Liberator of North Africa, charismatic conqueror of Islam, in reality he is Homer Crawford, "turncoat" black American sociologist who is determined to lead the Dark Continent into the modern age by whatever means are necessary. Arrayed against him are all the forces of the status quo: the combined military might of the North African states, mercenary hirelings of corrupt oil sheikdoms, Moslem religious fanatics, and the American CIA. Only the people are for El Hassan, and they, only so long as he is victorious.

The noted critic and a Palestinian now teaching at Columbia University,examines the way in which the West observes the Arabs.

Ian McEwan is known to skirt the edge with his writing; the fringes of society, to test the limits of what we can handle perhaps in our worlds as we bring his writing home with us and allow a whole new being to enter. So it is with The Cement Garden, the story of dying family who live in a dying part of the city. The father of four children decides, in an effort to make his garden easier to control, to pave it over. In the process, he has a heart attack and dies, leaving the cement garden unfinished and the children to the care of their mother. Soon after, the mother too dies and the children, fearful of being separated by social services, decide to cover up their parents’ deaths: they bury their mother in the cement garden. ll of the children are free thinking independent-minded teenagers. The story is told from the point of view of Jack, one of the sons, the narrator who is entering adolescence with all of its curiosity and appetites that he must contend with (along with the sure confusion of what the children have done). Julie, the eldest, is almost a grown woman. Sue is rather bookish and observes all that goes on around her. And Tom is the youngest and the baby of the lot. The children seem to manage in this perverse setting rather well until Julie brings home a boyfriend who threatens their secret by asking too many questions (like what is buried beneath the cement pile, etc), surely threatening the status quo (however morbid) that the children have come to accept as "normal" and as "home". We understand through McEwan that home is not to be defined by anyone else but it is, instead, what you know and have known that makes you feel safe, even if it is rather dangerous and macabre.

Doctor Orient: Fiction series. Occult Esoteric Mystical NOVEL Cuban voodoo, a vice lord, and a woman with power over death itself -- Dr. Owen Orient picked a lethal time to visit Miami. Cut off from his friends, students, and lover while on the run from the CIA and a powerful voodoo cult-just another day in the life of Dr. Owen Orient, psychic investigator. When the ink on his fake ID dries, Orient finds himself in sultry Miami working at a small pharmacy in a rundown neighborhood. He manages to stay under the radar until his boss turns up dead after refusing to sell his business to a syndicate headed by Cuban voodoo priest Mojo Pay. Orient has no choice but to investigate. Orient moves through a world of cocaine, sexual excess, dark voodoo rites, and occult murder in this riveting paranoir tale. The Priestess is an audacious new step forward in Frank Lauria’s genre-defying mix of horror, erotica, mystery, and thriller.

When Dr Philip Raven, an intellectual working for the League of Nations, dies in 1930 he leaves behind a powerful legacy -- an unpublished 'dream book'. Inspired by visions he has experienced for many years, it appears to be a book written far into the future: a history of humanity from the date of his death up to 2105. The Shape of Things to Come provides this 'history of the future', an account that was in some ways remarkably prescient -- predicting climatic disaster and sweeping cultural changes, including a Second World War, the rise of chemical warfare, and political instabilities in the Middle East.

Titus Crow and his faithful companion and record-keeper fight the gathering forces of darkness-the infamous and deadly Elder Gods of the works of H.P. Lovecraft. Cthulhu and his dark minions are bent on ruling the earth. A few puny humans cannot possibly stand against these otherworldly evil gods, yet time after time, Titus Crow drives the monsters back into the dark from whence they came. Spawn of the Winds is the fourth book in the Titus Crow series.

Computer-Two, like the other three that chased each other's tails in orbit round the Earth, was much larger than it had to be.It might have been one-tenth its diameter and yet contained all the volume it needed to store the accumulated and accumulating data needed to control space flight.They needed the extra space, however, so that Joe and I could get inside, if we had to.And we had to.

