Scorpia Rising by Anthony Horowitz

A dark and shocking conclusion to the bestselling Alex Rider missions.

Alex Rider wants his life back.

But when you’re the world’s most successful spy, there’s only one way out. Alex’s final mission will be the deadliest of all.

One bullet. One life.

The end starts here.

This gripping final mission brings together Alex Rider's old enemies to frame the teenage superspy in an unstoppable plot of revenge, from which he can never return.

Pursued from Europe to North Africa and Cairo's city of the dead – this is the twistiest and most deadly plot of any Alex Rider mission yet, and will reveal Smithers' ultimate gadget and see the shock death of a major character.

Find out more about the book at the Alex Rider website by clicking here...

About the Author

I had always wanted to write a modern 'teenager saves the world' story. It was a recurring fantasy when I was at school that I wasn't a bored thirteen year old stuck in a gruesome north London prep school, but that I was, in reality, an MI6 agent.

At he same time, I wanted to make my story seem very credible. So I've researched everything from the rudiments of SAS training to remaing in a car until the very last moment before it's crushed in a breaker's yard, and I get my thirteen year old son Nicholas to try out things like diving and snowboarding!

Anthony Horowitz is a popular and prolific children's writer, whose books now sell in more than a dozen countries around the world. He has won numerous prizes for his books which include Stormbreaker, Point Blanc (shortlisted for the 2001 Children's Book Award) and both reviewed on this site as well as Eagle Strike and Scorpia. Anthony also writes extensively for TV. He lives in north London.

Watch the animated trailer to the book below

The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco

`Few historical novels come close to acquiring the literary gravitas of Umberto Eco's superior thriller, perhaps because it is as much concerned with semiotics and the science of deductive reasoning as it is in conjuring up the fearful atmosphere of a 14th-century Italian monastery' - Metro

The year is 1327.

Franciscans in a wealthy Italian abbey are suspected of heresy, and Brother William of Baskerville arrives to investigate.

When his delicate mission is suddenly overshadowed by seven bizarre deaths, Brother William turns detective. He collects evidence, deciphers secret symbols and coded manuscripts, and digs into the eerie labyrinth of the abbey where extraordinary things are happening under the over of night.

A spectacular popular and critical success, The Name of the Rose is not only a narrative of a murder investigation but an astonishing chronicle of the Middle Ages.

He began to write it in 1978 because he "felt like poisoning a monk."

The novel works on many levels. It is a compelling murder mystery, as young narrator Adso of Elk accompanies the wise William of Baskerville as he uses logic and semiotics to not only solve a murder mystery, but to decipher labrynths and hidden secrets of the vast monastery library.

Interwoven with the murder mystery is a virtual course on philosophy and late Middle Ages religion, as Eco provides detailed accounts of the histories of various sects, includes scholarly debate on topics such as the poverty of Christ, and a history of the Catholic Church leading to the establishment of a papacy in Avignon, France.

One is reminded of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson as William and Adso use logic and determination to piece together numerous bizarre deaths and occurences at the Abbey, while encountering obstacles and outright hostility by the Abbot and his librarian, to name a couple. The setting of the novel, and the glimpse into a culture that few of us can even imagine, is reason enough to read The Name of the Rose.

About the Author

Umberto Eco, an Italian philosopher and best-selling novelist, is a great polymathic fabulist in the tradition of Swift, Voltaire, Joyce, and Borges. The Name of the Rose, which sold 50 million copies worldwide, is an experimental medieval whodunit set in a monastic library. Within the mystery is a tale of books, librarians, patrons, censorship, and the search for truth in a period of tension between the Papacy and the Holy Roman Empire. Eco was born in the city of Alessandria in the Italian region of Piedmont,  right in the middle of the Genova, Milan, Turin triangle. Young Umberto and his mother, Giovanna, moved to a small village in the Piedmontese mountainside during the Second World War. Eco received a Salesian education, and he has made references to the order and its founder in his works and interviews. His father came from a family of thirteen children, and was very keen fo Umberto to read Law, but instead he entered the University of Turin in order to take up medieval philosophy and literature. Umberto's thesis was on the topic of Thomas Aquinas and this earned him a BA in philosophy in 1954. In that period, Eco abandoned the Roman Catholic Church after a crisis of faith.

