Undone by her Tender Touch Pippa should have known better. She knew that Cameron had built a fortress around his feelings. Yet here she was pregnant after an evening of passion with the enigmatic entrepreneur. He would surely offer her a financial arrangement. But given his tragic past would he ever want more? More Than Perfect When billionaire Lucius inherits his best friends child he needs a wife. Preferably one who fulfils his every need... So he checks out the Pretorius Programme since it had found him the perfect assistant... However Angie Colter makes a few tweaks to the programme so suddenly she is the perfect wife! But what if Lucius finds out the truth? ...

Its the beginning of the 20th century; the age of scientific progress. But for Venice the future looks bleak. A conference of scientists assembles to address the problems among whose delegates are the parents of twelve-year-old Teodora. Within days of her arrival she is subsumed into the secret life of Venice: a world in which salty-tongued mermaids run subversive printing presses ghosts good & bad patrol the streets & librarians turn fluidly into cats. A battle against forces determined to destroy the city once & for all quickly ensues. Only Teo the undrowned child who survived a tragic accident as a baby can go between the linings to subvert evil & restore order. ...

Recently widowed attorney Paul Madriani is struggling to hold on to what is left of his family when he & his young daughter are caught up in yet another family tragedy. Pauls sister-in-law Laurel Vega is involved in a bitter custody battle with her ex-husband Jack who wants to take their children to Washington DC. When her case disintegrates Jacks new wife is found dead in the family home. Laurel is arrested & charged with murder. Madriani takes on her defence but the evidence against Laurel is daunting & her own failure to cooperate
- in particular to tell Paul where she was on the night of the murder
- leaves the reader wondering if perhaps he is defending a guilty woman. But what actually happened that night is more tragic than anything revealed so far. & it is up to Paul to uncover the shattering piece of evidence that will lead to the terrible truth.

...

The Special Operations Executive was one of the most secretive organizations of the Second World War its activities cloaked in mystery & intrigue. The fate therefore of many of its agents was not revealed to the general public other than the bare details carved with pride upon the headstones & memorials of those courageous individuals. Then in 2003 the first batch of SOE personal files was released by the National Archive. Over the course of the following years more & more files were made available. Now at last it is possible to tell the stories of all those agents that died in action. These are stories of bravery & betrayal incompetence & misfortune of brutal torture & ultimately death. Some died when their parachutes failed to open others swallowed their cyanide capsules rather than fall into the hands of the Gestapo many died in combat with the enemy most though were executed by hanging by shooting & even by lethal injection. The bodies of many of the lost agents were never found destroyed in the crematoria of such places as Buckenwald Mauthausen & Natzweiler others were buried where they fell. All of them should be remembered as having undertaken missions behind enemy lines in the knowledge that they might never return. ...

Angelic powers forbidden romance & the choice between fulfiling your destiny or following your hearts desire. Clara has known she is part-angel since she turned fourteen two years ago. But only now through fragmented visions of a terrifying bush fire is her Purpose
- the crucial rite of passage for every part-angel
- becoming clear to her. When Clara meets Christian the boy in her visions he is everything she could wish for
- so why does she also have feelings for her enigmatic classmate Tucker? Clara discovers that her Purpose is only a small part of a titanic struggle between angels & their destructive counterparts the Black Wings. & when the fire of her vision erupts & both Christian & Tucker are in danger who will she choose to save?


...

A broken heart & a moment of drunken bravado inspires middle-aged & typically rather cautious journalist Mike Carter to take off on a life-changing six month motorcycle trip around Europe. Never mind that he hadn't been on two wheels since an inglorious three-month teenage chapter involving a Lambretta four crashes & an 18-month ban for drink-driving a plan had begun to loosely form... And so having completed a six day residential motorcycle course & hastily re-mortgaged his flat Mike sets off alone resolving to go wherever the road takes him & enjoy the adventure of heading off into the unknown. He ends up travelling almost 20 000 miles & reaching the four extremes of Europe: the Arctic Circle in the north the Mediterranean coast in the south the Portuguese Atlantic to the west & the Iraqi border of Turkey in the east. But really it's a journey inwards as on the way Mike finds his post-divorce scars starting to heal & attempts to discover what he as a man in his forties who hasn't quite found his place in the world should be doing. Self-deprecating poetic & utterly engaging his is a heroic journey taken for the rest of us too scared to leave our 9 to 5 office-bound existence. ...

In Uneven Development" a classic in its field Neil Smith offers the first full theory of uneven geographical development expanding on established ideas regarding space & nature & combining these with a critique of capitalist economics. In his groundbreaking analyses of the production of nature & the politics of scale Smith anticipated many of the asymmetrical contours that now mark neoliberal globalization." ...

The new blockbuster from one of the world's greatest storytellers continues the legacy of A Woman of Substance. The great-grandaughters of Emma Harte the heroine of A WOMAN OF SUBSTANCE & EMMA'S SECRET follow in her legendary footsteps... Evan Hughes Emma's American great-grandaughter is trying to integrate into the powerful Harte family. She is caught between her estranged parents her new family & new love. Meanwhile a dangerous enemy hovers in the background. Tessa Longden Evan's cousin is battling her husband for custody of their daughter Adele. When Adele suddenly goes missing Tessa seeks her sister Linnet's help. Linnet O' Neill the most brilliant businesswoman of the four great-granddaughters is the natural heir to her mother Paula. But her glittering future at the helm of the vast Harte empire means many sacrifices. India Standish the traditionalist in the family falls in love with a famous British artist from a working-class background. Madly in love India is determined to marry him. When Evan discovers letters from Emma Harte to her grandmother the story is swept back to the 1950s. But it is the revelations in Emma's letters to her grandmother that give Evan a new perspective & help to set her free from her own past. This latest dramatic story in the on-going saga of an extraordinary family dynasty is full of love passion & jealousy & is Barbara Taylor Bradford at her inimitable best. ...

Cecilia Banks has a great deal on her plate. But when her son Ian turns up on her doostep with the unexpected consequence of a brief fling she feels she has no choice but to take the baby into her life. Cephas's arrival is the latest of many challenges Cecilia has to face. There is the matter of her cancer for a start an illness shared with her novelist friend Helen. Then there is Helen herself whose observations of Cecilia's family life reveal a somewhat ambivalent attitude to motherhood. Meanwhile Tim Cecilia's husband is taking self-effacement to extremes & Ian unless he gets on with it will throw away his best chance at happiness. Cecilia however does not have to manage alone. In a convent in Hastings sits Sister Diana Clegg who holds the ties that bind everyone not only to each other but to strangers as yet unmet. As events unfold & as the truth about Cephas is revealed we are invited to look closely at madness guilt mortal dread & the gift of resilience. No one will remain unchanged. ' Frank courageous & entertaining. I felt better for reading it' Margaret Drabble ...

When Elizabeth Price engages private detective Roland ' Orlando' Gibbons to find out the truth about her husband's suspected affair she unwittingly sets off a chain of correspondence that reunites four formerly close-knit couples. They all live just a few suburban streets away from each other; they are all still married; so how
- & why
- did they become so estranged? In a series of letters
- from love notes to condolence messages (the latter one arriving some years late)
- each protagonist is far more self-revealing than they would ever be in person. The result is an uproarious & poignant portrait of four marriages & a story about how little we know those we think we know best. Nigel Williams' new novel of suburban intrigue & late-flowering lust (and love) Unfaithfully Yours heralds the return of one of the country's finest comic writers in peak condition: all hail Nigel Williams chronicler of England's sleepy suburbs where all is not quite as cricket as it seems...



...