Simon Edginton

Go undercover into the secret world of teen super spy Alex Rider in this explosive collection of action-packed short stories. See Alex take action against an imminent disaster, discover the truth behind the death of his parents and get inside the mind of his arch rival, Yassen Gregorovich.

When Germany invaded Wilhelm Brasse's native Poland in 1939, he was asked to swear allegiance to Hitler and join the Wehrmacht. He refused. He was deported to Auschwitz concentration camp as political prisoner number 3444. A trained portrait photographer, he was ordered by the SS to record the inner workings of the camp. He began by taking identification photographs of prisoners, went on to capture criminal medical experiments, and also recorded executions. Between 1940 and 1945, Brasse took around 50,000 photographs of the horror around him. He took them because he had no choice.

Eventually, Brasse's conscience wouldn't allow him to hide behind his camera. First he risked his life by joining the camp's Resistance movement. Then, when Soviet troops finally advanced on the camp to liberate it, Brasse refused SS orders to destroy his photographs. 'Because the world must know,' he said.

The reknowned actor Sir Alec Guinness talks about his youth, training, stage and film career, family, and beliefs in this fascinating memoir which also includes a highly entertaining collection of theatrical moments, interspersed with portraits of friends and fellow actors.

Jamie Carragher is the footballing hero who stood firm to make Liverpool FC's breath-taking victory at the UEFA Champions League Final in 2005 possible, coming back against AC Milan, despite the Italian team's enormous lead.

This is a story about true loyalty and dedication to one of the world's greatest teams.

Four years ago, wine critic Gil Petty went missing during a tour of the wine region of Gaillac; his body was discovered strung up on a cross in a vineyard. Looking into the unsolved murder, forensic expert Enzo Macleod finds that beneath the tranquil façade of French viticulture lurks a back-stabbing community riddled with rivalry - and someone who is ready to stop him even if they have to kill again...  Book 2 of series.

No gamble in history has been more momentous than the landfall of Columbus's ship the Santa Maria in the Americas in 1492 - an event that paved the way for the conquest of a 'New World'. The accounts collected here provide a vivid narrative of his voyages throughout the Caribbean and finally to the mainland of Central America, although he still believed he had reached Asia. Edited and translated by J M Cohen.

Middle-aged doctor Alain Massoulier has received a life-changing letter, thirty-three years too late. Lost in the Paris postal system, the letter from Polydor, dated 1983, offers a recording contract to The Holograms, in which Alain played lead guitar. Alain is overcome by nostalgia, and is tempted to track down the members of the group. But in a world where everything has changed, where will his quest take him?

Ben Schroeder, a talented young man from an East End Jewish family, has been accepted as a pupil into the chambers of Bernard Wesley, QC. But Schroeder is an outsider, not part of this privileged society, where wealth and an Oxbridge education are essentials. He encounters prejudice, intrigue, and scandal. Can he survive in this world where nothing, not even justice, is sacred?

'What the doctor ordered . . . a fiercely funny novel.' Sunday Times It is the year of our Lord 1349 and it is the season of the Plague. Novice friar Brother Diggory, now sixteen, has lived in the Monastery of the Order of St Odo at Whye since his eighth birthday. But his life is about to change. The sickness is creeping ever closer and the monks must attend to the victims. When Brother Diggory is nominated to tend to those afflicted, he realises he is about to meet the Plague, and that it is more powerful than him. What he doesn't realise is that encountering an illness and understanding it are two quite different things. An uproarious and uplifting novel about sickness and health, the fashions of 14th Century medicine, and how perhaps we're never quite as cutting-edge as we might like to believe.

Embark on 20 epic expeditions alongside real-life explorer Levison Wood, from the Silk Road and medieval pilgrimages to the Holy Land to Nellie Bly's trip around the world, and recent missions to the Moon and the Mariana Trench. Along the way, Levison Wood shares his own insights into adventuring, telling you what it's REALLY like to follow in the footsteps of Alexander the Great.

When busker James Bowen rescued a ginger tom cat, it was the start of a friendship that would turn both their lives around. This is a collection of the wisdom James has learnt from Bob as they go through thick and thin together. From the power of friendship to staying calm and finding the joys in a simple life, let Bob be your guide on how to navigate the ins and outs of life like a wise street cat.