Following this, Eco worked as a cultural editor for RAI, Radiotelevisione Italiana, the state broadcasting station, he also became a lecturer at the University of Turin (1956–64). A group of avant-garde artists—painters, musicians, writers—whom he had befriended at RAI (Gruppo 63) became an important and influential component in Eco's future writing career. This was especially true after the publication of his first book in 1956, Il problema estetico di San Tommaso, which was an extension of his doctoral thesis. This also marked the beginning of his lecturing career at his alma mater. He divides his time writing and lecturing between an apartment in Milan and a vacation house near Rimini. He has a 30,000 volume library in the former and a 20,000 volume library in the latter.

"I myself like easy books that put me to sleep immediately. But the normal reader who does not spend his day fighting with Kant or Hegel feels respected if there is a jujitsu with a novel, a resistance, a seduction. If the book says yes immediately, it is a whore."

Umberto Eco

To find out more about the Author click here...

The Name of the Rose translated surprisingly well to screen in 1986, with a masterclass in laconic understatement from Sean Connery, an early appearance from US bad boy Christian Slater and a convincingly medieval setting.

Streetlife: The Untold History of Europe's Twentieth Century by Leif Jerram

'...an enjoyably idiosyncratic and provocative journey...

excellent at showing how space matters.'

Financial Times

'Brilliant and provocative, Streetlife is a compelling history of Europe's cities in the twentieth century. This is urban history for the twenty-first century - passionate, political and a pleasure to read.' Simon Gunn

The twentieth century in Europe was an urban century: it was shaped by life in, and the view from, the street.

Women were not liberated in legislatures, but liberated themselves in factories, homes, nightclubs, and shops.

Lenin, Hitler, and Mussolini made themselves powerful by making cities ungovernable with riots rampaging through streets, bars occupied one-by-one.

New forms of privacy and isolation were not simply a by-product of prosperity, but because people planned new ways of living, new forms of housing in suburbs and estates across the continent. Our proudest cultural achievements lie not in our galleries or state theatres, but in our suburban TV sets, the dance halls, pop music played in garages, and hip hop sung on our estates.

In Streetlife, Leif Jerram presents a totally new history of the twentieth century, with the city at its heart, showing how everything distinctive about the century, from revolution and dictatorship to sexual liberation, was fundamentally shaped by the great urban centres which defined it.

Read the full review here...

Here's an extract from the opening chapter...

There is a familiar history of the twentieth century—almost comforting in its familiarity, despite its triumphs, drama and tragedy. There is a well-known history of ‘great individuals’—Adenauer and Lloyd George, Curie and Pankhurst, Clemenceau and Gorbachev, Stalin and Hitler, Franco and Mussolini. And there is a history of the great movements of nameless individuals, invisibly harnessed to some profound evolving truth: the rise of democracy, of women, of rationalism, of capitalism, of socialism, or of secularization; or the fall of communism, child mortality, or of empires.

But the real drama of history happens where the two worlds collide—where the nameless individual in the crowd meets the great man (or woman). What did the tsar care what the workers of No 6 Shop,

Trubochnyi Metal Works in St Petersburg thought? Not much, perhaps. But he would certainly come to care, when they went on strike in 1916 and 1917, destroyed his world, and transformed global politics for our times. As for the people dancing wildly to ‘black’ jazz in the cellars of wartime Hamburg and Berlin, what did they care about the racial policies of Hitler, Goering, and Heydrich being decided in Berlin in the summer and autumn of 1941? A great deal, it would seem, for dancing to ‘black’ music in a racist state was a clear rejection of a certain set of ideas—a rejection expressed in the movements of their bodies and the smiles on their faces, but not in the ballot box. We need to tell a different story of a messy continent in a messy century. We have to give up our familiar tidy frameworks and neat narratives. If we want to find the point of encounter, and witness the rendezvous between big and small, we have to start thinking about where the twentieth century happened. We have to look at its streetlife.

About the Author

Leif Jerram, Lecturer in European and Urban History, University of Manchester, was born in Woolwich in south-east London in 1971, and lived there until he went to study history at Oxford University. After having lived in San Diego, Bremen, Munich and Paris, he settled in Manchester to do his PhD - the first industrial city.

