In December 1991, Isabel Allende's daughter Paula fell gravely ill and sank into a coma...
Allende,s writing is so vivid we smell the countryside, hear the sounds, see the bright birds, smell and even taste the soft fruit.
Moving through Paula's last days, we enter that world, and share it, gladly, sadly, gratefully, and ultimately changed by the very reading of it.

Commanded by her lover to tell him a story he has never heard before, Eva Luna spins a skein that weaves in and out of the colour and passion  of the harsh, sun-impacted landscapes of South America. Her stories encompass guerrillas and fortune-tellers, tyrants and beauties, whores and
peasants; her themes tangle with politics and poverty, passion, pain and tragedy. And, throughout, the simple longing of the human heart for  happiness is tempered by hope.

In The Information Martin Amis returns to the big picture of Money and London Fields. The book takes in the whole of society, with the  possible exception of the middle classes. This leaves us with the very rich, the very desperate, and the very bohemian. Comedy, the author has said  is the oply genre with any future: it is all thats'left. So The Information is a comedy that goes where comedy shouldn't normally go,
into the territories abandoned by romance, by satire and by tragedy.

One million dollars - that's what Harvey Metcalfe, fife-long king of shady deals, has pulled off with empty promises of an oil bonanza and instant  riches. Overnight four men - the heir to an earldom, a Harley Street doctor,a Bond Street art dealer and an Oxford don - find themselves penniless.
But this time Harvey has swindled the wrong men. They band' together and shadow Harvey from the casinos of Monte Carlo to the high stakes  windows at Ascot. Their plan is simple: to sting the crook for exactly what they lost. ,Not a penny more, not a penny less

Investigating other people's tragedies and cock-ups and misfortunes was all he knew. He was used to being a voyeur, the outsider looking in,  and nothing, but nothing, that anyone did surprised him any more. Yet despite everything he'd seen and done, inside ]ackson there remained a belief - a
small, battered and bruised belief - that his job was to help people be good rather than punish them for being bad. Cambridge is sweltering, during an unusually hot summer. To Jackson Brodie, former police inspector turned private investigator, the world consists of  one accounting sheet - Lost on the left, Found on the right - and the two never seem to balance. Jackson has never felt at home in Cambridge, and has a failed marriage to prove it. Surrounded by death, intrigue and misfortune, his own life  haunted by a family tragedy, he attempts to unravel three disparate case histories and begins to realise that in spite of apparent diversity, everything is connected ...

HIGH CITADIEL
Among the towering peaks of the Andes, a non-scheduled passenger plane is hi-jacked and forced down. The surviving passengers, stranded at 16,000 feet, embark on a perilous descent, only to find that they are trapped by a formidably-armed Communist force, whose target is one particular V.I.P., his
beautiful niece and a personal aide. But the enemy is obviously intent on wiping out the lot, and as the ill-assorted party realise the odds at stake and the strength of the force against them, two breath-taking stories unfold. In the valley a desperate delaying action is fought with  ingenious weapons, while in the high regions of the rock and glacier and fatal mountain sickness, three men-ill-equipped and inexperienced in  mountaineering - set out on a fearful race to save their companions .

JUGGERNAUT
The juggernaut is huge: as long as a football pitch is wide, it weighs 550 tons. Its task: to transport a transformer through Nyala, an oil-rich  West African state. Neil Mannix leads the Anglo-American convoy on its dangerous journey. Mannix is a troubleshooter and his London-based boss has sensed that trouble
is what Mannix will find. And he does: Nyala erupts in civil war. The juggernaut becomes a mobile hospital for civilians and soldiers. A means of escape, a symbol of hope for the thousands of refugees who pour out of their villages to travel alongside. In Juggernaut, a story of daring and death, of ambush and threat, Desmond Bagley is in masterful form: fast-paced, intriguing and triumphant.

In EMPIRE OF THE SUN J G Ballard has produced a mesmerizing, hypnotically compelling novel of war, of starvation and survival, of internment camps  and death marches, which blends searing honesty with an almost hallucinatory vision of a world thrown utterly out of joint. It is a novel which  shatters the myths of the Second World War in Asia -and which immediately takes its place as a classic work of modern literature.
Rooted as it is in the author's own disturbing experience of war in our time, it is one of that small and select group of novels by which the  Twentieth Century will be not only remembered but judged.

Three novellas - simple, sensuous, and each with an unexpected twist in the tale Dulcima, The GraSS God and The Delicate Nature are all linked by the theme of love: bittersweet love that is overwhelming, sometimes tragic ... and  always takes its victims by surprise.

