Coronet books

Raymond Briggs' now famous bestselling comic cartoon book depicts the effects of a nuclear attack on an elderly couple in his usual humorous yet macabre way.

Pruedence Layne is young, beautiful and talented. Though Prue may love the charming and valiant soldier, Christopher Harland, whom she has nursed back to life after front-line combat in the Second World War, she cannot resist a long-coveted posing abroad. Once in France, temptations of a different kind - the attentions of a consultant surgeon - lure her even further away from her young admirer. It is only when Kit is seriously wounded that Prue is struck by the full force of her love for him, but by then fate is no longer in her hands… and she discover that the greater than all is the love.

A haunting story of the loneliness of war.

This is the third book in a series of 4 about the Lafette family. The central charactor is Dan Lafette a lager than life personality who finds success, failure and doom in personal finance and the relationships closest to him. As many of Fast books the historic landscape the charactors past through appears accurate. Who blossoms from the text is Barbra Laffette, Dan youngest a woman of integrity. There is a later book that focuses on her. Rich charactors, interactions reflecting the yin/yang of human nature I've read the series twice and will again. Series begins w The Immigrants, continues w Second generation.

1890s. Seventeen years have passed and the Lanarkshire mining village of Blacklaw has weathered both depression and the driving ambition of its coalmaster. But at last, falling wages have driven the miners to desperate rebellion... During a violent pit strike Neill Stalker is accused of murder, and only one thing can save him, for Neill is the illegitimate son of Drew Stalker. In Edinburgh, Drew has become Scotland's most eminent young advocate, with the highest honours within his grasp. Only scandal can bring him down - and scandal in the form of his bastard son is about to re-enter his life. His sister Mirrin faces a different threat to her hard-won respectability. Married with Tom Armstrong, she is now happily with children and enjoying her life on the Hazelrig Farm. As Tom's eyesight fails and their farm's future become uncertain, Mirrin must draw on all her courage to survive.

A small town in Suffolk finds itself under siege when it is terrorized by a macabre and brutal rapist. "The man was a loving husband and father, however outside his home he personified evil with each rape that he committed. The only thing that each victim can remember is the claw that he uses during each attack. With each brutal or deadly attack that is committed, police and the townspeople are terrified that they might be next..." [From "Softwear" at GoodReads.com.] Some critics have called this novel anti-feminist because Lofts shifts the focus of the subject [rape] from the victim to the wider impact on the community at large; how it alters perceptions of social responsibility and acceptable behavior. She expands to demonstrate economic shifts as well, such as how the fear of being on the street at night benefits taxi companies yet dampens business for local bars and restaurants.

Ted Mundy, British soldier's son born 1947 in the shining-new Republic of Pakistan, is friends with Sasha, refugee son of an East German Lutheran pastor. The two men meet first as students in riot-torn West Berlin of the late sixties, again in the grimy looking-glass world of Cold War espionage and in today's world of terror. Originally published.

Auguries of Innocence is the first book of poetry from Patti Smith in more than a decade. It marks a major accomplishment from a poet and performer who has inscribed her vision of our world in powerful anthems, ballads, and lyrics. In this intimate and searing collection of poems, Smith joins in that great tradition of troubadours, journeymen, wordsmiths, and artists who respond to the world around them in fresh and original language. Her influences are eclectic and striking: Blake, Rimbaud, Picasso, Arbus, and Johnny Appleseed. Smith is an American original; her poems are oracles for our times.

In lively, mordantly witty prose, Negroponte decodes the mysteries--and debunks the hype--surrounding bandwidth, multimedia, virtual reality, and the Internet, and explains why such touted innovations as the fax and the CD-ROM are likely to go the way of the BetaMax. "Succinct and readable. ... If you suffer from digital anxiety ... here is a book that lays it all out for you."--Newsday.

This is the story of Marblehead, from its earliest settlement to the present, and of a family who settled and stayed there in the Hearth and Eagle Inn; it is also the story of Hesper Honeywood, a passionate young woman whose long and dramatic life, full of triumph and tragedy, contained the history of both.

