Simon Vance

Tony Webster and his clique first met Adrian Finn at school. Sex-hungry and book-hungry, they would navigate the girl-less sixth form together, trading in affectations, in-jokes, rumour and wit. Maybe Adrian was a little more serious than the others, certainly more intelligent, but they all swore to stay friends for life. Now Tony is retired. He’s had a career and a single marriage, a calm divorce. He’s certainly never tried to hurt anybody. Memory,...

A gothic labyrinth of roofs and turrets, cloisters and corridors, stairwells and dungeons, it is also the cobwebbed kingdom of Byzantine government and age-old rituals, a world primed to implode beneath the weight of centuries of intrigue, treachery, and death. Steerpike, who began his climb across the roofs when Titus was born, is now ascending the spiral staircase to the heart of the castle, and in his wake lie imprisonment, manipulation, and murder. Gormenghast...

Roger Kilbourne, who has the ability to "cross over" into the land of the dead, uses his talent to realize the life he dreams of--even if it means bringing the dead back to the land of the living.

Nominated for the Man Booker Prize, an exquisite tale of romance and rivalry, gambling and greed, from one of England's finest writers. As the shadows lengthen over the June grass, all England is heading for Epsom Down?high life and low life, society beauties and White chapel street girls, bookmakers and gypsies, hawkers and thieves. Hopes are high, nerves are taut, hats are tossed in the air? This is Derby Day. For months people have been waiting...

"Germany, 1933. The world is not yet at war, but the influence of the Nazi party is spreading like wildfire through Berlin. The prequel to the bestselling Station series introduces us to John Russell, an Englishman with a political past who must keep his head down as the Nazis solidify their power. The Reichstag parliament building has burned down, just four weeks after Hitler's appointment as German Chancellor. The torching will be used to justify...

Trent's Last Case (1913) is a detective novel by E.C. Bentley. Adapted three times for the cinema-including a 1952 feature film starring Michael Wilding, Orson Welles, and Margaret Lockwood-Trent's Last Case, which was titled The Woman in Black in the U.S., earned the acclaim of such writers as Dorothy L. Sayers, and was followed by a sequel and a collection of short stories involving its main character. When Sigsbee Manderson, a prominent American...

Christopher Hitchens, the #1 New York Times bestselling author of God Is Not Great has been called a Tom Paine for our times, and in this addition to the Books that Changed the World Series, he vividly introduces Paine and his Declaration of the Rights of Man, the world's foremost defense of democracy. Inspired by his outrage at Edmund Burke's attack on the French Revolution, Paine's text is a passionate defense of man's inalienable rights, and the...

"The North" is simultaneously a location, a direction, and a mystical concept. Although this concept has ancient roots in mythology, folklore, and fairy tales, it continues to resonate today within modern culture. McIntosh leads readers, chapter by chapter, through the magical and spiritual history of the North, as well as its modern manifestations, as documented through physical records, such as rune stones and megaliths, but also through mythology...

Eighteenth-century anatomist Dr. Thomas Silkstone travels to the English countryside to unravel a tangled web of mystery, medicine, and murder-in this captivating new novel from Tessa Harris. . . A man staggers out of his cottage into the streets of Oxfordshire, shattering an otherwise peaceful evening with the terrible sight of his body shaking and heaving, eyes wild with horror. Many of the villagers believe the Devil himself has entered Joseph...

During World War II, an American soldier encounters a German woman living a secret life in bomb-blighted London. In September of 1940, the Blitz had begun. Like other British civilians, Audrey Stocking is determined to survive, except she isn't from England. She is a German-a young Jewish woman with a fake passport and a nearly-perfect British accent, trying her best to blend into the city. Her days are kept busy working for the Woman's Voluntary...