A comic novel set in England in 1838, about the adventures of a young country girl while in London to see the coronation of Queen Victoria.

    Bates makes good use of his intimate knowledge of the world of pilots (anyone who has read his 'Stories of Flying Officer X' will appreciate just how deep was that knowledge); and his understanding of the complexities of human relationships. The novel was televised by the BBC in September 1979. This novel first appeared in a Penguin edition in 1967.

    A character gets an idea in his head, a hook on his emotions, a need that has to be fulfilled, and he does everything possible to carry through, no matter how difficult. Written with the haunting emotional intensity and lightning pace that has made David Morrell the master of high-action suspense writing, this collection of stories will leave you dazzled.

    Accompanied by an old man haunted by memories of the war; an amorous dog named Sammy Davis, Junior, Junior; and the unforgettable Alex, a young Ukrainian translator who speaks in a sublimely butchered English, Jonathan is led on a quixotic journey over a devastated landscape and into an unexpected past.

    They simply accept them as fact and enjoy the moments when she emerges from them, buoyant and energetic. With Kennedy's election, presidency and assassination as background, Suzanne tells the story of the dissolution, and ultimate redemption, of her family. Sure to appeal to readers of Barbara Kingsolver, Alice Hoffman and Mona Simpson, Paper Wings is a subtle and moving novel about a mother and daughter who struggle, hope, and learn from each other how to emerge from shadows of tragedy.

    By turns philosophical, suspenseful, and passionate, this debut novel transports readers into a mystical world and takes them on a journey they won't soon forget.

    Terrified by his disappearance, his family must reconcile a new world of cruelty and chaos with the collapse of everything they have known. As Isaac navigates the tedium and terrors of prison, forging tenuous trusts, his wife feverishly searches for him, suspecting, all the while, that their once-trusted housekeeper has turned on them and is now acting as an informer. And as his daughter, in a childlike attempt to stop the wave of baseless arrests, engages in illicit activities, his son, sent to New York before the rise of the Ayatollahs, struggles to find happiness even as he realizes that his family may soon be forced to embark on a journey of incalculable danger. A page-turning literary debut, The Septembers of Shiraz simmers with questions of identity, alienation, and love, not simply for a spouse or a child, but for all the intangible sights and smells of the place we call home.

    And a second wife. And a writer, maybe? Or she was going to be, before she had children. Now, in her rented Brooklyn apartment, she’s grappling with her sexual and intellectual desires while also trying to manage her roles as a mother and a wife.Vivian Barr seems to be the perfect political wife, dedicated to helping her charismatic and ambitious husband find success in Watergate-era Washington D.C. But one night he demands a humiliating favor, and her refusal to obey changes the course of her life—along with the lives of others.Esther is a fiercely independent young woman in ancient Persia, where she and her uncle’s tribe live a tenuous existence outside the palace walls. When an innocent mistake results in devastating consequences for her people, she is offered up as a sacrifice to please the king, in the hopes that she will save them all.Following in the tradition of The Hours and The Red Tent, The Book of V. is a bold and contemporary investigation into the enduring expectations and restraints placed on women’s lives.

    Her husband, Brian, a rigorous man whose dreams of glory have been blighted by two star-crossed missions. Walt Womack, the steady, unflappable leader of the training team that prepares Lucy for her first shuttle flight.Lucy has devoted years of intense and focused effort to win her place on a mission, but as her lifelong dream of flying in space comes true, her familiar world appears to be falling apart around her. Her marriage is deteriorating. Her son’s asthma is growing more serious. Her relationship with Walt Womack is becoming dangerously intimate. And when at last she is in space, 240 miles above the earth, and an accident renders the world she left behind appallingly distant—perhaps unreachable—her spirit is tested in gripping and unexpected ways.In The Gates of the Alamo, Stephen Harrigan’s narrative authority brought a vanished nineteenth-century Texas to vibrant life. In Challenger Park, he does the same with the world of space flight, bringing us up close to the lives—the risks, the friendships, the rituals, the training—of the astronauts and the people who work with them. Harrigan has written an exciting—indeed a thrilling—novel about the contrary pulls of home and adventure, reality and dreams, and the unimaginable experience, the joys and terrors and revelations, of space flight itself.

    Christmas should be for the children, but with the Depression biting deeper, money and food in short supply and factories, ship yards and businesses closing down, the outlook is pretty bleak. It looks like many East End kids will wake up on Christmas morning to nothing. Robbie Graham is out of luck and work. Can he earn enough to put food on his table for his motherless children, Ben and Ruthie? Never mind something for their Christmas stockings? Meanwhile single mother and local shop owner, Flo Hawkins cannot bear the thought of some children having nothing for Christmas. Alongside her daughter, Honour, they decide to make their own gifts and the community unites to throw a Christmas party at the Salvation Army for those less fortunate. But will it be Flo who gets the best gift ever?

