Hardcover, UK First Edition, First Printing, Signed by author to the title page.

'I don't know if my story is grand enough to be a tragedy, although a lot of shitty stuff did happen. It is certainly a love story but that did not begin until midway through the shitty stuff, by which time I had not only lost my eight-year-old son, but also my house and studio in Sydney where I had once been as famous as a painter could expect in his own backyard...'So begins Peter Carey's highly charged and lewdly funny new novel. Told by the twin voices of the artist Butcher Bones and his 'damaged 220-pound brother' Hugh, it recounts their adventures and troubles after Butcher's plummeting prices and spiralling drink problem force them to retreat to northern New South Wales. Here the formerly famous artist is reduced to being a caretaker for his biggest collector, and the nurse for his erratic brother. Then the mysterious Marlene turns up one stormy night, clad in a pair of Manolo Blahniks. Claiming that the brothers' friend and neighbour owns an original Jacques Liebovitz, she soon sets in motion a chain of events that could be the making or ruin of them all. Once again displaying Peter Carey's extraordinary flair for language, "Theft" is a love poem of a very different kind. Ranging from the rural wilds of Australia to Manhattan via Tokyo - and exploring themes of art, fraud, responsibility and redemption - this is a great novel which will also make you laugh out loud.

Longlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2006

Hardcover, UK First Edition, First Printing, Signed, Dated (publication date 1/6/06) & First Line Quoted by author to the title page.

'I don't know if my story is grand enough to be a tragedy, although a lot of shitty stuff did happen. It is certainly a love story but that did not begin until midway through the shitty stuff, by which time I had not only lost my eight-year-old son, but also my house and studio in Sydney where I had once been as famous as a painter could expect in his own backyard...'So begins Peter Carey's highly charged and lewdly funny new novel. Told by the twin voices of the artist Butcher Bones and his 'damaged 220-pound brother' Hugh, it recounts their adventures and troubles after Butcher's plummeting prices and spiralling drink problem force them to retreat to northern New South Wales. Here the formerly famous artist is reduced to being a caretaker for his biggest collector, and the nurse for his erratic brother. Then the mysterious Marlene turns up one stormy night, clad in a pair of Manolo Blahniks. Claiming that the brothers' friend and neighbour owns an original Jacques Liebovitz, she soon sets in motion a chain of events that could be the making or ruin of them all. Once again displaying Peter Carey's extraordinary flair for language, "Theft" is a love poem of a very different kind. Ranging from the rural wilds of Australia to Manhattan via Tokyo - and exploring themes of art, fraud, responsibility and redemption - this is a great novel which will also make you laugh out loud.

Longlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2006

Signed numbered limited slipcase edition. One of only 1000 copies.

Moving back through the 1940s, through air raids, blacked out streets, illicit liaisons, sexual adventure, to end with its beginning in 1941, The Night Watch is the work of a truly brilliant and compelling storyteller. This is the story of four Londoners - three women and a young man with a past, drawn with absolute truth and intimacy. Kay, who drove an ambulance during the war and lived life at full throttle, now dresses in mannish clothes and wanders the streets with a restless hunger, searching... Helen, clever, sweet, much-loved, harbours a painful secret...Viv, glamour girl, is stubbornly, even foolishly loyal, to her soldier lover...Duncan, an apparent innocent, has had his own demons to fight during the war. Their lives, and their secrets connect in sometimes startling ways. War leads to strange alliances...Tender, tragic and beautifully poignant, set against the backdrop of feats of heroism both epic and ordinary, here is a novel of relationships that offers up subtle surprises and twists. The Night Watch is a thrilling towering achievement.

Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2006

Longlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction 2006

Moving back through the 1940s, through air raids, blacked out streets, illicit liaisons, sexual adventure, to end with its beginning in 1941, The Night Watch is the work of a truly brilliant and compelling storyteller. This is the story of four Londoners - three women and a young man with a past, drawn with absolute truth and intimacy. Kay, who drove an ambulance during the war and lived life at full throttle, now dresses in mannish clothes and wanders the streets with a restless hunger, searching... Helen, clever, sweet, much-loved, harbours a painful secret...Viv, glamour girl, is stubbornly, even foolishly loyal, to her soldier lover...Duncan, an apparent innocent, has had his own demons to fight during the war. Their lives, and their secrets connect in sometimes startling ways. War leads to strange alliances...Tender, tragic and beautifully poignant, set against the backdrop of feats of heroism both epic and ordinary, here is a novel of relationships that offers up subtle surprises and twists. The Night Watch is a thrilling towering achievement.