There he has remained, barring a brief stint as a fellow at Selwyn College, Cambridge.

He is currently a lecturer in urban history in the School of Arts at Manchester University, as well as being involved in community politics and activism. He has published widely in the field of cultural and urban history, including most recently Germany's Other Modernity: Munich and the Making of Metropolis, 1895-1930 (2007).
 
Interested in contemporary cultural history? Listen to Dr Jerram on Streetlife - Performing politics in the square (OU/BBC Radio 4) part of the Thinking Allowed series...
 
In 1905 Russians gathered at six different points to march on the Winter Palace and the streetscape of St Petersburg contributed enormously to their success. The Russian poor were cheek by jowl with the rich and this inflamed a class consciousness which - despite industrialisation - the poor suburbs of Europe did much to dissapate. How does urban geography effect the way societies develop? What have streets given to politics? As street protests continue to challenge authority across the Middle East and violence characterises the marches in our own capital, Laurie is joined by Leif Jerram and John Clarke from the Open University to discuss the role the street in the history of politics. Also on the programme Jeffrey Alexander discusses how the revolution was 'performed' for Egypt and for the rest of the world from Cairo's central square. That compelling drama provided a powerful symbol which was enough to bring down the government.

Click here to listen to the Radio 4 programme

A house is so much more than a home - Real estate may dominate dinner-party talk, but few people think clearly about how the buildings they live in shape their lives. Leif Jerram surveys their domestic and social roles...click here to read the full article...

Life of Pi by Yann Martel

'Extraordinary...Life of Pi could renew your faith in the ability of novelists to invest even the most outrageous scenario with plausible life.' New York Times

'This enormously lovable novel is suffused with wonder.'

The Guardian

In the author's note that prefaces this vertiginously tall tale, Yann Martel blends fact and fiction with wily charm. Yes, he'd published two books that failed to shake the world - eager, studious-young-man's fiction with a strain of self-conscious experimentalism - and taken off to India nursing the faltering seeds of another. But no, he didn't there meet a wise old man who directed him to a putative "main character", now living back in Martel's native Toronto: a certain Piscine Molitor or Pi Patel, named for a French swimming pool and nicknamed for an irrational number, who in the mid-1970s survived 227 days lost at sea with a Royal Bengal tiger.

Despite the extraordinary premise and literary playfulness, one reads Life of Pi not so much as an allegory or magical-realist fable, but as an edge-of-seat adventure.

When the ship in which 16-year-old Pi and his zookeeping family are to emigrate from India to Canada sinks, leaving him the sole human survivor in a lifeboat on to which barge a zebra, a hyena, an orang-utan and a bedraggled, seasick tiger, Pi is determined to survive the impossible. "I will turn miracle into routine. The amazing will be seen every day." And Martel writes with such convincing immediacy, seasoning his narrative with zoological verisimilitude and survival tips about turtle- fishing, solar stills and keeping occupied (the lifeboat manual notes that "yarn spinning is highly recommended"), that disbelief is suspended, like Pi, above the terrible depths of the Pacific ocean.

Extract from the opening of the novel...

...in Toronto, among nine columns of Patels in the phone book, I found him, the main character. My heart pounded as I dialed his phone number. The voice that answered had an Indian lilt to its Canadian accent, light but unmistakable, like a trace of incense in the air. "That was a very long time ago," he said. Yet he agreed to meet. We met many times. He showed me the diary he kept during the events. He showed me the yellowed newspaper clippings that made him briefly, obscurely famous. He told me his story. All the while I took notes. Nearly a year later, after considerable difficulties, I received a tape and a report from the Japanese Ministry of Transport. It was as I listened to that tape that I agreed with Mr. Adirubasamy that this was, indeed, a story to make you believe in God.

It seemed natural that Mr Patel's story should be told mostly in the first person, in his voice and through his eyes. But any inaccuracies or mistakes are mine. It also seemed natural that the end of the story should come first, that the beginning should be in the middle, and that the story should come last. Such is the logic of fiction. A story is always better appreciated if its ending is known first.

