As the First World War reaches its final year, an illicit love affair is beginning between a sixteen-year-old boy & a young woman married to a soldier at the front. They meet secretly in her flat on the outskirts of Paris, in cornfields & on river banks. When she receives letters from her husb&, they burn them together. Intoxicated by passion, they cannot bear to end their affair, even when it causes a scandal among their friends & neighbours. Instead, they hurtle towards tragedy. Written in spare, haunting prose when Raymond Radiguet was still a teenager, this semi-autobiographical novel became an instant bestseller & its author was hailed as a genius before his tragic death at the age of twenty. Expressing all the anguish & joy of adolescence, it is a work of startling imagery & subtle beauty. This Penguin Modern Classics edition

Includes:: an introduction by Fay Weldon.

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Raymond Radiguet wrote the highly scandalous Devil in the Flesh between the ages of sixteen & eighteen, following his own love affair with a married woman. At the time, in post WWI France, the book created a stir comparable to that of Lady Chatterley`s Lover Francois, the adolescent narrator, meets Marthe in Paris at the start of the First World War when her husband is away at the Front. They fall in love with each other. Their passion leads to a tragic climax four years later when Marthe passes off their love child as her husband`s legitimate child even though everyone knows the truth. The themes of freedom, family & passion against a background of war & honour in The Devil in the Flesh created a scandal at the time of publication, which was also the year of the author`s death. ...

WINNER OF THE CWA HISTORICAL DAGGER AWARD 2014. Longlisted for the John Creasey Dagger Award for best debut crime novel of 2014. London, 1727
- & Tom Hawkins is about to fall from his heaven of card games, brothels & coffee-houses into the hell of a debtors` prison. The Marshalsea is a savage world of its own, with simple rules: those with family or friends who can lend them a little money may survive in relative comfort. Those with none will starve in squalor & disease. & those who try to escape will suffer a gruesome fate at the hands of the gaol`s rutheless governor & his cronies. The trouble is, Tom Hawkins has never been good at following rules
- even simple ones. & the recent grisly murder of a debtor, Captain Roberts, has brought further terror to the gaol. While the Captain`s beautiful widow cries for justice, the finger of suspicion points only one way: to the sly, enigmatic figure of Samuel Fleet. Some call Fleet a devil, a man to avoid at all costs. But Tom Hawkins is sharing his cell. Soon, Tom`s choice is clear: get to the truth of the murder
- or be the next to die.A twisting mystery, a dazzling evocation of early 18th Century London, THE DEVIL IN THE MARSHALSEA is a thrilling debut novel full of intrigue & suspense.


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How do high mountain ranges form on the face of the Earth? This question has intrigued some of the greatest philosophers & scientists, going back as far as the ancient Greeks. Devil in the Mountain is the story of one scientist, author Simon Lamb, & his quest for the key to this great geological mystery. Lamb & a small team of geologists have spent much of the last decade exploring the rugged Bolivian Andes, the second highest mountain range on Earth
- a region rocked by earthquakes & violent volcanic eruptions. The author's account is both travelogue & detective story, describing how he & his colleagues have pursued a trail of clues in the mountains, hidden beneath the rocky landscape. Here, the local silver miners strive to appease the spirit they call Tio
- the devil in the mountain. Traveling through Bolivia's back roads, the team has to cope with the extremes of the environment, & survive in a country on the verge of civil war. But the backdrop to all these adventures is the bigger story of the Earth & how geologists have gone about uncovering its secrets. We follow the tracks of the dinosaurs, who never saw the Andes but left their mark on the shores of a vast inland sea that covered this part of South America more than sixty-five million years ago, long before the mountains existed. & we learn how to find long lost rivers that once flowed through the landscape, how continents are twisted & torn apart, & where volcanoes come from. By the end of their journey, Lamb & his team turn up extraordinary evidence pointing not only to the fundamental instability of the Earth's surface, but also to unexpected & profound links in the workings of our planet.

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The Chicago World`s Fair of 1893 & its amazing ` White City` was one of the wonders of the world. This is the incredible story of its realization, & of the two men whose fates it linked: one was an architect, the other a serial killer. The architect was Daniel H. Burnham, the driving force behind the White City, the massive, visionary landscape of white buildings set in a wonderland of canals & gardens. The killer was H. H. Holmes, a handsome doctor with striking blue eyes. He used the attraction of the great fair
- & his own devilish charms
- to lure scores of young women to their deaths. While Burnham overcame politics, infighting, personality clashes & Chicago`s infamous weather to transform the swamps of Jackson Park into the greatest show on Earther, Holmes built his own edifice just west of the fairground. He called it the World`s Fair Hotel. In reality it was a torture palace, a gas chamber, a crematorium. These two disparate but driven men toegther with a remarkable supporting cast of colourful characters, including as Buffalo Bill, George Ferris, Thomas Edison & some of the 27 million others who converged on the dazzling spectacle of the White City, are brought to life in this mesmerizing, murderous tale of the legendary Fair that transformed America & set it on course for the twentieth century.

