Psychological

When Roger Huntington comes home from college for the summer and is met by his best friend, Tooth, he knows they're going to have a good time. A summer full of beer, comic books, movies, laughs, and maybe even girls. The sun is high and the sky is clear as Roger and Tooth set out to shoot beer cans at Bobcat Mountain. Just two friends catching up on lost time, two friends thinking about their futures. . . two friends suddenly thrust into the middle of a nightmare.

England in the time of his boyhood was a cold and colourless country. They had seen to that, the Autumn Men. They who had been lifted high, the old men of his country and other countries, who in the autumn of their years, reflecting on the unfulfilled promise of their youth, and their failures as yet unredeemed, feeling as any old man adrift alone on a small boat, sails broken, oars lost, swept hopelessly onward towards the deafening roar of the approaching weir, might feel, decided that too few had sweetly and honourably been called.

AMBER: Everyone knows me as Amber Reynolds, the fierce and determined law student, who won’t let her blindness hold her back. My friends and colleagues encourage and applaud me, but I never feel clean. Because they don’t know who I really am… or the true reason I’m blind. You see, my father used to hurt people, until one day he kidnapped and brutalized the wrong boy. And the men who came to get him destroyed our lives.

The plot centers on Anthony Beavis, a dilettante social theorist, a man inclined to recoil from life. The pleasures of the physical world disgust him and the universe of ideas is but a poor refuge. Having long lost the art of intimacy, he betrays friendships and toys with the affections of women. But as Beavis approaches middle age, his world of perfect detachment begins to lose its appeal. Finally realizing that his withdrawal from life has been motivated not by intellectual honesty but by moral cowardice, Beavis, devastated and at crisis point, meets the remarkable and redoubtable Dr Miller.

Teacher, Tara Lomas just wants to spend time with her husband, Steve but he is intent on working hard to secure them a bright future in order to raise a family. Feeling bored and unloved Tara is persuaded to try a little social networking. Once she embarks on setting up a profile on Friend Finder she soon becomes addicted and hunts for her old netball coach Lee Powell.

In this expansive, rich, and deeply tragic portrait of a German family from 1899 to 1945, Len Deighton brilliantly weaves a portrait of the fortunes of two sons, and a nation, over half a century.

Events start to unravel when the system closes in on a bewildered family. The middle class cossetted family life they had enjoyed and loved. The only life they knew, starts to implode with devastating effects. The perfect family unit enjoyed by so many was the plan, this was not the script. The perfect family who for generations enjoyed paid education, wealth, and privilege. This privileged life had allowed them to build a beautiful family, stunning home, and high net worth social circle in sunny Nottingham.

Stranded on a sentient moon with nothing but their enhanced intuition and the help of a bygone deity, the survivors of a post-human race set out to investigate the sudden disappearance of their enemies. What they find might plunge the universe into oblivion. Galaxies away, after a narrow escape from Niflheim, the god of the dead and the goddess of writing forge an alliance with a Nephilim to uncover the fate of the all-but-forgotten goddess of memory when they receive a distress call from the god of reckoning.

When Shelley Woodhouse wakes up in hospital from a coma, the first thing she says is that her husband must be arrested. He’s the reason she’s in here. She knows it. She remembers what he did. Clearly as anything. But there are things Shelley has forgotten too, including parts of her childhood. And as those start to come back to her, so do other memories. Ones with the power to change everything.

Gwen and Audrina met at university but haven’t seen each other since. They were best friends; they shared a house and their dreams for the future. Nineteen years later, Gwen is now a popular television newsreader and Audrina is a successful model, married to a wealthy footballer and has three stunning children. Neither of them has talked to anyone about what happened at university all those years ago, the catastrophic events following their night out at The Pendle Bar. Maybe now is the time to finally face the past.

Jackson and Lydia Hemsworth are pillars of the community, feted for having the perfect marriage and three wonderful children – Florence, Jessica and Ezra. But appearances can be deceptive. Because behind closed doors Jackson Hemsworth rules his family with cruelty and control. His marriage is a sham; his children for years have cowed in fear. Until the day that Jackson and Lydia throw themselves off Newport Bridge in a joint suicide pact – the final cruel blow by Jackson to control his wife and torture his adult children.

A woman arrives in Florence, overwhelmed by the strange, warm city so different from her home. Amidst the Renaissance architecture and amorous couples, she finds an unexpected love of her own. With his dark, ugly looks, people might stop and stare, wondering what someone like her was doing with someone like him. But he's the Mickey to her Minnie, and she can fix him—they can fix each other. She feels bound to him, body and soul.

‘If you want everyone you love to stay safe, you must walk away…’ The fortune teller told me my fate. But I ignored her. I married the man of my dreams. We made a family. A life that’s beautiful, safe and happy. I’ve pushed it to the back of my mind: what she said about the tragedy that lay ahead for me. I want to believe that we are in charge of our own fate. Looking at my two perfect, beautiful children, I refuse to believe things could go wrong for us. But as strange things begin to happen, I begin to wonder… could there be any truth behind what the fortune teller told me that day?

Mick has never fully recovered from his service in Vietnam, and he has hit rock bottom. His fondest memories are of his late teens and early 20's, and the fabulously talented band that he led in those years as a gifted guitar player and singer on the brink of fame. Now Mick finds himself impoverished, forced into a retirement home by his estranged son, and completely unable to accept his new circumstances - that is until a sudden brainstorm and a uniquely brilliant idea ignites an excited and single-minded determination to pull his old band members back together after 50 years.

For an atheist it’s a great deal, though it does suggest atheism may have a weak point. For those of faith it’s a matter of jam now and purgatory tomorrow. A bargain many artists feel is something they can live with. For agnostics it’s usually a question of can the afterlife really be that bad, would workplace regulations reach all parts of heaven and hell. However, in this volume the terms are agreed and the Devil pays his fees and the character his dues, each happy to wait a few decades for the eternal payback.