The Fourth Reich is waiting to arise—and the only man who can stop it is about to sign its birth certificate. In 1945 the children of the Third Reich were secretly hidden all over the world, to be concealed until they came of age in the 1970s, at which point $780 million would be waiting in a Swiss bank. But all of these elaborate plans need an unsuspecting outsider to set them in motion: Noel Holcroft, the American son of a high-ranking Nazi officer. He has just been shown an incredible document known as the Holcroft Covenant. If he signs, he will inadvertently deal a serious blow to an already fragile world—and authorize his own death warrant. Praise for Robert Ludlum and *The Holcroft Covenant *  “Pleases and seduces . . . [Robert] Ludlum stuffs more surprises into his novels than any other six-pack of thriller writers combined. . . . I sprained my wrist turning his pages and didn’t notice until an hour later.”—John Leonard, The New York Times  * “Don’t ever begin a Ludlum novel if you have to go to work the next day.”—Chicago Tribune*** BONUS: This edition includes an excerpt from Robert Ludlum’s *The Bourne Identity.*

Edgar Award-winning author Lawrence Block returns with another outrageous caper featuring Chip Harrison...a sleuth who always seems to get into trouble with a capital T! Now a man about town working for a famous detective, Chip Harrison finds himselfat a Times Square Club waiting for his latest client, a stripper, to finish a night's work. When she completes her set, she introduces him toher roommate, a dancer who's targeted for murder...and killed in the club right before their very eyes! The list of suspects is as long as the line outside the club, and now it will take all of Chip's street smarts to trap a killer! Lawrence Block is one of the most respected and bestselling authors ofmystery fiction Lawrence Block has won the Edgar Award three times, the Shamus Award four times, the Maltese Falcon Award twice, and was named Grandmaster by the Mystery Writers of America Previously published under pseudonyms and in omnibus collections, this isthe first time the Chip Harrison novels are being individually published under Lawrence Block's name The Chip Harrison mystery series also includes Make Out With Murder,Chip Harrison Scores Again, and No Score

The last of an ancient Cornish clan, Carla Tregellas has inherited her historic ancestral home: a massive mansion looming high up on the jagged cliffs of Cornwall. From the moment Carla takes possession of the grand manor she feels right at home, warmly welcomed by everyone—except the strange and secretive housekeeper, Mrs. Pendennis, who warns the new owner of the tragic, inevitable fate that will surely befall her if she does not depart at once. But Carla cannot leave, for the unseen bonds of a dark family curse are beginning to tighten . . . and a demon lover waits.

Adonis was so beautiful he must surely be a prince among ponies... But he is not. At least, that's what Sara and Patrick are told when they go to visit the Merrimans, who own Adonis. The pony spends his life in a field, but Patrick and Sara are convinced that he is not the rogue he is painted. The only way they can think of to rehabilitate Adonis without horrifying every adult around is to ride him in secret, and that brings its own problems.

Rich in its stories, characters, and imaginative range, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting is the novel that brought Milan Kundera his first big international success in the late 1970s. Like all his work, it is valuable for far more than its historical implications. In seven wonderfully integrated parts, different aspects of human existence are magnified and reduced, reordered and emphasized, newly examined, analyzed, and experienced.

'In all my life, I had never seen anything as beautiful as this grey pony ... ' Gill Caridia and her family are on the move. Gill's father writes the sort of book that literary papers love, but which few people actually buy. And then he writes a detective story that sells so well he buys back the house in the countryside where he grew up. It means change for all the children, but for Gill it means the chance to find horses, and not just horses but to ride at Wembley. But Gill learns that no dream comes without cost. This passionate and vivid story, which takes Gill from the age of 11 to 13, looks at what it really means to own something.

Careless of the hurts he inflicts along the way, Bart O'Breen walks his own road, as proud as the devil and as lonely as hell.In the Galway village of Boola, Bart O'Breen is a strong wilful young man who leaves trouble and harm in his wake. As always in a novel by Walter Macken, there is a host of memorable secondary characters, and an unfailing accuracy and warmth in the depiction of the life of the "plain people" of the west of Ireland. One of Walter Macken's finest novels, Sunset on the Window-Panes is a moving and memorable story of Irish life.

Low-life writer and unrepentant alcoholic Henry Chinaski was born to survive. After decades of slacking off at low-paying dead-end jobs, blowing his cash on booze and women, and scrimping by in flea-bitten apartments, Chinaski sees his poetic star rising at last. Now, at fifty, he is reveling in his sudden rock-star life, running three hundred hangovers a year, and maintaining a sex life that would cripple Casanova. With all of Bukowski's trademark humor and gritty, dark honesty, this 1978 follow-up to Post Office and Factotum is an uncompromising account of life on the edge.