For thirty years, Julien has lived with the question as to why his mother, Helene, suddenly walked out on him and his father - and why his father Henri refused to ever speak of her again. Now, as he sits by his father's bedside preparing to say goodbye, Julien remembers his father's long-lost notebook: a gift from Helene in which he jealously kept the recipes that made him the renowned chef of the Relais Fleuri restaurant. Julien is determined to find this last link to the father he so fiercely loves, and the mother he has never forgotten. But can the secrets to his father's cooking finally help him understand the other secrets Henri has kept all these years?

Here is the fascinating autobiography of an Englishman who entered this world with many problems, who emigrated to the other side of the world after disappointments in England, who learned how to live and work in the harsh climates of the desert and who eventually found his Utopia with the Aborigines there. He lived with them, he instructed them in working and safe methods, he often fell afoul of them yet he went on to be respected by them but was never one of them, even though he had been adopted by the Pitjanjatjara tribe. A serious health problem brought him into contact with the local Witch Doctor who used his skills and power to save the little fella's life. Family problems back in England called him home. He had difficulty in adapting to the entirely different life in England and he almost made it back to his Utopia - but he never did.

Little Billy, with the help of the Minpins, plans to defeat the dreadful monster who lives in the forest of Sin.

Poor Mr Majeika goes to the bottom of the class when the school inspector comes to call. Things don't get any easier when Mr Majeika turns himself into a lobster by mistake. Class Three somehow has to get Wilhemina Worlock to undo the spell...

Class Three has got a new computer and while exploring it, Mr Majeika manages to get the whole class trapped in the school website. Many adventures follow and Class Three meet bizarre characters before they can get out.

Ten-year-old Ned spends two long, hot summers with his great uncle Silas in the village of Souldrop. While Silas instructs his nephew in the ways of country life he finds plenty of time away from the beady eye of housekeeper Mrs Betts to indulge in his two great loves, women and home-made wine - the combination of which constantly lands him in hot water.

Ever since his days as a medical student, Samer Nashef has challenged the medical profession to be more open and accurate about the success of surgical procedures, for the sake of the patients. Here he unclothes his own profession to demonstrate many revelations, such as the paradox at the heart of the cardiac surgeon’s craft: the more an operation is likely to kill you, the better it is for you. And he does so with absolute clarity, fluency and not a little wit.

Douglas Petty is a man who enjoys his reputation as an unreconstructed male with a penchant for too much wine and too many women. Inheriting his father's eccentric estate and dog sanctuary quietened him a little, and marriage to Amy a little more. Even so, it seemed out of character for him a sue a tabloid newspaper for libel when it printed a scurrilous story about him.

His lawyers told him he had a good chance of winning the case, mainly because Amy's testimony would clearly refute the story. But then Amy is involved in a horrendous train crash and while the authorities assume she died in the resulting fire, there is no body to prove it. And if she wasn't killed why has she disappeared and, with no money and no other family, where is she?

In a story of mesmerising suspense, Amy slowly reveals why she cannot return to her beloved home, and why she can never escape from the lies she was told as a child.

Pandemonium is an epic mock-heroic poem, written in response to the pandemic with all the anger and wit that Armando Iannucci brings to his vision of contemporary events. It tells the story of how Orbis Rex, Young Matt and his Circle of Friends, Queen Dido and the blind Dom'nic did battle with 'a wet and withered bat' from Wuhan.

Welcome to the last days of Pompeii as you've NEVER imagined them before! Join fart-trader Caecilius, his wife, Vesuvius, and their ten-year-old son, Filius, in a bizarre world of accidental gladiators, pizza-emitting volcanoes and the legendary Ma-wol-n-f.

You'll meet the household servant, Slavius; thrill at the misadventures of Barkus Wooferinicum and generally have an uproariously hilarious time of it all.

1867. King's Road, Chelsea, is a sea of plant nurseries, catering to the Victorian obsession with rare and exotic flora. But each of the glossy emporiums is fuelled by the dangerous world of the plant hunters - daring adventurers sent into uncharted lands in search of untold wonders to grace England's finest gardens.Harry Compton is as far from a plant hunter as one could imagine - a salesman plucked from the obscurity of the nursery growing fields to become 'the face that sold a thousand plants'.But one small act of kindness sees him inherit a precious gift - a specimen of a fabled tree last heard of in The Travels of Marco Polo, and a map.Seizing his chance for fame and fortune, Harry sets out to make his mark. But where there is wealth there is corruption, and soon Harry is fleeing England, rounding the Cape of Good Hope and sailing up the Yangtze alongside a young widow - both in pursuit of the plant that could transform both their lives forever.

