Echoing the experiences of Robert Louis Stevenson - who spent several years in the South Pacific - here is the story of a contemporary writer who lived in and came to love the Solomon Islands. Most unexpectedly, Will Randall, once a happy schoolteacher, found himself dispatched to a small village on a not very large island, far out in the vastness of the South Pacific. His mission (although he had hardly chosen to accept it): - to fulfil the dying wishes of the 'Commander' and help the loc...

Writer, adventurer, ex-teacher and veteran of umpteen travel disasters, Will Randall has fallen off donkeys in Spain and out of canoes in the Solomon Islands, but none of this has prepared him for a disastrous season as a ski-bum with a posse of raucous, hard-drinking ex-students.Dismally unfashionable and hopeless at skiing, Randal finds that his stay in the charming Alpine backwater of mont St Bernard brings a whole host of new opportunities for domestic catastrophe, romantic rej...

Will Randall travels with a purpose, as well as an outrageous sense of fortune. In INDIAN SUMMER he found himself, by chance, having the extraordinary experience of helping slum schoolchildren put on a play to help save their school. In Botswana he was taken up by a headmaster to teach a class of six year olds at The River of Life school. They are football crazy and one of Will's jobs is to take them to play neighbouring (sometimes as much as 100 miles away) schools. Camping en-route or st...

While attempting to teach at an inner London comprehensive Will Randall is taken up by an elderly German woman who asks him to accompany her to India. Nothing ventured, he agrees and so begins a wonderful life-changing adventure. Set down in Puna (3 hours from Bombay) he begins work teaching English at a slum school. Most of the children are orphans or parentless (one lost his parents four years previously when his mother had let go of his hand at a railway station and he 'd boarded the wr...

After a trusted friend in the military divulged a disturbing and mind-expanding tale regarding the 1947 Roswell UFO incident, Will Randall found himself confronting life's greatest questions-not least of these being how to hold onto hope for humanity and the earth itself. The tale, long buried in government archives and at risk of being destroyed forever, drew him into a philosophical, scientific, and spiritual inquiry into the very nature of reality. The Traveler's Tale is a deep...

House-sitting in Boston one winter, Will Randall picks up with one of his more disreputable travel buddies, Jack J. Makepeace, and life gets a great deal more exciting.Makepeace introduces Randall to his current employers, Chestnut Investigations, and soon Will finds himself appointed apprentice Private Investigator. He tails mongrels and errant husbands, attends a seminar on Blood Spatter and is recruited in a lapdancing club by an anti-government go-go girl. Then emotional stakes...

A New York Times Best Seller! A New York Times Notable Book!A unique and sweeping debut novel of an American female combat photographer in the Vietnam War, as she captures the wrenching chaos and finds herself torn between the love of two men.On a stifling day in 1975, the North Vietnamese army is poised to roll into Saigon. As the fall of the city begins, two lovers make their way through the streets to escape to a new life. Helen Adams, an American photo...

The Sunday Times and New York Times bestseller.'The slow, murderous disintegration of a marriage is all too believable... As the novel advances into treacherous territory, Harrison's elegant, incisive prose gets dirtier, more dangerous' ObserverFans of Into the Water and The Couple Next Door will love The Silent Wife.Having nothing left to lose changes everyt...

Bill Bryson’s first travel book, The Lost Continent, was unanimously acclaimed as one of the funniest books in years. In Neither Here nor There he brings his unique brand of humour to bear on Europe as he shoulders his backpack, keeps a tight hold on his wallet, and journeys from Hammerfest, the northernmost town on the continent, to Istanbul on the cusp of Asia. Fluent in, oh, at least one language, he retraces his travels as a student twenty years before.Whether...

Pre-order HIDE AND SEEK, the first standalone thriller from Chris Carter, coming July 2026!From the Sunday Times bestselling author comes the next installment in the Robert Hunter series!When an unidentified female body is discovered laid out on a slab in an abandoned butcher's shop, the cause of death is unclear. Her body bears no marks; except for the fact that her lips have been carefully stitched shut.I...

Shortlisted for the 2015 Man Booker Prize'All you can do is surrender, happily, to its power' Salman RushdieThe Year of the Runaways tells of the bold dreams and daily struggles of an unlikely family thrown together by circumstance. Thirteen young men live in a house in Sheffield, each in flight from India and in desperate search of a new life. Tarlochan, a former rickshaw driver, will say nothing about his past in...

Self-published in France, and a subsequent bestseller, the hilarious story of a year in the life of a young Englishman abroad.Paul West, a young Englishman, arrives in Paris to start a new job - and finds out what the French are really like.They do eat a lot of cheese, some of which smells like pigs' droppings. They don't wash their armpits with garlic soap. Going on strike really is the second national participation sport after pétanque. And, yes, they do use suppositories...