Can we truly know the one we love? In this book, the author looks straight into the green eye of every lover's jealous struggle. It focuses on why we are driven to try possess one another, how jealousy can outlive death, and whether we can ever reclaim those careless days of first love.

`It's a masterpiece, of course, but more than that it shows that there is some such thing as being a simple observer' Nicci French, Independent It was 1932 when Joseph Mitchell first came across Joe Gould, a Harvard-educated vagrant of Greenwich Village.

You may not know his name. Aubrey was a modest man, a gentleman-scholar who cared far more for the preservation of history than for his own legacy. The author has seamlessly stitched together John Aubrey's own words to tell his life story and the history of seventeenth-century England.

What is the matter with old Mr Jones? Endless footsteps and low groans can be heard from his room in the dead of night. Only his son William knows the a terrible secret: his father betrayed his business partner Mr Diamond, and swindled him out of a great fortune. William resolves to go to London, find Mr Diamond and make amends.

On Valentine's Day, 1989, Salman Rushdie received a telephone call from a BBC journalist that would change his life forever: Ayatollah Khomeini, a leading Muslim scholar, had issued him with a death sentence. This book offers an account of how he was forced to live in hiding for over a decade.

Joshua and Natalie share a vexed history of sporadic encounters, explosive drunkenness and failed intercourse, all spliced with the occasional sad intimation of true love. Natalie attempts to start a new life without him in Manchester, but when Joshua calls unexpectedly and asks her to meet him in America she knows she has no choice but to go.

In 1935, Graham Greene set off to discover Liberia, a remote and unfamiliar West African republic founded for released slaves. Crossing the red-clay terrain from Sierra Leone to the coast at Grand Bassa with a chain of porters, he came to know one of the few areas of Africa untouched by Western colonisation.