Viking

'It had been almost a year since I’d found Hannah dead, and I thought I’d managed to erase all traces of that night within myself. I was wrong.' Special Topics in Calamity Physics is a mesmerizing debut. As teenager Blue van Meer tells her story we are hurled into a dizzying world of murder and butterflies, womanizing and wandering, American McCulture, the Western Canon, political radicalism and juvenile crushisms. Structured around a syllabus for a Great Works of Literature class (with hand-drawn Visual Aids), Blue’s wickedly funny yet poignant tale reveals how the imagination finds meaning in the most bewildering times, the ways people of all ages strive for connection, and how the darkest of secrets can set us free.

Every life is both ordinary and extraordinary, but Logan Mountstuart's - lived from the beginning to the end of the twentieth century - contains more than its fair share of both. As a writer who finds inspiration with Hemingway in Paris and Virginia Woolf in London, as a spy recruited by Ian Fleming and betrayed in the war and as an art-dealer in '60s New York, Logan mixes with the movers and shakers of his times. But as a son, friend, lover and husband, he makes the same mistakes we all do in our search for happiness. Here, then, is the story of a life lived to the full - and a journey deep into a very human heart.

Since her days in the orphanage, Latha has been a companion and servant to Thara, a more fortunate girl her own age. But since her trip to the hill country when she caught her first glimpse of a rose, Latha has known she was destined for a better life. For now, she must watch silently as Thara receives all the luxuries Latha is denied, consoled only by the rose-scented soap stolen from the bathroom of her master's house. Years and miles away, Biso, a desperate young mother, flees from her murderous husband, taking her children with her to the remote hills. As Biso and Latha journey towards their separate fates, struggling to hold on to their independence, each will betray the people they love, changing the course of their lives for ever. A Disobedient Girl is an epic, heartbreaking novel about the linked destinies of two women, set against the backdrop of beautiful, politically turbulent Sri Lanka.

For twenty-five years, a solitary American novelist has been writing at the desk she inherited from a young poet who disappeared at the hands of Pinochet's secret police; one day a girl claiming to be the poet's daughter arrives to take it away, send ing the writer's life reeling. Across the ocean, in the leafy suburbs of London, a man caring for his dying wife discovers, among her papers, a lock of hair that unravels a terrible secret. In Jerusalem, an antiques dealer slowly reassembles his fath er's study, plundered by the Nazis from Budapest in 1944. Connecting these stories is a desk of many drawers that exerts a power over those who possess it or give it away. As the narrators of Great House make their confessions, the desk takes on more and more meaning, and comes finally to stand for all that has been taken from them, and all that binds them to what has disappeared. Great House is a story haunted by questions: What do we pass on to our children, and how do they absorb our dreams a nd losses? How do we respond to disappearance, destruction, and change? Nicole Krauss has written a soaring, powerful novel about memory struggling to create a meaningful permanence in the face of inevitable loss.

This tale is told by 1 that died at birth by 1 that came into the world in days of endles war at the moment of disaster. Billy Dean is a secret child, growing up in the dark heart of Blinkbonny. He has a beautiful young mother and a father who arrive s at night carrying the scent of incense and cigarettes. His world is just a bed, some pictures of the holy island and a single locked door, but his father fills his dreams with mysterious tales and dreadful warnings. When his father disappears, Bill y's mum brings him out into the world, and he learns the dreadful truth of what happened in Blinkbonny on the day he was born. Gradually he finds he has the gift of helping to rebuild what has been broken. But there is one figure who is beyond healin g, who comes looking for Billy himself and is determined on a kind of reckoning. I am Billy Dean. This is the truth. This is my tale. David Almond's extraordinary first novel for adults is the story of a child, born of sin, who emerges into a post-in dustrial, almost apocalyptic world where the force of his innocence is tested to the extreme.

Sensational books like "Freakonomics" have shown how human behaviour follows predictable patterns. But how do you take these radical ideas and apply them to your business? And how do you make money from them? "Secrets of the Moneylab" sets out what b usiness can learn from the findings of the new economics and social psychology. It shows how you can shape desires, use incentives and reduce risks to consistently improve the bottom line. In his experimental lab at Hewlett-Packard, chief economist K ay-Yut Chen is running groundbreaking research into human behaviour. He packs "Secrets of the Moneylab" with insights into the invisible forces controlling the world of business. These findings, which defy conventional wisdom and traditional economic theory, will help you engineer your business for success.

Paperback, Viking 2011 304 pages ISBN: 0670919349 ISBN-13: 9780670919345 In New York a woman spends a night with a young Chilean poet before he departs, leaving her his desk. Later, he is arrested by Pinochet's secret police ...In north London, a man caring for his dying wife discovers a lock of hair that unravels a terrible secret ...In Jerusalem, an antiques dealer reassembles his father's study, plundered by the Nazis. One item remains missing ...Spanning continents and decades, weaving an intricate web of its characters' lives, "Great House" tells a soaring story of love, loss and survival ...

This is an unforgettable tale of adventure, tragedy, love and war. In love for the first time, Sira Quiroga leaves Madrid, along with everything she knows and cares about, to run away to Tangiers, Morocco with her lover Ramiro. She entrusts him with all her inheritance only to be left by him - pregnant, penniless and in trouble with the authorities. At her lowest ebb Sira falls back on the one skill she possesses: sewing. Moving to Tetouan, Sira survives by sewing beautiful clothes for the English mistress of one of the most powerful men in Morocco and for her German friends. As the women unguardedly gossip about their husbands and lovers, Sira is placed in a position very valuable to the British secret service, and she is soon forced to move to Madrid where great danger lies. This is a grand and epic story that tells the story of Spain's civil war, Madrid in the Second World War and reveals a world of war, glamour, espionage and passion.

