Alex Lake's day job is all about helping people, especially children. She cares about them passionately and does everything in her power to rescue them from those who mean them harm. It's as frustrating a career as it can be rewarding, though all too often she is left wondering if she has done enough. When the case of three-year-old Ottilie Crane comes to her attention everything changes. She finds herself completely unable to detach from the child the way she should, and feels an overpowering need to make a real difference in little Ottilie's life. To do this she needs the support of her superiors, but no one is prepared to believe that Ottilie is in danger. In the end, Alex follows the only course left to her, and takes law into her own hands...

2015: Madison, Wisconsin. Junior cop Sally Jansson is called out to the house of Willis Lynsey, a reclusive scientist, for an animal-cruelty complaint: the man was seen forcing a horse in through the door of his home. Inside there is no horse. But Sally finds a kind of home-made utility belt. She straps this on - and ‘steps’ sideways into an America covered with virgin forest. Willis came here with equipment and animals, meaning to explore and colonise. And when Sally gets back, she finds Willis has put the secret of the belt on the internet. The great migration has begun... The Long Earth: our Earth is but one of a chain of parallel worlds, lying side by side in a higher space of possibilities, each differing from its neighbours by a little (or a lot): an infinite landscape of infinite possibilities. And the further away you travel, the stranger the worlds get. The sun and moon always shine, the basic laws of physics are the same. However, the chance events which have shaped our particular version of Earth, such as the dinosaur-killer asteroid impact, might not have happened and things may well have turned out rather differently. But only our Earth hosts mankind...

Back in 1957, nine-year-old Zidra Vincent met Jim Cadwallader for the first time. Fourteen years later, their bond of friendship - forged during a childhood in the beautiful coastal town of Jingera - is still strong. But is friendship all they dream of? Jim is now a respected war correspondent in Cambodia, though he has plans to come home for good. Because there is something very important he wants to say to Zidra. Zidra, meanwhile, is an ambitious reporter at the Sydney Morning Chronicle, and the seeds of a major story have just landed in her lap. Life is looking good, if only she could share it with the man who knows her best. Then, while at work in the newsroom one morning, Zidra catches sight of a wire service bulletin. A story out of Cambodia. The body of a Western journalist has been discovered near Phnom Penh. And her world collapses around her ...

From humble beginnings in New Zealand Owen Glenn built up a highly successful global business empire and now he is concentrating on using his wealth to deliver significant philanthropic benefits here and overseas. This fascinating memoir gives insight into Owen's business philosophies and commercial strategies especially with regard to international business expansion and success. It also decribes how Owen is now using his considerable energies to contribute to the world in a philanthropic sense. In addition, it covers Owen's ideas as to the best way forward for New Zealand Inc. He is keen to see the country he loves succeed and he has clear ideas on where and how we should be channelling our energies. This is a great read, inspiring and aspirational for every New Zealander.

By the end of the fifteenth century, Florence was well established as the home of the Renaissance. As generous patrons to the likes of Botticelli and Michelangelo, the ruling Medici embodied the progressive humanist spirit of the age, and in Lorenzo the Magnificent they possessed a diplomat capable of guarding the militarily weak city in a climate of constantly shifting allegiances between the major Italian powers. However, in the form of Savonarola, an unprepossessing provincial monk, Lorenzo found his nemesis. Filled with Old Testament fury and prophecies of doom, Savonarola’s sermons reverberated among a disenfranchised population, who preferred medieval Biblical certainties to the philosophical interrogations and intoxicating surface glitter of the Renaissance. Savonarola’s aim was to establish a ‘City of God’ for his followers, a new kind of democratic state, the likes of which the world had never seen before.The battle which this provoked would be a fight to the death, a series of sensational events – invasions, trials by fire, the ‘Bonfire of the Vanities’, terrible executions and mysterious deaths – featuring a cast of the most important and charismatic Renaissance figures. This famous struggle has often been portrayed as a simple clash of wills between a benign ruler and religious fanatic, between secular pluralism and repressive extremism. However, in an exhilaratingly rich and deeply researched story, Paul Strathern reveals the paradoxes, self-doubts and political compromises which made the battle for the soul of the Renaissance city one of the most complex and important moments in Western history.

'All my life I think I've been trying to find it again, that clarity, as if all the world's air were rushing into me and filling my lungs to the brim. 'And that sense of defying gravity before the thrill of falling.' In this richly imaginative and compelling collection of longer stories, Witi Ihimaera ranges across an intriguing and surprising variety of styles, subjects and settings. A young Maori girl fights for a future in the grim reality of urban New Zealand; a fond nephew pays affectionate, humorous tribute to his glamorous aunt; a Kiwi rock diva faces her past in faraway London; Moby Dick is fabulously reincarnated in post-climate-change Antarctica; a dying woman recalls the giant tortoises of the Galapagos Islands; a shy boy from the East Coast makes an extraordinary journey with his famous ancestor, Tupaea. In these profound, often funny, always memorable stories, Ihimaera again defies the expected to reaffirm his place as one of this country's finest technicians and storytellers.

