John Murray Court Number One. The Old Bailey Grant Thomas

The twelve stories in this startling collection range over centuries and across the world • There are stories about those who are lonely, or estranged, or out of time. There are hauntings, both literal and metaphorical; and acts of cruelty and neglect but also of penance • Some stories concern themselves with the present, and the mundane circumstances in which people find themselves: a woman who feels stuck in her life imagines herself in different jobs - as a lighthouse keeper in Wales, or as a guard against polar bears in a research station in the Arctic • Some stories concern themselves with the past: a sixteenth-century alchemist and doctor, whose arrogance blinds him to people's dissatisfaction with their lives until he experiences it himself

A Man Called Ove meets Inspector Montalbano, Auntie Poldi leaves no stone unturned in her quest for answers • Wine and murder - nothing is more likely to rouse Auntie Poldi's love of the chase • Still relishing the notoriety from her spectacular resolution of the Candela case, Poldi is alive to the faintest whiff of criminality • What to others might seem a series of misfortunes - the water supply cut off, a poisoned dog - is clearly, to Poldi, an escalation: the Mafia have had her in their sights ever since she solved Valentino's murder • Poldi has tasted blood. No one is above suspicion. And trouble will surely follow

As Hitler prepared to invade Poland during the sweltering summer of 1939, men and women from across London's museums, galleries and archives formulated ingenious plans to send the nation's highest prized objects to safety. Using stately homes, tube tunnels, slate mines, castles, prisons, stone quarries and even their own homes, a dedicated bunch of unlikely misfits packed up the nation's greatest treasures and, in a race against time, dispatched them throughout the country on a series of top-secret wartime adventures • National Treasures highlights a moment from our history when an unlikely coalition of mild-mannered civil servants, social oddballs and metropolitan aesthetes became the front line in the heritage war against Hitler. Caroline Shenton shares the interwoven lives of ordinary people who kept calm and carried on in the most extraordinary of circumstances in their efforts to save the Nation's historic identity

Громкие дела об убийствах зачастую привлекают наше внимание — ведь у каждой противозаконной смерти есть своя история. Но, в отличие от нас, судья не может перевернуть страницу и жить дальше. Как и подсудимый, и семья жертвы, и многие другие люди, которые находятся в зале суда • И все же нам интересно, что там происходит. И хотя большинство людей имеют лишь самое приблизительное представление о том, что происходит в британском Суде короны, любой человек может стать свидетелем или даже оказаться на скамье подсудимых • С захватывающим дух мастерством и глубоким состраданием автор Unlawful Killings описывает судебный процесс и наглядно показывает, каково это — быть судьей • Линии разлома нашего общество становится все труднее игнорировать. И Джозеф Уэнди считает, что мы делаем это на свой страх и риск

'The feeling of being lost in time and geography with months and years hazily sparkling ahead is a prospect of inconjecturable magic.' • In 1933, aged eighteen, Patrick Leigh Fermor set out on his 'great trudge', a year-long journey by foot from the Hook of Holland to Istanbul. Three decades later he wrote A Time of Gifts, the sparklingly original account of the first part of this youthful adventure, which took him through the Low Countries, up the Rhine, through Germany, down the Danube, through Austria and Czechoslovakia, and as far as Hungary • Alone, carrying only a rucksack and with a small allowance of only a pound a week, Fermor had planned to sleep rough - to live 'like a tramp, a pilgrim, or a wandering scholar' - but a chance introduction in Bavaria led to comfortable stays in castles, and provided a glimpse of the old Europe of princes and peasants

Two brothers. One mute, the other his lifelong protector • Year after year, their family visits the same sacred shrine on a desolate strip of coastline known as the Loney, in desperate hope of a cure • In the long hours of waiting, the boys are left alone. And they cannot resist the causeway revealed with every turn of the treacherous tide, the old house they glimpse at its end • Many years on, Hanny is a grown man no longer in need of his brother's care • But then the child's body is found. And the Loney always gives up its secrets, in the end

It is seven years since the Sweats wiped out most of the world's population. But for those who survived the outbreak, life has gone on. Stevie Flint and Magnus McFall are now part of a small community on the Orkney Islands, without mobile phones or TV, without antibiotics or fuel, who are trying to rebuild the rudiments of democratic civilisation • When three strangers arrive on the islands, however, they upset the fragile community, bringing long-buried tensions to the surface. Realising that a number of the islands' young are missing, Stevie and Magnus set off on a journey to the mainland to get them back - a mainland swarming with outlaw gangs, and where self-appointed autocrats and religious fanatics hold sway • Thrilling and breathless, No Dominion asks what happens when the scaffolding of civilisation collapses, and how far we'd go to preserve our humanity

When a young British man asks his German grandfather what it was like to fight on the wrong side of the war, the question is initially met with irritation and silence. But after the old man's death, a long letter to his grandson is found among his things • That letter is this book. In it, he relates the experiences of an unlikely few days on the Eastern Front - at a moment when he knows not only that Germany is going to lose the war, but that it deserves to. He writes about his everyday experience amid horror, confusion and great bravery, and he asks himself what responsibility he bears for the circumstances he found himself in. As he tries to find an answer he can live with, we hear from his grandson what kind of man he became in the seventy years after the war

Little Nell Trent lives in the quiet gloom of the old curiosity shop with her ailing grandfather, for whom she cares with selfl ess devotion. But when they are unable to pay their debts to the lecherous and demonic money-lender Daniel Quilp, the shop is • seized and they are forced to fl ee, thrown into a shadowy world in which there seems to be no safe haven. The Old Curiosity Shop an • instant bestseller that captured the hearts of the nation

The acclaimed travel writer's youthful journey - as an 18-year-old - across 1930s Europe by foot began in A Time of Gifts, which covered the author's exacting journey from the Lowlands as far as Hungary • Picking up from the very spot on a bridge across the Danube where his readers last saw him, we travel on with him across the great Hungarian Plain on horseback, and over the Romanian border to Transylvania • The trip was an exploration of a continent which was already showing signs of the holocaust which was to come. Although frequently praised for his lyrical writing, Fermor's account also provides a coherent understanding of the dramatic events then unfolding in Middle Europe. But the delight remains in travelling with him in his picaresque journey past remote castles, mountain villages, monasteries and towering ranges

John Julius Norwich's last book is the book he always wanted to write: the extremely colourful story of the country he loves best • From frowning Roman generals and belligerent Gallic chieftains, to Charlemagne (hated by generations of French children taught that he invented schools) through Marie Antoinette and the storming of the Bastille to Vichy, the Resistance and beyond, FRANCE is packed with heroes and villains, adventures and battles, romance and revolution. Full of memorable stories and racy anecdotes, this is the perfect introduction to the country that has inspired the rest of the world to live, dress, eat -- and love better

The Secret Lives of Colour tells the unusual stories of the 75 most fascinating shades, dyes and hues. From blonde to ginger, the brown that changed the way battles were fought to the white that protected against the plague, Picasso's blue period to the charcoal on the cave walls at Lascaux, acid yellow to kelly green, and from scarlet women to imperial purple, these surprising stories run like a bright thread throughout history. In this book Kassia St Clair has turned her lifelong obsession with colours and where they come from (whether Van Gogh's chrome yellow sunflowers or punk's fluorescent pink) into a unique study of human civilisation. Across fashion and politics, art and war, The Secret Lives of Colour tell the vivid story of our culture