From the eleventh storey of a Los Angeles high-rise Nate looks out on the city
- the traffic the trees the beach beyond. He breathes
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Tender Branson the last surviving member of the Creedish death cult has commandeered a Boeing 747 emptied of passengers in order to tell his story to the planes black box before it crashes. Brought up by the repressive cult & like all Creedish younger sons hired out as a domestic servant Tender finds himself suddenly famous when his fellow cult members all commit suicide. As media messiah he ascends to the very top of the freak-show heap before finally & apocalyptically spiralling out of control. ...

Samuel Carver makes bad accidents happen to worse people. He's very good at his job. But nobody's perfect. & one of Carver's targets has got away. Now the world faces a new age of conflict driven by religious fanaticism. In Russia the government have admitted they no longer know the whereabouts of one hundred small-scale 'suitcase nukes'. In Afghanistan & Kosovo ruthless terrorists plot the downfall of their hated enemies. In Texas a dying billionaire plots his own personal Armageddon. & Carver can do nothing to stop them. He was beaten & tortured & left to die but Samuel Carver is a hard man to kill. When he awakes in a Swiss sanatorium from weeks of torment he discovers that the woman he loves has vanished. Somehow he must find the strength to track her down. Carver's hunt will take him deep into the heart of a conspiracy in which the lives of millions are at stake. He must confront an agonizing choice between his duty & his heart & face the ultimate sacrifice. As the clock ticks down to doomsday who will survive the final explosive conflagration? In The Survivor" the worlds of fact & fiction collide in a thriller that grips from the first page to the last." ...

Murder was always an insult. But the murder bloody & brutal of an entire family in their own home was a different form of evil. Nixie Swisher crept down the stairs for a drink
- & saved her own life. When Lieutenant Eve Dallas is called to the house minutes later she finds the whole family murdered in their beds. But the killers made a mistake: they left a survivor. Nixie saw everything. & unfortunately for her these elite killers soon realise they need to finish the job. So Eve & her billionaire husband Roarke give everything they can to keep Nixie safe in their own home. & then a terrifying climax reveals there may be more to Nixie than meets the eye.. .
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Nothing prepares a man for war & Private Charles Waite of the 2/7th Queens Royal Regiment was certainly ill-prepared when his convoy carrying supplies of petrol & ammunition on its way to Dunkirk took a wrong turning near Abbeville. They met half a dozen German tanks on the road & saw hundreds of German soldiers marching across fields towards them. The day I was captured I had a rifle but no ammunition. Charles lost his freedom that day in May 1940 & didnt regain it until May 1945 when he was finally picked up by the Americans having walked 1600km from his prison camp attached to Stalag 20B in East Prussia. When I got back I couldnt tell anybody about what had happened during my years as a POW. I was ashamed. I hadnt won any medals; I had no stories of brave deeds. How could I be proud of breaking rocks for 12 hours day or pulling cabbages out of frozen ground at gunpoint? Would they have wanted to hear about the wounded soldiers dying in my arms of the acts of cruelty I witnessed & the terrible hunger & fatigue suffered on the Long March? Everybody wanted to forget the war & get on with rebuilding their lives. Silent for 70 years for the first time he has put his story on paper. He describes his first march from Abbeville to Trier & journey by cattle truck across Germany to the east; working in a stone quarry & years of farm labour; his period in solitary confinement for sabotage; & the Long March home in the one of the worst winters on record. His story is also about friendship of physical & mental resilience & of compassion for everyone who suffered. My book is for all who lie in foreign fields. Those in shallow graves the men we couldnt take with us. Its for those left behind. ...

