Contains four essays, including a memoir of the author's father's working life in the saw-mills of the Pacific Northwest, a tribute to his mentor John Gardner, and an essay about the influences on his writing life; fifty poems; and, seven stories.

Bernard Jacquelain returns from the trenches a changed man. The city is a whirl of decadence and corruption and he embarks on a life of parties and shady business dealings, as well as an illicit affair. But as another war threatens, everything around him starts to crumble, and the future for him and for France suddenly looks dangerously uncertain.

After a death, a brutal murder and a blackout which covers half the country, Inspector Kurt Wallander is sure that these events must be linked. Hampered by the discovery of betrayals in his own team, lonely and frustrated, Wallander begins to lose conviction in his role as a detective.

`I started to write short pieces when I was living in a room too small to write a novel in.' So says Angela Carter of this collection, written during a period living in Toyko.

At the height of Stalin's postwar terror, Innokenty, a young diplomat and scion of a corrupt ruling class, discovers an earlier and more spiritual tradition than that adopted by the October Revolution, the beginning of a process which is Solzhenitsyn's basic theme: the individual's experience of acquiring an immortal soul.

The First Crusade is one of the best-known and most written-about events in history. This book intends to address the history of the First Crusade from the perspective of the east, examining the role of the Byzantine Empire and its ruler, Emperor Alexios I Komnenos.

Paul Kinder, a novelist with one forgotten book to his name, teaches creative writing in a university in the north-west of England. Either he's researching his second, breakthrough novel, or he's killing time having sex in cars. Either eternal life exists, or it doesn't. Either you'll laugh, or you'll cry. Or maybe both.

The First World War created the modern world. It destroyed a century of relative peace and prosperity and saw a continent at the height of its success descend into slaughter. This book offers an account that portrays the unfolding military conflict on land, sea and in the air.