KERRY REICHS: THE BEST DAY OF SOMEONE ELSE'S LIFE ~ Vi Connelly got the wedding bug at just six years of age. The thrill, the attention, the big white dress - it's the Best Day of Your Life, and it's seriously addictive! Unless, of course, it's always the best day of someone else's life. Now in her late twenties, Vi finds herself a bridesmaid time and again. She's honoured to perform her wedding duties, but watching everyone else's big day begins to make Vi wonder about her own. After years of dating, Vi's got an arsenal of funny stories to tell her friends, but deep down, her heart's still stuck on her ex - the gorgeous, eternally unobtainable Caleb. Then she meets someone new, someone who could turn out to be more than just another dating war-story. But just as love finally seems to be within reach, matters take an unexpected turn. To top things off, Vi is about to embark on the mother of all wedding seasons - her mission, should she choose to accept it, is to attend eleven weddings in eighteen months, and survive with her sanity, and her relationships, intact. THE BEST DAY OF SOMEONE ELSE'S LIFE is a funny, fresh and touching debut about relationships, marriage, girlie cocktails and complicated love.

LAWRENCE BLOCK: HIT AND RUN ~ When Keller gets the call to make a hit on a man in Des Moines, he's tempted to pass. So far he's been lucky in his chosen profession, and he's pretty much got enough stashed away to retire. Just one more, he thinks. But he quickly finds that this job might not just mark the end of his career - it could be the end of him, period. After three days in a Des Moines motel room he realises he was never meant to make the hit - he was just supposed to take the fall when a prominent politician was gunned down by someone else. Suddenly he's on the run, all the evidence pointing the cops his way and literally nowhere to go.

 

CATRIN COLLIER: MAGDA'S DAUGHTER ~ Stateless and destitute after the Second World War, Magda Janek settles in the Welsh town of Pontypridd, in the hope of building a new life for herself and her baby daughter, Helena. All Magda has to give Helena are the ambitions she had once cherished for herself; dreams cruelly snatched from her by the war and its terrible aftermath. But 1960s Pontypridd is a place of opportunity - at twenty-one, Magda's daughter has beauty, confidence and prospects beyond even her mother's wildest imaginings. With a university degree behind her, a coveted teaching post in her old Grammar school, and marriage to the love of her life, Dr Eddie John, the son of an old Pontypridd family to look forward to, Helena couldn't have been happier. Until tragedy strikes. A tragedy that robs Helena of the only family she has ever known and everything she has ever believed in; Helena uncovers a bitter secret, so explosive that her mother carried it to the grave...

EMILY GIFFIN: LOVE THE ONE YOU'RE WITH ~ The New York Times bestselling author of SOMETHING BORROWED, SOMETHING BLUE, and BABY PROOF delivers another captivating, straight-from-the heart novel. This is a story for everyone who has ever wondered: How can I truly love the one I'm with, when I can't forget the one who got away? Ellen and Andy's first year of marriage doesn't just seem perfect, it is perfect. There is no question how deep their devotion is, and how naturally they bring out the best in each other. But one fateful afternoon, Ellen runs into Leo for the first time in eight years. Leo, the one who brought out the worst in her. Leo, the one who left her heartbroken with no explanation. Leo, the one she could never quite forget. When his reappearance ignites long-dormant emotions, Ellen begins to question whether the life she's living is the one she's meant to live. LOVE THE ONE YOU'RE WITH is a powerful story about one woman at the crossroads of true love and real life.

LISA GARDNER: SAY GOODBYE ~ Afraid of spiders...? You should be. Creepy crawlies take on a whole new meaning for the working girls of Sandy Springs, Atlanta, when a client comes to the red light district looking for something different. He wants girls to let his pet spiders walk all over them. Seems like a simple - if strange request - but not all the girls come back. When FBI field officer Kimberly Quincy gets called out to talk to one of the girls, she's already got enough on her mind. What was a routine evidence-tagging session at the scene of a cargo plane crash has gone horribly wrong. Just when they'd recovered all the crew bodies, they get an unwelcome surprise...an extra body caught in a tree. Without a head. When Kimberly finally gets home to think it all through, and climbs into bed next to her husband Mac, a phone call shatters the peace and proves that the nightmare is only just beginning. On the other end of the line, a muffled cry and the sound of metal on flesh...

