As the seventeenth century opens, a band of venturers forms the Honourable Company of Merchants trading from England to the East Indies. In France, the siege of La Rochelle ends with the massacre of thirty thousand men, women and children. Almost two centuries later, in 1788, John Lemprière published his classical dictionary. This much is fact. Lawrence Norfolk tells us how the first two events led, inescapably, to the third. This amazing tale encompasses the Great Voyages of Discovery and multinational financial conspiracies, and leads a motley cast of scholars and eccentrics, drunk aristocrats and whores, assassins and octogenarian pirates through two centuries and three continents to the brink of French Revolution. John Lemprière reluctantly enters this world as an introverted scholar, obsessed by the myths of antiquity. At the end of this astonishing story he understands that it takes far more than learning to lay the ghosts of the past to rest.

There’s a werewolf at large on the streets of the city – a new, rare female one. So new that in her human form Annie doesn’t even realize that at the last full moon she turned into a predatory wolf, and made her first kill – a man. But she’s been left with strange and deliriously compelling sensations of the night she can’t remember. Whatever she did, she’d like to do it again. Police suspect a mad dog, but when the news reaches Dr. Marco Potenza, he realizes the killer was no dog, but a werewolf. He ought to know, he runs a clinic where, for a fee, werewolves, or as they prefer to be called, “people living with LMD” (Lycanthropic Metamorphic Disorder), can be sedated and confined during their monthly transformation. If he can find her, Potenza is sure that he, and he alone, can save the new werewolf from her predatory side. But Potenza is not the only man anxious to find the new member of the city pack. Jim, Potenza’s former right-hand man/wolf and now a fugitive from the clinic, is also determined to reach Annie first and keep her from Potenza’s clutches. A manic and side-splittingly funny chase for the lupine hunter is on. Peopled with unforgettable characters, brimming with tart and funny observations on big-city and corporate life, and with a corkscrew plot that keeps the pages flying, this hilarious novel speeds along faster than a werewolf after a bad guy. From the Hardcover edition.

'Prelude to Power' is the first of four volumes and covers the early days of New Labour, culminating in their victory at the polls in 1997. It details the extraordinary tensions between Tony Blair and Gordon Brown.

The new novel by the author of The Alchemist.

Taking place over the course of 24 hours during the Cannes Film Festival, this is the story of Igor, a successful, driven Russian entrepreneur who will go to the darkest lengths to reclaim a lost love--his ex-wife.

London Topographical Society Publication No. 158 with Historic Royal Palaces and The Society of Antiquaries of London 2001.

Contributions by Arthur Koestler, Ignazio Silone, John Wain and others.

A photographic guide to the more than three hundred species found north of Mexico depicts the animals in characteristic poses