FROM THE NUMBER ONE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLING AUTHOR Philip Noble is an eleven-year-old in crisis. His pub landlord father has died in a road accident, and his mother is succumbing to the greasy charms of her dead husband's brother, Uncle Alan. The remaining certainties of Philip's life crumble away when his father's ghost appears in the pub and declares Uncle Alan murdered him. Arming himself with weapons from the school chemistry cupboard, Philip...

'The World According to Garp' is the comic and compassionate coming-of-age novel that established John Irving as one of the most imaginative writers of his generation.

Eight-year-old Casey?s mother Ruth is a cruel woman, with a weakness for other women?s husbands. Casey?s father is gentle and hard-working and, though Tom Denton has long suspected his wife of having sordid affairs, he has chosen to turn a blind eye to keep the peace. But then, out of the blue, Tom?s world is cruelly shattered when he receives two bits of devastating news. Because of this, Tom realises that from now on their lives must change, forever....

Can she put right the secrets of the past? London, 1939. Winnie Berry has been the landlady of the Battersea Tavern for nearly 25 years and the pub is like home to her - a place of tears and laughter, full of customers that feel like family. A place where she's learned to avoid the quick fists of her husband and where she's raised her beloved son, David. He's inherited his father's lazy streak and can't seem to hold down a job, but when war is declared...

It's a hot summer afternoon. Tension is in the air. A gang of youths on bikes gathers outside a chip shop. A teenage boy is stabbed and left bleeding on the street. The boy's mother wonders how this could have happened to her son.

Edmund has escaped from his family into a lonely life. Returning for his mother's funeral he finds himself involved in the old, awful problems together with some new ones.

Glasgow, 1942. To please his father, Sandy McLean is training to be a surgeon. But Sandy's real passion is for painting. And when he meets Sophie, the stunning French girl who models for the local art school, he spies a second reason to become an artist. When Sandy rescues Sophie from the unwelcome advances of a drunk at a dance, he hopes it may be the start of something special. Although Sophie doesn't want a relationship, a friendship is formed...

'Mothers and Sons' is a written meditation on the dramas surrounding this most elemental of relationships. Each of the nine stories focuses on a moment in which an unspoken balance shifts; in which a mother and son do battle, or experience a sudden crisis, thus leaving their conception of who they are subtly or seriously altered.

?Love is whatever you can still betray. Betrayal can only happen if you love.? So says Magnus Pym, the spy of the title; and he has betrayed a lot in his life - countries, friends, family and lovers. When Magnus disappears after his father?s funeral, MI6 launches an urgent manhunt to prevent his defection. But Pym is on a search of his own - to unravel the mystery of what made him the perfect spy. Was it the duplicity of his con artist father, Rick?...

Penny Leighton, TV Producer and wife of the local vicar Simon Canter, is struggling to cope with motherhood. The couple have had their only child Jenna, while Penny is in her forties and it's been a big shock to her system. When Simon engages the services of a nanny, Ella, as a way of helping Penny, it only serves to push her further away from him and from Jenna. After Penny's sister arrives in the village after the death of the woman Penny called...