Author: Paul Torday
By Weidenfeld & Nicolson

This is the story of Dr Alfred Jones, a fisheries scientist - for whom diary -notable events include the acquisition of a new electric toothbrush and getting his article on caddis fly larvae published in 'Trout and Salmon' - who finds himself reluctantly involved in a project to bring salmon fishing to the Highlands of the Yemen - a project that will change his life, and the course of British political history forever. With a wickedly wonderful cast of characters - including a visionary Sheikh, a weasely spin doctor, Fred's devilish wife and a few thousand transplanted salmon - Salmon Fishing in the Yemen is a novel about hypocrisy and bureaucracy, dreams and deniability, and the transformin...

Author: Harriet Lane
By Weidenfeld & Nicolson

Frances is a thirty-something sub-editor, an invisible production, drone on the books pages of the Questioner. Her routine and colourless existence is disrupted one winter evening when she happens upon the aftermath of a car crash and hears the last words of the driver, Alys Kyte.When Alys's family makes contact in an attempt to find closure, Frances is given a tantalising glimpse of a very different world: one of privilege and possibility. The relationships she builds with the Kytes will have an impact on her own life, both professionally and personally, as Frances dares to wonder whether she might now become a player in her own right...

Author: Paul Torday
By Weidenfeld & Nicolson

From the author of Salmon Fishing in the Yemen comes a story about inheritance, the great English country house, and a way of life that is disappearing....Ed Hartlepool has been living in self-imposed exile for five years, but with a settlement regarding his inheritance looming, he must return to his ancestral seat, Hartlepool Hall. On his return, he discovers that his father has left him, along with the house, a seven million pound tax bill, two massive overdrafts, an 80-year-old butler, and a vast country estate that is creaking at the seams.Not only that, but there is a strange woman in residence - Lady Alice - who seems to have made herself very much at home. With the debts mounting, it ...

Author: Elmore Leonard
By Weidenfeld & Nicolson

US Marshal Raylan Givens, star of the series JUSTIFIED, and protagonist of RIDING THE RAP, PRONTO, and the story 'FIRE IN THE HOLE', is back in action, this time with a federal warrant to serve on a dope dealer named Angel Arenas, a man 'born in the U.S. but a hundred percent of him Hispanic'. The state troopers are impressed when the marshal struts into the convict's hotel room without drawing his gun, but Raylan soon finds that Angel's already been the victim of another crime, one that's way bigger than a few pot plants, and clearly the work of a professional...RAYLAN shows Elmore Leonard at the height of his powers, as we follow one of his favorite protagonists through a series of adventu...

Author: Carlos Ruiz Zafon
By Weidenfeld & Nicolson

In an abandoned mansion at the heart of Barcelona, a young man - David Martin - makes his living by writing sensationalist novels under a pseudonym. The survivor of a troubled childhood, he has taken refuge in the world of books, and spends his nights spinning baroque tales about the city's underworld. But perhaps his dark imaginings are not as strange as they seem, for in a locked room deep within the house letters hinting at the mysterious death of the previous owner. Like a slow poison, the history of the place seeps into his bones as he struggles with an impossible love. Then David receives the offer of a lifetime: he is to write a book with the power to change hearts and minds. In retur...

Author: Antonia Fraser
By Weidenfeld & Nicolson

Mistresses and wives, mothers and daughters - Antonia Fraser brilliantly explores the relationships which existed between The Sun King and the women in his life. This includes not only Louis XIV's mistresses, principally Louise de La Valliere, Athenais de Montespan, and the puritanical Madame de Maintenon, but also the wider story of his relationships with women in general, including his mother Anne of Austria, his two sisters-in-law who were Duchesses d'Orleans in succession, Henriette-Anne and Liselotte, his wayward illegitimate daughters, and lastly Adelaide, the beloved child-wife of his grandson.

Author: Simon Sebag Montefiore
By Weidenfeld & Nicolson

Jerusalem lacks a biography. It lacks a secret history. Simon Sebag Montefiore's account is seen through kings, conquerors, emperors, soldiers, Moslems, Jews, Christians, Macedonians, Romans and Greeks, Palestinians and Israelis, from King David, via Nebachunezzar, Alexander, Herod, Caesar, Cleopatra, Jesus, Saladin, to King Hussein, Anwar Sadat and Ariel Sharon. Jerusalem is the centre of the world, the capital of three faiths, the prize of many conquerors, the jewel of many empires, the eye of the storm of today's battle of civilisations. Sebag Montefiore has been going to Jerusalem all his life. There is a special family connection: Sir Moses Montefiore, his nineteenth century great-great...

Author: Paul Torday
By Weidenfeld & Nicolson

An ebook exclusive from the author of the bestselling SALMON FISHING IN THE YEMEN (shortly to be released as a film starring Ewan McGregor), a tale of the unexpected...Bobby Clarke arrives at a hotel on the Mediterranean shore. He is a former MP, unseated by the expenses scandal, who is now spending time abroad to recover from a major illness. The other purpose of his stay is to write his memoirs in order to demonstrate that he was unfairly pilloried for 'a minor accounting error', having valiantly served his country for 30 years. He settles into his new surroundings but soon it becomes clear that all is not as it seems. For a start Bobby seems to have no memory of the immediate past. Each t...

Author: Jennifer Worth
By Weidenfeld & Nicolson

Jennifer Worth came from a sheltered background when she became a midwife in the Docklands in the 1950s. The conditions in which many women gave birth just half a century ago were horrifying, not only because of their grimly impoverished surroundings, but also because of what they were expected to endure. But while Jennifer witnessed brutality and tragedy, she also met with amazing kindness and understanding, tempered by a great deal of Cockney humour. She also earned the confidences of some whose lives were truly stranger, more poignant and more terrifying than could ever be recounted in fiction. Attached to an order of nuns who had been working in the slums since the 1870s, Jennifer tells ...

Author: Anne Sebba
By Weidenfeld & Nicolson

This will be the first serious yet sympathetic book by a female biographer to explain the story of how an American divorcee became a hate figure for allegedly ensnaring a British King from his throne. It focuses on the core conflict of her life in the 1930s, with particular reference to her impoverished American childhood as a motivation for her ambition.'That woman', so called by her sister-in-law the new Queen Elizabeth, was born BessieWallis Warfield in 1895 in Baltimore, and she endured a childhood of relative obscurity which sharpened a burning desire to rise above her circumstances. To win in the game of life was her unequivocal aim. 'That woman' was not only one of the most talked abo...