     It was a time for America and her heroes: men like Michael and Andrew O'Connor, rival brothers fresh out of Annapolis, men who left all they knew and loved to seek glory in a world at war. Mike beneath the ocean aboard the USS Tigerfish. Andrew in the air as a fighter pilot ace. Theirs was a baptism by fire, yet they rose to confront a brutal enemy across the sea — and to chase the explosive dreams that could ultimately destroy them. From Harry Homewood, bestselling author of Final Harbor, Silent Sea, and Torpedo! , comes the epic novel of a family at war. A novel of family, duty, pride — and of two brothers, competitors in both love and war, whose inner struggles provided them with the courage that could mean the difference between life and death. Harry Homewood was a qualified submariner before he was seventeen years old, having lied to the Navy about his age, and serving in a little "S"-boat in the old Asiatic Fleet. After Pearl Harbor he reenlisted and made eleven war patrols in the Southwest Pacific. He later became Chicago Bureau Chief for Newsweek, chief editorial writer for the Chicago Sun-Times, and for eleven years had his own weekly news program syndicated to thirty-two PBS television stations.

    To recover the painting, he must repair his strained relationship with his harshly judgmental father, uncover his family history, and restore his connection to his own Judaism. Along the way to illuminating the mysteries of his past, Matt is torn between his doting girlfriend, Tracy, and his alluring attorney, Rachel, with whom he travels to Budapest to unearth the truth about the painting and, in turn, his family.As his journey progresses, Matt's revelations are accompanied by equally consuming and imaginative meditations on the painting and the painter at the center of his personal drama, Budapest Street Scene by Ervin Kalman. By the time Memento Park reaches its conclusion, Matt's narrative is as much about family history and father-son dynamics as it is about the nature of art itself, and the infinite ways we come to understand ourselves through it.Of all the questions asked by Mark Sarvas's Memento Park--about family and identity, about art and history--a central, unanswerable predicament lingers: How do we move forward when the past looms unreasonably large?

    Before the final performance, $203,000 of the band’s money went missing from a safe deposit box at the Drake Hotel in what was called the single highest deposit box theft in the city’s history. The money was never recovered. Black Dogs might be the story behind the greatest rock ’n’ roll heist of all time. the last thing nineteen-year-old Patrick Sullivan needed was a new scam. Just months earlier, he had left a trail of broken friendships and new enemies in Baltimore for a fresh start in New York City after a botched robbery attempt landed one of his best friends in jail. But when he spies a briefcase full of cash backstage at a Led Zeppelin concert, Patrick makes plans for one last crazy mission–one that he hopes will redeem him in the eyes of everyone he left behind. To pull it off, Patrick will have to return to his hometown to round up his crew: Alex, the one who did time for Patrick’s last crime; Frenchy, the neurotic musician who still lives with Mom; and dim-witted but endearing Keith, the greasy-haired loner who excels at installing car stereos and then uninstalling them, all in the same day.When the unlikely team’s plan goes horribly wrong, the boys find themselves mixed up with Backwoods Billy, the psychotic leader of the Holy Ghosts Christian motorcycle gang. They need some help, and they find it in some unlikely places: by crossing paths and making deals with a pill-popping DA, a safe-cracking funk band called the New York Giants, and the Maryland chapter of the Misty Mountain Hoppers Led Zeppelin Fan Club. Sporting a rare 1958 Les Paul guitar and a complicated plan that could either go wonderfully right or horribly wrong, the guys, fueled by beer and egos, make a desperate attempt at robbing the world’s coolest rock band–to hilarious result.Black Dogs brings to life one of the infamously unsolved rock ’n’ roll mysteries and introduces us to a lovable bunch of knuckleheads who may have just pulled off the greatest heist in rock ’n’ roll history.

    The promised Messiah and future king of the Jews, destined to overthrow Roman rule. Galvanized, Judas joins the Nazarene’s followers, ready to enact the change he has waited for all his life.But Judas’ vision of a nation free from Roman rule is crushed by the inexplicable actions of the Nazarene himself, who will not bow to social or religious convention—who seems in the end to even turn against his own people. At last, Judas must confront the fact that the master he loves is not the liberator he hoped for, but a man bent on a drastically different agenda.Iscariot is the story of Judas—from his tumultuous childhood and tenuous entry into a career and family life as a devout Jew, to a man known to the world as the betrayer of Jesus. But even more, it is a singular and surprising view into the life of Jesus himself that forces us all to reexamine everything we thought we knew about the most famous—and infamous—religious icons in history.

    The music industry is mourning Kurt Cobain, Right Said Fred have re-emerged as an ‘ironic’ pop act and John Major is the country’s prime minister. Nothing is as it should be. Emma, a working-class rock music fan from Hull, with a penchant for a flaming Drambuie and a line of coke with her best mate Dave down The Angel, is troubled. Trev, her beloved whippet, has doggy IBS, and her job ordering bathroom supplies at the local caravan company is far from challenging. So when her dad, Tel, informs her that Kurt Cobain has killed himself aged 27, Emma is consumed with anxiety. Janis Joplin, Brian Jones, Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix…why have so many rock musicians died aged 27? And will Emma be next to join The Twenty Seven Club?The Twenty Seven Club is a nostalgic, often humorous, drug and booze-infused tale of friendship, discovery and anxiety as Emma tries, for once, to focus on life, rather than death.