JENNIFER McMAHON: PROMISE NOT TO TELL ~ Kate Cypher has returned home to Vermont, after a telephone call from friends who are worried about her mother's failing health. On the night she arrives, a young girl is murdered, a horrific crime that eerily mirrors another from Kate's childhood. Three decades earlier, her misfit friend Del, shunned and derided by her classmates as "the potato girl", was brutally slain. Del's killer was never found, and Del achieved immortality in local legends and ghost stories. Now, as the new murder investigation draws Kate irresistibly in, her past and present collide in terrifying and unexpected ways. But nothing is quite what it seems - and the grim spectres of her childhood are far from forgotten.

CHARLAINE HARRIS: A GRAVE SURPRISE ~ A bolt of lightning struck Harper Connelly when she was 15, leaving her with a strange spider web of red on her torso and right leg, episodes of weakness, shakes and headaches - and an ability to find dead people. Harper is summoned to Memphis to demonstrate her unique talent, but there are still plenty of sceptics, even as Harper stands atop a grave and announces there are two bodies buried there. The police are convinced there's something fishy going on when the grave is opened to reveal the centuries-dead remains of a man, which they'd expected (that being his grave, after all) and a dead girl, which no one expected - except Harper, of course. And suspicions are raised even further because Harper had failed to find eleven-year-old Tabitha Morgenstern when she was abducted two years before. Harper and Tolliver need to find the real killer to prove Harper's innocence, especially after their nocturnal visit to the cemetery in hopes that Harper can sense something more is followed by the discovery, the following morning, of a third dead body in the grave ...

ROBERT RANKIN: DA DA DE DA DA ~ Robert Rankin, the world's Master of Far Fetched Fiction, takes us on a roller coaster ride in his brand-new bestseller, which focuses on the biggest conspiracy theory in the world, ever. Here, in the Da-Da-Di-Da-Da Code, you will find the music of the angels - and the music of the devil. Aliens, flying saucers from hell, the Multiverse, the Illuminati: every wacky, way-out conspiracy theory you've ever heard: they're all here, wrapped into a plot that will leave Dan Brown fans breathless, Michael Shea readers stupified, Raymond Khoury lovers incredulous ...Robert Rankin: the original and the best

 

ROSEMARY BAILEY: LOVE AND WAR IN THE PYRENEES ~ Over the fifteen years Bailey has been living in the region, the more she realised she didn't know, and people did not want her to know, about the war; about the French during the Occupation, the real role of the Resistance, the level of collaboration, the concentration camps in the Pyrenees and the treatment of Jews and other refugees. It is still very much a veiled history. Although people now acknowledge that the role of the Resistance in winning the war was exaggerated and glorified way beyond its actual numbers or achievements, few are willing to admit the level of acceptance of the German occupation, of the fascist ideals of the Vichy government and the degree of collaboration, passive or active, that occurred throughout the war years. Most of the archives remain firmly closed. This is a portrait of human tragedy, heroism and cruelty that will create a picture of the period from a contemporary angle, the history linked to sights that can still be visited, and brought to life by letters, interviews and encounters with people today, including the historians currently trying to investigate what really happened.

VALERIE MARTIN: TRESPASS ~ Toby and Salome are a young, modern couple living in New York, but their backgrounds are world apart. He is a middle-class all-American boy from a family of academics; she is a Croatian refugee raised in New Orleans. When Salome unexpectedly becomes pregnant, they decide to spend their lives together and hastily marry. But finding a way to reconcile their families and pasts proves a difficult task. Toby's mother's deep-seated mistrust of Salome causes tension, leaving her unable to accept her new daughter-in-law. But Salome' s past, full of dangerous secrets, is more horrifying than any of them could imagine - and the violence that destroyed her homeland is far from over...

 

JAMES ROLLINS: THE LAST ORACLE ~ What if you could bio-engineer the next great world prophet, to scientifically produce the next Buddha, the next Mohammed, or the next Jesus? Would it mark the Second Coming or initiate a chain reaction leading to the end of mankind? A thinktank of world scientists formed during the Cold War has discovered a way to manipulate and enhance autistic children who show savant talents - mathematical geniuses, statistical masterminds, brilliant conceptual artists - but a strange side-effect begins to arise. Before it can be analyzed fully, a rogue group of scientists begin their own secret experimentation with a cadre of the best children. They seek to create a world prophet for the new millennium, one to be manipulated to create a new era of global peace...a peace on their own terms. But such manipulation has grim consequences as a biological meltdown among the children begins to occur - turning the innocent into something frightening. Can Commander Gray Pierce and his elite SIGMA Force stop the experiments before they engineer the extinction of mankind? It will be a race against time to solve a mystery that dates back to the first famous oracle of history - the Oracle of Delphi...

