In 1970, The Ford County Times, one of Mississipi's more colourful weekly newspapers, went bankrupt. To the surprise & dismay ...

When Claude goes to the Isle of Skye for a quiet holiday with his dad & aunt, all recuperating from the recent death of his mother, he expects his only adventures to be in his active imagination. However, having been befriended by Roddy, an old fisherman, Claude is amazed to see what look like hundreds of body parts being washed up on the beach. On closer examination, these turn out to be shop-window dummies & a curious attraction leads Roddy to keep one of the heads as a souvenir. But Roddy's harmless pilfering surely shouldn't attract the attentions of two very dangerous-looking men from Italy, who mysteriously appear on Skye? A fantastic mystery story, which moves from Scotland to Italy, & will grip the reader all the way. ...

In 1957, Giuseppe Tomasi, Prince of Lampedusa, the last member of a great Sicilian family, died childless, impoverished & unknown, leaving behind him a recently completed manuscript of a novel. The following year that novel, The Leopard, was published to great acclaim & is now recognised as one of the finest works of twentieth-century fiction. For a quarter of a century Italian & foreign scholars were denied access to the reclusive writer's papers until, following a meeting with Lampedusa's adopted son, David Gilmour succeeded in gaining permission to work in the writer's last home in Sicily. There, & in the nearby ruin of the Palazzo Lampedusa, he found many letters, diaries, notebooks & photographs which had not seen the light of day since Lampedusa's death. In The Last Leopard, David Gilmour brings to life not only an enigmatic writer of genius, but the slow, careful distillation of an undoubted masterpiece. ...

In 1960, when Sir Francis Chichester first raced singlehanded across the Atlantic, it was widely regarded as an insane stunt. Nowadays, the Singlehanded Transatlantic Race is not only accorded the greatest of respect but is also recognised as a true test of stamina & seamanship.

Almost half a century after Chichester

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14 August 1945. As Emperor Hirohito recorded a message of surrender for the Japanese people, rebel troops commanded by high-ranking officers from War Minister Anami¹s staff burst into the Imperial palace. Their intention was to stage a coup, destroy the recording & issue forged orders for Japan to continue the war. Had they succeeded, there would have been massive kamikaze attacks on allied forces, causing carnage & possibly provoking America to drop a third atomic bomb on an already devastated Japan...

But on that fateful night, in the skies approaching Tokyo, a stream of B-29B ' Superfortress' bombers were heading towards Japan's last functioning oil refinery. Fearing that the approaching planes could be carrying another atom bomb, Japanese air defences ordered a total black out of the city & the Imperial palace & in so doing completely disrupted the rebels' plans, enabling soldiers loyal to the Emperor to sieze back control. At midday on 15 August 1945, the Imperial message of surrender was broadcast throughout Japan. The Second World War was finally over.

THE LAST MISSION is gripping work of speculative investigation into one of the least known yet profoundly significant episodes of World War II.



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JJ Liddy sometimes blames his unreliable temperament on the visit he made to Tir na n' Og, the land of eternal youth, when he was fifteen years old. It's perhaps not surprising that his children have also turned out to be a little eccentric, especially eleven-year-old Jenny. She forgets to go to school, can't bear to wear shoes, & spends entire days roaming the mountainside.

It's up there that she meets the ghost. He is guarding a pile of rocks known as the beacon, & when some archaeologists arrive to excavate it, they run into the strangest kind of obstruction.

But it is not people the ghost fears, & when the real enemy finally reveals itself, the future of the entire human race is threatened. Only Aengus Og & his fairy kin can help now.



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THE BOOK: In every generation, according to Jewish tradition, thirty-six just men, the Lamed-waf, are born to take the burden of the world's suffering upon themselves. At York in 1185 the just man was Rabbi Yom Tov Levey, whose sacrifice so touched God that he gave his descendants one just man each generation, all the way down to Ernie Levey, the last of the just, killed at Auschwitz in 1943. This, then, is the story of Ernie Levey. ...