Description: Among the coral outcrops of the island of Rota, lies the wreck of a Spanish galleon, the Santa Margarita - Spring 1601. This is a reconstruction of the Santa Margaritas disastrous last voyage, beset by an extraordinary sequence of typhoons and storms. Based on what little is known of the ships journey overloaded cargo, bad-blood amongst the crew and a curse we are told a story of greed, horror, deprivation and unimaginable hardship by the handful of survivors rescued from the wreck.

Description: After the cataclysmic fall of Stalingrad, Germany's campaign in Russia stood on a knife's edge. Hitler had to break Russia quickly or the war would be over. Thus 'Operation Citadel' was conceived. This was a plan to eliminate the huge salient around the Russian city of Kursk and trap the enormous Soviet Army in a noose of German steel. The only trouble was that the Russians knew it was coming...A powerful look into the maelstrom of the greatest battle in history, LAST CITADEL follows the story through the eyes of a remarkable group of people - the men and women who fought for family, pride, country and, finally, for survival ...

Description:Encouraged by her parents to befriend the Stoke d'Urbervilles, young Tess is seduced by their son, Alec, and bears him a child who dies. Making a fresh start, she goes to work on a Wessex farm where she meets Angel Clare, the parson's son, who is willing to marry her - until he learns of her past.

Description: Lamorna Cove - a tiny bay in Cornwall, picturesque, unspoilt. A hundred years ago it was the haunt of a colony of artists. Today, Mel Pentreath hopes it is a place where she can escape the pain of her mother's death and a broken love affair, and gradually put her life back together. Renting a cottage in the enchanting but overgrown grounds of Merryn Hall, Mel embraces her new surroundings and offers to help her landlord, Patrick Winterton, restore the garden. Soon she is daring to believe her life can be rebuilt. Then Patrick finds some old paintings in an attic, and as he and Mel investigate the identity of the artist, they are drawn into an extraordinary tale of illicit passion and thwarted ambition from a century ago, a tale that resonates in their own lives. But how long can Mel's idyll last before reality breaks in and everything is threatened?

Description: As a child Jude suffered a recurrent nightmare; now her six-year-old niece is having the same dream. A successful auctioneer, Jude is asked to value a collection items belonging to Anthony Wickham, a lonely 18th century astronomer, and she leaps at the chance to escape to the untamed beauty of Norfolk. With the help of Euan, a local naturalist, Jude begins to untangle Wickham's tragic story, but she discovers threatening links to the present.

Description: Shortlisted for the BBC Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction Shortlisted for the Royal Society Prize for Science Book Richard Holmes, prize-winning biographer of Coleridge and Shelley, explores the scientific ferment that swept across Britain at the end of the 18th century in his ground-breaking new biography 'The Age of Wonder'. 'The Age of Wonder' is Richard Holmes's first major work of biography in over a decade. It has been inspired by the scientific ferment that swept through Britain at the end of the eighteenth century, 'The Age of Wonder' and which Holmes now radically redefines as 'the revolution of Romantic Science'. The book opens with Joseph Banks, botanist on Captain Cook's first Endeavour voyage, stepping onto a Tahitian beach in 1769, hoping to discover Paradise. Many other voyages of discovery swiftly follow, while Banks, now President of the Royal Society in London, becomes our narrative guide to what truly emerges as an Age of Wonder. Banks introduces us to the two scientific figures that dominate the book: astronomer William Herschel and chemist Humphry Davy. Herschel's tireless dedication to the stars, assisted (and perhaps rivalled) by his comet-finding sister Caroline, changed forever the public conception of the solar system, the Milky Way galaxy and the meaning of the universe itself. Davy first shocked the scientific community with his near-suicidal gas experiments in Bristol, then went on to save thousands of lives with his Safety Lamp and established British chemistry as the leading professional science in Europe. But at the cost, perhaps, of his own heart. Holmes proposes a radical vision of science before Darwin, exploring the earliest ideas of deep time and deep space, the creative rivalry with the French scientific establishment, and the startling impact of discovery on great writers and poets such as Mary Shelley, Coleridge, Byron and Keats. With his trademark sense of the human drama, he shows how great ideas and experiments are born out of lonely passion, how scientific discoveries (and errors) are made, how intense relationships are forged and broken by research, and how religious faith and scientific truth collide. The result is breathtaking in its originality, its story-telling energy, and not least, in its intellectual significance.

Description: Archangel tells the story of four days in the life of Fluke Kelso, a dissipated, middle-aged former Oxford historian, who is in Moscow to attend a conference on the newly opened Soviet archives. One night, Kelso is visited in his hotel room by an old NKVD officer, a former bodyguard of the secret police chief Lavrentry Beria. The old man claims to have been at Stalin's dacha on the night Stalin had his fatal stroke, and to have helped Beria steal the dictator's private papers, among them a notebook. Kelso decides to use his last morning in Moscow to check out the old man's story. But what starts as an idle inquiry in the Lenin Library soon turns into a murderous chase across nighttime Moscow and up to northern Russia - to the vast forests near the White Sea port of Archangel, where the final secret of Josef Stalin has been hidden for almost half a century.

Description: In the Roaring Twenties an Englishman and a Frenchman were fierce rivals not only on the European race circuits but also for the sensuous Eve Aubicq. When war breaks out both sign up for missions in Occupied France. They cause havoc to the Nazis until their cover is blown and they are captured and tortured. This is an acclaimed novel of heroism, self-sacrifice, love and betrayal.

What else could a giraffe with an extending neck, a pelican with an expanding beak and an athletic little monkey be but The Ladderless Window-Cleaning Company? When this trio are invited to clean all the 677 windows belonging to the Duke of Hampshire, it is no wonder that they have adventures.