Please note: the worn tattered appearance of the dustjacket is part of the artwork design of the cover.

Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2006

At the foot of Mount Kanchenjunga in the Himalayas, lives an embittered old judge who wants nothing more than to retire in peace. But with the arrival of his orphaned granddaughter, Sai, and his cook's son trying to stay a step ahead of US immigration services, this is far from easy. When a Nepalese insurgency threatens Sai's blossoming romance with her handsome tutor they are forced to consider their colliding interests. The judge must revisit his past, his own journey and his role in this grasping world of conflicting desires every moment holding out the possibility for hope or betrayal.

Longlisted for the Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction 2007.

Shortlisted for The Man Booker Prize 2006.

Hardcover, UK First Edition, First Printing, Signed by author to the title page.

Danielle, a junior television producer, is on the hunt for the documentary idea that will make her reputation; Marina, the beautiful daughter of a famous and wealthy liberal journalist and intellectual, is desperate to prove her worth - while unsure exactly of how this is to be achieved; Julius, a freelance writer of devastating book reviews, is determined to live a fabulous Manhattan lifestyle on a budget of nothing at all. "The Emperor's Children" follows these three friends - and their overlapping social and family circles - through their day-to-day lives, their perceived struggles and successes and their constant search for meaning and authenticity. Sweeping in scope, minutely perceptive about the nuances of Manhattan life, with richly drawn characters and vivid prose, "The Emperor's Children" is a finely textured portrait of a particular place at a particular moment - and a haunting illustration how the events of a single day can change everything, for ever. It reveals Claire Messud as a novelist in bloom, writing at the height of her powers. 'Messud is an expert storyteller. Her style is precise and illuminating... dazzling.' - "Observer". 'Messud's ability to filter her rich imagination through brilliantly precise prose allows her to show the kernel of redemption in even the most unlikely of human alliances.' - "Sunday Times".

Longlisted for The Man Booker Prize 2006

UK First Edition, First Printing Signed, First Line Quoted and Dated (publication date 7th August 2006) by author to the title page.

'All the archives in the world weren't enough when he didn't know who, or what, he should be looking for and where he should be looking.' Coventry museum curator, David Carter cannot help but wish for more: that his wife would still be the ambitious and sparkling Scottish girl he once found so irresistible; that his job could live up to the promise it once held; that his daughter's arrival could have brought her parents closer. But a few careless words spoken by his mother's friend Julia have left David restless with the knowledge that his whole life has been constructed around an untruth. And so he begins to catalogue his joys and disappointments, the migrations and arrivals, the intersecting lives around him, hoping to find the same breathless excitement in the artifacts of his own life as in those he handles at the museum; hoping that someday there will be someone to show them to. Because once, long ago, a young Irish girl called Mary Friel arrived in war-time London an innocent and left carrying a shame; a shame she still hopes can be diminished by a knock at the door of her Donegal home. There are so many ways to begin, and to live; so many ways to love, and not to love, and to begin again. Against the backdrop of post-WW2 Britain, Jon McGregor's lyrical, intimate novel explores what happens when our lives fail to take the turns we expect, and the ways we learn to let go of the people we might have been.

'All the archives in the world weren't enough when he didn't know who, or what, he should be looking for and where he should be looking.' Coventry museum curator, David Carter cannot help but wish for more: that his wife would still be the ambitious and sparkling Scottish girl he once found so irresistible; that his job could live up to the promise it once held; that his daughter's arrival could have brought her parents closer. But a few careless words spoken by his mother's friend Julia have left David restless with the knowledge that his whole life has been constructed around an untruth. And so he begins to catalogue his joys and disappointments, the migrations and arrivals, the intersecting lives around him, hoping to find the same breathless excitement in the artifacts of his own life as in those he handles at the museum; hoping that someday there will be someone to show them to. Because once, long ago, a young Irish girl called Mary Friel arrived in war-time London an innocent and left carrying a shame; a shame she still hopes can be diminished by a knock at the door of her Donegal home. There are so many ways to begin, and to live; so many ways to love, and not to love, and to begin again. Against the backdrop of post-WW2 Britain, Jon McGregor's lyrical, intimate novel explores what happens when our lives fail to take the turns we expect, and the ways we learn to let go of the people we might have been.

Longlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2006

**UNSIGNED** UK First Edition, First Printing

Part political thriller, part meditation on the nature of desire and betrayal, "Seven Lies" tells the story of Stefan Vogel, a young man growing up in the former East Germany, whose yearnings for love, glory and freedom express themselves in a lifelong fantasy of going to America. The hopeless son of an ambitious mother and a kind but unlucky diplomat, Stefan lurches between his budding, covert interests - girls and Romantic poetry - to find himself embroiled in dissident politics, which oddly seems to offer both. In time, by a series of blackly comic and increasingly dangerous manoeuvres, he contrives to make his fantasy come true, finding himself not only in the country of his dreams, but also married to the woman he idolises. America seems everything he expected, and meanwhile his secrets are safely locked away behind the Berlin Wall. A new life of unbounded bliss seems to have been granted to him. And then that life begins to fall apart... Exquisitely written and brilliantly imagined, James Lasdun's second novel is a terrifying plummet into anxiety, as complacency yields to an edgy paranoia. Pitching the furtive, shabby world of Communist Berlin against the glassy superficiality of contemporary New York, "Seven Lies" is an examination of the architecture of deceit - how deceit builds on itself until life is little more than an accretion of falsehood; how hope turns to fear, and dreams to nightmares.

Longlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2006

From the Publisher "Superb second novel, already optioned for film"

The novel's perspective ricochets among all members of the Melrose family - the family featured in St. Aubyn's praised trilogy, "Some Hope" - starting with Robert, who provides an exceptionally droll and compelling account of being born; to Patrick, a hilariously churlish husband who has been sexually abandoned by his wife in favour of his sons; to Mary, who's consumed by her children and an overwhelming desire not to repeat the mistakes of her own mother. All the while, St. Aubyn examines the web of false promises that entangle this once-illustrious family whose last vestige of wealth - an old house in the south of France - is about to be donated by Patrick's mother to a New Age foundation. An up-to-the-minute dissection of the mores of child-rearing, marriage, adultery, and assisted suicide, "Mother's Milk" showcases Edward St. Aubyn's luminous and acidic prose - and his masterful ability to combine the most excruciating emotional pain with the driest comedy. Absorb "Mother's Milk" into your and bloodstream and postnatal depression will never seem the same again... "A masterpiece. Edward St. Aubyn is a writer of immense gifts. His wit, his profound intelligence and his exquisite control of a story that rapidly descends to the lower depths before somehow painfully rising again - all go to distinguish the trilogy as fiction of a truly rare and extraordinary quality" - Patrick McGrath on "Some Hope".

Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2006

**UNSIGNED** UK Bloomsbury, Hardcover, First Edition, First Printing.

Paul Bannerman, an ecologist in Africa, believes he controls the trajectory of his life, with the markers of vocation and marriage. But when he's diagnosed with thyroid cancer and prescribed treatment that makes him radioactive and for a period a danger to others, he questions, as Auden wrote, 'What authority gives/ Existence its surprise.' Taken in by his parents, businessman Adrian and successful lawyer Lyndsay, to protect his wife and child from radiation, back in his childhood garden he faces the contradiction between the values of his conservation work and those of his wife, an advertising agency executive. While threat of projects to build a nuclear reactor and drain the country's vital wetlands preoccupy Paul, the strange state of his existence leads his mother to face her own past. With Paul cured and normality apparently returned, his parents take a holiday in Mexico to fulfil the archaeological vocation his father missed. The consequence of this is the final surprise of passionate existences.

Longlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2006

Soft cover original in fine wraps. UK First Edition, First Printing, Signed and Dated by author to the title page. Book comes with a Cambridge Wordfest brochure and a Wordfest promotional card.

