Clever, inscrutable and utterly charismatic, Robert Porter calls himself 'prot' and has no traceable background - but he claims that he is an inhabitant of the planet K-PAX, a perfect world without wars.

    "Dickensian . . . a brilliant new prism through which to view (Naipaul's) life and work."--New York Times.

    They are superficially a study in contrasts yet share equally haunting sexual burdens carried since youth. With common secrets, they are drawn into a remarkable friendship.

    You get used to it. It’s not so bad.’ So I thought I might as well come here." —Adam Longman, Class of 2011Tripoli College is a humble New England institution. Originally founded as a free school for Native Americans, it is now beset by financial problems and so has entered into an increasingly troubling financial relationship with a snack food corporation. Big Anna® deposes the college president, uses the campus as a testing ground for their latest “dietary and mood additive,” and creates a field studies program in the Caribbean, where students in the (literal) field soon learn the true price of their Human Power Technology practices.Set amidst this madness is a quasi love story, between Bill Brees, a dean going undercover as a student, utterly bemused by how things have changed since his undergrad days, and Maggie, an African American student startled into the realization that maybe nothing changes at all.The Ghost Apple is told through a wealth of documents: tourism pamphlets, course catalogs, blog posts, historical letters, and slave narratives. Slowly, they reveal the extent of Tripoli's current crisis, and highlight those larger crises—of genocide, slavery, ignorance and indifference —on which the college and the nation were founded . . . and on which we continue to subsist.

    In this now-classic political thriller, he and fellow author J. Frederick George tell a savagely witty, chillingly topical tale set in the tense moments of the Gulf War. When a foreign exchange student is found murdered at an Iowa University, Deputy Sheriff Clyde Banks finds that his investigation extends far beyond the small college town--all the way to the Middle East. Shady events at the school reveal that a powerful department is using federal grant money for highly dubious research. And what it's producing is a very nasty bug.Navigating a plot that leads from his own backyard to Washington, D.C., to the Gulf, where his Army Reservist wife has been called to duty, Banks realizes he may be the only person who can stop the wholesale slaughtering of thousands of Americans. It's a lesson in foreign policy he'll never forget.

    Burroughs reveals another, gentler side in The Cat Inside. Originally published as a limited-edition volume, this moving and witty discourse on cats combines deadpan routines and dream passages with a heartwarming account of Burroughs's unexpected friendships with the many cats he has known. It is also a meditation on the long, mysterious relationship between cats and their human hosts, which Burroughs traces back to the Egyptian cult of the "animal other." With its street sense and whiplash prose, The Cat Inside is a genuine revelation for Burroughs fans and cat lovers alike.

    Alice is a candidate for the position of junior nurse, grade 4. It is only a few weeks since her release from Borstal. She has returned to her childhood home in the French Colony, where her father, recently retired from his position as chief janitor, continues as part-time healer, and full-time headache for the local church. It seems she has inherited some of his gift.With guidance from the working nurse’s manual, and some tricks she picked up in prison, Alice brings succour to the thousands of patients littering the hospital’s corridors and concrete courtyard. In the process she attracts the attention of a lovesick patient, Teddy Bunt, apprentice to the nefarious ‘Gentleman Squad’ of the Karachi police. They fall in love; Teddy with sudden violence, Alice with cautious optimism.Their love is unexpected, but the consequences are not.Alice soon finds that her new life is built on foundations as unstable as those of her home. A Catholic snubbed by other Catholics, who are in turn hated by everyone around them, she is also put at risk by her husband, who does two things that no member of the Gentlemen Squad has ever done – fall in love with a working girl, and allow a potentially dangerous suspect to get away. Can Teddy and Alice ever live in peace? Can two people make a life together without destroying the very thing that united them? It seems unlikely, but then Alice Bhatti is no ordinary nurse...Filled with wit, colour and pathos, Our Lady of Alice Bhatti is a glorious story of second chances, thwarted ambitions and love in unlikely places, set in the febrile streets of downtown Karachi. It is the remarkable new novel from the author of A Case of Exploding Mangoes.

    En route Van Horne must also contend with ecological guilt, a militant girlfriend, sabotage both natural and spiritual, and greedy hucksters of oil, condoms, and doubtful ideas. Winner of a 1995 World Fantasy Award.

    Peter S. Murphy needs fifteen thousand dollars by the end of the day, or the city of Los Angeles can say goodbye to the El Healtho clinic. A recovery center for the most severe cases of alcoholism in the state -- even if no one ever does quite seem to get dry there -- El Healtho has been the bane of Dr. Murphy's existence ever since he started running it. But now that its doors are about to close forever, Dr. Murphy finds he'll do anything to keep it open. Up to and including admitting Humphrey Van Twyne III, a patient with an extremely violent past whose wealthy family has the means to keep El Healtho open for business. Sure, the man isn't exactly an alcoholic. And yes, what he really needs is to be under the care of the surgeons who performed the lobotomy that's rendered Van Twyne all but a vegetable. But the money's good -- until the rag-tag group of ne'er-do-wells at El Healtho begin to wreak havoc with Dr. Murphy's plans, and suddenly no one day has ever seemed so long. A literary precursor to One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, The Alcoholics is Thompson like you've never read him before, a pitch-black, mad-cap portrait of deviant behavior that is at once darkly comic, humane and harrowing.

    Joseph Malik, editor of a radical magazine, had snooped into rumors about an ancient secret society that was still alive and kicking. Now his offices have been bombed, he's missing, and the case has landed in the lap of a tough, cynical, streetwise New York detective. Saul Goodman knows he's stumbled onto something big - but even he can't guess how far into the pinnacles of power this conspiracy of evil has penetrated.Filled with sex and violence - in and out of time and space - the three books of The Illuminatus! Trilogy are only partly works of the imagination. They tackle all the cover-ups of our time — from who really shot the Kennedys to why there's a pyramid on a one-dollar bill — and suggest a mind-blowing truth.

    These seemingly undistinguished possessions, stuffed into a worn-out suitcase, take on a riotously funny life of their own as Dovlatov inventories the circumstances under which he acquired them, occasioning a brilliant series of interconnected tales: A poplin shirt evokes the bittersweet story of a courtship and marriage, while a pair of boots (of the kind only the Nomenklatura can afford) calls up the hilarious conclusion to an official banquet. Some driving gloves—remnants of Dovlatov’s short-lived acting career—share space with neon-green crepe socks, reminders of a failed black-market scam. And in curious juxtaposition, the belt from a prison guard’s uniform lies next to a stained jacket that once belonged to Fernand Léger.Imbued with a comic nostalgia overlaid with Dovlatov’s characteristically dry wit, The Suitcase is an intensely human, delightfully ironic novel from “the finest Soviet satirist to appear in English since Vladimir Voinovich.”

    It is a novel about writing, about discovering a literary personality, and about the sorts of consolation that art can provide.' Andrew Motion