Selected cartoons from Snoopy Vol. I

Life hadn't been easy for Harriet Lacey since her husband had been killed in the same car crash that had left Flynn Palmer blinded. But recently things had been looking better. Flynn, bitter at his plight yet full of guilt over Harriet, had found her a flat in the same block as himself. And the new nanny was coping excellently with Harriet's young children, Jamie and Arabella. But on the day the children are kidnapped the flat is to become a prison for Harriet - and the telephone an instrument of torture... Biography: Dorothy Eden (1912-1982) was the internationally acclaimed author of more than forty bestselling Gothic, romantic suspense, and historical novels. Born in New Zealand, where she attended school and worked as a legal secretary, she moved to London in 1954 and continued to write prolifically. Eden's novels are known for their suspenseful, spellbinding plots, finely drawn characters, authentic historical detail, and often a hint of spookiness.

Victoria Bradshaw fell in love with London playwright Oliver Dobbs when she was just eighteen. But he had left her and disappeared from her life. Now, years later, he was a widower standing on her doorstep wit his two-year-old son in his arms. And Victoria was foolish enough to want to take him back. Their early spring journey to a castle in Scotland would become an odyssey of emotional discovery ...in a novel about relationships as real as those you've experienced and a love as rich and unpredictable as dreams can be.

Clark's Harbor was the perfect coastal haven, jealously guarded against outsiders. But now strangers have come to settle there. And a small boy is suddenly free of a frenzy that had gripped him since birth... His sister is haunted by fearful visions... And one by one, in violent, mysterious ways the strangers are dying. Never the townspeople. Only the strangers. Has a dark bargain been struck between the people of Clark's Harbor and some supernatural force? Or is it the sea itself calling out for a human sacrifice? A howling, deadly... Cry For The Strangers.

Holly Beckman was a gifted and determined Jewish young. She suddenly inherited a share in the antique shop where she'd worked as a dedicated apprentice, it was the beginning of both her climb to success and her descent into heartbreak. Her burning ambition sustains her through personal tragedy and the collapse of her antique business, fights for acceptance and happiness in London during the 1920s.

Alldera escapes from the Holdfast, a feudal post-holocaust enslave in which women are enslaved creatures, and survives a long trek in search of a community of women who reproduce parthenogenetically.

"Selected cartoons from Good grief, more Peanuts!" Vol. II.

Fay Weldon's first novel, a sharp and witty parable of the way people see themselves. For several weeks, Esther Sussman had lived in a sordid flat in Earls Court. During the day she read science fiction novels. In the evenings she watched television. And she ate, and ate, and drank, and ate. She had not felt so secure since she spent her days in a pram. It had been her husband's idea that they should go on a diet. Together they would fight middle-age flab and feel young again. It was the diet that had made Esther leave home. The lack of food had made her see things very clearly and she had looked at her life - the daily dusting, sweeping, cooking, washing-up - and found it all pointless. She had not felt strong enough for marriage, and so she escaped. From the fastness of her Earls Court retreat Esther starts to recount the events leading up to her revelation to her friend Phyllis. 'I suppose you really do believe your happiness is consequent upon your size'' she asks. Phyllis does; Esther does not and triumphantly sets out to prove her point.

Something damned strange was happening to the weather. Not just freakish blizzards in the Sahara, but typhoons, hurricanes, floods, and snow, snow, more snow. The meteorologists were predicting a New Ice Age. But they fooled nobody, least of all the CIA and its Russian counterpart, the KGB.The old quip─"don't just talk, do something"─was being tightly followed by someone, somewhere. So they met together and selected an elite team to get to the bottom of the "miracle". Durell headed the team, into the outer reaches of Sweden. And in the foreboding wastelands he hoped to find the mad scientist who was the key figure in the whole set-up. From Back Cover Blurb

Dark Ages. Keeping watch over the young Arthur Pendragon, the prince and prophet Merlin Ambrosius is haunted by dreams of the magical sword Caliburn, which has been hidden for centuries. When Uther Pendragon is killed in battle, the time of destiny is at hand, and Arthur must claim the fabled sword to become the true High King of Britain.