Michelle de Krester
The Hamilton Case

The place is Ceylon, the time is the 1930s. Sam Obeysekere -'obey' by name and by nature - is a Ceylonese lawyer, a perfect product of empire. His family once had wealth and influence, but cracks start to open as political change comes to the island, and Sam's glamorous father dies leaving gambling debts. But the Obeysekeres' troubles reach back into the past. And there is the Hamilton Case, a murder scandal that shakes the upper echelons of island society. Set amid tea plantations and jungle, decay, corruption and the back-water of empire, this is a gripping story of a world at the end of its tether.

Joanne Harris
Jigs And Reels

Suburban witches, defiant old ladies, ageing monsters, suicidal Lottery winners, wolf men, dolphin women and middle-aged manufacturers of erotic leatherwear. In these twenty-two short stories from the author of Holy Fools and Chocolat, the miraculous goes hand in hand with the mundane, the sour with the sweet, and the beautiful, the grotesque, the seductive and the disturbing are never more than one step away in Joanne Harris's first collection of short stories.

Robert Harris
Pompeii

Where better to enjoy the last days of summer than on the beautiful Bay of Naples? Along the coast the Roman Empire's richest citizens are relaxing in their luxurious villas. The world's largest navy lies at anchor. Only one man is worried. The engineer Marcus Attilius has just taken charge of the Aqua Augusta, the enormous aqueduct which brings fresh water to a quarter of a million people. Springs are failing. And now there's a crisis on the Augusta's sixty-mile main line - somewhere north of Pompeii, on the slopes of Mount Vesuvius.