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On Writing

The Palace Of Heavenly Pleasure

Salem's Lot

Stephen King's second book, 'Salem's Lot--about the slow takeover of an insular hamlet called Jerusalem's Lot by a vampire patterned after Bram Stoker's Dracula--has two elements that he also uses to good effect in later novels: a small American town, usually in Maine, where people are disconnected from each other, quietly nursing their potential for evil; and a mixed bag of rational, goodhearted people, including a writer, who band together to fight that evil. Simply taken as a contemporary vampire novel, 'Salem's Lotis great fun to read, and has been very influential in the horror genre. But it's also a sly piece of social commentary. As King said in 1983, "In 'Salem's Lot, the thing that really scared me was not vampires, but the town in the daytime, the town that was empty, knowing that there were things in closets, that there were people tucked under beds, under the concrete pilings of all those trailers. And all the time I was writing that, the Watergate hearings were pouring out of the TV.... Howard Baker kept asking, 'What I want to know is, what did you know and when did you know it?' That line haunts me, it stays in my mind.... During that time I was thinking about secrets, things that have been hidden and were being dragged out into the light." Sounds quite a bit like the idea behind his 1998 novel of a Maine hamlet haunted by unsightly secrets, Bag of Bones. --Fiona Webster

Dylan On Dylan

I change during the course of a day. I wake and I'm one person, and when I go to sleep I know for certain I'm somebody else.'" Bob DylanDYLAN ON DYLANgathers together for the first timetwenty-nine of the most significant and revealing conversations with the singer, stretching over forty years from the earliest days of his career in 1962 through to 2004. Among the highlights are the seminal Rolling Stone" interviews by Jann Wenner, Jonathan Cott, Kurt Loder and Mikal Gilmore, as well as the legendary 1966 Playboy" interview.In-depthand intimate, these interviews cover the gaps left by the Chronicles: Volume 1".Dylan expert Jonathan Cott writes an introduction to this must-have collection of the artist in his own words.

The Spice Route

The Spice Route is one of history's greatest anomalies: shrouded in mystery, it existed long before anyone knew of its extent or configuration. Spices came from lands unseen, possibly uninhabitable, and almost by definition unattainable; that was what made them so desirable. Yet more livelihoods depended on this pungent traffic, more nations participated in it, more wars were fought for it, and more discoveries resulted from it than from any other global exchange. Epic in scope, marvelously detailed, laced with drama, "The Spice Route spans three millennia and circles the world to chronicle the history of the spice trade. With the aid of ancient geographies, travelers' accounts, mariners' handbooks, and ships' logs, John Keay tells of ancient Egyptians who pioneered maritime trade to fetch the incense of Arabia, Graeco-Roman navigators who found their way to India for pepper and ginger, Columbus who sailed west for spices, de Gama, who sailed east for them, and Magellan, who sailed across the Pacific on the exact same quest. A veritable spice race evolved as the west vied for control of the spice-producing islands, stripping them of their innocence and the spice trade of its mystique. This enthralling saga, progressing from the voyages of the ancients to the blue-water trade that came to prevail by the seventeenth century, transports us from the dawn of history to the ends of the earth.

The Last Nazi

What if

Cell

'Civilization slipped into its second dark age on an unsurprising track of blood but with a speed that could not have been foreseen by even the most pessimistic futurist. By Halloween, every major city from New York to Moscow stank to the empty heavens and the world as it had been was a memory.' The event became known as The Pulse. The virus was carried by every cell phone operating within the entire world. Within ten hours, most people would be dead or insane. A young artist Clayton Riddell realises what is happening. And together with Tom McCourt and a teenage girl called Alice, he flees the devastation of explosive, burning Boston, desperate to reach his son before his son switches on his little red mobile phone...

Balham To Bollywood

For some actors, the idea of going to India for eight weeks to act in a Bollywood epic shot in the middle of a desert would send them scurrying back to their agent asking for some other work, any other work.| Not Chris England. He runs his own cricket team (An England XI), and since he was given the part of a cricketer in a British Army team playing against a small Indian village a hundred years ago, he wouldn t just be working. He would be representing his country at his favourite sport.| This is a cricket tour diary with a difference, as Chris England charts the progress of the film from his audition in a London park to the film s release eighteen months later. The author s ability to evoke the landscape and atmosphere of India is complemented by his skill in bringing to life the bizarre and often very funny world of film making.