The last in a long line of women sworn to guard our world against evil, jeweller Garet James is struggling to come to terms with who - or what - she really is. Will Hughes, the alluring four-hundred-year-old vampire who tasted her blood and saved her life, could help, but he's disappeared. Garet believes he's in France, searching for the Summer Country, the legendary land of the Fey where he might be freed from his vampire curse. Desperate to understand her legacy, Garet follows Will. In Paris, she encounters strange, mythic beings - an ancient botanist metamorphosed into the city's oldest tree, a gnome who lives beneath the Labyrinth at the Jardin des Plantes, a dryad in the Luxembourg Gardens - meetings that convince her she is on the right path. But Garet is not the only one trying to find the way in to the Summer Country - and the closer she gets, the more dangerous it becomes...

Seraphina works as the music assistant to the royal court composer in Lavondaville. Her world is populated by humans and by dragons able to take human form, and for now there is an uneasy peace between them. In fact, the fortieth anniversary of the treaty between human and dragonkind is rapidly approaching. But then a member of the royal family is murdered, and the crime appears to have been committed by a dragon. The peace and treaty between both worlds is threatened. Seraphina is caught desperately in the middle of the tension. Her father is human, and her mother was a dragon in human form.She is unique, and completely illegal – and if she is found out, her life is in serious danger . . .

A young man leaves home a deckhand on a Norwegian freighter, to travel the world. He returns to New Zealand changed almost beyond recognition. Along the way he meets nine people who influence his life and help make him the writer he becomes. James McNeish's Touchstones has a cast of characters who include 'the Mother Courage of the English theatre', an anti-Mafia reformer in Sicily, a Kanak revolutionary who is assassinated, a rejected cousin and 'Mr Punch in naval uniform', the New Zealand poet Denis Glover. All are larger than life. Some of them, like the author's mysterious Maori aunt, are good enough to bottle. The book is witty, poignant and in the words of its editor, Emma Neale, 'rich in astonishing anecdote'. It is at once a self-portrait, a hymn to a vanishing New Zealand, and the first time James McNeish has written about himself.

UNIT is called in an important diplomat is attacked in his own home - by a man who then vanishes into thin air. The Doctor and Jo spend a night in the 'haunted' house and meet the attackers - who have 'time-jumped' back from the 22nd century in the hope of changing history. Travelling forward in time, the Doctor and Jo find themselves trapped in a future world where humans are slaves and the Daleks have already invaded. Using their ape-like servants to Ogrons to maintain order, the Daleks are now the masters of Earth. As the Doctor desperately works to discover what has happened to put history off-track, the Daleks plan a time-jump attack on the 20th century. This novel is based on a Doctor Who story which was originally broadcast from 1 - 22 January 1972. Featuring the Third Doctor as played by Jon Pertwee, with his companion Jo Grant and the UNIT organisation commanded by Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart

January, 1719. A man sits at a table, writing. Nearly sixty, Daniel Defoe is troubled with gout and 'the stone', burdened with a large family and debts, mired in political controversy and legal threats. But for the moment he is preoccupied by a younger man on a barren shore - Robinson Crusoe. Several miles south another old man, Robert Knox, sits bent over a heavy volume - the only book he has written, published nearly forty years before. The large folio is now worn and tattered, crammed with extra pages covered in notes and emendations. A leaner copy of Knox's book is also on the shelf in Defoe's library, perhaps even open on the table as he writes.The title page distils its contents: 'An Historical Relation of the Island of Ceylon in the East Indies: Together with an Account of the Detaining in Captivity of the Author and diverse other Englishmen now Living there and of the Author's Miraculous Escape. Illustrated with Figures and a Map of the Island. By Robert Knox, a Captive there near Twenty Years'. Knox's Historical Relation was a best-seller when it was published in 1681, just a year after he escaped from Ceylon and returned to England. But by 1719, despite Knox's efforts to have a revised edition published, it has long been out of print. If Defoe had died in 1718, the year before he wrote Robinson Crusoe, few of us would have heard of him. He is principally remembered for this book and its hero. They have a life of their own: in the years since it was published, Crusoe has been abridged, imitated, parodied, dramatized, turned into opera, pantomime, comic books and cartoons, made into a string of films, adapted for reality television and translated into every written language. Where did Crusoe come from? And what is the secret of his endurance? Crusoe explores the intertwined lives of two real men: Daniel Defoe and Robert Knox and the character and book that emerged from their peculiar conjunction. It is the biography of a book and its hero, the story of Defoe, the man who wrote Robinson Crusoe, and of Robert Knox, the man who was Crusoe.

