On 9 August 2007 France's largest bank announced that it had had to suspend trading in two huge investment funds it controlled. The same day three German banks revealed that they were close to collapse. A few days later came the first run on a British bank since the 1860s as vast queues of worried investors besieged Northern Rock. Within weeks, the Government were being forced to bail out this previously little-known bank to the tune of £30 billion, share prices in other mortgage lenders were plummeting, & alarming news about the state of several of the biggest US banks was crossing the Atlantic. What lay behind this series of crippling disasters?

In The Crunch, award-winning journalist Alex Brummer painstakingly traces the course of the crisis from its origins in the US 'subprime' market to its explosion on to the international scene. It's a story of greed, mismanagement & dithering in which bankers seeking to make a quick buck, regulators engaged in turf wars & blame-avoidance, & governments paralysed by the sheer scale of the problem all conspired to bring the banking system almost to its knees. It's also a story of victims: the millions of people in the US who have already been thrown out of their houses, the entire population of the UK who have been co-opted to guarantee Northern Rock with £30 billion of public money, borrowers everywhere who are now finding credit more expensive & harder to get. &, as Alex Brummer convincingly argues, now that recession looms, this is only the beginning.

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Italy, October 1301. Dante Alighieri, Prior to the city of Florence, is sent to Rome to meet with the Pope. Sinister omens greet his arrival; the river Tiber is threatening to burst its banks & the corpses of several young woman have been found eviscerated & ritually murdered. Dante has no power to order an investigation but when the authorities show little interest in the deaths he promises the mother of one victim that he will bring the murderer to justice. But when Dante visits the Vatican, & makes the acquaintance of an ambitious senator named Spada, he discovers that the city hides yet more dark secrets ...

In the latter half of the 13th century, Christian Europe again sought to prise the Holy Land out of the grasp of the Infidel. Tens of thousands took up the Cross
- some for the greater glory of God, others for baser motives: lust for power, for riches, for revenge.
THE CRUSADER tells the story of the seventh & last Crusade, as experienced by a young Spanish nobleman, Francisco de Montcada. He is the hero of this novel, but his tale is told by his former friend & a fellow acolyte, a venal & moderately trustworthy Cistercian monk named Brother Lucas. For Francisco has returned from the Levant a broken & seemingly possessed man. The Inquisition decree that his tortured soul be exorcized & the task falls to Brother Lucas. Eschewing the Inquisition

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Elise loves the farm that is her home; she loves playing with beetles & chameleons in the garden, buying sweets from the village shop & listening to the stories of spirits & charms told by her nanny, Beauty. As a young white girl in 1990s Zimbabwe, her life is idyllic. Her clothes are always clean & ironed, there is always tea in the silver teapot, gin & tonics are served on the veranda, &, in theory at least, black & white live in harmony.

However this dream-world of her childhood cannot last. As Elise gets older, her eyes are opened to the complexities of adult existence, both through the changes wrought in her family by the arrival of her step-father Steve, & through her growing understanding of the tensions in Zimbabwean society. As Mugabe

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Elise loves the farm that is her home; she loves playing with beetles & chameleons in the garden, buying sweets from the village shop & listening to the stories of spirits & charms told by her nanny, Beauty. As a young white girl in 1990s Zimbabwe, her life is idyllic. Her clothes are always clean & ironed, there is always tea in the silver teapot, gin & tonics are served on the veranda, &, in theory at least, black & white live in harmony.

However this dream-world of her childhood cannot last. As Elise gets older, her eyes are opened to the complexities of adult existence, both through the changes wrought in her family by the arrival of her step-father Steve, & through her growing understanding of the tensions in Zimbabwean society. As Mugabe

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Suffused with rich satire, chaotic brilliance, verbal turbulence & wild humour, The Crying of Lot 49 opens as Oedipa Maas ...