Between writing her bestselling novels, Caroline Lawrence has penned several short stories, covering incidents alluded to in the novels, but not dramatised at length. This book brings together all the mini-mysteries to date to provide even more coverage of events in the lives of our four detectives during the dangerous, exciting reign of Emperor Titus.

"Meet Louis Warlock. Man about town, denizen of Soho's nightclubs and cabaret bars - and the most skilled magician of his time . . . As a boy, Ludvik Weinschenk fled Nazi Germany to England with a pack of playing cards and three tricks to his name. Twelve years later, in 1950s London, having risen through the ranks of concert parties, night clubs and variety theatres, Ludvik - or Louis Warlock as he is now known - is the most famous magician in Britain. But after his talent for deception attracts the attention of the British secret service, Louis is thrown into the perilous world of espionage and finds himself sent across Europe with a dangerous mission to fulfil. When he comes face to face with a nemesis whose cunning rivals his own, Louis will need to use every trick in the book - or risk the most terrible consequences, both for the country and for himself."--Publisher

An unabridged compilation of the bestselling and award winning trilogy The Boys from Bondi, Going Home and Joshua. A rare look at the adolescent Jewish-Australian experience filled with daring and wit. The unforgettable portrayal of the conflict between Arab and Jew is told with passion, humour and unlikely optimism. The book is a tragi-comic adventure touched with romance and growing up.

In a magnificent and daring new novel that triumphantly blends fact and fiction, Jack Dann offers his own thrilling secret history of a lost year in Leonardo da Vinci's life. He begins with a wildly imaginative bit of speculation: What if Leonardo, who was obsessed with flight and who conceived brilliant blueprints for the first flying machines, didn't stop with his designs? What if, during that missing year, he actually built and flew his marvelous machine... five hundred years before the Wright brothers legendary flight at Kitty Hawk?

This unforgettable, magical novel takes for its premise an inspired bit of speculation based firmly in history: Leonardo da Vinci's conception of a marvelous flying machine. Set against the colorful backdrop of Italy and Persia in the 1400s, The Memory Cathedral masterfully calls forth a dazzling era when magic and science were one and the same.

"This delightful lesbian romp set in Elizabethan England captures the adventures of Moll Cutpurse, a swashbuckling heroine, upholder of the right of women, as she pits her wits against Puritans and tricksters, travels with the gypsies, rescues a near-victim of the anti-witchcraft hysteria, and cheats the wealthy out of their ill-gotten gains - with help from her lifelong friend and lover, Bridget, the apothecary"--P [4] of cover.

The immense service that Langer's careful, thoughtful, immensely intelligent and restrained study renders is that the esthetics of atrocity cease to be an exclusive domain of the victims. Many of his writers are not Jewish and several were not imprisoned or interned, and yet all of them have been driven by the death-camp universe. The atrocity of that time and the atrocities that have succeeded Auschwitz represent a continuity that may almost be called a new tradition, one in which the phantasmagoric and horrific is real and the gentle and generous a prodigy to be remarked with amazement. " The Holocaust and the Literary Imagination is a pioneering work of criticism for it impels us, readers and writers alike, to inquire after the basic paradox: how can literature delight and transfix or warn and modify a humanity from whom nothing is hidden, nothing prohibited, for whom nothing is shocking or unreal." -Arthur A. Cohen, New York Times Book Review "A stimulating, perceptive study of the literature of the Holocaust.... Langer's examination of possible stylistic approaches to the subject, from the delicate whimsy of Aichinger to the graphic bestiality of Kosinski's The Painted Bird is in each case detailed and subtle." - The New Republic

The transcripts take the reader on an intellectually breathtaking tour through David Mamet's baroque, fragmented world, where nothing is certain except the certainty bestowed by the academy.After the Cola riots, the fire at the Stop 'n' Shop, and the death of my kitten, what remains? Does the Joke Code still operate? Has anyone seen my copy of Bongazine? Can Jane of Trent unlock this paranoia? What were Chet and Donna doing in the boathouse? And just who does Ginger think she is? In playing with the ideas of perception, accuracy, and truth, Wilson dares to doubt them all.

Stark is a secret consortium with more money than God, and the social conscience of a dog on a croquet lawn. What's more, it knows the Earth is dying. Deep in Western Australia where the Aboriginals used to milk the trees, a planet-sized plot is taking shape. Some green freaks pick up the scent: a pommie poseur; a brain-fried Vietnam vet; Aboriginals who have lost their land not much against a conspiracy that controls society. But EcoAction isnt in society: it just lives in the same place, along with the cockroaches. If you're facing the richest and most disgusting scheme in history, you have to do more than stick up two fingers and say peace.