Nina Bawden's latest novel, the successor to the Booker shortlisted Circles of Deceit, is a compelling, ironic tale about families, old age and money.
Fanny Pye's London House, bought cheaply many years earlier, is now worth half a million. When she intervenes in a street brawl and is hospitalised, her children suggest that she should move to a smaller house in the suburbs - and thereby release some useful 'family money'. Fanny has different
views about inheritance and property and is anyway more concerned that she cannot remember the terrible incident in which she was injured and a  man died. As her amnesia clears, Fanny is invaded by a terrible sense of danger. Here, the tempo of a thriller is brilliantly linked with a wry  exainination of the manners and morals of an acquisitive society.

Ireland in the Fifties. Three children from very different backgrounds are growing up in the tiny seaside town of Castlebay. Clare dreams of escape through education and David of a dazzling future as a specialist doctor. Gerry just wants fame and success. Over the next decade their lives are destined to meet in a quite unforeseen way, but never will they escape the echoes of their past.

Evacuate from Blitz-battered London, genteel Elizabeth White is sent to stay with the boisterous Irish O'Connors. It is the beginning of an unshakeable bond between Elizabeth and Aisling O'Connor which will survive twenty turbulent years. Writing with warmth, wit and great compassion, Maeve Binchy tells a magnificent story of the lives and loves of two women, bound together in friendship.

Every table at Quentins Restaurant has a thousand stories to tell: tales of love, betrayal and revenge, There has been great hope and deep despair.
The staff who come and go have stories of their own, and the restaurant itself has had times when it looked set fair for success and others when it seemed doomed to failure, Ella Brady wants to make a documentary about the renowned Dublin restaurant that has captured the spirit of a generation
and a city in the years it has been open,

Ria and Marilyn have never met - they live thousands of miles apart, separated by the Atlantic Ocean: one in a big, warm, Victorian house in Tara Road,  Dublin, the other in a modern, open-plan house in New England. Two more unlikely friends would be hard to find: Ria's life revolves around her family and
friends, while Marilyn's reserve is born of grief. But when each needs a place to escape to, a house exchange seems an ideal solution.

Along with the borrowed houses come neighbours and friends, gossip and speculation as Ria and Marilyn swap lives for the summer ...

Kit MacMahon lives in the small sleepy Irish town of Lough Glass, where everyone knows everyone; children who walk to school together grow up and become sweethearts and marry, people gossip and grumble and dream their lives away, for it is a place where changes come slowly.

Until one day, beautiful, mysterious He1en MacMahon disappears, presumed drowned in the lake, and then the gossip runs wild. The consequences for He1en's husband, her son, but above all for her daughter Kit, are unimaginable and will leave not one of their lives unchanged.

The story moves from Lough Glass to London where Lena Gray lives a tempestuous life with Louis, her great love. But who i"s Lena Gray? Why does she want to get involved with Kit MacMahon and the affairs of Lough Glass?

'Lou Reed ... balances admiration for Reed's rock noir with an unflinching portrait of the conceit, paranoia and petulance of its creator ...
Bockris has an insider's knowledge of Reed's progress from Warhol protege with the Velvet Underground to his present role as a world-weary rock savant.
Bockris writes with chilling lucidity'

Eric Moro,a brilliant young medical student who loves women, was born to be a surgeon. But when he first enters Alexandra Taylor's life, he is nothing more to her than the ideal artist's model. However, before too long, she is captivated by his reckless sensuality - the wayward smile that  speaks of mischief, the intimate candour that leaves her raw and exposed, the unquestioning love, unlike any she has ever known before.

They enter into a relationship astonishing in its ferocity. But then a foolish act from Eric's past comes back to haunt them and instead of planning  an outdoor wedding - instead of facing a romantic 'forever' - they are confronted by the ultimate tragedy. Inevitably, death will force them apart, yet ultimately it is death, and their struggle to fight against it, that will ensure their love survives.

Rachel Elliot is single and attractive, a director of a successful advertising firm with a handsome lover, several  close friends and a clutch of young goachildren. But as her fortieth birthday approaches so does a sneaking sense of futility. With typical  resolution Rachel decides that the answer to this new problem is to have a child of her own.

Used to getting what she wants, she expects to achieve this aim in the same easy manner in which all her other life ambitions have been realised.

