Michael Maloney

It's two fifteen a.m., you're in bed alone and you're woken by the phone. Your eyes are wide and your body tense before it has completed so much as a single ring. And as you wake, in the tiny moment between sleep and consciousness, you know already that something is wrong.

Only someone bad would call at such an hour. Or someone good, but with bad news, which would probably be worse.

You lie there in the darkness and wait for the answer machine to kick in. Your own voice sounds strange as it tells you that nobody is there but that a message can be left.

You feel your heart beat. You listen. And then you hear the one voice in the world you least expect… your very own Blast From the Past.

Nine year old Bruno knows nothing of the Final Solution and the Holocaust. He’s oblivious to the appalling cruelties being inflicted on the people of Europe by his country. All he knows is that he has moved from Berlin to a desolate area where he has no one to play with.

Until he meets Shmuel.

Shmuel lives in a strange parallel existence on the other side of the adjoining wire fence, where everyone wears a uniform of striped pyjamas. Despite the wire fence separating them, the two boys become best friends.

As they grow closer, Bruno starts to learn the terrible truth that lies beyond the fence, and what life is like for his friend.

There is something special about the ancient cathedral in Chartres, and there is something special too about Agnès Morel, the mysterious woman who is to be found cleaning it each morning. The young woman brings healing to the town, only to find her own redemption among its community of lost souls.

Serious-minded theology student Paul Pennyfeather, sent down from Oxford for indecent behaviour, is the new schoolmaster at Llanabba Castle. His colleagues are an assortment of misfits, rascals and fools. Sports day arrives, and as the farce unfolds and the young run riot, no one is safe.

Mary Challoner must protect her sister at all costs. When she discovers that the notorious Marquis of Vidal is planning to run away with her little sister, Mary will not stand idly by. To save Sophia's reputation without destroying her own, Mary will take her sister's place - and once the Marquis sees through her disguise, he will be humiliated and forced to return her home. But the irresistible Marquis is a wilder rake than even Mary anticipated, and her growing feelings for him are proving an unexpected complication...

Nick 'Foxy' Foxton's career as a world class jockey is on a perfect track until a near fatal accident cuts his dream brutally short. But when he returns to Aintree years later, nothing can prepare him for what unfolds.

At the age of twenty-two, William Dalrymple left his college in Cambridge to travel to the ruins of Kublai Khan's stately pleasure dome in Xanadu. This is an account of a quest which took him and his companions across the width of Asia, along dusty, forgotten roads, through villages and cities full of unexpected hospitality and wildly improbable escapades, to Coleridge's Xanadu itself.

At once funny and knowledgeable, In Xanadu is in the finest tradition of British travel writing. Told with an exhilarating blend of eloquence, wit, poetry and delight, it is already established as a classic of its kind.

Mr Golightly, a rumpled elderly man, moves into a cottage in Great Calne. He is the author of a once famous work, now tending to be overlooked. He had meant to use his holiday to rewrite his opus as a soap opera, but he is gradually drawn into the problems of the village people.