Life giving you the finger? Pull it! These quirky tales of sci-fi and fantasy will take you to realms where lightspeed meets light-hearted and you can't say awkward without orc.From the perils of being a dragon's beauty consultant to hidden benefits of software in whiteware, S J Cavanagh shows that he's outstanding in left field. Includes "Elf Esteem", which made ASIM's Best of Fantasy Vol 1.“Haughtiness in Love” A Short Love StoryIt’s a love story of Iba kundra and Jawl dsena. It’s a unique love story without love.Many of young people will find their own life in this story. It is obvious to have a story in love life.Read it and feel it.Heena Kothari.

“With the clarity of Robert B. Parker and the complexity of Michael Connolly, [this thriller] disturbs and charms at the same time.” —Booklist   Once a cancer patient, former Orlando detective Mike Garrity is a survivor—for now, at least. Death has a way of following him around, like a black cloud over his head. If it’s not his own mortality he’s thinking about, it’s someone else’s. Like his teenage daughter’s friend who just died of a suspected suicide. Or the woman he’s just met in his cancer support group, Debbie, who learns that she doesn’t have much longer to live.   Maybe Mike has gotten soft during his second chance. He can’t refuse to help Debbie when she asks him to track down the son she gave up for adoption more than twenty years ago. But his investigation leads to a dead body, which leads to Mike becoming the prime suspect in the...

One Day meets Up: The House That Made Us is a love story – and a life story – told through a series of photographs and based on a true story When Mac and Marie marry and find a home of their own, Mac takes a snap of themselves outside their newbuild bungalow, the garden bare and the paint on the front door still wet. It becomes a tradition, this snap, and slowly the photographs build into an album of a fifty-year partnership. Every year they take a photo and though things change around them – the garden matures, the fashions change, they grow older – the one constant is their love. Every year, come rain, come shine, from the Seventies through the decades, every photo tells the story of their love. Until the last photo, where the couple becomes one, and their story comes to an end...

Goodnight and Good Riddance: How Thirty-Five Years of John Peel Helped to Shape Modern Britain is a social history, a diary of a nation's changing culture, and an in-depth appraisal of one of our greatest broadcasters, a man who can legitimately be called the most influential figure in post-war British popular music.Without the support of John Peel, it's unlikely that innumerable artists - from David Bowie to Dizzee Rascal, Jethro Tull to Joy Division - would have received national radio exposure. But Peel's influence goes much deeper than this. Whether he was championing punk, reggae, jungle or grime, he had a unique relationship with his audience that was part taste-maker, part trusted friend.The book focuses on some 300 shows between 1967 and 2004, giving a thorough overview of Peel's broadcasting career and placing it in its cultural and social contexts. Peel comes alive for the reader, as do the key developments that kept him at the...

From crime writer Steve Cavanagh comes another gripping thriller featuring lawyer Eddie Flynn. This is the legal thriller listeners have been waiting for.An innocent client. A wife in jeopardy. Who will take The Plea?When billionaire David Child is arrested for the murder of his girlfriend, Clara, the FBI believes they can get him to testify and take down a huge money laundering scheme. Con artist turned lawyer Eddie Flynn is given the job: persuade David to plead guilty and give the agents the evidence they need. If Eddie can't get David to take a plea bargain, the FBI has incriminating files on Eddie's wife - and will send her to jail. But David swears he didn't murder anyone. The evidence overwhelmingly shows that David killed Clara: the security video showed no one else entering their apartment, the murder weapon was in his car, and he was covered in gunshot residue he can't explain. Yet as the FBI pressures Eddie to secure the guilty plea, Eddie becomes increasingly convinced that David is telling the truth.With adversaries threatening, Eddie has to find a way to prove David's innocence and find out if there's any way he might have been framed. But the stakes are high: Eddie's wife is in danger. And not just from the FBI....The Plea is a locked room mystery from Steve Cavanagh, the author Nelson DeMille compares to John Grisham, Scott Turow, and Brad Meltzer.

