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At the opening of a voyage filled with disaster and delight, Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin are in pursuit of a privateer sailing under American colours through the Great South Sea. Stephen's objective is to set the revolutionary tinder of South America ablaze to relieve the pressure on the British government which has blundered into war with the young and uncomfortably vigorous United States. The shock and barbarity of hand-to-hand fighting are sharpened by O'Brian's exact sense of period, his eye for landscape and his feel for a ship under sail.

The hunter becomes the hunted in Gridlinked, the first sci-fi thriller in Neal Asher's compelling Agent Cormac series. When a portal to other planets explodes on Samarkand, thousands are killed and a terraforming project is obliterated. Earth Central Security suspects sabotage – and assigns a...

Jack Aubrey and his old friend Dr Maturin are sailing on a secret mission with a hand-picked crew, most of them shipmates from the adventures and lucrative voyages of earlier years.

This book describes and explains the major events, personalities, conflicts, and convergences that have shaped the history of the Muslim world. The body of the work takes listeners from the origins of Islam to the eve of the nineteenth century, and an epilogue continues the story to the present day. Michael Cook thus provides a broad history of a civilization remarkable for both its unity and diversity.

Jack Aubrey returns from his duties protecting whalers off South America and is persuaded by a casual acquaintance to make investments in the City on the strength of supposedly certain information. This innocent decision ensnares him in the London criminal underground and in government espionage - the province of his friend Stephen Maturin. Is Aubrey's humiliation and the threatened ruin of his career a deliberate plot?

Shadow of the Scorpion is a standalone prequel to Neal Asher’s explosive Agent Cormac series. Some secrets are too hard to bear . . . Following the human vs prador war, Ian Cormac signs up with Earth Central Security. He’s sent out to restore order on worlds devastated by alien bombardment...

Line War is the fifth and final novel in Neal Asher's action-packed Agent Cormac series. The human Polity worlds are under attack from Erebus, a renegade AI. And it’s now merged with lethal Jain technology, and isn’t afraid to use it. When Erebus kills millions, on a world of no apparent...

No one can outrun the past in Brass Man, is the third novel in Neal Asher's popular Agent Cormac series. Imperfectly resurrected by Jain technology, Mr Crane is back from the dead. The brass killing machine is haunted by a violent past he can’t fully forget or truly remember. He seeks to heal...

Old enemies meet on new worlds in The Line of Polity, the second novel in Neal Asher's popular Agent Cormac series. At the frontiers of human-occupied space, the Miranda space station has been utterly destroyed. Earth Central assigns Agent Ian Cormac to discover the truth, because the alien...

Murder and smuggling, conspiracy and treason - can Reverend Hardcastle catch a killer? Kent, 1796. Shocked to discover a dying man on his doorstep - and lucky to avoid a bullet himself - Reverend Hardcastle finds himself entrusted with the victim's cryptic last words. With smuggling rife on England's south-east coast, the obvious conclusion is that a dodgy deal has gone wrong. But why is the leader of the local Customs service so reluctant to investigate?

Prador Moon is one of Neal Asher’s most explosive excursions into the Polity universe. It’s also an action-packed prequel to the dramatic events in Neal Asher's Spatterjay novels. It takes one encounter to turn peace into war . . . The worlds of the Polity stretch from Earth Central into the...

Life ashore may once again be the undoing of Jack Aubrey in The Yellow Admiral, Patrick O'Brian's best-selling novel and eighteenth volume in the Aubrey/Maturin series. Aubrey, now a considerable though impoverished landowner, has dimmed his prospects at the admiralty by his erratic voting as a member of Parliament; he is feuding with his neighbor, a man with strong navy connections who wants to enclose the common land between their estates.

Polity Agent is the fourth novel in Neal Asher's popular Agent Cormac series. Refugees arrive in the Polity from eight hundred years in Agent Cormac’s future. And once they are through, the gate they use is dumped into the sun, as something dangerous and non-human is in pursuit. Cormac soon...

With reference to the ideas of a Yale professor who first identified the theory and to the writings of George Orwell from whose ‘newspeak’ the word was adapted, Booker sheds new light on the remarkable – and worrying – effects of ‘groupthink’ and its influence on our society. Booker defines the three rules of groupthink: the adoption of a common view or belief not based on objective reality; the establishment of a consensus of right-minded people, an ‘in group’; and the need to treat the views of anyone who questions the belief as wholly unacceptable.

Great Contemporaries profiles towering figures ranging from Franklin Roosevelt, Adolf Hitler, Lawrence of Arabia and Leon Trotsky to Charlie Chaplin, H. G. Wells, Rudyard Kipling and George Bernard Shaw. Written in the decade before Churchill became prime minister, the essays in Great Contemporaries focus on the challenges of statecraft at a time when the democratic revolution was toppling older regimes based on tradition and aristocratic privilege.

By 1942, Churchill faced a vastly different war than the one he'd inherited from Neville Chamberlain. Britain was no longer alone; the Soviets were now an unlikely ally in the East, and Pearl Harbor had finally pushed America into action. Yet the scale of violence remained unchanged. On average...

Maurice Questing was left to die in a pool of boiling mud. Chief Inspector Roderick Alleyn knew that any number of people could have killed him: the English exiles he'd hated, the New Zealanders he'd despised or the Maoris he'd insulted. Even the spies he'd thwarted - if he wasn't a spy himself.

It is the 1650s, and Spain considers the Caribbean its own private sea, but England, Holland, and France conspire to battle for freedom on the oceans. Set in days littered with the plunder of piracy, Ned Yorke, a loyal royalist living in Barbados, has a small vessel and devoted crew, and together they sail, hunted by roundheads and Spaniards, determined to pay whatever the price for freedom from tyranny. What transpires is a colorful, dramatic retelling of historical events surrounding the capture of Jamaica and the infamous raid on Santiago.

H.M.S. Surprise, the third in O'Brian's acclaimed Aubrey-Maturin series, follows the variable fortunes of Captain Jack Aubrey's career in Nelson's navy, as he attempts to hold his ground against admirals, colleagues, and the enemy, and accepts a commission to convey a British ambassador to the East Indies. The voyage leads him and his friend Stephen Maturin to the strange sights and smells of the Indian subcontinent, and through the archipelago of Spice Islands where the French have a near-overwhelming local superiority.

Alan Groombridge had a fantasy. Husband to a woman he didn't like, father of two children he had never wanted,and manager of the second smallest branch of the Anglian-Victoria bank in the country, Alan was doomed to a life of domestic boredom and tedious routine.All that saved him was that one fantasy: stealing enough of the bank's money to allow him just one year of freedom -one year in which to live a different sort of life. But one day there was no more dreaming and no more games.