Rachel's quest, however, proves fraught with unexpected problems. Something disastrous - and quite unforeseen - occurs at work. Friends and  lovers do not support or co-operate with her in the way she had envisaged. Being independent can be isolating, Rachel discovers, especially for someone so adept at keeping her emotions to herself.

 Fay Langdon has relinquished.her singing career to marry Owen, a highly successful solicitor. At one of their dinner parties Fay meets the glamorous, self-obsessed Julia and is destined to join the handful of acolytes who provide'Julia with ammunition for her merciless scorn and disapprobation.
As the years pass and Fay's and Julia's lives grow empty of purpose, they are drawn together by their fear of age and isolation. Yet a mutual  mistrust continues to exist between them until Fay is driven to one last heroic act.

Harvard professor Robert Langdon receives an urgent late-night phone call while on business in Paris: the elderly curator of the Louvre has been
brutally murdered inside the museum. Alongside the body, police have found a series of baffling codes. As Langdon and a gifted French cryptologist,
Sophie Neveu, begin to sort through the bizarre riddles, they are stunned to find a trail that leads to the works of Leonardo Da Vinci - and suggests
the answer to a mystery that stretches deep into the vault of history.
Unless Langdon and Neveu can  decipher the labyrinthine code and quickly assemble the pieces of the puzzle, a stunning historical truth will
be lost forever ...

When a world renowned scientist is found brutally  murdered, a Harvard professor, Roberl Langdon,is summoned to identifY the mysterious symbol
seared onto the dead man's chest. His conclusion: it is the  work of the Illuminati, a secret brotherhood, presumed extinct for nearly four
hundred years - nOW reborn to continue their bitter vendetta against sworm  enemy, the Catholic church.
In Rome, the college of cardinals assembles to elect a new pope. Yet somewhere within the walls of the Vatican, an unstoppable bomb of terrifying
power relentlessly counts down to oblivion. While the minutes tick away, Langdon joins forces with Vittoria Vetra, a beautiful and mysterious Italian
scientist, to decipter the  labyrinthine trail of ancient symbols that snakes across Rome to the long-forgotten Illuminati lair - a secret refuge
wherein lies the only hope for the Vatican.
But, with each revelation comes another twist, another turn in the plot, which leaves Langdon and Vetra reeling and at  the mercy of a seemingly
invincible enemy..

When ,a new NASA satellite detects evidence of an  astonishingly rare object buried deep in the Arctic ice,  the floundering space agency proclaims
a muCh-needed  ... a victory that has profound implications  for u.S. space policy and the impending presidential election.
With the Oval Office in the balance, the President dispatches White House IntelligenCe analyst Rachel Sexton to the Arctic to verify the authenticity
of the  find. Accompanied by a team of experts, including the charismatiC academic Michael Tolland, Rachel uncovers the unthinkable - evidence of
scientific  trickery _ a bold deception that threatens to plunge the world into controversy.. .

When the National Security Agency's invincible code-breaking machine encounters a mysterious code,if cannot break, the agency calls ih its,
head  cryptographer, Susan Fletcher, a brilliant, beautiful mathematician. What she uncovers sends shockwaves  through the corridors of power.
The NSA is beiNg ,held hostage - not by guns or bombs, but by a code so complex that if released would cripple U.S. intelligence.
Caught in an accelerating tempest of secrecy and lies, Fletcher battles to save the agency she believes in Betrayed on all sides, she fInds
herself fighting not only for her Country but for her life, and in the end, for the life of the man she loves ... ' "

James Brown is Soul Brother Number One, the man who wrote the book on soul music.
He has had more hits than alInost any other performer. With Little Richard he is one of pop music's most enduringly creative and influential
giants, regarded with awe by everyone from his peers in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame to the kids in the local garage band.

'The outrageousness of Cities of the Red Night suggest it was written in collusion with Swift, Baudelaire, Schopenhauer, Orwell, Lenny Bruce, General Patton and John Calvin ... Burroughs may just turn out to be a hipster Moses leading his children of darkness through debauched  deserts into the promised land'

Anew volume of stories from A. S. Byatt is always a joy, and this one is rich and rare indeed. In the same delectable format as The Matisse Stories  and The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye, this collection deals with betrayal and loyalty, quests and longings, loneliness and passion - the mysterious  absences at the heart of the fullest lives. A woman walks out of her previous existence and encounters an ice-blond stranger from a secretive world; a schoolgirl draws a blood-filled picture of Jael; a swimming pool reveals a beauteous monster in its depths. The settings range from the heat of Provence  in summer to the cold forests of Scandinavia, from chalk-strewn classrooms to herb-scented hillsides, from suburban streets to rocky wilds.

