'I lost my own father at 12 years of age and know what it is to be raised on lies and silences my dear daughter you are presently too young to understand a word I write but this history is for you and will contain no single lie may I burn in hell if I speak false.'

In a dazzling act of ventriloquism, Peter Carey gives the Australian outlaw Ned Kelly a voice so wild, passionate and original that it is impossible not to believe that the famous bushranger himself is speaking from beyond the grave. Carey gives us Ned Kelly as orphan, as Oedipus, as horse thief, farmer, bushranger, reformer, bank-robber, police-killer and, finally, as his country's beloved Robin Hood.
in 1878 Francis Harty, a poor farmer, said 'Ned Kelly is the best bloody man that has ever been in Benaila, I would fight up to my knees in blood for him - I have known him for years, I would take his word sooner than another man's oath''By the time of his hanging in 1 880 a whole country would seem to agree - and it is a measure of Peter Carey's achievement that he has not only made art from his country's great story but that he persuades us all to understand the true measure of that 'best bloody man'.

'I am following the traces of a great jewel. All its owners are dead, and the jewel is lost ...'

Precious stones are thousands of years old. They pass through the hands of owners and smugglers, merchants and thieves. Often the hands leave no traces, but they are there all the same: they leave impressions, invisible, like atoms of hydrogen drawn to the surface of a diamond.
The Love of Stones charts three lives linked by one such jewel. Katharine Sterne searches contemporary London, Tokyo and Istanbul, following the trail of a brooch once worn by Oueen Elizabeth 1. Two hundred years earlier, a pair of Iraqi Jewish brothers travel to London, bearing an unearthed jar of mysterious and priceless stones.

The first novel in five years by one of the world's greatest writers.

England, 1930s. Christopher Banks has become the country's most celebrated detective, his cases the talk of London society. Yet one unsolved crime has always haunted him: the mysterious disappearance of his parents in Old Shanghai when he was a small boy. Now, as the world lurches towards total war, Banks realizes that the time has come for him to return to the city of his childhood and at last solve the mystery - that only by his doing so will civilization be saved from the approaching catastrophe.
Moving between London and Shanghai of the inter-war years, When We Were Orphans is a story of memory, intrigue and the need to return; of a childhood vision of the world surviving deep into adulthood, indelibly shaping and distorting a person's life.

Following the publication of her acclaimed autobiography, Time to be in Earnest, P. D. James has returned to the fiction for which she is best-known, the classical English detective story.
Death in Holy Orders is set in an Anglican theological college on a desolate stretch of the East Anglian coast, a location which she has made particularly her own.

When the body of one of the students is found on the shore smothered by a fall of sand, his wealthy father demands that Scotland Yard should re-examine the verdict of accidental death. Dalgliesh has visited St Anselm's in his boyhood and, as he is due for a holiday, agrees to pay a visit, expecting no more than a nostalgic return to old haunts and a straightforward examination of the evidence given at the inquest. Instead he finds himself embroiled in one of the most horrific and puzzling cases of his career. Other visitors come to the college on the weekend of his arrival, not all of them with benign intent. One will never leave it alive.

A dazzling and boldly original biography by Andrew Motion, Poet Laureate and the celebrated biographer of Larkin and Keats.

Wainewright was an ingenious and unscrupulous criminal. In 1828 he inherited the handsome family home, while successive legacies allowed him to maintain a flamboyant lifestyle. But, within the space of a few years, three of his relatives were to die in suspicious circumstances.
Eventually tried and arrested, Wainewright was transported for life to Tasmania. Yet he had lived at the centre of the Romantic world. He exhibited at the Royal Academy and painted Byron's portrait. He was good friends with Henry Fuseli, William Blake and Charles Lamb, and knew John Glare, William Hazlitt, Thomas de Quincey and John Keats. He was known as amiable, kind, and good-hearted.
Combining the form of a 'confession' with notes, asides and illuminations, Wainewright the Poisoner strips away the layers of legend and restores Wainewright to his own voice, capturing his dandified style, his charm as well as his callousness, his wit as well as his wantonness - and his deadly unreliability.

The author of Taxi Driver returns to the darkest streets of New York City for another story of lost souls.

It is the early 1990s: Frank Pierce is an EMS paramedic, driving an ambulance through the city's darkest streets on the 'graveyard shift'. Surrounded by the injured and the dying, Frank is dwelling in an urban night-world, and crumbling under the accumulated weight of too many years spent saving - and losing - lives. Bringing Out the Dead is the account of fifty-six hours in Frank's life - two days and three nights on the job - as, hungering for redemption he reaches the very brink of spiritual collapse.

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