Everthing's Eventual

In this eerie, enchanting compilation, the author takes readers down a road less travelled (for good reason) in the blockbuster e-book 'Riding the Bullet'. Terror becomes deja vu all over again when you get 'That Feeling, You Can Only Say What It Is in French'. 'Lt's Theory of Pets' will make you stop and think before giving a dog to a loved one. And there are eleven more stories that will keep you awake until dawn. Nothing is quite as it seems. Expect the unexpected in Everything's Eventual, a veritable treasure trove of enthralling, witty, dark tales that could only come from the imagination of the greatest storyteller of our time.

Turning Angel

Rape and murder aren't new to the Deep South, but when the body of a popular high school girl is found dumped in the local river, the whole town of Natchez, Mississippi is shocked.Penn Cage no longer practises law, but when his best friend Drew is accused of the murder and asks for help, Penn must face the hardest questions of his life: Can he defend Drew against the town, the police and overwhelming evidence? Or could it be true that his friend is a brutal killer who has deceived Penn and everyone else?

Cloud Atlas

'A remarkable book, made up of six resonating strands; the narrative reaches back into the 19th century, to colonialism and savagery in the Pacific islands, and forwards into a dark future, beyond the collapse of civilisation. It knits together science fiction, political thriller and historical pastiche with musical virtuosity and linguistic exuberance: there won't be a bigger, bolder novel this year' Justine Jordan, <I>Guardian</I>.<br> 'It is an impeccable dance of genres...played out to a suite on the great themes of colonialism, power, greed, corporate culture, and the way human civilisations evolve, morph, die and survive...an elegiac, radiant festival of prescience, meditation and entertainment.' Neel Mukherjee, <I>The Times</I>.<br> 'His wildest ride yet... a singular achievement, from an author of extraordinary ambition and skill' Matt Thorne, <I>Independent on Sunday</I>.

50 Ways to Get Along With Absolutely Anyone

Happy relationships are the key to joy in our lives. But, as most people know, this does not always seem possible.Chuck Spezzano, the master of relationship advice, offers a vital book of principles to enable you to get along with anyone and transform the problem areas of your life. These timeless principles are combined with simple and practical exercises that help you bring out the best in all of your relationships. The book can be read day-by-day or simply opened at random to discover your inspiration for the day.Chuck's kind-hearted yet challenging essays guarantee to transform your best enemies into your best friends and make your life easier and happier.

Rage

Jonah Said is a man with nowhere left to run. Hunted, haunted, and bearing the horrific scars of a life spent on the frontline of some of the world's bloodiest battlefields, he's not what you'd call a model soldier. That's why the British Army has shipped him to the Zone

Ready or Not

Every bride is entitled to pre-wedding jitters, and what reasonable girl wouldn't think twice about marriage when her fianc

A Vote For Murder

It's a funny thing about holidays in the country, but after only a few days away you feel as if you've been out of circulation for a month

The Virgin of Small Plains

January 1987, Small Plains, Kansas. On the night of the decade

Gardern Of Beasts

Paul Schumann corrects God"s mistakes. His first hit was revenge for his father"s murder - but then he found he had a talent for it. Now, he"s been offered theultimate job. One final target, and he can retire. Only his client isn"t the mob. It"s the US government. And if he succeeds, he could change the course of history.Jeffery Deaver"s breathtaking new thriller adds an epic twist to his trademark pace and suspense. Schumann"s mission will take him to the Berlin of Hitler"s Olympics, where danger and betrayal lurk everywhere. It"s a cat-and-mouse chase, with Schumann both cat and mouse, a man who thinks he has nothing to lose .

Wolves of the Calla

Determined to reach the Dark Tower, gunslinger Roland and his companions emerge from the forests in the Mid-World on a path that leads to a tranquil valley community of farmers and ranchers in the borderlands.Beyond the town, the rocky ground rises towards the dark source df affliction. Danger is imminent - the Wolves of the Calla are gathering, their unspeakable depredation poised to threaten the soul of the community. Roland and his companions venture all as they face an unknown adversary. And the future of the Mid-World once again faces crimson chaos.Wolves of the Calla is the magnificent fifth novel in Stephen King's epic Dark Tower series that continues to captivate processions of readers.And the Tower is closer...Set in a world of extraordinary circumstances, filled with stunning visual imagery and unforgettable characters, the Dark Tower series is Stephen King's most visionary piece of storytelling that may well be his crowning achievement.

