Robert Bathurst

At night, the normal rules of Nature do not apply. In the night-wood I have met a badger coming the other way, tipped my cap, said hello. The animals do not expect us humans to be abroad in the dark, which is their time, when the world still belongs to them.

That was in winter. The screaming of a tawny owl echoed off the bare trees. For all of our street-lamp civilization, you can still hear the call of the wild. If, if, you go out after the decline of the day...

As the human world settles down each evening, nocturnal animals prepare to take back the countryside. Taking readers on four walks through the four seasons, acclaimed nature writer and farmer John Lewis-Stempel reveals a world bursting with life and normally hidden from view. Out beyond the cities, it is still possible to see the night sky full of stars, or witness a moonbow, an arch of white light in the heavens.

It is time for us to leave our lairs and go tramping. To join our fellow creatures of the night.

Author of the bestselling Clifton Chronicles, Jeffrey Archer, gives us fourteen gripping and rewarding short stories for readers to return to time and again.

Find out what happens to the hapless young detective from Naples who travels to an Italian hillside town to solve a murder and the pretentious schoolboy whose discovery of the origins of his father's wealth changes his life forever. Follow the stories of the woman who dares to challenge the men at her Ivy League university during the 1930s, and another young woman who thumbs a lift and has an encounter of a lifetime.

From the master of the short story, the refreshingly original stories in Tell Tale prove why Archer has been described by the Mail on Sunday as 'probably the greatest storyteller of our age'.