In an isolated trailer home in the far north of Japan, an old criminal scrutinizes his tattooed skin while he waits for the past to catch up with him. A year later, the life of a young policeman breaks down as he investigates a tattooed corpse and the history of death and guilt embedded in its skin. From the Japanese underworld to midnight in the London Zoo aquarium, Skin charts the lives of people in a world made stark and fantastical. The grief of a young computer programmer who cannot erase the ghostly memories of his twins. The vicious logic of the games played by children while their parents sip drinks under parasols. And London Zoo, where the disappearance of dead animals is blamed on the 'Featherman', an eerie bodysnatcher who passes through London's wastelands and derelict spaces, leaving no trace for the feathers of green humming-birds.

Written between 1963 and 1966, when its publication would have proved to be political dynamite—and its author's undoing— The Architects of political intrigue and personal betrayal takes readers into the German Democratic Republic in the late 1950s, shortly after Khruschev's "secret speech" denouncing Stalin and his methods brought about a "thaw" in the Soviet bloc and, with it, the release of many victims of Stalinist brutality. Among these is Daniel, a Communist exile from Hitler who has been accused of treachery while in Moscow and who now returns to Germany after years of imprisonment. A brilliant architect, he is taken on by his former colleague, Arnold Sundstrom, who was in exile in Moscow as well but somehow fared better. He is now in fact the chief architect for the World Peace Road being built by the GDR. In Daniel, Arnold's young wife Julia finds the key that will unlock the dark secret of her husband's success and of her own parents' deaths in Moscow-and will undermine the very foundation on which she has built her life. A novel of exquisite suspense, romance, and drama, The Architects is also a window on a harrowing period of history that its author experienced firsthand-and that readers would do well to remember today.

On the night of May 4, 1886, during a peaceful demonstration of labor activists in Haymarket Square in Chicago, a dynamite bomb was thrown into the ranks of police -trying to disperse the crowd. The officers immediately opened fire, killing a number of protestors and wounding some two hundred others. Albert Parsons was the best-known of those hanged; Haymarket is his story. Parsons, humanist and autodidact, was an ex-Confederate soldier who grew up in Texas in the 1870s, and fell in love with Lucy Gonzalez, a vibrant, outspoken black woman who preferred to describe herself as of Spanish and Creole descent. The novel tells the story of their lives together, of their growing political involvement, of the formation of a colorful circle of "co-conspirators"-immigrants, radical intellectuals, journalists, advocates of the working class-and of the events culminating in bloodshed. More than just a moving story of love and human struggle, more than a faithful account of a watershed event in United States history, Haymarket presents a layered and dynamic revelation of late nineteenth-century Chicago, and of the lives of a handful of remarkable individuals who were willing to risk their lives for the promise of social change.

At a time when Charlemagne ruled, the Byzantines were encroaching upon Russia, and the faith of Allah was flourishing in Baghdad, there existed a kingdom with a tolerant, advanced civilization: somewhere between the Caucasus mountains and the Volga, the Khazar kingdom grew and flourished, and in one of the oddest choices ever made, converted itself to Judaism. A thousand years later, when the writer Marc Sofer is given an ancient Khazarian coin by a mysterious visitor, he is drawn into investigating the fascinating enigma of the Khazars. Why did these Steppe warriors decide to become Jews? Why, after centuries of power and prosperity, were they effaced from history? What is the connection between this ancient, vanished people, and the terrorist group calling themselves the New Khazars, who have begun attacking oil plants on the Caspian sea? Taking place both in the 10th century and the 21st, this absorbing, dramatic tale is part historical novel, part thriller. The story of the Khazars is interwoven with a contemporary political conspiracy in an unusual blend of reality and fiction that explores the ever important themes of history and identity.

The novel centres on a colourful group of refugee Tibetans. One of the group's members, the charismatic (and slightly dubious) Rabbi Chod, recognises himself as the reincarnation of Moses, and various friends as reincarnations of key Biblical figures. Despite condemnation from both the mainstream Jewish and Tibetan communities, he declares his followers the true 'lost tribe of Israel', and defiantly opens up a synagogue in a pet shop. a family where suppression and dysfunction are common currency. Both of his parents are Tibetan Jews, followers of Rabbi Chod. His father owns a cafe called 'Hush Hush', so called because within the cafe, all forms of noise are forbidden. Any customer who speaks is instantly banned and a Polaroid photo of them is pinned to a cork board in case they should dare to return. way not into the future, but the past. He falls asleep each night only to wake up the day before. In this way, as he grows up his parents get younger. By the end of the book his parents are children - too young to manage by themselves - and the adult Monlam has to look after them. In this way he witnesses his own family history, quite literally living backwards into their lives.

A contemporary Frankenstein that defies expectations, this is a thrilling novel, couched in luminous, captivitating prose, about a journalist, Cédric Allyn-Weberson, who suffers a horrific accident, paralyzing him from the neck down. An ideal candidate for a body transplant, Cédric survives the surgery but has both physical and existential trouble with his recovery and adaptation: encountering his lover with a new body, discovering the life history of his donor, and attempting to understand the mind-body relationship as he lives it.