Who can forgive a mother who poisons her eight-year-old son? Even if it was an accident. Tasha thought she had everything under control – her family life, her career as a nurse – until her son got into her stash of painkillers. Now, during her first weekend home from drug treatment, she must come to grips with the damage she's done and somehow pick up the pieces. Told from the points of view of four different family members, Weekend Pass is a story about the lies we tell ourselves and the people we love. And it's about struggling to rise above the mistakes that threaten to define us. "Weekend Pass packs a lot into fewer than two hundred pages. The dialogue never stutters. The writing is tight and clean and elegant with hidden depths that give pause for reflection and thought. It covers important, difficult themes in a compassionate, humanist way. It was an absolute pleasure to read." – Recommended, TheBookbag.co.uk

Hamlin Garland was a popular 20th century American writer best known for writing about hardscrabble life on the Plains and the frontier. His stories resonated in an era known for the Depression and the Dust Bowl.

"I have a tumor in my head. I call it Bob . . ." With two ex-wives, a fifteen-year-old daughter who hates him, and a soon-to-be-fatal brain tumor nicknamed Bob, retired police detective Mike Garrity doesn't have a lot to live for. He's resigned himself to spending his last months alone, until an old colleague offers him a chance to go out with a bang, leave his daughter with an inheritance, and maybe even earn her respect. Twenty-two year old TJ Sommerset is a member of the hit boy band Boyz Klub, a millionaire, and missing-in-action, putting at risk a world tour and millions in endorsements. He's also the idol of Mike's teenage daughter, Jennifer. So when Boyz Klub's frantic manager hires Mike to locate his golden goose, Mike's all too happy to make one last attempt to impress Jennifer. However, it isn't long before Mike discovers that there are other people looking for TJ as well. And once a headless corpse shows up, it's clear that they're not just...

‘Plotting that takes the breath away’ Ian Rankin

For twenty years, Father Ewan McEwan, a Roman Catholic priest, has enjoyed a passionate long-term relationship with Lady Marina Proudfoot, an older woman of great beauty and refinement, whose two-year-old daughter and husband were tragically drowned in a boating accident. But when Marina unexpectedly dies, the emotional fallout affects not just Ewan, but Marina's son, Timothy, his lover, Roger, and Roger's wife, Sally. Now Ewan must survive not only his profound grief but also the secret revelations she leaves behind.

As a young man Red Cavanagh awoke one morning to find his father dead - murdered by members of the old Willis Walton gang. Setting off in pursuit he stopped in Bald Hills to secure himself a rifle, but didn't succeed. Then within hours, a grave is discovered in a clearing, covered with a crude wooden cross bearing the name Red Cavanagh...Four years on and Bald Hills is in deep trouble. The transcontinental railroad is likely to be routed to the north of the town, and a greedy local rancher is seizing property and land aided by gunman Chet Warrener. There seems no hope for the ordinary townspeople. Until, one day, a stranger rides into town...

Once a con artist, now a hotshot lawyer, Eddie Flynn's learnt that fast talk and sleight of hand are just as important in the courtroom are they are on the street. That's why Leonard Howell asks for Eddie's help when his 19-year-old daughter goes missing - he needs someone willing to break the rules. But what if the whole thing was a setup from the very beginning? With a client on trial for his life and the body count rising, the only question is which is deadlier - a man who keeps his oath or one who breaks it?A missing girl, a desperate father and a case that threatens to destroy everyone involved - Eddie Flynn's got his work cut out in the thrilling new novel from the author of The Defence. Read by Adam Sims.

Who is JT LeBeau?