Brought up by Brock the badger after being abandoned by his human parents, Nab undertakes the quest for the Faradawn, the three magical grains guarded by the Elflords of the Mountains, Forests, and Seas, which will help establish a new order of innocence and peace.

In the middle of the night, the Carpathia received a distress call from the sinking Titanic. The intrepid little ship heroically changed course and headed straight into the frozen sea to help save as many people as it could. Follow the Carpathia as it risks everything to navigate remote, treacherous ice fields in the dark and come to the rescue of passengers on the world-famous ocean liner. Along the journey, you will learn all about Morse code, navigation tools, the different roles of the crew, how the ships found each other, and by-the-minute details of exactly what happened on this cold and fateful night.

When a minor Paris criminal is found stabbed in the neck on a country lane in Picardie it looks like another case for Inspector Lucas Rocco. But instead he is called off to watch over a Gabonese government minister, hiding out in France following a vicious coup. 

As if that wasn't enough to keep him occupied, Rocco discovers that there is a contract on his head taken out by an Algerian gang leader with a personal grudge against him. With time running out, to catch a murderer and to save his own life, Rocco will be tested like never before.

Murder by suicide? Three senior government officials - a judge, a politician, and an ex-police chief - are all dead by their own hands.

Inspector Lucas Rocco finds himself once more working for the Interior Ministry: undertaking an investigation meant to avoid a government scandal and ignoring unpalatable truths. He's soon convinced that a common denominator must be at play...

Rocco uncovers top-level fraud, theft and deception. And when he narrowly survives an attempt on his life, he realises that he has nothing to lose by bringing the truth out in to the open - whatever the risks.

A troubled insomniac in 1890s England falls into a sleep-like trance, from which he does not awake for over two hundred years. When he comes out of his trance he is horrified to discover a hierarchal society in which more than a third of all people are enslaved. Oppressed and uneducated, the masses cling desperately to one dream - that the sleeper will awake, and lead them all to freedom.

When his father sat him down and told him to 'make something' of himself, young vet Marc Abraham decided to do it the hard way - by setting up an emergency 'out of hours' clinic.

If getting used to the long night shifts wasn't bad enough, emergency cases are rarely straightforward. Whether it was dog who swallowed golf balls, or a gerbil in urgent need of a caesarean, every case had the potential for heartbreak. But animals and their owners could also be hilarious, such as the breeder who unwittingly gave his German Shepherd four testicles. . .

Over the course of twelve tough months, the clinic began to flourish. Would Marc finally make something of himself after all?

Marc Abraham writes guilelessly about his early mistakes, and the terror and joy involved in saving an animal's life. His memoir is a heart-warming, compelling and thoroughly entertaining look at the life of a vet on call.

It is 248 BC, the year of the 133rd Olympic Games.

At this time the Hellenistic world is at its peak, with Greek settlements spread across the Middle East, Egypt and Spain. As ever, the world is politically troubled, with Rome locked in a war with Carthage and a major conflict brewing between Egypt and Syria. However, ordinary people are still preoccupied with the crops, household affairs - and in some cases, with winning an Olympic crown. Starting at the autumn equinox, in this imagined account of a year in the life of eight fascinating characters, Philip Matyszak reveals what life was really like at this time. Rather than focusing on the kings and generals from the histories of Thucydides and Polybius, we are invited into the homes of ordinary Greek citizens.

From the diplomat who is using the Games as a cover to engage in political skulduggery to the sprinter who dreams of glory, A Year in the Life of Ancient Greece takes us through a dramatic twelve months to reveal the opportunities and the perils of everyday life during this period.

Yorkshire Grit: The Life of Ray Illingworth is a fascinating account of one of English cricket's most outstanding figures told by award-winning writer Mark Peel. Raised in the harsh world of Yorkshire cricket, Illingworth's all-round ability and tactical acumen made him an indispensable member of their great sides of the 1950s and 60s. Leaving Yorkshire in 1968, he went on to captain Leicestershire to unprecedented success, and also became one of England's finest captains and the first man since Douglas Jardine nearly 40 years earlier to regain the Ashes in Australia. Yet for all his success on the field, Illingworth's attritional tactics and refusal to compromise made him a controversial figure. His return to Yorkshire as manager was marred by a clash with Geoff Boycott, while his time as England's chairman of selectors and manager saw clashes with Mike Atherton and other top players. In this first biography of Illingworth for nearly 50 years, Peel reappraises a dominant personality who never shied away from controversy.