"This rediscovered gem of Czech literature, a crime novel by renowned Holocaust memoirist Heda Margolius Kovaly, depicts a chilling moment in history, redolent with the stifling atmosphere of political and personal oppression of the early days of Socialist Czechoslovakia. In 1985, Czech Holocaust memoirist, literary translator, and political exile Heda Margolius Kovaly turned her pen to fiction. Inspired by the stories of Raymond Chandler, Kovaly knit her own terrifying experiences in early 1950s Socialist Prague -- her husband's imprisonment and wrongful execution, her own persecution at his disgrace -- into a gorgeous psychological thriller-cum-detective novel. Set in and around a cinema where a murder was recently committed, Innocence follows the unfolding of the investigation while telling the stories of the women who work there as ushers, each of whom is forced to support herself in difficult circumstances. As the novel brings this group alive, it tells their various life stories that have brought them to this job, the secrets they share with one another, and the secrets they keep. When the detective trying to solve the first murder is found slain by the cinema, all of their secrets come into the light. A smart, evocative, and deeply stirring literary crime novel with international appeal"--

Art investigator Madison Dupre knew the offer was too good to be true: $20,000 for a quick trip to Dubai, the fantastic Arabian Nights city on the Persian Gulf. The call came from Sir Henri Lipton, a man who was supposed to be dead—and who she sincerely had hoped was burning in hell because he had ruined her career before his violent “demise.” He told her only one tantalizing thing about the piece of art: “Let’s just say it’s a couple thousand years old and was buried with Christ.” The fact the offer came from a man wanted on three continents for art looting was fair warning that there would be a catch. But with credit collectors and an avaricious landlord pounding at her door, Madison listened when the devil whispered magic words in her ear: $20,000– cash – upfront. There was a catch, of course. A number of them. Sir Henri was up to his neck in conspiracies and needed someone to deflect the danger onto—not to mention frame for the most audacious art theft in history. Dubai, a city that has been called Las Vegas on steroids, would just be the first stop for Madison on a quest that takes her to an ancient Mesopotamian city, the dark streets of exotic Istanbul, Venice at Carnival time, and a cathedral where the most sacred object of Christendom is stored. Along the way, she finds romance in the arms of a Russian agent who she doesn’t trust—and can’t resist.

Twenty-four stories of Israeli and Jewish life, chosen from the more than one hundred Haim Watzman has written over the last nine years in his "Necessary Stories" column in the The Jerusalem Report. Bookended by a flashback to his first weekend in Israel forty years ago and a storytelling encounter on a recent flight back home from the US, these stories--funny, meditative, and sad, set in immigrant camps, the army, and the author's own neighborhood in south Jerusalem--uniquely capture what it is like, in our age, to be an Israeli and a Jew. Praise for Haim Watzman: "His stories detail the lives of ordinary Israelis, often touching on current events ... The dialogue, though written in English, has the distinct feeling of Hebrew speech -- that unmistakable combination of impatience and warmth." --Naomi Zeveloff, Forward "Watzman knows that every encounter, no matter how fleeting--a conversation in a cemetery with a long-dead Talmudic sage; Felix Mendelssohn's great aunt scolding the young prodigy; four Jews on a plane discussing the Bible, the Zohar and Wuthering Heights--is a matter of life and death. Necessary Stories is a quietly beautiful work, haunting in places, gently funny in others, written by a graceful, thoughtful, eloquent man who understands that life itself is not enough. One must live to tell the tale." --From the Introduction by Joseph Skibell "Author Haim Watzman is a master of the tiny moment, the exact point in time that leaves an impression on the future ... If you enjoy short stories, 'Necessary Stories' is a fine collection, filled with hints and hidden meanings. It's a perfect choice for a Jewish book club whose members can discuss these stories for hours." --Rivkah Lambert Adler, Jerusalem Post, June 14, 2017 "Watzman writes with immediacy, attentiveness and empathy, whether he's describing a pregnant feral cat he names Hagar, who makes her home in the dumpster of his Jerusalem building, or the best friend of the bride at a wedding, or his late son, who was killed in a tragic accident while serving in the IDF. Watzman ... has a good ear for dialogue. The stories, layered with meaning, speak to his wide-ranging interests." --Sandee Brawarsky, The Jewish Week/Times of Israel "All but one of these stories are relatively short ... Yet anyone who sits down with this collection will come away with a sense of something much larger--a multifaceted impression of what it's like to make a life in a place where the prosaic mixes with the fantastic; history, politics, and philosophy are around every corner, and each encounter with a stranger holds the potential to show you the world from a fresh angle." --Janice Weizman, The Jerusalem Report