The best-selling MAKING LOVE was acclaimed by everyone from the Sun to the Sunday Telegraph as the indispensable compendium of erotic Verse, and established Alan Bold aS our foremost delver into the naughtier reaches of world literature.
Now by popular demand, here is the irresistible SucceSSor to that pioneering  work: MOUNTS OF VENUS, the complete anthology of erotic prose.

The letter requesting the renowned detective's services arrived too late-one month after the sender's demise. But a client was a client, and Hercule Poirot was determined to get to the botttom of the mystery. Why had Emily Arundell believed her life was in danger? And why had the old lady revised
her will only days before her death? Poirot faces one of the most unusual challenges of his career as he tries to determine which of the victim's  disgrunntled relatives did not have a motive for murder!

 Pat Conroy's Inspired Masterpiece I Introduces The Wingo Family of Colleton, South Carolina
All Wingos share one heritage ... shrimp fishing, poverty and the searing memory of a single terrifying event - the source of Tom Wingo's self-hatred and of his sister Savannah's suicidal despair.
To save himself and Savannah, Tom confronts the past with the help of New York psychollogist Susan Lowenstein.  As Tom and Susan unravel the bitter history of his troubled childhood, in episodes of grotesque humour, poignant lyricism and shattering violence; the door opens vividly onto a world peopled by a cast of colourful, eccentric and  unforgettable characters.

 There began to creep over Matilda a most extraordinary and peculiar feeling ... a kind of electricity ...
Matilda is an exceptional girl, but her parents think she is just a nuisance. When one day she is attacked by her odious headmistress, Miss Trunchbull, Matilda  suddenly discovers she has a remarkable power with which to avenge herself!

People Who do not know Salterton call it dreamy and old-world. They say it is the place where Anglican clergymen go when they die. The real  Saltertonians, however, know that there is nothing quaint about the place at all. With its two cathedrals, its one university, and its native sons  and daughters busily scheming for their dreams, Salterton is very much in the real world.

The Autobiography, like the man himself, holds nothing back. He talks about his battles against drugs and racism, and discusses the many women in his life. But above all, Miles talks about music and musicians, including the legends he has played with over the years: Bird, Dizzy, Monk, Trane,  Mingus and many others. The man who has given us the most exciting music of recent times has now given us a fascinating and compelling insight  into his extraordinary life.

The Hand that Signed the Paper tells the story of Vitaly, a Ukrainian peasant, who endures the destruction of his village and family by Stalin's  communism. He welcomes the Nazi invasion in 1941 and willingly enlists in the SS Death Squads to take a horrifying revenge against those he perceives
to be his persecutors.  This remarkable novel, a shocking story of the hatred that gives evil life, is also an eloquent plea for peace and justice.

This is a collection of six excellent, award-winning stories about kids growing up in Britain today.

Deborah Eisenberg is a writer of outstanding originality and skill. In these seven remarkable new stories she pries open daily life to explore the hidden mechanisms of human behaviour.

A record is a world. It is the world scratched by man in a form that may survive him. Music became a thing, a commodity, with the arrival of the world's first popular phonograph in 1906. From that moment on it has been the privilege of the 20th century to witness the progress of a new  art form: phonography, or the art of making music in a recorded form.  How have recording artists and producers as diverse as Louis Armstrong, Jelly Roll Morton, Leopold Stokowski, Phil Spector,"Edgar Varese, The Beatles,
Glenn Gould, Frank Zappa John Culshaw and many others developed the art-as different from live music as film is different from theatre?

Sugar, an alluring, nineteen-year-old prostitute in the brothel of the peculiar Mrs Castaway, yearns for a better life. And when she is visited by William Rackham, the somewhat reluctant heir to Rackham Perfumeries, she begins an ascent through the strata of 1870s' London Society that offers
us intimacy with a host of loveable, maddening and superbly realised characters.
Gripping from the first page, this hugely acclaimed novel is an intoxicating and deeply satisfying read - not only a wonderful story but the  creation of an entire, extraordinary world.

The enthralling record of small-town America in the turbulent post-war years, seen through the eyes of a young and idealistic rabbi struggling to belong. In the dramatic unfolding of David Hartman's life we relive a period of national turmoil spanning McCarthyism, the civil rights movement and the agony
of Vietnam. Heartwarming, painful and - ultimaltely - triumphant, David's story is the story of every American of conscience in an age of doubt and uncertainty, of joy and disappointment, of failure and success.

As eighty-year