchingly into the abyss of slavery, this spellbinding novel transforms history into a...

When Pandora picks up her older brother Edison at her local Iowa airport, she literally doesn't recognize him. In the four years since the siblings last saw each other, the once slim, hip New York jazz pianist has gained hundreds of pounds. And it's not just the weight. Imposing himself on Pandora's world, Edison breaks her husband Fletcher's handc...

Snipers in the hills overlook half the intersections in Sarajevo. In the streets below, people strive to go about their daily lives, trying to second guess when and where the next bullet will strike. One man, a cellist, defies this game of 'Sarajevo Roulette'. In memory of the city's dead, for two consecutive days, he becomes a sitting target as he...

Two months before Adolf Hitler's rise to power, a young woman is found half naked and near death in the woods outside Berlin. The only clue to her identity is a handbill advertising a lecture by Albert Einstein. Psychiatrist Martin Kirsch little knows this will be his last case. Searching for the truth about his celebrated patient, he finds profess...

London's East End in the 1950s was a vibrant place-a closeknit community of families where children made playgrounds on bombsites and a lively social scene emerged. It was into this world that Jennifer Worth entered as a young midwife. Post-war life could be a stuggle, but there was also warmth and humour. Farewell to the East End chronicles the li...

Hiram Granville, a modern Leonardo, secured more than a thousand patents during his lifetime, often just ahead of others who had already been working the same ideas. His son John, an economics genius, never lost a cent in the stock market-or any other financial deal-and was investigated for insider trading on more than one occasion. Now Cat, a docu...

The nine children of the Hegarty clan gather in Dublin for the wake of their wayward brother Liam. It wasn't the drink that killed him - although that certainly helped - it was what happened to him as a boy in his grandmother's house, in the winter of 1968. Tracing the line of hurt and redemption through three generations, this is a novel about lov...

Were things really better in the good old days? Only if you were healthy, wealthy and male. For most, life in London was one of grinding poverty, binge drinking, prostitution and gun crime. The 19th century was a time of growing awareness of the existence of an impoverished underclass - a terrifying demi-monde of criminals, tarts and no-hope low-li...

At the end of the Second World War, some of the highest ranking Nazis escaped from justice, Aided and abetted by the Vatican, they travelled down secret 'rat lines' and were taken in by shady Argentine secret agents. Vengeful Holocaust survivors and inept politicains attempted to bring them to justice and there were daring plots to kidnap or assass...