Fiction 11


two clash on the subject of their aspirations for the marriage of Catherine’s young daughter, and both women are forced to confront the ghosts of the past, in particular Lady Catherine’s cruelty and deception. As the shocking truth emerges, the Darcy and Bingley families rally. But will it be too late for the sisters to find the love and happiness they were denied so long ago? 308 paperback pages with list of the main characters. £14.99 NOW £3.50


69516 A FAIR MAIDEN by Joyce Carol Oates A gripping tale of suspense in which an elderly aristocrat forms an obsession with a young girl. 15 year old Katya Spivak is out for a walk on the gracious streets of Bayhead Harbour with her two summer babysitting charges when she is approached by silver-haired, elegant Marcus Kidder. At first he seems harmless and even pleasant. Like his name a sort of gentle joke.


His beautiful home, the children’s books he had written, his classical music, the fine art in his study, the lavish gifts to her - Mr Kidder’s life couldn’t be more different from Katya’s drab working class existence back home in South Jersey, or more enticing. By degrees and almost imperceptibly, something changes, and posing for Mr Kidder’s new painting isn’t the light-hearted endeavour it once was. What does he really want from her? How far will he go to get it? A chilling novel by the American master of suspense. 231pp. £15.99 NOW £5


69505 TO DEFY A KING by Elizabeth Chadwick A prize-winning historical novel which tells the story of Mahelt Marshal, the favourite daughter of the powerful William Marshal, Earl of Pembroke. At 14 she is married to Hugh whose half brother is William of Salisbury, known as William Longespeed, and his half brother is King John. The book is about divided loyalties and the theme of rebellion comes to the fore


in the years leading up to Magna Carta as the King’s relationship with his barons steadily deteriorates. Mahelt’s life changes dramatically when her father is suspected of treachery by King John. Her brothers become hostages and adapting to her new married life is hard, but she comes to love Hugh deeply - however, defying her father-in-law brings disgrace and heartbreak. Magnificent in scope and detail of the medieval period from the food, clothing, sights to the mindset of the characters. 540pp in paperback. £6.99 NOW £3.50


69513 THE APPOINTMENT by Herta Müller


A brooding allegory of life under the long oppression of the regime of Nicolai Ceausescu. ‘I’ve been summoned. Thursday, at ten sharp.’ So begins one day in the life of a young clothing factory worker living under Ceausescu’s totalitarian regime. She has been questioned before, but this time believes it will be worse. And what is her crime? Sewing notes into the linings of men’s suits bound for Italy. ‘Marry me’ the notes say, with her name and address - anything to get out of the country. As she rides the tram to her interrogation, her thoughts stray to her friend Lilli, shot while trying to flee to Hungary, to her grandparents, deported after her first husband informed on them, to Major Albu, her interrogator, who begins each session with a wet kiss on her fingers, and to Paul, her lover and the one person she can trust. Distracted, she misses her stop and finds herself on an unfamiliar street and what she discovers there puts her fear of the appointment into chilling perspective. Drawing on the author’s own experiences and translated into English from the original German. 214pp in paperback. £12.99 NOW £4


69526 THE REPORT by Jessica Francis Kane A wartime tragedy and a search for blame, the novel is set in early Spring 1943, when air-raid sirens wail out over the East End of London. From every corner of Bethnal Green people emerge from pubs, cinemas and houses and set off for the shelter of the Tube stations. At the entrance steps, something goes badly wrong when


the crowd panics and 173 people are crushed to death. When an enquiry is called for, it falls to the local magistrate Laurence Dunne to find out what happened during those few, fatally confused minutes. As he gathers testimony from the guilt-stricken warden of the shelter, the vicar struggling to bring comfort to his congregation, and the grieving mother who has lost her youngest daughter, the picture grows ever murkier. It is only decades later when the case is reopened by one of the children who survived that the facts can finally be brought to light. Based on the true story of the worst civilian disaster of World War Two, this is a moving and well crafted novel about loss and guilt and the possibility of redemption. 240pp in paperback. £12.99 NOW £4