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An intimate & moving portrait of a family combined with an account of the events which swept through Africa in the post-independence period. Aminatta Forna`s intensely personal history is a passionate & vivid account of an African childhood
- of an idyll that became a nightmare. As a child she witnessed the upheavals of post-colonial Africa, the bitterness of exile in Britain & the terrible consequences of her dissident father`s stand against tyranny. Mohamed Forna, a man of unimpeachable integrity & great charisma, was a new star in the political firmament Sierra Leone as the country faced its future as a fledgling democracy. Always a political firebr&, he was one of the first black students to come to Britain after the war. In Aberdeen he stole the heart of Aminatta`s mother, to the dismay of her Presbyterian parents, & returned with her to Sierra Leone. But the new ways of Western parliamentary democracy were tearing old Africa apart, giving rise only to dictatorships & corruption of hitherto undreamed-of magnitude. It was not long before Aminatta`s father languished in jail as a prisoner of conscience, & there was worse to come. Aminatta`s search for the truth that shaped both her childhood & the nation`s destiny begins among the country`s elite & takes her into the heart of rebel territory. Determined to break the silence surrounding her father`s fate, she ultimately uncovered a conspiracy that penetrated the highest reaches of government & forced the nation`s politicians & judiciary to confront their guilt.
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In 1979, journalist Zuhair al-Jezairy fled Iraq & certain death after openly defying Saddam`s regime. Twenty-five years later he is back, & cautiously celebrating. He joins ”al Mada”, & is Editor-in-Chief when the newspaper breaks the Oil-for-Food scandal. He leaves to start his own documentary film company & travels throughout Iraq, from the Marshlands of the South, to Tikrit, Najaf, & the Northern region of Kurdistan. He sees the country emerge from thirty-five years of totalitarianism & documents the violence & bloodshed, as well as the many brave & extraordinary people he meets. Giving first-hand accounts of the looting of Baghdad & his encounters with ordinary Iraqis all over the country, this is an elegiac & inspirational account of Iraq after Saddam. ...

He doesn't need Alex Rider's girly gadgets. He's much more fanciable than Andy Mc Nab's Boy Soldier. His adventures will take you to places even Wilbur Smith hadn't thought of. Soon after escaping an assassin that bursts from the shadows to try & kill him in the dark windswept grounds of his school in Dartmoor, Max Gordon discovers that his explorer father has also gone missing. Max is determined to find him whatever dangers may lay in his path. A secret clue, that his father has left, leads Max to the inhospitable wilderness of Namibia & the discovery of a potential massive ecological disaster masterminded by the very powerful & completely ruthless businessman, Shaka Chang. Whoever is behind Max's fathers disappearance is determined to get rid of Max too. For good. The Devil's Breath is the first incredible book, in a blockbuster new adventure series for boys & girls of 9+, with more plot twists & death defying action scenes than a Bond film. A world of stampeding buffalo, lethal scorpions, ancient tribes & prophecies awaits you... ...

Dr Forle is a scientist on a river station deep in the heart of the South American jungle: the last inhabited point before the impassable interior. He is studying the eerie forest glades that the local tribes call 'devil's gardens'. Who or what has created these cursed & poisoned places? The answer, he hopes, will change the way we think about life itself. But as The Devil's Garden opens, work on the station is thrown into chaos by the arrival of a ruthless Colonel & a sinister Judge. They claim to be registering the indigenous peoples to vote & yet that night Forle witnesses an act of torture that he cannot ignore. From that moment on, he is drawn deeper & deeper into a world of brutality & corruption until he finds himself in the midst of a small war involving remote tribes, renegade soldiers, cocaine growers & the woman he has come to love. When one of his assistants is murdered, Forle is forced to abandon his life's work & take sides. What kind of a man is he? ...

For nearly two years the two most infamous dictators in history actively collaborated with one another. The Nazi-Soviet Pact stunned the world when it was announced, the Second World War was launched under its auspices with the invasion & division of Pol&, & its eventual collapse led to the war`s defining & deciding clash. It is a chapter too often skimmed over by popular histories of the Second World War, & in The Devils` Alliance Roger Moorhouse tells the full story of the pact between Hitler & Stalin for the first time, from the motivation for its inception to its dramatic & abrupt end in 1941 as Germany declared war against its former partner. Using first-hand & eye-witness testimony, this is not just an account of the turbulent, febrile politics underlying the unlikely collaboration between these two totalitarian regimes, but of the human costs of the pact, as millions of eastern Europeans fell victim to the nefarious ambitions of Hitler & Stalin. ...