When Red is Black

When Inspector Chen Cao agrees to do a translation job for a Triad-connected businessman he is given a laptop, a 'little secretary' to provide for his every need, medical care for his mother. There are, it seems, no strings attached .. Then a murder is reported: Chen is loath to shorten his working holiday, so Sergeant Yu is forced to take charge of the investigation. The victim, a middleaged teacher, has been found dead in her tiny room in a converted multi-family house. Only a neighbour could have committed the crime, but there is no motive. It is only when Chen returns and starts to investigate the past that he finds answers. But by then he has troubles of his own. This is the third critically-acclaimed Inspector Chen mystery set in contemporary China . The first two, Death of a Red Heroine and A Loyal Character Dancer, are also available from Sceptre.

Ghostwritten

What is real and what is not?": David Mitchell's first novel, Ghostwritten: A Novel in Nine Parts, plays with this question throughout its "parts". (That there are 10 sections is just part of the mystery of this book's schema.) Told through a range of voices, scattered across the globe--Tokyo, Hong Kong, Mongolia, Petersburg, London--Ghostwritten has been described as a "firework display, shooting off in a dozen different narrative directions" (Adam Lively).Certainly, Mitchell offers his readers a vertiginous, sometimes seductive, display of persona and place. "Twenty million people live and work in Tokyo," he writes in "Okinawa", the first section in the novel. "It's so big that nobody really knows where it stops." That sense of the global extension of the (post)modern city, the networks-- cultural, technological, phantasmagoric--to which it gives rise, is one key to this story of a Japanese death cult devoted to purging the "unclean" (gas attacks on the metro). "No, in Tokyo you have to make your place inside your head": that's how this immense world gets smaller, more subjective, more mad, as the narrator, Mr Kobayashi, sheds his "old family of the skin" to join a new "family of the spirit". It's a common theme. "I'm this person, I'm this person, I'm that person, I'm that person too," chants the voice of "Hong Kong", in the second section of the book. "No wonder it's all such a fucking mess." Neal's talking about his world, his life as a Hong Kong trader--"he's a man of departments, compartments, apartments"--but he might also be describing the experience of reading Ghostwritten. At once loquacious and knowing, leisurely and frantic, Mitchell offers his readers a huge, but fragmentary, portmanteau which builds in the links between its parts--aching bodies, reality police, the "ghost" writer in the machine of contemporary life, its mad, comic, and cosmic voices--without quite convincing you that they really do come together. -- Vicky Lebeau

Lawrence Sander's McNally's Chance

When Sabrina Wright, bestselling author of sumptuous tales of love lost and found, asks Archy McNally's help to find her missing husband, Archy quickly discovers it's not a simple domestic case. Sabrina's husband did not disappear: it was her daughter who ran off and Sabrina sent the girl's stepfather to find her. Both of them seem to have got lost...Gillian Wright fled to Palm Beach when she heard the true story of her birth: that Sabrina had the girl out of wedlock, put her up for adoption, then adopted her. But when local gossips get wind of the story, tongues wag and three different Palm Palm Beach names see the help of the posh resort's most discreet inquirer. When the gossip turns deadly, Archy must take a chance in order to unravel a thirty-year old mystery while walking a tightrope between client confidentiality and justice.

The Twelfth Card

Sixteen-year-old geneva settle is running from death. she's just a bright high school kid researching a paper on her ancestors,but someone out there sees her as a threat.someone will stop at nothing to prevent her digging up the past.someone on a mission to kill....

The Matchbreaker

When Lindsey Parker's widowed father announces that he is to remarry, Lindsey does what any good daughter would do: wishes him congratulations, then sets about trying to kill his fiancee, Karen. Fortunately, the murder attempt fails but Lindsey still succeeds in driving Karen off. It doesn't take long, however, before Lindsey realizes that her father's heart really is broken and the only way to mend it is by getting Karen back. But, Karen already has a new man - mysterious entrepreneur. Lindsay enlists the help of an old schoolmate, now private detective, in an attempt to break this new couple up, but when on her friend's advice, Lindsay turns honey-trapper and sets out to seduce her ex-future-step-mother's new man, she finds herself falling in love...

The Vanished Man

Lincoln Rhyme and Amelia Sachs are brought in to help with the high-profile investigation. For the ambitious Sachs, solving the case could earn her a promotion. For the quadriplegic Rhyme, it means relying on his prot