Off ​With His Head

Agatha Christie - The ​Hound of Death
Twelve ​unexplained phenomena with no apparent earthly explanation… A dog-shaped gunpowder mark; an omen from ‘the other side’; a haunted house; a chilling séance; a case of split personalities; a recurring nightmare; an eerie wireless message; an elderly lady’s hold over a young man; a disembodied cry of ‘murder’; a young man’s sudden amnesia; a levitation experience; a mysterious SOS. To discover the answers, delve into the supernatural storytelling of Agatha Christie… ‘Twelve thrilling, chilling, mysteries.’ Observer

Agatha Christie - The ​Listerdale Mystery
After ​Mr St Vincent’s death, his family are plunged into poverty. Living in reduced circumstances their lives change when they find an elegant town house with staff, for a suspiciously cheap rent. Why would Lord Listerdale rent his home out for such a low price and why are the staff so accommodating?

Ray Bradbury - Fahrenheit ​451 (angol)
The ​hauntingly prophetic classic novel set in a not-too-distant future where books are burned by a special task force of firemen. Guy Montag is a fireman. His job is to burn books, which are forbidden, being the source of all discord and unhappiness. Even so, Montag is unhappy; there is discord in his marriage. Are books hidden in his house? The Mechanical Hound of the Fire Department, armed with a lethal hypodermic, escorted by helicopters, is ready to track down those dissidents who defy society to preserve and read books. The classic novel of a post-literate future, Fahrenheit 451 stands alongside Orwells 1984 and Huxleys Brave New World as a prophetic account of Western civilizations enslavement by the media, drugs and conformity. Bradburys powerful and poetic prose combines with uncanny insight into the potential of technology to create a novel which over fifty years from first publication, still has the power to dazzle and shock.

Agatha Christie - While ​the Light Lasts
A ​macabre recurring dream … revenge against a blackmailer … jealousy, infidelity and a tortured conscience … a stolen gemstone … the haunting attraction of an ancient relic … a race against time … a tragic love triangle … a body in a box … an unexpected visitor from beyond the grave… Nine quintessential examples of Agatha Christie’s brilliance are contained in this new collection of early short stories – including the very first one she ever wrote – and provide a unique glimpse of the Queen of Crime in the making. ‘Probably the best suspicion scatterer and diverter in the business.’ New York Herald Tribune

Agatha Christie - Poirot's ​Early Cases
Poirot's ​Early Cases was published in 1974. It includes the following short stories: The Affair at the Victory Ball, The Adventure of the Clapham Cook, The Cornish Mystery, The Adventure of Johnnie Waverly, The Double Clue, The King of Clubs, The LeMesurier Inheritance, The Lost Mine, The Plymouth Express, The Chocolate Box, The Submarine Plans, Third Floor Flat, Double Sin, The Market Basing Mystery, Wasp's Nest, The Veiled Lady, Problem at Sea and How Does Your Garden Grow?

Agatha Christie - Elephants ​Can Remember
Hercule ​Poirot stood on the cliff-top. Once, many years earlier, there had been a tragic accident. This was followed by the grisly discovery of two more bodies – a husband and wife – shot dead. But who had killed whom? Was it a suicide pact? A crime of passion? Or cold-blooded murder? Poirot delves back into the past and discovers that ‘old sins leave long shadows’. ‘Splendid… she tells us all we want to know and nothing that is irrelevant.’ The Times

Agatha Christie - Third ​Girl
Three ​single girls share a London flat. The first works as a secretary; the second is an artist; the third, who comes to Poirot for help, disappears believing she is a murderer. There are rumours of revolvers, flick-knives and blood stains. But, without hard evidence, it will take all Poirot's tenacity to establish whether the third girl is guilty, innocent or insane.

Anya Seton - Katherine
Katherine ​came to the court of Edward III at the age of 15: the orphan daughter of a minor herald, betrothed to an obscure knight. And soon, the beloved mistress of the King's son and the mother of his children.

Agatha Christie - Towards ​Zero
What ​is the connection between a failed suicide attempt, a wrongful accusation of theft against a schoolgirl, and the romantic life of a tennis player? To the casual observer, apparently nothing. When a houseparty gathers at Gull's Point, the seaside home of an elderly widow, earlier events come to a dramatic head.

