The first book in a brand new series The Last Kingdom is set in England during the reign of King Alfred. Uhtred is an English boy born into the aristocracy of ninth-century Northumbria. Orphaned at ten he is captured & adopted by a Dane & taught the Viking ways. Yet Uhtreds fate is indissolubly bound up with Alfred King of Wessex who rules over the only English kingdom to survive the Danish assault. The struggle between the English & the Danes & the strife between christianity & paganism is the background to Uhtreds growing up. He is left uncertain of his loyalties but a slaughter in a winter dawn propels him to the English side & he will become a man just as the Danes launch their fiercest attack yet on Alfreds kingdom. Marriage ties him further still to the West Saxon cause but when his wife & child vanish in the chaos of the Danish invasion Uhtred is driven to face the greatest of the Viking chieftains in a battle beside the sea. There in the horror of the shield-wall he discovers his true allegiance. The Last Kingdom like most of Bernard Cornwells books is firmly based on true history. It is the first novel of a series that will tell the tale of Alfred the Great & his descendants & of the enemies they faced Viking warriors like Ivar the Boneless & his feared brother Ubba. Against their lives Bernard Cornwell has woven a story of divided loyalties reluctant love & desperate heroism. In Uhtred he has created one of his most interesting & heroic characters & in The Last Kingdom one of his most powerful & passionate novels. ...

Read by Jamie Glover. Harper Collins are delighted to announce that this bestselling favourite author following the triumphant conclusion to the Grail Quest series with the publication of Heretic has embarked on a new medieval series. The Last Kingdom is set in the England of the ninth & tenth centuries. These were the years when the Danish Vikings had invaded & occupied three of Englands four kingdoms & when King Alfred his son & grandson fought back & won the freedom of the country again. The story is seen through the eyes of Uhtred a dispossessed English nobleman. Captured as a child & raised by the Danes he now finds his allegiances divided. But the one thing he knows is that he wants to recover his fathers land the fort by the wild northern sea that we now know as Bamburgh. Bernard Cornwell is a master of historical fiction & this new series looking with a fresh light at Alfred the Great his kingdom & his legacy will be as outstanding & as popular as the Grail Quest & the Warlord Chronicles. ...

A twisted zoo where otherworlders are the main attraction & trapped in the cages. Any time AIR gets close to shutting it down the zoo vanishes & reappears somewhere else. Solo is a black ops agent who's captured & enslaved & treated like an animal. Vika is his new handler tasked with his care & feeding. They were supposed to be enemies but they become lovers-until his feelings for her are used against him & he's put to the ultimate test. ...

Martine is looking forward to the holidays & riding Jemmy her white giraffe until an accident sends her & Ben on a journey to the Matobo Hills wilderness in Zimbabwe. It is a lawless land where nothing is as it seems. When they uncover a plot in which the fate of a magnificent leopard & the lost treasure of an African King are mysteriously linked their friendship faces its greatest test. Far from home & the help of Grace & Tendai & with Gwyn Thomas languishing under false accusations in jail Martine & Ben must use every survival skill they possess. They'll come face to face with Griffin Mercy Mr Ratcliffe (known as Rat) Magnus the hornbill & a witch doctor not to mention Khan the last leopard. They must decide who their friends are & who are enemies as they race against time to save the world's rarest leopard & each other. This third African adventure is written with all the zest & skill that have endeared so many readers to THE WHITE GIRAFFE & DOLPHIN SONG. ...

Join Martine & her magical giraffe Jemmy in two more heart-warming adventures. In The Last Leopard an accident sends Martine & Ben on a journey to the Matabo Hills in Zimbabwe where they must race against time to save the world's rarest leopard
- & each other. & In The Elephant's Tale Martine & Ben travel to the Namibian desert where they uncover a terrible plot. These are books full of charm & atmosphere & stunning African landscapes which will enchant animal lovers everywhere.
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Will Elliott is out of a job. The lighthouse he's been manning on Prince Albert Rock off the wild Cornish coast is about to become automated. So Will decides to fulfil his lifelong ambition
- to sail round the coastline of Britain. Determined to continue his solitary existence Will begins his preparations for his epic voyage. But before he has time to so much as paint his hull he meets Amy Finn
- a beautiful artist & fellow loner. & as if that isn't distraction enough suddenly his sleepy Cornish village is rocked by the biggest scandal to hit Cornwall since Guenevere ran off with Launcelot. It seems as if Will will never get away & even if he does will his journey be solo or is there hope that he & Amy could be embarking on a two-man voyage of discovery?

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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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