About the Author

Yann Martel was born in Salamanca, Spain, in 1963, of Canadian parents who were doing graduate studies. Later they both joined the Canadian foreign service and he grew up in Costa Rica, France, Spain and Mexico, in addition to Canada. He continued to travel widely as an adult, spending time in Iran, Turkey and India, but is now based mainly in Montreal. He obtained a degree in Philosophy from Trent University in Ontario, then worked variously as a tree planter, dishwasher and security guard before taking up writing full-time from the age of 27.

His first book, The Facts Behind the Helsinki Roccamatios, was published in 1993 and is a collection of short stories, dealing with such themes as illness, storytelling and the history of the twentieth century; music, war and the anguish of youth; how we die; and grief, loss and the reasons we are attached to material objects.

This was followed by his first novel, Self (1996), a tale of sexual identity, orientation and Orlando-like transformation. It is described by Charles Foran in the Montreal Gazette as a ' ... superb psychological acute observation on love, attraction and belonging ...'

In 2002 Yann Martel came to public attention when he won the Man Booker Prize for Fiction for his second novel, Life of Pi (2002), an epic survival story with an overarching religious theme. The novel tells the story of one Pi Patel, the son of an Indian family of zookeepers. They decide to emigrate to Canada and embark on a ship with their animals to cross the Pacific. They are shipwrecked and Pi is left bobbing in a lifeboat in the company of a zebra, a hyena, an orang-utan and a 450-pound Bengal tiger. Life of Pi will eventually be published in over forty countries and territories, representing well over thirty languages, and the film rights have been optioned by Fox studios.

In 2004, a collection of short stories was published entitled We Ate The Children Last. His latest book is a further novel, Beatrice and Virgil (2010), which deals with the holocaust.

To find out more about the novel click below...

http://www.lifeofpi.co.uk/

The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution by Richard Dawkins

'This is the book Richard Dawkins needed to write and many need to read ... clear, absorbing and vivid.' Bishop Richard Harries

'Dawkins combines an artist's wonder at the virtuosity of nature with a scientist's understanding of how it comes to be.'

 Matt Ridley

'Whether it’s Lenski’s bacteria or our own ancestors, Richard Dawkins discusses the evidence for evolution with his usual charm, style, clarity and brilliance.' Simon Singh

Charles Darwin’s masterpiece, On the Origin of Species, shook society to its core on publication in 1859. Darwin was only too aware of the storm his theory of evolution would provoke but he would surely have raised an incredulous eyebrow at the controversy still raging a century and a half later.

Evolution is accepted as scientific fact by all reputable scientists and indeed theologians, yet millions of people continue to question its veracity.


In The Greatest Show on Earth Richard Dawkins takes on creationists, including followers of ‘Intelligent Design’ and all those who question the fact of evolution through natural selection. Like a detective arriving on the scene of a crime, he sifts through fascinating layers of scientific facts and disciplines to build a cast-iron case: from the living examples of natural selection in birds and insects; the ‘time clocks’ of trees and radioactive dating that calibrate a timescale for evolution; the fossil record and the traces of our earliest ancestors; to confirmation from molecular biology and genetics.

All of this, and much more, bears witness to the truth of evolution.

The Greatest Show on Earth comes at a critical time: systematic opposition to the fact of evolution is now flourishing as never before, especially in America. In Britain and elsewhere in the world, teachers witness insidious attempts to undermine the status of science in their classrooms. Richard Dawkins provides unequivocal evidence that boldly and comprehensively rebuts such nonsense. At the same time he shares with us his palpable love of the natural world and the essential role that science plays in its interpretation. Written with elegance, wit and passion, it is hard-hitting, absorbing and totally convincing.

Extract from Chapter One

Imagine that you are a teacher of Roman history and the Latin language, anxious to impart your enthusiasm for the ancient world — for the elegiacs of Ovid and the odes of Horace, the sinewy economy of Latin grammar as exhibited in the oratory of Cicero, the strategic niceties of the Punic Wars, the generalship of Julius Caesar and the voluptuous excesses of the later emperors. That’s a big undertaking and it takes time, concentration, dedication. Yet you find your precious time continually preyed upon, and your class’s attention distracted, by a baying pack of ignoramuses (as a Latin scholar you would know better than to say ignorami) who, with strong political and especially financial support, scurry about tirelessly attempting to persuade your unfortunate pupils that the Romans never existed. There never was a Roman Empire. The entire world came into existence only just beyond living memory. Spanish, Italian, French, Portuguese, Catalan, Occitan, Romansh: all these languages and their constituent dialects sprang spontaneously and separately into being, and owe nothing to any predecessor such as Latin.