John Egan is a misfit, 'a twelve-year old in the body of a grown man with the voice of a giant who insists on the ridiculous truth'. With an obsession for the "Guinness Book of Records" and faith in his ability to detect when adults are lying, John remains hopeful despite the unfortunate cards life deals him. During one year in John's life, from his voice breaking, through the breaking-up of his home life, to the near collapse of his sanity, we witness the gradual unsticking of John's mind, and the trouble that creates for him and his family. Set in early seventies Ireland, "Carry Me Down" is a deeply sympathetic take on one sad boyhood, told in gripping, and at times unsettling, prose. It plays out its tragic plot against a disarmingly familiar background and refuses to portray any of its lovingly drawn characters as easy heroes or villains.

Longlisted for the Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction 2007

Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2006

 Hardcover, Uk First Edition, First Printing. Signed by Author to title page.

David Mitchell, author of the Man Booker-shortlisted "Cloud Atlas", returns with a vintage novel destined to be his most captivating achievement to date. David Mitchell comes home - to England, 1982, and the cusp of adolescence. Jason Taylor is 13, doomed to be growing up in the most boring family in the deadest village (Black Swan Green) in the dullest county (Worcestershire) in the most tedious nation (England) on earth. And he stammers. 13 chapters, each as self-contained as a short story, follow 13 months in his life as he negotiates the pitfalls of school and home and contends with bullies, girls and family politics. In the distance, the Falklands conflict breaks out; close at hand, the village mobilises against a gypsy camp. And through Jason's eyes, we see what he doesn't know he knows - and watch unfold what will make him wish his life had been as uneventful as he had believed. Vividly capturing the mood of the times - high unemployment, Cold War politics and the sunset of agrarian England - this is at once a portrait of an era and of an age: the black hole between childhood and teenagerdom.

Shortlisted for the Costa Novel Award 2006

Longlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2006

Hardcover, UK First Edition, First Printing, Signed, dated (publication date) and first line quoted by author to the title page.

David Mitchell, author of the Man Booker-shortlisted "Cloud Atlas", returns with a vintage novel destined to be his most captivating achievement to date. David Mitchell comes home - to England, 1982, and the cusp of adolescence. Jason Taylor is 13, doomed to be growing up in the most boring family in the deadest village (Black Swan Green) in the dullest county (Worcestershire) in the most tedious nation (England) on earth. And he stammers. 13 chapters, each as self-contained as a short story, follow 13 months in his life as he negotiates the pitfalls of school and home and contends with bullies, girls and family politics. In the distance, the Falklands conflict breaks out; close at hand, the village mobilises against a gypsy camp. And through Jason's eyes, we see what he doesn't know he knows - and watch unfold what will make him wish his life had been as uneventful as he had believed. Vividly capturing the mood of the times - high unemployment, Cold War politics and the sunset of agrarian England - this is at once a portrait of an era and of an age: the black hole between childhood and teenagerdom.

Shortlisted for the Costa Novel Award 2006

Longlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2006

Hardcover, UK First Edition, First Printing, Signed by author to the title page.

When an English priest takes over a small Scottish parish, not everyone is ready to accept him. He makes friends with two local youths, Mark and Lisa, and clashes with a world he can barely understand. The town seems to grow darker each night. Fate comes calling and before the summer is out his quiet life is the focus of public hysteria. Father David looks back to find a Lancashire childhood. He remembers a lost father and a grand school for Catholic boys. He finds 1960s Oxford in the heat of student revolt and recalls a choice he once made in the orange groves of Rome. "Be Near Me" is a story of art and politics, love and change, and a book about the way we live now. Trapped in class hatreds, threatened by personal flaws, Father David begins to discover what happened to the ideals of his generation. Meanwhile a religious war is unfolding on his doorstep...

Longlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2006

Telegraph 'a superb novel ... a masterpiece of characterisation ... a generous, wonderfully observed novel, and the best O'Hagan has written yet'

The Times 'O'Hagan is devastatingly amusing ... Be Near Me establishes O'Hagan as one of our most sympathetic prose-poets.'

Literary Review 'A work that portrays tragedy with such intelligence, tenerness and honesty.'