Concentration

A Small Town in Germany by John le Carré

London security officer, Alan Turner, is sent to locate a missing official from the British Embassy in Bonn, and the 43 confidential files that disappeared with him as Germany's past, present and future threaten to collide in a nightmare of violence.

City Come A-Walkin' by John Shirley

Stu Cole is struggling to keep his nightclub, Club Anesthesia, afloat in the face of mob harassment when he's visited by a manifestation of the city of San Francisco, crystallized into a single enigmatic being. This amoral superhero leads him on a terrifying journey through the rock and roll demimonde as they struggle to save the city.

Flight 714 by Hergé

On their way to Sydney, Tintin and Captain Haddock run into an old friend, a pilot who offers them a ride on a private jet. But when the plane gets hijacked, Tintin and the Captain find themselves prisoners on a deserted volcanic island!

Galapagos by Kurt Vonnegut

Galápagos takes the reader back one million years, to A.D. 1986. A simple vacation cruise suddenly becomes an evolutionary journey. Thanks to an apocalypse, a small group of survivors stranded on the Galápagos Islands are about to become the progenitors of a brave, new, and totally different human race. In this inimitable novel, America's master satirist looks at our world and...

HMS Resolute by Elizabeth Matthews

How did a ship involved in a failed search for a lost explorer alter the course of history and become the symbol of Anglo-American friendship? Sent into the Arctic to find Franklin in 1852, HMS Resolute was abandoned; then salvaged by an American whaler, who brought her home on Christmas Eve 1855. When Britain and America were on the brink of their 3rd war, she became the focus of...

Journeys by Ian R. MacLeod

From a changed Jerusalem to windmills which draw their own wind. From windswept British campsites to vast slave empires which have never been. MacLeod's breadth of vision in this collection is extraordinary, but what unites these stories is his abiding interest in humanity, and the way in which he combines the fantastically strange and with the memorably everyday. Expect widescreen...

Pagan Holiday by Tony Perrottet

The ancient Romans were responsible for many remarkable achievements - Roman numerals, straight roads - but one of their lesser-known contributions was the creation of the tourist industry. The first people in history to enjoy safe and easy travel, Romans embarked on the original Grand Tour, journeying from the lost city of Troy to the Acropolis, from the Colossus at Rhodes to Egypt...

Snuff by Terry Pratchett

At long last, Lady Sybil has lured her husband, Sam Vimes, on a well-deserved holiday away from the crime and grime of Ankh-Morpork. But for the commander of the City Watch, a vacation in the country is anything but relaxing. The balls, the teas, the muck - not to mention all that fresh air and birdsong - are more than a bit taxing on a cynical city-born and -bred copper. Yet a...

Switch Bitch by Roald Dahl

These four stories are, by turns, funny, bawdy, touching, and outrageous. They are for lovers of tales that combine the macabre and the erotic with intriguing twists of plot.

The Prisoner of Heaven by Carlos Ruiz Zafón

Barcelona, 1957. It is Christmas, and Daniel Sempere and his wife, Bea, have much to celebrate. They have a beautiful new baby son named Julian, and their close friend Fermin Romero de Torres is about to be wed. But their joy is eclipsed when a mysterious stranger visits the Sempere bookshop and threatens to divulge a terrible secret that has been buried for two decades in the city's...

The Social Contract by Jean-Jacques Rousseau

"Man was born free, but everywhere he is in chains." Thus begins Rousseau's influential 1762 work, in which he argues that all government is fundamentally flawed and that modern society is based on a system of inequality. The philosopher posits that a good government can justify its need for individual compromises and that promoting social settings in which people transcend their...

Up the Line by Robert Silverberg

Being a Time Courier was one of the best jobs Judson Daniel Elliott III ever had. It was tricky, though, taking group after group of tourists back to the same historic event without meeting yoruself coming or going. Trickier still was avoiding the temptation to become intimately involved with the past and interfere with events to come. The deterrents for any such actions were...