69531 THE CAPTAIN’S TABLE: A Bella Wallis


Mystery by Brian Thompson Bella is no ordinary, simpering late Victorian miss. Her life is dedicated to punishing evil-doers by exposing them as thinly disguised characters in the books she writes under a male pseudonym. She is not alone in her venture. Her confederates include Captain Quigley, her ‘fixer’, his shady assistant Murch who specialises in ‘gently persuading’


recalcitrant baddies to spill the beans, and the dashing Philip Westland, who may be a government spy. Philip’s best friend is smitten by an heiress who has been promised by her father to a vulgar treasure seeker. The unhappy female is due to inherit a set of rare pearls but the latter were ill-gotten. Can Bella ignore her own affairs of the heart and concentrate on gathering material for her next bestseller, whilst feistily eluding a brutal threat to her life? A scintillating 232 pages. £12.99 NOW £4


69533 ZONE OF THE INTERIOR by Clancy Sigal


Reminiscent of Jack Kerouac’s ‘On the Road’ here is a spaced-out 60s anti-establishment novel, a lost classic of zonked-out, high-as-a-kite literature which they dared not print. It tells the story of Sid Bell, an American political fugitive in London, who falls under the spell of Dr Willie Last, partly modelled on the radical ‘anti-psychiatrist’ R. D. Laing. This unlikely duo feast on LSD, mescaline, psilocybin, yoga, meditation, vegetarianism and psycho- babble, believing that only by self-injecting themselves with schizophrenia will they become true existentialist guerrillas. Their ‘purple haze’ odyssey takes them into the eye of the hurricane - mental hospitals, secure units for the violent, the Harley Street cabal of the ‘Sacred 7’ and semi-derelict churches that come complete with an underground tank for the woman convinced that she is a fish. Sigal’s approach is richly sardonic and anti- establishment, of both right and left, in a jazz-influenced, free-form prose, comic and serious, myth-puncturing and elegiac. A compelling read in beautifully presented softback, 360pp. £9.99 NOW £4


68984 NO.1 LADIES’ DETECTIVE AGENCY: Signed Collectors’ Edition


by Alexander McCall Smith A captivating portrait of an exotic world, and in the words of the TLS, ‘One of the International Books of the Year’. Wayward daughters. Missing husbands. Philandering partners. If you have a problem and no one else can help you, then pay a visit to Precious Ramotswe,


Botswana’s only female private detective, a woman of cheerful character and traditional build. Precious sets out on the trail of a missing child, in a case that tumbles our heroine into a hotbed of strange situations and more than a little danger. Full of sly humour and set in a place of breathtaking beauty, this is a rare pleasure. 224 page two-colour hardback. Collectable and SIGNED BY THE AUTHOR, each copy is numbered and bound in ochre, sun-burnt ‘hide’ suede slipcase with gold tooling.


£50 NOW £17.50


69001 GIRL IN THE POLKA-DOT DRESS by Beryl Bainbridge


Waspish, sinister, inimitably vivid and marvellously strange, Beryl Bainbridge’s great last novel evokes a nation on the brink of paranoid disintegration, and a moment of pivotal tragedy, with eerie brilliance. In the rainswept summer of 1968, Rose sets off for the US from Kentish Town to meet a man she knows as Washington Harold. In her suitcase is a polka-dot dress and a one-way ticket. They are to join forces in search of the charismatic Dr Wheeler - oracle, guru and redeemer - whom Rose credits with rescuing her from a terrible childhood, and against whom Harold nurses a silent grudge. As they trail their quarry, zigzagging through America in a camper van, damaged Rose and driven Harold encounter a ragged counter-cultural army of Wheeler’s acolytes. Somewhere in the wide American darkness, Dr Wheeler is waiting. Why did the girl in the polka-dot dress run out of the hotel shouting ‘we shot him!’? 200pp. £16.99 NOW £6


69003 IMPORTANCE OF BEING SEVEN by Alexander McCall Smith Bertie is the six year old boy. Despite inhabiting a great city renowned for its impeccable restraint, the extended family of 44 Scotland Street is trembling on the brink of reckless self-indulgence. Matthew and Elspeth receive startling and expensive news on a visit to the Infirmary. Angus and Domenica are contemplating an Italian ménage â trois and even Big Lou is overheard discussing cosmetic surgery. But when Bertie Pollack, six years old and impatient to be seven, mislays his meddling mother Irene one afternoon, a valuable lesson is learned - that wish-fulfilment is a dangerous business. 279pp in paperback.


