An intimate & entertaining portrait of one of comedy's greatest geniuses by those who knew Peter Cook best & can write abut his rare talent. The contributors include Clive Anderson, Alan Bennett, John Cleese, Stephen Fry, William Goldman, Barry Humphries, Eric Idle, Dudley Moore & Michael Palin. ...

On a Monday night in October in a small seaside town in Suffolk, a woman is brutally murdered. There are no obvious suspects, she was not an obvious victim. She just wasn't, thinks her grieving, bewildered friend Tess, the type to have something happen to her. Something Might Happen is not a murder mystery. There are clues, false trails, detectives, all the paraphernalia of the whodunnit, but Myerson's concern is with the effect of the murder on an ordinary community & specifically on Tess herself, her husband Mick & her three children. As the police go about their routine investigation, Tess's world of nappies, school runs & baked beans begins to unravel. Suddenly nothing is certain, the mundane becomes charged with significance, established relationships begin to crumble & places that once were safe are safe no longer. ' It is the naked honesty of Myerson's prose that makes her work so compelling, & this novel stands as her most impressively realised work to date-Myerson has a forensic interest in the messiness of grief, which she itemises with the awful clarity of vision that often accompanies shock' Guardian ...

Something Special was previously unpublished except in a 1950s anthology & in Japan, & rediscovered after her death. It is the only short story that Iris Murdoch ever wrote for publication. Set in Dublin, against the vividly recognisable backdrop of the writer's native city in the late fifties, Something Special is the story of Yvonne, an ordinary, bold young Irish woman who believes there's more to life than marriage to Sam, the respectable young man who's courting her. Written with verve & characteristic sly humour, it moves to a surprising climax & conclusion
- a poignant, strangely haunting story about the incompatibility of dreams & desires.
...

Somewhere Else is a thousand miles away & right next-door. It's where fly-fishing takes you: a place & state of mind.



...

Zan is worried about his sister, Jade, who doesn't seem to recognise family & friends. Even more disturbing, Jade insists she's Janet Bailey; a girl from another time & place. This must be the result of Jade's recent horrific ordeal, musn't it? But if it's Post Traumatic Stress then why are her memories of being Janet so utterly vivid? & will they ever be able to get the real Jade back? ...

With his widely acclaimed debut, 28-year-old William Kowalski emerged as one of the most exciting & distinctive new American writers in years. In his hew book, Kowalski once again proves himself an extraordinarily gifted writer as he follows his hero Billy Mann on his search for the mother who deserted him as a baby. Now 20 years old, Billy travels atop his beloved motorcycle to the last known address he has for her ot a side street named Santa Fe, New Mexico. It is a journey that will teach him many things about family, friends, love ...

' It's the end of the 1916 winter & the conditions are almost unbelievable. We live in a world of Somme mud. We sleep in it, work ...

' It's the end of the 1916 winter & the conditions are almost unbelievable. We live in a world of Somme mud. We sleep in it, work ...

' It's the end of the 1916 winter & the conditions are almost unbelievable. We live in a world of Somme mud. We sleep in it, work ...

On a scorching June Sunday in 1876, thousands of Indian warriors
- Lakota Sioux, Cheyenne & Arapaho
- converged on a grassy

...