Winner of the World Fantasy Award Tenth Anniversary Edition, with a new introduction and three extra stories. It's a rainy day when the woman approaches Joe. He is a private detective and she is looking for someone, as these things often go. Her quarry is the obscure author of a series of pulp novels featuring one Osama bin Laden: Vigilante. Joe's quest will take him across the world in search of the writer. And every step of the way - from the backwaters of Laos to Paris and London - he is plagued, by assailants he cannot name, by questions he cannot hope to answer and by ghostly entities he cannot seem to shake. Joe knows how the story should end, but even he is not ready for the truths he will find in New York and atop a quiet hill above Kabul, nor for the choice he will have to make there...

In a slightly alternate world, heroics mean different things to different people. Oblivion and Fogg, inseparable friends for seventy years, guarding the British Empire, bound together by a shared fate. Until one night in Berlin, in the aftermath of the Second World War, and a secret that tore them apart. Now, recalled to the Retirement Bureau from which no one can retire, Fogg and Oblivion must face up to a past of terrible war and unacknowledged heroism: a life of dusty corridors and secret rooms, of furtive meetings and blood-stained fields, to answer one last, impossible question: What makes a hero?