DONNA HAY: THE TWO MRS ROBINSONS ~ Anna lives with Oliver Robinson and their 3-year-old son Charlie. But Oliver is still married to his first wife Eve, mother of his two teenage children. Eve is a dominant figure who insists on making her presence felt; Anna is young and beautiful, with a bright future. Each woman is weary of the other, insecure and jealous about the relationship Oliver has with the other. Petty squabbles about the division of Oliver's time and money drag on indefinitely until a terrible tragedy leaves both women shattered. Forced to pull together through their shared loss, can they put their differences aside to emerge from the adversity?

 

PHILIP K DICK: THE MAN IN THE HIGH CASTLE ~ It is 1962 and the Second World War has been over for seventeen years: people have now had a chance to adjust to the new order. But its not been easy. The Mediterranean has been drained to make farmland, the population of Africa has virtually been wiped out and America has been divided between the Nazis and the Japanese. In the neutral buffer zone that divides the two superpowers lives the man in the high castle, the author of an underground bestseller, a work of fiction that offers an alternative theory of world history in which the Axis powers didnt win the war. The novel is a rallying cry for all those who dream of overthrowing the occupiers. But could it be more than that? Subtle, complex and beautifully characterized, The Man in the High Castle remains the finest alternative world novel ever written, and a work of profundity and significance.

STEPHEN BAXTER: WEAVER ~ The Weaver of Time's Tapestry has finally suceeded in twisting the threads of history into a new shape; the Luftwaffe have pushed the RAF to the brink, and the invasion barges have reached the beaches of Sussex and Kent. Britain wakes up to the nightmare of the Wermacht unleashed in Southern England. As the desperate battle to hold up the invasion rages it is left to a few indivuals caught up in the panic and chaos to piece together what has really happened - is this the culmination of a plan that has taken centuries to play out, a plot from the future to change the past forever? Stephen Baxter's historical thriller series crashes into the 20th century with a terrfying vision of mechanised war and political atrocity unleashed on English soil. This is the climax of one of the most thoughful and involving series of novels that have brought history alive like no other.

LAWRENCE FREEDMAN: A CHOICE OF ENEMIES ~ The United States is locked into three prolonged conflicts without much hope of early resolution. Iran is pursuing a nuclear programme; the aftermath of the overthrow of Saddam Hussein has seen unrelenting intercommunal violence; and the Taliban have got back into Afghanistan. George W. Bush will almost certainly leave office without solving any of these big foreign policy issues that have defined his presidency. Lawrence Freedman, one of our most distinguished historians of 20th century military and political strategy, teases out the roots of each engagement over the last thirty years and demonstrates with clarity and scholarship the influence of these conflicts upon each other. How is it that the US manages to find itself fighting on three different fronts? Freedman supplies a context to recent events and warns against easy assumptions: neo-conservatives, supporters of Israel and the hawks are not the sole reasons for the failure to develop a viable foreign policy in the Middle East. The story is infinitely more complex and is often marked by great drama. First, the countries in dispute with America are not themselves natural allies; and second, their enmity was not, at first, America's choice. Until the Shah went into exile in 1979 Iran had been a pillar of US security policy...Third, the region's problems cannot all be traced to the Arab-Israeli dispute. Unique in its focus, this book will offer not only new revelations but also remind us of what has been forgotten or has never been put in context.

PETER HART - 1918: A VERY BRITISH VICTORY ~ In the spring of 1918 the German army launched a series of devastating offensives against the French and British lines on the Western Front. For four months they threw literally everything they had at the Allies, sending them reeling all the way back to the Marne. But despite the most appalling losses, the British did not break, and when the German advance ran out of steam in the summer, the Allies finally turned the tables on them and began the astonishing advance that would bring an end to the war. In a conflict known for its static battles, 1918 provided some of the most dramatic, mobile battles of the century. For the Germans this was the last desperate fling of the dice, much like the Ardennes offensive of December 1944. This book captures the desperation of the ordinary British soldiers, fighting with their backs to the wall as they clung on to their fragile lines. Drawing on the dramatic personal accounts of men who were there - both commanders and ordinary soldiers - Peter Hart brings to life the sheer suspense of waiting for the German attack, the desperate turmoil of the retreat, and the nail-biting turning of the tide which brought an end to the war.