The Fuller Memorandum

Bob Howard is a low-level techie working for a super-secret government agency. While his colleagues are out saving the world, Bob's under a desk restoring lost data. None of them receive any thanks for the jobs they do, but at least a techie doesn't risk getting shot or eaten in the line of duty. Bob's world is dull but safe, and that's the way it should have stayed; but then he went and got Noticed. Now, Bob Howard is up to his neck in spycraft, alternative universes, dimension-hopping nazis, Middle Eastern terrorists, damsels in distress, ancient Lovecraftian horror and the end of the world.Only one thing is certain: it will take more than control-alt-delete to sort this mess out. . .

When Robin wakes up in a clinic with most of his memories missing, it doesn't take him long to discover that someone is trying to kill him.It's the twenty-seventh century, when interstellar travel is by teleport gate and conflicts are fought by network worms that censor refugees' personalities and target historians. The civil war is over and Robin has been demobilized, but someone wants him out of the picture because of something his earlier self knew. On the run from a ruthless pursuer and searching for a place to hide, he volunteers to participate in a unique experimental polity, the Glasshouse. Constructed to simulate a pre-accelerated culture, participants are assigned anonymized identities: it looks like the ideal hiding place for a posthuman on the run. But in this escape-proof environment Robin will undergo an even more radical change, placing him at the mercy of the experimenters, and of his own unbalanced psyche . . .

Freya Nakamachi-47 has some major existential issues. She's the perfect concubine, designed to please her human masters - hardwired to become aroused at the mere sight of a human male. There's just one problem: she came off the production line a year after the human species went extinct. Whatever else she may be, Freya Nakamachi-47 is gloriously obsolete. What's more, the rigid social hierarchy that has risen in the 200 years since the last human died, places beings such as Freya very near the bottom. So when she has a run-in on Venus with a murderous aristocrat, she needs passage off-world in a hurry - and can't be too fussy about how she pays her way.But if Venus was a frying pan, Mercury is the fire - and soon she's going to be running for her life. Because the job she's taken as a courier has drawn her to the attention of powerful and dangerous people, and they don't just want the package she's carrying. They want her soul ...

It was called in as a robbery at Hayek Associates, an online game company. So you can imagine Sergeant Sue Smith's mood as she watches the video footage of the heist being carried out by a band of orcs and a dragon, and realises that the robbery from an online game company is actually a robbery from an online game.Just wonderful. Like she has nothing better to do. But online entertainment is big business, and when the bodies of real people start to show up, it's clear that this is anything but a game. For Sue, computer coding expert Jack Reed, and forensic accountant Elaine Barnaby, the walls between the actual and the virtual are about to come crashing down. There is something very dangerous and very real going on at Hayek Associates, and those involved are playing for keeps. No cheats, no back doors, no extra lives - make a wrong call on this one and it's game over.

His most ambitious novel to date, ACCELERANDO is a multi-generational saga following a brilliant clan of 21st-century posthumans. The year is some time between 2010 and 2015. The recession has ended, but populations are ageing and the rate of tech change is accelerating dizzyingly. Manfred makes his living from spreading ideas around, putting people in touch with one another and leaving a spray of technologies in his wake. He lives at the cutting edge of intelligence amplification technology, but even Manfred can take on too much. And when his pet robot cat picks up some interesting information from the SETI data, his world - and the world of his descendants - is turned on its head.

In the twenty-first century man created the Eschaton, a sentient artificial intelligence. It pushed Earth through the greatest technological evolution ever known, while warning that time travel is forbidden, and transgressors will be eliminated.Distant descendants of this ultra high-tech Earth live in parochial simplicity on the far-flung worlds of the New Republic. Their way of life is threatened by the arrival of an alien information plague known as the Festival. As forbidden technologies are literally dropped from the sky, suppressed political factions descend into revolutionary turmoil. A battle fleet is sent from Earth to destroy the Festival, but Spaceship engineer Martin Springfield and U.N. diplomat Rachel Mansour have been assigned rather different tasks. Their orders are to diffuse the crisis or to sabotage the New Republic's war-fleet, whatever the cost, before the Eschaton takes hostile action on a galactic scale.

We've all been there. You might even be there right now. Do you use your hard-earned university education for such critical tasks as memorising your boss's lunch order or showing them, yet again, how to use the photocopier? Or what about those awesome days when you're instructed to 'send me that thing from a week ago' or 'book me a table at that restaurant that girl said was good', and are then berated when you're not able to figure out immediately what your boss is talking about?TO MY FUTURE ASSISTANT compiles everything that disgruntled (and optimistic) assistants everywhere promise never to do when they're the boss* - from ridiculous requests and backhanded compliments to outright insults. Filled with helpful tips and tricks for Boss Wrangling, these pages are just what the underpaid masses need to survive (and laugh at) the daily injustices of life at the bottom of the career ladder.*But inevitably will.

When Ben Silverstein is sent to the rundown town of Buttonville to spend the summer with his grandfather, he's certain it will be the most boring holiday ever. That is, until his grandfather's cat brings home what looks like . . . a baby dragon? Enter Pearl Petal, a local girl with an eye for adventure, who helps Ben take the wounded dragon to the only veterinarian in town - the mysterious Dr Woo. No one knows where Dr Woo came from or why she's moved into the old button factory and renamed it Dr Woo's Worm Hospital. But as Ben and Pearl discover once they are inside, Dr Woo's isn't a worm hospital at all - it's actually a secret hospital for Imaginary Creatures. After Ben accidentally leaves the hospital's front door unlocked, a rather large, rather stinky, and very hairy beast escapes into Buttonville. Ben and Pearl are tasked with retrieving the runaway creature, and what started out as the most boring holiday ever becomes the story of a lifetime.

After a lull of four years, the 'silk stocking rapist' is back at work on the Upper East side, but this time Assistant DA Alexandra Cooper and Detective Mike Chapman have perfect DNA evidence to work with. They also have a much older case to work on - a skeleton has been found entombed in the wall of a house Edgar Allan Poe once lived in, but it turns out to be a relatively modern murder - from 1978. On the day the discovery of this body is leaked to the press, Alex gets a call that the silk stocking rapist has struck again, this time fatally. Or has he? The m.o. isn't precisely the same as the others, and it transpires that the victim worked in Poe's old house in 1978. Are the cases linked or is someone trying to silence possible witness to a thirty-five-year-old murder? With consummate skill, Linda Fairstein has created an outstanding crime novel, layered with the history of New York, the roller-coaster everyday life of a prosecutor and culminating with a surprising but satisfying denouement.

Rose Aubrey is one of a family of four children. Their father, Piers, is the disgraced son of an Irish landowning family, a violent, noble and quite unscrupulous leader of popular causes. His Scottish wife, Clare, is an artist, a tower of strength, fanatically devoted to a musical future for her daughters. This is the story of their life in south London, a life threatened by Piers's streak of tragic folly which keeps them on the verge of financial ruin and social disgrace . . .'A book bursting with love and vitality' DAILY EXPRESS