Tsugumi Ohba - Death ​Note 11. - Kindred spirit
Light's ​latest machinations are putting a strain on even his formidable intellect as Near flies to Japan to beard Kira in his den. Near is sure that Light is Kira, but his sense of honour as L's heir will allow no doubts. He doesn't want to just stop the Kira murders, he wants to expose Light as the Death Note killer. Light thinks he's up to the challenge, but will the pressures of his fiancee, his new flame, and his acolyte prove to be fatal distractions?

Agatha Christie - Evil ​Under the Sun
A ​quiet holiday at a secluded hotel in Devon is all that Hercule Poirot wants, but amongst his fellow guests is a beautiful and vain woman who, seemingly oblivious to her own husband’s feelings, revels in the attention of another woman’s husband. The scene is set for murder, but can the field of suspects really be as narrow as it first appears?

Agatha Christie - Five ​Little Pigs
Amyas ​Crale's passion for painting and women made him famous. His murder made him infamous. Sixteen years earlier his jealous wife was tried, convicted and sentenced to life for a notorious slaying. Now their daughter Carla, a young woman convinced her mother is innocent, has presented Hercule Poirot with a brilliant challenge: to clear her mother's name by returning to the scene of the murder and finding the fatal flaw in the perfect crime.

Marya Hornbacher - Wasted
Why ​would a talented young girl go through the looking glass and step into a netherworld where up is down and food is greed, where death is honor and flesh is weak? Why enter into a love affair with hunger, drugs, sex, and death? Marya Hornbacher sustains both anorexia and bulimia through five lengthy hospitalizations, endless therapy, and the loss of family, friends, jobs, and ultimately, any sense of what it means to be "normal." By the time she is in college, Hornbacher is in the grip of a bout with anorexia so horrifying that it will forever put to rest the romance of wasting away. In this vivid, emotionally wrenching memoir, she re-created the experience and illuminated that tangle of personal, family, and cultural causes underlying eating disorders. Wasted is the story of one woman's travels to the darker side of reality, and her decision to find her way back - on her own terms.

Jennifer Brown - Hate ​List
Five ​months ago, Valerie Leftman's boyfriend, Nick, opened fire on their school cafeteria. Shot trying to stop him, Valerie inadvertently saved the life of a classmate, but was implicated in the shootings because of the list she helped create. A list of people and things she and Nick hated. The list he used to pick his targets. Now, after a summer of seclusion, Val is forced to confront her guilt as she returns to school to complete her senior year. Haunted by the memory of the boyfriend she still loves and navigating rocky relationships with her family, former friends and the girl whose life she saved, Val must come to grips with the tragedy that took place and her role in it, in order to make amends and move on with her life.

Agatha Christie - Death ​in the Clouds
From ​seat No.9, Hercule Poirot was ideally placed to observe his fellow air passengers. To his right sat a pretty young woman, clearly infatuated with the man opposite; ahead, in seat No.13, sat a Countess with a poorly-concealed cocaine habit; across the gangway in seat No.8, a detective writer was being troubled by an aggressive wasp. What Poirot did not yet realize was that behind him, in seat No.2, sat the slumped, lifeless body of a woman… ‘It will be a very acute reader who does not receive a complete surprise at the end.’ Times Literary Supplement

Agatha Christie - Death ​Comes as the End
It ​is 2000 BC in Egypt and Imhotep the Ka-Priest brings home his beautiful young concubine Nofret. But not all the members of his family welcome her. When she is found dead Imhotep’s daughter, Renisenb, suspects it might not have been an accident. The death unleashes the greed and hate that have been building up within the family and the horrific events that follow tear it apart.