£7.99 NOW £3.50


69006 KING’S MAN: A Thrilling Epic of Bravery and Battle in Richard the Lionheart’s England


by Angus Donald It is AD 1192. The third crusade is over. Richard the Lionheart is on his way back to England. But, with all the princes of Europe united against him, can the greatest warrior in Christendom make it safely home? Captured, bound and imprisoned,


Richard’s slim hope of salvation rests on one man - a former outlaw, a vengeful earl - the intrepid Robin Hood. For King and country, Robin and his loyal lieutenant Alan Dale will risk all, from blood-soaked battlefields to deadly assassins, to see the Lionheart restored to his rightful throne. A saga of courage and comradeship that brings the medieval world roaring to life. 438 pages. £12.99 NOW £5


69044 LAST STATION by Jay Parini


Made into a film starring Helen Mirren, James McAvoy and Christopher Plummer, this is a modern classic and an unforgettable portrait of Russia on the cusp of revolution. 1910. Anna Karenina and War and Peace have made Leo Tolstoy the world’s most famous author, but fame comes at a price. In the tumultuous final year of his life, Tolstoy is desperate to find


respite, so he leaves his large family and the hounding press behind and heads into the wilderness. Too ill to venture beyond the tiny station of Astapovo, he believed his last days would pass in peaceful isolation. But the battle for Tolstoy’s soul will not be so simple. 372pp in paperback. £8.99 NOW £3


69020 THE WHISPERER by Donato Carrisi This record-breaking bestseller was an astonishing Italian publishing phenomenon. Six severed arms are discovered buried in a forest clearing, arranged in a mysterious circle. They belong to missing young girls, but the rest of the bodies are nowhere to be found. Criminologist Goran Gavila is given the case. An


Bibliophile Books Unit 5 Datapoint, 6 South Crescent, London E16 4TL TEL: 020 74 74 24 74


instinctively rebellious man, he is forced to work with young female police officer Mila Vasquez. Lithe, boyish and answering to no-one, she has a tragic history of her own that has left her damaged. Theirs is a fiery but strangely affecting working relationship and as they uncover more about the dark secret in the forest, their lives are increasingly in each other’s hands. 474pp in paperback.


£7.99 NOW £3.50


56203 BULLDOG DRUMMOND by Sapper


Bulldog Drummond was the original daredevil adventurer. Fearless, resourceful and debonair, Drummond could easily have been the father of James Bond. In the first four novels of the series, ‘Bulldog Drummond’, ‘The Black Gang’, ‘The Third Round’, ‘The Final Count’, all of which are contained within this volume, Hugh Drummond finds himself pitting his wits again Carl Peterson, a criminal genius with an insatiable passion for power and world domination. His chameleon appearances are one of the joys of these thrilling tales. 768pp. Paperback. ONLY £3


66180 COMPLETE RICHARD


HANNAY STORIES by John Buchan


Major General Sir Richard Hannay is the fictional secret agent created by writer and diplomat John Buchan, who was himself an Intelligence officer during the First World War. Caught up in the first of these five gripping adventures just before the outbreak of war in 1914, he manages to thwart the enemy’s evil


plan and solve the mystery of the ‘thirty-nine steps’. In Greenmantle, he undertakes a vital mission to prevent jihad in the Islamic Near East. Mr Standfast, set in the decisive months of 1917-18, is the novel in which Hannay, after a life lived ‘wholly among men’, finally falls in love; later, in The Three Hostages, he finds himself unravelling a kidnapping mystery with his wife’s help. In the last adventure, The Island of Sheep, he is called upon to honour an old oath. 992 paperback pages. Great value. ONLY £2