Set in Nairobi, Kenya, Nairobi Ndoto follows three expatriate women whose ndoto—the Swahili word for dreams—become a nightmare when their world is thrown into turmoil by murder. Tilly, Pauline, and Zara each dreamed of a life abroad in Kenya filled with adventure, opportunities, and new beginnings. Reality didn't match the dream. Tilly thought her move to Kenya would be temporary, but nearly ten years and three kids later, she no longer knows what home is. Dealing with an increasingly strained marriage and the unexpected downsides of life abroad, Pauline struggles to establish herself as more than a trailing spouse. Zara, tired of shuttling between Nairobi and Mogadishu and sleeping in borrowed shipping containers, longs for stability. When someone in their expat circle engages in illicit activity, the women become entangled in a murder. Lines are crossed and friendships tested as they sift through the shock and tragedy.

What would you do to pay the bills; to survive, or to just get rich, would you compete against other teams in a quarantined town filthy with zombies wanting to bite out your throat? Emma and Lewis sign up for the race, they need the money to save his life. But they won't just be racing the dead, the surprise blizzard or the other contestants. Because anger and vengeance know no bounds and like everyone in the blighted town they become pawns in a game of retribution. The contestants become nothing more than live entertainment to viewers who watch and judge their every move in the town of Prideful as they race each other to arrive alive to a final flag. The team that makes will get airlifted out alive and go back home richer for it, the others walk back to a pittance and if they are not careful. They won't get out at all.

Who Was Angela Zendalic? is set in Oxford, in the locality of Jericho and the world of University academia, encompassing the past and the present. A deeply moving and sensitive story told with skill, humour, and a mirror to profoundly changing times. In 1954, Peggy, a respectable war widow and librarian, gives birth out of wedlock to Angela, a 'coloured' baby, and due to the discrimination of society, and her own deep shame, must give up the baby for adoption. Angela is adopted by a loving and well-meaning white couple, and as she grows up must come to terms with racial prejudice, the confusion surrounding her circumstances, and of falling in love with a man fifteen years her senior. Sarah, Angela's own daughter, grows up to be a feisty, liberated single parent who, on the death of her father, discovers her mother was a stranger called Angela Zendalic. Thus, she must confront her shock in order to search for her.

From crime writer Steve Cavanagh comes another gripping thriller featuring lawyer Eddie Flynn. This is the legal thriller listeners have been waiting for.An innocent client. A wife in jeopardy. Who will take The Plea?When billionaire David Child is arrested for the murder of his girlfriend, Clara, the FBI believes they can get him to testify and take down a huge money laundering scheme. Con artist turned lawyer Eddie Flynn is given the job: persuade David to plead guilty and give the agents the evidence they need. If Eddie can't get David to take a plea bargain, the FBI has incriminating files on Eddie's wife - and will send her to jail. But David swears he didn't murder anyone. The evidence overwhelmingly shows that David killed Clara: the security video showed no one else entering their apartment, the murder weapon was in his car, and he was covered in gunshot residue he can't explain. Yet as the FBI pressures Eddie to secure the guilty plea, Eddie becomes increasingly convinced that David is telling the truth.With adversaries threatening, Eddie has to find a way to prove David's innocence and find out if there's any way he might have been framed. But the stakes are high: Eddie's wife is in danger. And not just from the FBI....The Plea is a locked room mystery from Steve Cavanagh, the author Nelson DeMille compares to John Grisham, Scott Turow, and Brad Meltzer.

Once a con artist, now a hotshot lawyer, Eddie Flynn's learnt that fast talk and sleight of hand are just as important in the courtroom are they are on the street. That's why Leonard Howell asks for Eddie's help when his 19-year-old daughter goes missing - he needs someone willing to break the rules. But what if the whole thing was a setup from the very beginning? With a client on trial for his life and the body count rising, the only question is which is deadlier - a man who keeps his oath or one who breaks it?A missing girl, a desperate father and a case that threatens to destroy everyone involved - Eddie Flynn's got his work cut out in the thrilling new novel from the author of The Defence. Read by Adam Sims.

‘Plotting that takes the breath away’ Ian Rankin