Instead of devoting your full attention to the noble vocation of classical scholar and teacher, you are forced to divert your time and energy to a rearguard defence of the proposition that the Romans existed at all: a defence against an exhibition of ignorant prejudice that would make you weep if you weren’t too busy fighting it...

...The plight of many science teachers today is not less dire. When they attempt to expound the central and guiding principle of biology; when they honestly place the living world in its historical context — which means evolution; when they explore and explain the very nature of life itself, they are harried and stymied, hassled and bullied, even threatened with loss of their jobs. At the very least their time is wasted at every turn. They are likely to receive menacing letters from parents and have to endure the sarcastic smirks and close-folded arms of brainwashed children. They are supplied with state-approved textbooks that have had the word “evolution” systematically expunged, or bowdlerized into “change over time”. Once, we were tempted to laugh this kind of thing off as a peculiarly American phenomenon. Teachers in Britain and Europe now face the same problems, partly because of American influence, but more significantly because of the growing Islamic presence in the classroom — abetted by the official commitment to “multiculturalism” and the terror of being thought racist.

Richard Dawkins on The Greatest Show on Earth

Click here to listen to Richard Dawkins talk about why it's time for a book setting out the evidence for evolution, when calling someone ignorant isn't an insult, and how the media have made him into a militant atheist

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/video/2009/sep/21/richard-dawkins-greatest-show-earth

Fermat's Last Theorem by Simon Singh

'Far from being a dry textbook it reads like the chronicle of an obsessive love affair. It has the classic ingredients that Hollywood would recognise' Daily Mail

When Cambridge mathematician Andrew Wiles announced a solution for Fermat's last theorem in 1993, it electrified the world of mathematics. After a flaw was discovered in the proof, Wiles had to work for another year - he had already laboured in solitude for seven years - to establish that he had solved the 350-year-old problem.

Simon Singh's book is a lively, comprehensible explanation of Wiles's work and of the colourful history that has build up around Fermat's last theorem over the years. The book contains some problems that offer a taste for the maths, but it also includes limericks to give a feeling for the quirkier side of mathematicians.

The extraordinary story of the solving of a puzzle that has confounded mathematicians since the 17th century. The solution of Fermat's Last Theorem is the most important mathematical development of the 20th century.

In 1963 a schoolboy browsing in his local library stumbled across the world's greatest mathematical problem: Fermat's Last Theorem, a puzzle that every child can understand but which has baffled mathematicians for over 300 years. Aged just ten, Andrew Wiles dreamed that he would crack it.

Wiles's lifelong obsession with a seemingly simple challenge set by a long-dead Frenchman is an emotional tale of sacrifice and extraordinary determination. In the end, Wiles was forced to work in secrecy and isolation for seven years, harnessing all the power of modern maths to achieve his childhood dream. Many before him had tried and failed, including a 18-century philanderer who was killed in a duel. An 18-century Frenchwoman made a major breakthrough in solving the riddle, but she had to attend maths lectures at the Ecole Polytechnique disguised as a man since women were forbidden entry to the school.

A remarkable story of human endeavour and intellectual brilliance over three centuries, Fermat 's Last Theorem will fascinate both specialist and general readers.

A word from the Author

For the last seven years I have worked as a science journalist for BBC television in London, and, without doubt, the story of Fermat's Last Theorem is the most compelling scientific tale I have encountered. As soon as Andrew Wiles solved the problem of the Last Theorem, I began working on a TV documentary describing his achievement (which was aired in the UK on BBC's Horizon series and in the USA as part of the NOVA series), but it was obvious that there was much more to the story than could be squeezed into 60 minutes of television. The book is intended to do justice to the extraordinary history of the problem, involving tragedy, obsession, rich prizes, suicide and even transvestism. At the same time, it was an opportunity to desribe the beautiful mathematical ideas behind Wiles' proof of Fermat's Last Theorem. Mathematics is not about balancing checkbooks, it's about exploring an abstract universe of numbers, filled with profound and subtle concepts. Since the moment I heard about Fermat's Last Theorem I was fascinated by it, and I hope that you will be equally enthralled.