Christianity was born nearly 2000 years ago in ancient Palestine. It has shaped the course of human history. Yet historians still cannot say how it really began. How did a 1st-century preacher called Jesus manage to spark a new religion? It is one of the biggest and most profound of all historical mysteries. This extraordinary book finally provides the answer. And it has been staring us in the face for over a century.

A moving, inter-war family saga from Patricia Wastvedt, the Orange Prize Longlisted author of "The River". In 1947, Elisabeth Mander's German nephew comes to stay: Stefan Landau, her dead sister's teenage son, whom she hates and loves before she's even set eyes on him. Orphaned by the war and traumatised by the last, vicious battles of the Hitler Youth, Stefan brings with him to England only a few meagre possessions. Among them a portrait of a girl with long copper hair by a young painter called Michael Ross - and with it the memory, both painful and precious, of her life and that time between the wars. Spanning decades and generations, "The German Boy" tells the moving story of two families entangled by love and friendship, divided by prejudice and war, and of a brief encounter between a woman and a man that touched each of their lives forever. "An absorbing literary saga ...a sophisticated and subtly woven story". ("Daily Mail"). Born in 1954, Patricia Wastvedt grew up in Blackheath, south London, and spent her summers in Kent. She has a degree in Creative Arts and an MA in Creative Writing, and her first novel, "The River", written in her late forties, was long-listed for the Orange Prize. She teaches at Bath Spa University, and is also a manuscript editor. She lives and writes in a cottage in Somerset.

Since "Unreal" was published in 1985, Paul Jennings has written over 100 stories and sold over 7 million copies of his books. To celebrate 20 years of stories by Paul Jennings, Penguin has put together a collection of his funniest work. Hand-picked by Paul, each book contains around 25 stories from the "UnCollected Series" and "Tongue-Tied".

A collection of stories by Paul Jennings.

Since "Unreal" was published in 1985, Paul Jennings has written over 100 stories and sold over eight million copies of his books. To celebrate over twenty years of stories by Paul Jennings, Penguin has put together collections of his work. Hand-picked by Paul, each book contains 20-25 stories from the "UnCollected" series, "Tongue-tied" and the "Super Diaries". Paul Jennings' "Funniest Stories", Paul Jennings' "Weirdest Stories" and Paul Jennings' "Spookiest Stories" have sold over 110,000 copies combined, and Paul's "Trickiest" looks set to follow.

Neil Young is an iconic figure in the history of rock and pop culture (inducted not once but twice into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame). This title offers an overview of his personal life and musical career, spanning his time in bands Buffalo Springfield and Crosby, Stills & Nash, and his role as the patron saint of the grunge scene.

In 1938, when her diary begins, Helga is eight years old. Alongside her father and mother and the 45,000 Jews who live in Prague, she endures the Nazi invasion and regime: her father is denied work, schools are closed to her, she and her parents are confined to their flat. Then deportations begin, and her friends and family start to disappear. In 1941, Helga and her parents are sent to the concentration camp of Terezin, where they live for three years. Here Helga documents their daily life - the harsh conditions, disease and suffering, as well as moments of friendship, creativity and hope - until, in 1944, they are sent to Auschwitz. Helga leaves her diary behind with her uncle, who bricks it into a wall to preserve it. Helga's father is never heard of again, but miraculously Helga and her mother survive the horrors of Auschwitz, the gruelling transports of the last days of the war, and manage to return to Prague. As Helga writes down her experiences since Terezin, completing the diary, she is fifteen and a half. She is one of only a tiny number of Czech Jews who have survived. Reconstructed from her original notebooks, which were later retrieved from Terezin, and from the loose-leaf pages on which Helga wrote after the war, the diary is presented here in its entirety, accompanied by an interview with Helga and illustrated with the paintings she made during her time at Terezin. As such, Helga's Diary is one of the most vivid and comprehensive testimonies written during the Holocaust ever to have been recovered.

THE ORIGIN OF LIFE: What is life? Where did it come from? In what form did it first appear? And how? Every creature, plant and cell that has ever inhabited the Earth owes its existence to the emergence, some four billion years ago, of a single life-form: the first ever living being, from which all other life subsequently evolved. Drawing on recent and dramatic advances in experimental biology, The Origin of Life takes us on a gripping, four-billion-year journey of discovery to explain exactly how such a thing could have happened. From interplanetary collisions to the inner-workings of cells and genes, it offers answers to the very grandest of questions before arriving at a thrilling solution to the greatest detective story of them all. THE FUTURE OF LIFE: Introducing a new chapter in human history: living technology. Our mastery of genetics now allows us to create entirely new life-forms within the laboratory - goats that produce spider silk in their milk, bacteria that excrete diesel, cells that identify and destroy tumours - offering tailor-made solutions to the crises of food shortage, pandemic disease and climate change. These living technologies can be downloaded for free or bought online in strands of ready-made DNA, using the equipment available in most student laboratories. But much remains unknown and this revolutionary technology is fraught with controversy, not least the fear of bioterrorism. The Future of Life introduces us to these remarkable innovations, explains how they work, explores the risks as well as the possibilities they afford, and presents a powerful argument for their benefit to humankind.