Mike Grady

The mesmerising tale of a cat with nine lives, and a relationship as ancient as time itself and just as powerful.

In a contest of change, which century from the past millennium would come up trumps? Imagine the Black Death took on the female vote in a pub brawl, or the Industrial Revolution faced the Internet in a medieval joust - whose side would you be on? In this hugely entertaining book, celebrated historian Ian Mortimer takes us on a whirlwind tour of Western history, pitting one century against another in his quest to measure change.

A wife compulsively digs in her garden. Two brothers, long estranged, reunite for a terse, heady summer. A woman flies to Krakow to see her adult son. At dusk, a teenage girl pushes her dying mother out into the sea. A small boy sits on his own in the cinema, entranced by the cowboys who light up the screen. With these short stories, Tim Pears illuminates a series of blazing moments in quiet lives - the tragic, strange, funny and beautiful fragments that make and unmake us - and shines a light into the gulfs that lie between us and those who should know us best.

Men had built cities before, but never such a city as Diaspar; for millennia its protective dome shut out the decay and danger of the world outside. But then, as legend had it, the Invaders came, driving humanity into this last refuge. It takes one man, a Unique, to smash the legend and discover the true nature of the Invaders.

Swanton Morley, the People’s Professor, sets off for Devon to continue his 'County Guides'. He has been invited to give the Founder’s Day speech at All Souls School, but when he arrives he discovers that a boy has died in mysterious circumstances. Was it an accident or was it – murder?

Taita stands as a unique advisor to the Pharaoh. But Southern Egypt has an enemy, and Taita has an ingenious plan to finally crush them. They will meet battle and betrayal on their journey but Taita must also contend with his charges, the spirited young princesses, who threaten Taita’s plan to use them as offerings in his alliance with Crete.

In the 22nd century visionary scientist Vannevar Morgan conceives the most grandiose engineering project of all time, and one which will revolutionize the future of humankind of space: a Space Elevator, 36,000 kilometres high, anchored to an equatorial island in the Indian Ocean.

First published in 1926, The Gentle Art of Tramping is as relevant now as then. Tramping is an approach: to nature, to humankind, to nations, to beauty, to life itself. This lost classic is a breath of fresh air for world-weary souls. It is a gentle art; know how to tramp and you know how to live. Know how to meet your fellow wanderer, how to be passive to the beauty of nature and how to be active to its wildness and its rigour. The adventure is not the getting there, it's the 'on-the-way'. It is not the expected, it is the surprise.

Born of a German father and a Russian mother, Richard Sorge moved in a world of shifting alliances and infinite possibility. In the years leading up to and during the Second World War, he became a fanatical communist - and the Soviet Union's most formidable spy. Combining charm with ruthless manipulation, he infiltrated and influenced the highest echelons of German, Chinese and Japanese society. His intelligence proved pivotal to the Soviet counter-offensive in the Battle of Moscow, which in turn determined the outcome of the war itself. Drawing on a wealth of declassified Soviet archives, this is a major biography of one of the greatest spies who ever lived.

Inoffensive retired librarian, Alec Charlesworth, rescues a kitten from the cold on a December night - with unexpected and terrifying consequences ... A nail-biting tale of good versus evil involving one man, his dog and a group of 18th-century amateur scientific pioneers who just happen to be cats.

It is 1937 and disillusioned Spanish Civil War veteran Stephen Sefton sees a mysterious advertisement for a job where 'intelligence is essential'. Thus begins Sefton’s association with Professor Swanton Morley. When the vicar of Blakeney is found hanging from his church’s bellrope, Morley and Sefton find themselves drawn into a fiendish plot.

Welcome to the village of Notwithstanding where a lady dresses in plus fours and shoots squirrels, a retired general gives up wearing clothes altogether, and a spiritualist lives in a cottage with the ghost of her husband. A moving depiction of a charming vanished England.

On the 7th June 1832, King William IV reluctantly assented to pass the Great Reform Bill, under the threat of the creation of 60 new peers in the House of Lords. This led to a total change in the way Britain was governed and a two-year revolution that Antonia Fraser brings to vivid dramatic life.

Egypt is under attack, the ancient city of Luxor is surrounded. Pharaoh Tamose is dead and a poisonous new era has begun under cruel new Pharaoh, Utteric. This dark, powerful Pharaoh must be stopped and Egypt reclaimed.

The region stretching from eastern Europe and sweeping right across Central Asia deep into China and India, is taking centre stage in international politics, commerce and culture - and is shaping the modern world.

This region, the true centre of the earth, is obscure to many in the English-speaking world. Yet this is where civilization itself began, where the world's great religions were born and took root.

The Silk Roads were no exotic series of connections, but networks that linked continents and oceans together. Along them flowed ideas, goods, disease and death. This was where empires were won - and where they were lost.

A major reassessment of world history, The Silk Roads is an important account of the forces that have shaped the global economy and the political renaissance in the re-emerging east. 

5th November 1937, Morley, Miriam and Sefton find themselves caught up in the celebrations and the chaos. On the morning after the night before, Sefton goes for a swim in Pells Pool, the oldest freshwater lido in England – in the very centre of Lewes – where he discovers a woman’s body. She has drowned. Is it a misadventure or could it be … murder?

Francis Courtney sails to South Africa with revenge on his mind: his uncle Tom Courtney killed his father, and Francis intends to avenge his death. Christopher Courtney sets out to make his own way in the world. The perils on his journey carve a fierce warrior out of him, but they also harden his soul. As the lives of these two Courtney men intertwine, the sins of the fathers will forever alter the lives of a younger generation.

Francis Courtney sails to South Africa with revenge on his mind: his uncle Tom Courtney killed his father, and Francis intends to avenge his death. Christopher Courtney sets out to make his own way in the world. The perils on his journey carve a fierce warrior out of him, but they also harden his soul. As the lives of these two Courtney men intertwine, the sins of the fathers will forever alter the lives of a younger generation.

What was it actually like to live in Elizabethan England? If you could travel to the past and walk the streets of London in the 1590s, would you really have a sense of it being a glorious age? And if so, how would that glory sit alongside the vagrants, diseases, violence, sexism and famine of the time? Ian Mortimer answers the key questions that a visitor to late sixteenth-century England would ask.

In 1992, after being fired from a secret nuclear facility, a KGB agent buried a nuclear suitcase. Sixteen years later he has found a buyer for it. Travelling to the exchange point with the buyer is an undercover policeman. As their journey begins, it becomes clear that the agent may be intent on putting the lives of millions across Europe at risk...