66771 BUCKINGHAM PALACE GARDENS: A Novel by Anne Perry


Anne Perry’s Charlotte and Thomas Pitt mysteries are perhaps the best-loved of her Victorian bestsellers. This time we move in the upper - in fact, the highest - echelons of society, as the Prince of Wales invites four wealthy entrepreneurs and their wives to a house party at Buckingham Palace to discuss investment in a new railway that is to run the entire length of Africa. However, the prince’s soirée takes on a disastrous turn when a prostitute, one of three hired for some late-night frolics after the wives have gone to bed, is found mutilated and dead in Queen Victoria’s linen cupboard. Thomas Pitt, brilliant mainstay of Special Services is summoned immediately. 312 roughcut pages, first US edition of 2008. $26 NOW £6


66779 SOMETHING WICKED by David Roberts


Journalist Verity Browne returns from an assignment in Prague with suspected tuberculosis. The prescribed cure is rest and a healthy diet, so her fiancé, Lord Edward Corinth, arranges for her to stay at a private clinic in Henley-on- Thames. Lord Edward is investigating the horrific murder of his dentist, who had a macabre connection with Henley - three of


his patients had recently met unusual and highly suspicious deaths, and all of them lived near the town. Edward decides to base himself in Henley in order to more easily follow the trail and moves in with an old friend. 275pp, first US edition of 2007. £14.99 NOW £5


67055 DRESS LODGER by Sheri Holman In Sunderland, a city quarantined by the cholera epidemic of 1831, 15 year old prostitute Gustine rents a beautiful dress from her landlord to attract a higher class of clientele and to earn more money needed to feed her infant son. When she meets surgeon Henry Chiver, Gustine begins to work for him by securing cadavers for his ill-equipped anatomy school. It is a gruesome job that soon threatens the very things she has worked so hard to protect. 291pp in paperback. $14 NOW £2.25


68075 ROOTS: The Saga of an American


Family The 30th Anniversary Edition by Alex Haley


This book sold over one million copies in the first year and TV audiences exceeded 130 million people. When he was a boy in Henning, Tennessee, Alex Haley’s grandmother used to tell him stories about their family going back to their great, great grandparents all the way back to the man she called ‘The African’. Beaten, chained and dragged aboard a slave ship, he was sent to Colonial America. An astonishing feat of genealogical detective work, Haley discovered not only the name of the ‘African’, Kunta Kinte, but the precise location of Jussure, the very village in The Gambia, West Africa, from which he was abducted in 1767 at the age of 16 and taken on the Lord Ligoner to Maryland and sold to a Virginia planter. Haley met and talked in Africa with his six cousins and set about writing the monumental two- century drama of the slaves and freedmen, farmers and blacksmiths. 899pp in sturdy softback with roughcut pages.


£10.99 NOW £5


67206 THE BRAVE by Nicholas Evans In 1959, Tom Bedford lives in a fantasy world of Cowboys and Indians. When his sister Diane falls in love with one of his idols, Tom’s life is transformed and the darkest secret is revealed. They move to Hollywood and all his dreams seem to have come true. Soon, however, the sinister side of Tinseltown will cast its shadow and a shocking act of violence will change their lives forever. Even in 2007, what happened all those years ago remains a secret that corrodes Tom’s life and wrecks his marriage. Only when his son is charged with murder do the events resurface, forcing him to confront his demons. 353 pages. £17.99 NOW £2.25


e-mail: orders@bibliophilebooks.com ALISTAIR MACLEAN The Master of Action and Suspense


69626 SOUTH BY JAVA HEAD by Alistair Maclean February 1942. Singapore lies burning and shattered, defenceless before the conquering hordes of the Japanese Army, as the last boat slips out of the harbour and into the South China Sea. On board are a desperate group of people, each with a secret to guard. Dawn sees them far out to sea but with the first murderous dive bombers already aimed at their ship, an ordeal begins


that few are to survive. A nightmare succession of disasters are wrought by the hell-bent Japanese, the unrelenting tropical sun, and by the survivors themselves. Soon it becomes a desperate battle of wills and a battle of wits to stay alive as they journey south by Java Head. 50th anniversary edition in 433 page paperback.


