Summer, 1965. Late one night, thirteen-year-old Charlie Bucktin is startled by a knock on his window. His visitor is Jasper Jones. Rebellious, mixed-race and solitary, Jasper is intriguing. And he needs Charlie?s help. In the dead of night, the boys steal through town, and Charlie learns of Jasper?s horrible discovery. Burdened by a terrible secret and the weight of a town?s suspicion, Charlie feels his world closing in. After this summer nothing...

Nick hates it when people call him a genius. Sure, he's going to Cambridge University aged 15, but he says that's just because he works hard. And, secretly, he only works hard to get some kind of attention from his workaholic father. Not that his strategy is working. When he arrives at Cambridge, he finds the work hard and socialising even harder. Until, that is, he starts to cox for the college rowing crew and all hell breaks loose.

It's a hot summer afternoon. Tension is in the air. A gang of youths on bikes gathers outside a chip shop. A teenage boy is stabbed and left bleeding on the street. The boy's mother wonders how this could have happened to her son.

In rural Illinois two tenant farmers share much, finally too much, until jealously leads to murder and suicide. A tenuous friendship between lonely teenagers - the narrator, whose mother has died young, and Cletus Smith, the troubled witness to his parent's misery - is shattered. After the murder and upheavals that follow, the boys never speak again. Fifty years on, the narrator attempts a reconstruction of those devastating events and the atonement...

The second book in the Tales of the Otori trilogy continues the epic story of Otori Takeo and Shirakawa Kaede, the young lovers whose fate is played out in an ancient Oriental world, where ritualised codes of high honour counter the cruelty of savage blood-feuds. Takeo has pledged his life to the Tribe, a secret clan of spies and assassins who claim his legendary supernatural skills for their own ruthless purposes, in doing so he must deny his birthright...

"In his black-walled fortress at Inuyama, the warlord Iida Sadamu surveys his famous nightingale floor. Constructed with exquisite skill, it sings at the tread of each human foot. No assassin can cross it unheard." The youth Takeo has been brought up in a remote mountain village among the Hidden, a reclusive and spiritual people who have taught him only the ways of peace. But unbeknownst to him, his father was a celebrated assassin and a member of...

'When we go back to Devon I may not fit back into my old life. Too much may have happened to me ?' This is the summer that Lewis Little, precocious 13-year-old, is spending in Paris with his beautiful mother, Alice, who is translating the latest medieval romance by Valentina Gavrilovich, the bestselling and exotic Russian m̌igr.̌ This is the summer that the bewitching Valentina beckons from her sofa, and Lewis discovers an exquisite new world filled...

Grace Makutsi's husband Phuti is in a bind. An international firm is attempting to undercut his prices in the office furniture market. Phuti has always been concerned with quality and comfort, but this new firm seems interested only in profits. To make matters worse, they have a slick new advertising campaign that seems hard to beat. Nonetheless, with Mma Ramotswe's help, Phuti comes up with a campaign that may just do the trick. Meanwhile, Mma Makutsi...