Fingerprints of the Gods is the revolutionary rewrite of history that has persuaded millions of readers throughout the world. ...

Fingerprints of the Gods is the revolutionary rewrite of history that has persuaded millions of readers throughout the world. ...

The winner of seven Tonys, seven Grammys, an Oscar, & a Pulitzer Prize, Stephen Sondheim has become synonymous with the best in musical theatre. Now, in Finishing the Hat, he has not only collected his lyrics for the first time, he's giving readers a rare, personal look into his extraordinary shows & life.

Along with the lyrics for all of his productions from 1954 to 1981
- including West Side Story, Company, Follies, A Little Night Music, and Sweeney Todd, which have starred some of the most famous & talented actors in the world from Johnny Depp & Catherine Zeta Jones, to Judi Dench & Alan Rickman, Finishing the Hat is a celebration of the act of creation. Sondheim discusses his relationship with his mentor, Oscar Hammerstein II, & his collaborations with legends Leonard Bernstein, Richard Rodgers, Angela Lansbury, & countless others. His anecdotes
- rich with history, personal insights, & intimate details
- transport us back to a time when theatre was a major pillar of American culture. & throughout the book, Sondheim analyses his work & dissects his own songs as well as those of others, offering unparalleled insight into songwriting that will be studied for years to come.

Brilliant, poignant, scathing, & funny, Finishing the Hat is the newest production Sondheim can add to his list of classic works.






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Held hostage by the infamous Trimarchi brothers, Fiona Sheldon & her friend Bethany must submit to the Italians' sophisticated desires while her husband Duncan attempts to find the money he owes them. But Duncan is more concerned to free his mistress Bethany than his quiet wife. ...

At work Nina is known as the Ice Queen, as her frosty demeanour makes her colleagues think she's equally cold in bed. But what they don't know is that she spends her free time acting out sleazy scenarios with her boyfriend, Andrew, in which she's a prostitute & he's a punter.
But when Andrew starts inviting his less-than-respectable friends to join in their games, things begin to get strange & Nina finds herself being drawn deeper into London's seedy underworld, where everything is for sale & nothing is what it seems.
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At work Nina is known as the Ice Queen, as her frosty demeanour makes her colleagues think she's equally cold in bed. But what they don't know is that she spends her free time acting out sleazy scenarios with her boyfriend, Andrew, in which she's a prostitute & he's a punter.
But when Andrew starts inviting his less-than-respectable friends to join in their games, things begin to get strange & Nina finds herself being drawn deeper into London's seedy underworld, where everything is for sale & nothing is what it seems.
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At twenty, when his reign began, Alexander the Great was already a seasoned soldier & a complex, passionate man. Fire From Heaven tells the story of the boy Alexander, & the years that shaped him. Resolute, fearless, & inheriting a striking beauty, Alexander still needed much to make him The Great. He must survive
- though with lifelong scars
- the dark furies of his Dionysiac mother, who kept him uncertain even of his own paternity; respect his father's talent for war & kingcraft, though sickened by his sexual grossness; & come to terms with his heritage from both.

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Two hundred years before Hardy disguised it as Casterbridge, Dorchester was a typical English county town, of middling size & unremarkable achievements. But on 6 August 1613 much of it was destroyed in a great conflagration, which its inhabitants regarded as a 'fire from heaven', the catalyst for the events described in this book. Over the next twenty years, a time of increasing political & religious turmoil all over Europe, Dorchester became the most religiously radical town in the kingdom. The tolerant, paternalist Elizabethan town oligarchy was quickly replaced by a group of men who had a vision of a godly community in which power was to be exercised according to religious commitment rather than wealth or rank. One of this book's most remarkable achievements is the re-creation, with an intimacy unique for an English community so distant from our own, of the lives of those who do not make it into history books. We glimpse the ordinary men & women of the town drinking & swearing, fornicating & repenting, triumphing over their neighbours or languishing in prison, striving to live up to the new ideals of their community or rejecting them with bitter anger & mocking laughter. In it subtle exploration of human motives & aspirations, in its brilliant & detailed reconstruction, this book shows how much of the past we can recover when in the hands of a master historian. ...

Sam Packer of the British Secret Service knows a mission to Iraq is dangerous. But none more dangerous than this one. A whispered secret in a Baghdad hotel lobby leads to his kidnapping, torture & expected execution. His paymasters have given him up for dead. Only the intervention of his ex-lover, Chrissie, & a hostage swap get him released. But days later Chrissie is murdered. Perhaps she knew too much, knew of the secret that Sam had uncovered
- that a biological terror weapon codenamed Fire Hawk had been smuggled from Iraq for use against an unknown target in the West. Personal motives of revenge clash with priorities of State Security as Sam follows the weapon's & his dead lover's murky past through the Middle East, Cyprus & the Ukraine. At each step the mystery of the ultimate target deepens & the fanatics who control it become ever more elusive.
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