Pearl Louis Brandt has a terrible secret which she tries desperately to keep from her mother, Winnie Louie. And Winnie has long kept her own secrets - about her past and the confusing circumstances of Pearl's birth. Fate intervenes in the form of Helen Kwong, Winnie's so-called sister-in-law, who believes she is dying and must unburden herself of all falsehoods before she flies off to heaven. But, unfortunately, the truth comes in many guises, depending on who is telling the tale....... Thus begins a story that takes us back to Shanghai in the 1920s, through WWII, and the harrowing events that lead to Winnie's arrval in America in 1949.

The record of a six month journey which took Gerald Durrell, his wife Jacquie, and two cameramen through New Zealand, Australia and Malaya. The object was, first, to see what was being done about the conservation of wildlife in these countries, and secondly, to make a series of television films for the BBC.

Solzhenitsyn has created this work from his own experience of imprisonment and forced labour and from that of numerous victims of Stalin's terror and of Soviet prisons and labour camps. The result is a unique and startling national epic that presents the suppressed history of a vicious epoch and clearly documents the system that deformed or destroyed the lives of millions.

He was slow getting up this time, his feet dragging in the withered grass. I could have finished him. Instead I tied him up, partly because he was beaten and partly because the woman cried out behind me,'Stop it! You have to stop it!'.

I said, 'You're a strange mother, Mrs Wycherly. You don't seem to give a damn if your girl is dead or alive.' She laughed in my face. I went to the door, followed by the girlish laughter. A man was waiting for me on the other side of the door. His face was like a shiny, lumpy sausage, bulbous and queer under a silk stocking mask. He swung a tyre-iron in his hand. It came over in a looping arc and reached the side of my head before my fingers touched by gun butt. I fell backwards into the room and darkness

The Dream: Perestroika succeeds, the world begins to disarm, a new era of peace and stability is ushered in. The Soviet President continues with his program of reform and liberalisation... The Nightmare: Patrick Hyde, of British Intelligence, on patrol with a mujahideen group inside Soviet Tadjikistan, witnesses the shooting down of a Soviet military airliner by the Red Army. When he recognises a senior CIA officer and, to his horror, the identity of one of the aircraft's passengers, he has only one priority, to reach London and Sir Kenneth Aubrey.

The deceptively ladylike detective from St Mary Mead is back again. She solves the mystery of the dying man in the church sanctuary, the puzzle of Uncle Henry's hidden legacy and four more baffling mysteries, in this collection of eight newly-discovered stories by the Queen of Crime.

The pope is dead - but the papacy lives on. Already, from all corners of the globe, grizzled, scarlet-suited cardinals are gathering to elect a successor. Within the hushed confines of the Vatican, the air is alive with intrigue. Then in the midst of the most frenzied canvassing, comes a surprise result. The new Pope, Kiril I, is the youngest cardinal - and a Russian, recently released from seventeen years in the labour camps.

Son of a Norwegian master-mariner, grandson of Kaloni, the last of the great Polynesian navigators, Gunnar Thorkild is a man consumed by a dream. Convinced that the Polynesians' legendary Island of the Dead is real, he risks his career, his life and those of his fellow venturers to find it - and they are shipwrecked on the very island they seek. To survive, even in this lush tropical paradise, they must make new laws of power and property, of sex and marriage.....

To fulfil a promise to an old school friend, Miss Marple stays in a country house - with two hundred juvenile delinquents and seven heirs to an old lady's fortune. One of them is a murderer - a murderer with a talent for being in two places at once.