Junot Diaz - The ​Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
Areader ​might at first be surprised by how many chapters of a book entitled The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao are devoted not to its sci fi–and–fantasy-gobbling nerd-hero but to his sister, his mother and his grandfather. However, Junot Diaz's dark and exuberant first novel makes a compelling case for the multiperspectival view of a life, wherein an individual cannot be known or understood in isolation from the history of his family and his nation.Oscar being a first-generation Dominican-American, the nation in question is really two nations. And Dominicans in this novel being explicitly of mixed Taíno, African and Spanish descent, the very ideas of nationhood and nationality are thoughtfully, subtly complicated. The various nationalities and generations are subtended by the recurring motif of fukú, the Curse and Doom of the New World, whose midwife and... victim was a historical personage Diaz will only call the Admiral, in deference to the belief that uttering his name brings bad luck (hint: he arrived in the New World in 1492 and his initials are CC). By the prologue's end, it's clear that this story of one poor guy's cursed life will also be the story of how 500 years of historical and familial bad luck shape the destiny of its fat, sad, smart, lovable and short-lived protagonist. The book's pervasive sense of doom is offset by a rich and playful prose that embodies its theme of multiple nations, cultures and languages, often shifting in a single sentence from English to Spanish, from Victorian formality to Negropolitan vernacular, from Homeric epithet to dirty bilingual insult. Even the presumed reader shape-shifts in the estimation of its in-your-face narrator, who addresses us variously as folks, you folks, conspiracy-minded-fools, Negro, Nigger and plataneros. So while Diaz assumes in his reader the same considerable degree of multicultural erudition he himself possesses—offering no gloss on his many un-italicized Spanish words and expressions (thus beautifully dramatizing how linguistic borders, like national ones, are porous), or on his plethora of genre and canonical literary allusions—he does helpfully footnote aspects of Dominican history, especially those concerning the bloody 30-year reign of President Rafael Leónidas Trujillo. The later Oscar chapters lack the linguistic brio of the others, and there are exposition-clogged passages that read like summaries of a longer narrative, but mostly this fierce, funny, tragic book is just what a reader would have hoped for in a novel by Junot Diaz.

Jeffrey Eugenides - The ​Virgin Suicides
First ​published in 1993, "The Virgin Suicides" announced the arrival of a major new American novelist. In a quiet suburb of Detroit, the five Lisbon sisters--beautiful, eccentric, and obsessively watched by the neighborhood boys--commit suicide one by one over the course of a single year. As the boys observe them from afar, transfixed, they piece together the mystery of the family's fatal melancholy, in this hypnotic and unforgettable novel of adolescent love, disquiet, and death. Jeffrey Eugenides evokes the emotions of youth with haunting sensitivity and dark humor and creates a coming-of-age story unlike any of our time. Adapted into a critically acclaimed film by Sofia Coppola, "The Virgin Suicides" is a modern classic, a lyrical and timeless tale of sex and suicide that transforms and mythologizes suburban middle-American life.

David Foster Wallace - Infinite ​Jest
A ​gargantuan, mind-altering comedy about the Pursuit of Happiness in America Set in an addicts' halfway house and a tennis academy, and featuring the most endearingly screwed-up family to come along in recent fiction, Infinite Jest explores essential questions about what entertainment is and why it has come to so dominate our lives; about how our desire for entertainment affects our need to connect with other people; and about what the pleasures we choose say about who we are. Equal parts philosophical quest and screwball comedy, Infinite Jest bends every rule of fiction without sacrificing for a moment its own entertainment value. It is an exuberant, uniquely American exploration of the passions that make us human - and one of those rare books that renew the idea of what a novel can do.

John Green - Looking ​For Alaska
Winner ​of the Michael L. Printz Award An ALA Best Book for Young Adults An ALA Quick Pick A Los Angeles Times 2005 Book Prize Finalist A New York Public Library Book for the Teen Age A 2005 Booklist Editor's Choice A 2005 School Library Journal Best Book of the Year Before. Miles "Pudge" Halter is done with his safe life at home. His whole life has been one big non-event, and his obsession with famous last words has only made him crave "the Great Perhaps" even more (François Rabelais, poet). He heads off to the sometimes crazy and anything-but-boring world of Culver Creek Boarding School, and his life becomes the opposite of safe. Because down the hall is Alaska Young. The gorgeous, clever, funny, sexy, self-destructive, screwed up, and utterly fascinating Alaska Young. She is an event unto herself. She pulls Pudge into her world, launches him into the Great Perhaps, and steals his heart. Then... After. Nothing is ever the same.