A virus has wiped out 95 per cent of the worlds population in just a few weeks leaving the remaining 5 per cent to stay alive in a world devoid of the most basic amenities
- electricity transport & medicine. The few survivors of the human race are forced to fall back on the most primitive skills in order to live & re-establish some semblance of law & order. Abby Grant widowed by the plague moves through this new dark age with determination sustained by hope that her son who fled his boarding school at the onset has survived. She knows she must relearn the skills on which civilisation was built. With others she founds a commune & the group return to the soil. But marauding bands threaten their existence. For Abby theres a chance for a new life & love when she encounters James Garland the fourteenth Earl of Woodhouse who is engaged in a desperate fight to save his ancestral home. But more important she must find her son.
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A lot can change in three months: wars can be decided nations can be forged...or entire species can be brought to the brink of annihilation. The Morningstar Virus an incredibly virulent disease has swept the face of the planet infecting billions. Its hosts rampage attacking anything that remains uninfected even death cant stop the virus. Scattered across the world embattled groups have persevered. For some surviving is the pinnacle of achievement. Others hoard goods & weapons. & still others leverage power over the remnants of humanity in the form of a mysterious cure for Morningstar. Francis Sherman & Anna Demilio want only a vaccine-but to find it they must cross countryside in ruins dodging not only the infected but also the lawless living. The bulk of the storm has passed over the world leaving echoing thunder & softly drifting ashes. But for the survivors the peril remains & the search for a cure is just beginning... ...

An awe-inspiring journey through the eons of time & across the globe in search of visible traces of evolution in living creatures which have survived from earliest times & whose stories speak to us of seminal events in the history of life. Reading Richard Fortey is always pure pleasure BILL BRYSON The history of life on Earth is far older -- & far odder -- than many of us realise. In this book acclaimed author Richard Fortey traces this history not through fossil records but in the living stories of organisms that have survived nearly unchanged for hundreds of millions of years & whose existence today affords us tantalising glimpses of landscapes long vanished. For evolution has not obliterated its tracks. Scattered across the globe strange & marvellous plants & animals have survived virtually unchanged since life first began. They range from humble algal mats dating back almost two billion years to hardy musk oxen which linger as the last vestiges of Ice Age fauna. Following in Forteys questing footsteps Survivors takes us on fascinating journey to these ancient worlds. On a moonlit beach in Delaware where the horseshoe crab shuffles its way through a violent romance we catch a glimpse of life 450 million years ago shortly after it diversified on the ocean floor. Along a stretch of Australian coastline we bear witness to the sights & sounds that would have greeted a Precambrian dawn. Finally in the dense rainforests of New Zealand where the secretive velvet worm burrows into the rotting timber of the jungle floor we marvel at a living fossil which has survived unchanged since before the dissolution of the Gondwana supercontinent. Written with Forteys customary sparkle & gusto this wonderfully engrossing exploration of the worlds oldest flora & fauna brilliantly combines the best science writing about the origins of life with an explorers sense of adventure & a poets wonder at the natural world. Utterly compelling eye-opening & awe-inspiring this is a book for anyone with an interest in evolution in nature in the remarkable scope of geological time & our own modest interaction with it -- in short in life itself. ...

Four sisters four very different characters. But they have always been there for each other through the hard times as well as the good. Now they describe growing up performing from as young as two what it was like when fame suddenly hit & how it caused rifts in their close-knit family. Linda opens up about her devastation when her beloved husband died just as she was coping with breast cancer. Bernie tells how she suffered through the hearbreak of losing her unborn child & recently faced her own cancer battle Coleen talks about her marriages & reveals new secrets & Maureen describes her sadness at the devastating family feud that saw her much loved older sisters fall out with her Linda Bernie & Coleen. & they share the joy of getting back on stage for their thirtieth anniversary tour
- four survivors who found that age doesn't matter when it comes to having a great time.
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An awe-inspiring journey through the eons & across the globe in search of visible traces of evolution in the living creatures that have survived from earlier times. In this groundbreaking book prize-winning science writer Richard Fortey chronicles lifes history not through the fossil record but through the stories of organisms that have survived almost unchanged through geological time. Fortey takes us on a journey to ancient worlds: on a moonlit beach in Delaware where the horseshoe crab shuffles its way through a violent romance we catch a glimpse of life 450 million years ago. Along a stretch of Australian coastline we bear witness to the sights & sounds that would have greeted a Precambrian dawn. & in the dense rainforests of New Zealand where the secretive velvet worm burrows into the rotting timber of the jungle floor we marvel at a living fossil which has survived unchanged since before the break-up of Gondwana the ancient supercontinent over 150 million years ago. Written with Forteys customary sparkle & gusto this wonderfully engrossing exploration of the worlds oldest flora & fauna brilliantly combines the best science writing about the origins of life with an explorers sense of adventure & a poets wonder at the natural world. ...