Find out more about the author here...

And below you can watch the opening of the 1996 BBC documentary on the solving of Fermet's Theorem...

Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham

"All the reality of a vividly realised nightmare." The Times

"When a day that you happen to know is Wednesday starts off sounding like Sunday, there is something seriously wrong somewhere."

"Triffids" are tall plants capable of aggressive and seemingly intelligent behaviour. They are able to move about on their three "legs", appear to communicate with each other, and possess a deadly whip-like poisonous sting that enables them to kill and feed on the rotting carcasses of their victims.

The Day of the Triffids begins with Bill Masen in hospital, his eyes bandaged after having been splashed with droplets of triffid venom in a lab accident. During his convalescence he is told of the unexpected and beautiful green meteor shower that the entire world is watching. He awakes the next morning to a silent hospital and learns that the light from the unusual display has rendered any who watched it completely blind.

After unbandaging his eyes, he wanders through an anarchic London full of almost entirely sightless inhabitants, and witnesses civilization collapsing around him.

He meets some other sighted survivors and they decide to leave London and start a colony in the countryside...

The Day of the Triffids, Wyndham's first significant novel, has been permanently in print since its publication in 1951, and remains one of his most widely-read and highly acclaimed works.

To read a short biography of John Wyndham, click on the link below:

http://ds.dial.pipex.com/l.j.hurst/jwyndham.htm

Generation Dead by Daniel Waters

Newcomer Waters serves up the best YA read of the year with a tale of love, humour, humanity and zombies --err, the differently biotic. Witty and well written, “Generation Dead” is a classic desegregation story that also skewers adult attempts to make teenagers play nice New York Times

In this debut novel, Waters shows an impressive understanding of the factors affecting teens as they navigate the high school environment. Using humor to lighten a world that is mixed with both violence and horror, he is able to capture readers' attention and sympathy for a group of very complex characters.— Caryl Soriano, New York Public Library

All over the country, a strange phenomenon is happening. Some teenagers who die aren't staying dead. They are coming back to life, but they are no longer the same—they stutter, and their reactions to everything are slower. Termed "living impaired" or "differently biotic," they are doing their best to fit into a society that doesn’t want them.

With her pale skin and Goth wardrobe, Phoebe has never run with the popular crowd. But no one can believe it when she falls for Tommy Williams, the leader of the dead kids. Not her best friend, Margi, whose fear of the differently biotic is deeply rooted in guilt over the past. And especially not her neighbor, Adam, the star of the football team. Adam has just realized his feelings for Phoebe run much deeper than just friendship. He would do anything for her, but what if protecting Tommy is the one thing that would make her happy?

This is the first book in the Generation Dead series. To see Dan Waters' website, click below:

http://www.danielwaters.com/

Starseeker by Tim Bowler

'A thriller with a big heart and a real glimpse of the human soul, full of plot and passion, music and mystery.' Melvin Burgess

'A lovely, sure-footed novel. Bowler…is lyrical and emotionally charged – on full throttle, revving up our sense of what it is like to be a young person in the world today.' The Observer

'Compelling and suspenseful, this book understands that peer pressure for boys is tough, but is also full of male role models who are creative and sensitive.' Sunday Times

Luke's father is dead and he feels his mother is moving on too quickly. Since his father's death Luke has changed his priorities, and has fallen into bad company. His new friends persuade him to break into a house when its owner, an unfriendly and unlovable old woman, is out. Once inside he is confronted with the sound of a girl crying, and through a locked keyhole sees a young girl standing alone, crying in despair. Luke becomes drawn into finding out who the girl is, why she is in the house, and why she is so unhappy. Finding the answers will change all of their lives.

Tim Bowler has written 20 books and won 15 awards including the Carnegie Medal, the Angus Book Prize (twice), and the Lancashire Children's Book Award. To find out more about him, click on the link below.

http://www.timbowler.co.uk/home