The Last Man is Mary Shelleys apocalyptic fantasy of the end of human civilisation. Set in the late twenty-first century the novel unfolds a sombre & pessimistic vision of mankind confronting inevitable destruction. Interwoven with her futuristic theme Mary Shelley incorporates idealised portraits of Shelley & Byron yet rejects Romanticism & its faith in art & nature. Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1797-1851) was the only daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft author of Vindication of the Rights of Woman & the radical philosopher William Godwin. Her mother died ten days after her birth & the young child was educated through contact with her fathers intellectual circle & her own reading. She met Percy Bysshe Shelley in 1812; they eloped in July 1814. In the summer of 1816 she began her first & most famous novel Frankenstein. Three of her children died in early infancy & in 1822 her husband was drowned. Mary returned to England with her surviving son & wrote novels short stories & accounts of her travels; she was the first editor of P.B. Shelleys poetry & verse. ...

The four dead guards didnt concern Mitch Rapp as much as the absence of the man theyd been paid to protect. Joe Rickman wasnt just another foot soldier. For the last eight years Rickman had run the CIAs clandestine operations in Afghanistan. It was a murky job that involved working with virtually every disreputable figure in the Islamic Republic. More than a quarter billion dollars in cash had passed through Rickmans hands during his tenure as the master of black ops & no one with a shred of sense wanted to know the details of how that money had been spent. At first glance it looks as if Rickman has been kidnapped but Rapp knows certain things about his old friend that cause him to wonder if something more disturbing isnt afoot. Irene Kennedy the director of the CIA has ordered Rapp to find Rickman at all costs. Rapp must navigate the ever-shifting landscape of Afghanistan as the Taliban Iranians Pakistanis & Russians all plot to claim their piece of the war torn state. With Afghanistan crumbling around him Rapp must be as ruthless as his enemies & as deceitful as people in his own government if he has any hopes of completing his mission. ...

A hero can't always be good.. . Joe Rickman head of clandestine operations in the Middle East has been kidnapped & with him top secret CIA information that could prove disastrous in the wrong hands. Mitch Rapp must find Rickman at all costs. But something doesn't add up & he soon suspects something even more sinister is afoot. With elements inside his own government working against him Rapp will have to make to make a tough call between playing the hero & playing nice. Or will he be stopped dead before he can succeed? ...

From Oliver Bullough the acclaimed author of the Orwell Prize-shortlisted Let Our Fame Be Great a study
- part travelogue part
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Seven seconds. Thats all it took for Web London to lose everything: his friends his team his reputation. Point man of the FBIs super-elite Hostage rescue Team Web roared into a blind alley towards a drug leaders lair only to meet a high-tech custom-designed ambush that killed everyone around him. Coping with the blame-filled words of anguished widows & the suspicions of colleagues Web tries to put his life back together. To do so he must discover why he was the one man who lived through the ambush
- & find the only other person who came out of the alley alive.. .a ten-year-old boy who has since disappeared. Acting on his instincts Web believes he knows where the killer will strike next. Only this time he may not survive the attack. In this extraordinary work Baldacci uses his unsurpassed storytelling skills to explore the essence of survival itself as a conspiracy of violence surrounds an FBI agent whose fate was to be the.. .LAST MAN STANDING.
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It hardly seems credible today that a nineteenyear- old boy just commissioned into the Seaforth Highlanders could lead a platoon of men into the carnage of the Battle of the Somme. Or that as the machine gun bullets whistled past & shells exploded he could maintain his own morale to lead a platoon keeping its discipline & cohesion in spite of desperate losses. Norman Collins the author of this superb memoir was this remarkable man. Using Normans own words Last Man Standing follows him from his childhood in Hartlepool to his subsequent service in France. The book also covers such shattering events as the German naval assault on Hartlepool in December 1914 when as a seventeen-year-old Norman was subjected to as big a bombardment as any occurring on the Western Front at that time. Normans love for & devotion to the men under his command shine out in this book & his stories are gripping & deeply moving. They are illustrated by a rare collection of private photographs taken at or near the front by Norman himself although the use of a camera was strictly proscribed by the Army. Most of the images have never been published before. ...

As a small boy in Epping Forest Jack Straw could never have imagined that one day he would become Britain's Lord Chancellor. As one of five children of divorced parents he was bright enough to get a scholarship to a direct-grant school but spent his holidays as a plumbers' mate for his uncles to bring in some much-needed extra income. Yet he spent 13 years & 11 days in government including long & influential spells as Home Secretary & Foreign Secretary. This is the story of how he got there. His memoirs offer a unique insight into the complex sometimes self-serving but always fascinating world of British politics & reveals the toll that high office takes but more importantly the enormous satisfaction & extraordinary privilege of serving both your constituents & your country. Straw's has been a very public life but he reveals the private face too & offers readers a vivid & authoritative insight into the Blair/ Brown era & indeed the last forty years of British politics. ...

The Rough Diamonds are a close knit team. Kev Mc Govern their captain makes sure they work hard & play hard. Right now John OHara feels hes on the verge of losing everything. His family is about to break up. Hes dumbstruck when he finds out that his Mum is seeing his teacher & Dad...well the less said the better. John feels lonely & insecure; none of this is helping his street cred with the lads & worse still his form on the pitch is really suffering. ...

No one has given the extraordinary Thomas Young the all-round examination he so richly deserves
- until now. Celebrated biographer
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They framed me. They abducted my wife. They took my child. I want him back. Sam Capra has one reason to live: to reclaim his baby son from the people who kidnapped him. Teaming up with a young mother whose daughter went missing he tracks his child across the country in a dangerous desperate race against time. From the internationally bestselling author of Panic The Last Minute is the most heart-stopping thriller of the year from 'one of the best thriller writers of our time' (Harlan Coben). ...