£6.99 NOW £3.50


69624 LAST FRONTIER by Alistair Maclean Dr. Jennings, a noted scientist in possession of a precious secret, has gone over to the Soviet Union. It’s Michael Reynolds’ mission to get him back. To penetrate behind the Iron Curtain and reach his quarry is difficult enough, but to bring out a man uncertain, elderly and too well known is impossible. Until Reynolds discovers, within that terrifying organisation, there are men ready


and able to help. These dedicated Hungarian patriots, high minded, resourceful and when necessary as ruthless as their enemies, could be the key to his success in this deadliest of missions. 410pp in paperback. £7.99 NOW £3.50


69625 PUPPET ON A CHAIN by Alistair Maclean The classic thriller from the bestselling master which will get your heart pumping triple time. Paul Sherman of Interpol’s Narcotics Bureau flies to Amsterdam on the trail of a dope king. With enormous skill, the atmosphere is built up - Amsterdam with its canals and high houses, stolid police, psychopaths, women in distress and above all, murder. 314pp in paperback. £7.99 NOW £3.50


69894 ALISTAIR MCLEAN: Set of Three by Alistair Maclean


Set consists of Last Frontier, Puppet on a Chain and South by Java Head. Buy all three paperbacks and make further savings. £22.97 NOW £8.50


68872 HMS ULYSSES by Alistair Maclean The story of men who rose to heroism and then to something greater, this novel takes its place alongside The Cain Mutiny and The Cruel Sea as one of the classic novels of the Navy in WW2. It is the compelling tale of Convoy FR77 to Murmansk, a voyage that pushes men to the limits of human endurance, crippled by enemy attack and the bitter cold of the Arctic. Brilliant descriptive writing that grips the imagination. 467pp in paperback.


£7.99 NOW £3.50


68890 THE LONELY SEA by Alistair Maclean This volume includes two new stories which spans the master storyteller’s entire career and collects together all his stories of the sea. It begins with The Dileas, Saint George and the Dragon, Rawalpindi, The Sinking of the Bismark, Lancastria, City of Benares and The Gold Watch and ends with the two new stories, The Black Storm and The Good Samaritan. By a


magnificent storyteller. 294pp in paperback. £7.99 NOW £3.50


68889 THE GUNS OF NAVARONE by Alistair Maclean


The classic World War Two thriller from the acclaimed master of action, this is fiction sustained at high pitch. 1,200 British soldiers are isolated and waiting to die on the small island of Kherof off the Turkish coast. All these lives could be saved if only the vigilant, savage and catastrophically accurate guns of Navarone could be silenced. Navarone itself is a grim iron fortress, manned by a mixed garrisons of Germans and Italians. To Captain Keith Mallory, skilled saboteur and trained mountaineer, falls the task of leading the small party to scale the vast, impossible precipice of Navarone to blow up the guns. 410pp in paperback. £7.99 NOW £3.50


67970 MY NAME IS MICHAEL SIBLEY by John Bingham


Bingham, aka Lord Clanmorris, aka Michael Ward, was a British Intelligence officer and novelist. Over the course of 30 years, he served MI5 in various high ranking capacities and published more than 15 extraordinary novels. He died in 1988. Michael Sibley and John Prosset shared a history that dated back to their first years at boarding school, and so the news of Prosset’s murder came as a great shock to his old friend, especially because Sibley had been staying only the day before at Prosset’s country house, where the body was found. When the police came to question him in connection with the murder, Sibley finds himself lying about his recent visit, and thus begins to reveal the true nature of a longstanding but volatile relationship. 258pp in paperback.


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