The publication of a new novel from Terry Pratchett is always a major event. All we can reveal at this stage is that his 39th Discworld novel features the popular Sam Vimes, Commander of the City Watch...

Peter lives with his mother and grandfather in the museum. He knows where to find the most weird and wonderful exhibits and how to open a hundred secret doors. When his grandfather gets sick, Peter decides to search for his father, who disappeared before Peter was born. Instead he finds a strange old woman, who gives him a book called How to Live Forever but makes him promise never to read it. Trapped in a world where books are houses and wise men aren't wise at all, Peter meets a girl called Festival. She doesn't know where Peter's father has gone, but she might know someone who does. Together they look for the Ancient Child, who has the answers to everything...

If you had a second chance at first love . . . would you take it? It's been three years since Adam's love saved Mia after the accident that annihilated life as she knew it . . . and three years since Mia walked out of Adam's life forever. Now living on opposite coasts, Mia is Julliard's rising star and Adam is LA tabloid fodder, thanks to his new rock star status and celebrity girlfriend. When Adam gets stuck in New York by himself, chance brings the couple together again, for one last night. As they explore the city that has become Mia's home, Adam and Mia revisit the past and open their hearts to the future—and each other. Told from Adam's point of view in the spare, powerful prose that defined If I Stay, Where She Went explores the devastation of grief, the promise of new hope, and the flame of rekindled romance.

Set off to the Short-Shaggy-Tail-Waggy Super Dog Show with Sally, Nick and The Cat in the Hat! Meet dogs of all different shapes and sizes and learn all about how tails help dogs to balance; that they can see better in dim light than we can; the amazing things they've been trained to do; and much, much more. There are tons of fascinating dog facts, all told in a rhythmically rhyming story that will keep children captivated for hours! This fun and exciting story is perfect for early readers who are comfortable tackling new words and starting to read on their own.

Two men came to personify British and German generalship in the Second World War: Bernard Montgomery and Erwin Rommel. They fought a series of extraordinary duels across several theatres of war which established them as two of the greatest captains of their age. Our understanding of leadership in battle was altered for ever by their electrifying personal qualities. Ever since, historians have assessed their outstanding leadership, personalities and skill. Born four years apart, their lives were remarkably similar. In this groundbreaking study, Peter Caddick-Adams explores Montgomery and Rommel’s lives from their provincial upbringing, through to the trench fighting of the First World War, where both nearly died in 1914. Obsessed with fitness and training, the future field marshals emerged highly decorated and with a glowing war record. The pair taught in staff colleges, wrote infantry textbooks and fought each other as divisional commanders in 1940. The careers of both began on the periphery of the military establishment and represent the first time military commanders proactively and systematically used (and were used by) the media as they came to prominence, first in North Africa, then in Normandy. Dynamic and forward-thinking, their lives also represent a study of pride, propaganda and nostalgia. Caddick-Adams tracks and compares their military talents and personalities in battle. Each brought something special to their commands. Rommel’s breathtaking advance in May–June 1940 was nothing less than inspired. Montgomery is a gift for leadership gurus in the way he took over a demoralised Eighth Army in August 1942 and led it to victory just two months later. This is the first comparative biography written of the two. It explores how each was ‘made’ by their war leaders, Churchill and Hitler, and how the thoughts of both permeate down to today’s armies. Even though Rommel died in 1944, the rivalry between the two carried on after the war through their writings and other memoirs. This compelling work is both scholarly and entertaining and marks the debut of a major new talent in historical biography.

Al Qaeda expert and CNN national security analyst Peter Bergen paints a multi-dimensional picture of the hunt for bin Laden over the past decade, as well as the recent campaign that gradually tightened the noose around him. Other key elements of the book will include: * A careful account of Obama's decision-making process in the final weeks and days as the raid was planned, as well as what NSC cabinet members were advising him. The fascinating story of a group of mostly women analysts at the CIA in the HVT (high value target) section, who never gave up assembling the tiniest clues about OBL's whereabouts * The untold and action-packed history of the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) and the SEALs, which accounts for the confidence Obama had in tasking them with the mission * An analysis of what the death of OBL means for al Qaeda, for the wider jihadist movement that looked to him for inspiration and strategic guidance, and for Obama's legacy. Just as Hugh Trevor-Roper's The Last Days of Hitler was the definitive account of the death of the Nazi dictator, so too is Manhunt the authoritative, immersive account of the operation that killed the man who organized the largest mass murder in American history.