This is the story of Kiril Lakota, a cardinal who reluctantly steps out from behind the Iron Curtain to lead the Catholic Church and to grapple with the many issues facing the contemporary world. The pope is dead, and the corridors of the Vatican hum with intrigue as cardinals gather to elect his successor. The result is a surprise: the new pope is the youngest of them all - a bearded Ukrainian. The Shoes of the Fisherman is the moving story of Kiril I, recently released from 17 years in Siberian labour camps and haunted by his past.

As a young and outspoken priest, Luca Rossini was brutally tortured in an Argentine military prison, and then nursed back to health by the beautiful Isabel. Exiled to Rome to avoid scandal, Rossini becomes a cardinal and the pope's confidante. He is admired and feared by his colleagues, for he understands the Church and speaks frankly. When the pope becomes gravely ill and a successor must be chosen, Rossini takes a central role. In the midst of the political intrigue that surrounds the selection of a new pope, Isabel arrives in Rome - along with Rossini's daughter.

In an impoverished village in southern Italy, the enigmatic life and mysterious death of Giacomo Nerone has inspired talk of sainthood. Father Blaise Meredith, a dying English priest, is sent by the Vatican to investigate. As he tries to untangle the web of facts, rumours and outright lies that surround Nerone, we are reminded how the power of goodness ultimately prevails over despair.

Leo Tolstoy's classic story of doomed love is one of the most admired novels in world literature. Generations of readers have been enthralled by his magnificent heroine, the unhappily married Anna Karenina, and her tragic affair with dashing Count Vronsky.

An epic saga from New York Times best-selling author Stephanie Dray based on the true story of an extraordinary castle in the heart of France and the remarkable women bound by its legacy.

Nick Lansing and Susy Branch are young, attractive but impoverished New Yorkers. They are in love and decide to marry, but realise their chances of happiness are slim without the wealth and society that their more privileged friends take for granted. Nick and Susy agree to separate when either encounters a more eligible proposition.

Prince Lyov Nikolayevitch Myshkin is one of the great characters in Russian literature. Is he a saint or just naïve? Is he an idealist or, as many in General Epanchin's society feel, an "idiot"? Certainly his return to St. Petersburg after years in a Swiss clinic has a dramatic effect on the beautiful Aglaia, youngest of the Epanchin daughters, and on the charismatic but willful Nastasya Filippovna. As he paints a vivid picture of Russian society, Dostoyevsky shows how principles conflict with emotions - with tragic results.

First published in 1925, The Painted Veil is an affirmation of the human capacity to grow, change, and forgive. Set in England and Hong Kong in the 1920s, it is the story of the beautiful but shallow young Kitty Fane. When her husband discovers her adulterous affair, he forces her to accompany him to a remote region of China ravaged by a cholera epidemic.

In this remarkable novel, Mauriac brings his extraordinary talent for probing the inmost core of the human character to what is arguably the most exciting theme in the world: the battle for the human soul. In all of literature there can be few more appalling studies of a soul devoured by pride and avarice, corroded by hatred.

East Africa, 1913. The disgraced English aristocrat Everard Dominey stumbles out of the bush and comes face to face with his lookalike, the German Baron von Ragastein. Months later, Dominey returns to London and resumes his glittering social life. But is it really Dominey who has come back - or a German secret agent seeking to infiltrate English high society?

When a maid in the upper class Ellison household is strangled, Inspector Pitt is called in to investigate. He finds a world ruled by strict manners and social customs, where the inhabitants of the Ellison's neighborhood appear to be more outraged by the thought of scandal than they are by murder. Inspector Pitt finds a most unlikely ally in Charlotte, the Ellison's spirited daughter. But as the murders continue, Charlotte and Pitt find themselves drawn together by more than the investigation.

'Ah for darkness...not the darkness of a house which coops up a man among furniture, but the darkness where he can be free!' Maurice Hall knows he must choose between living life in the shadows or denying himself a chance at love and fulfilment. Aware of his attraction to the same sex, in a time where it was considered unlawful and immoral to have homosexual desires, Maurice must decide whether to battle or submit to a prejudiced 20th-century English society.

This first novel in The Deptford Trilogy introduces Ramsay, a man who returns from World War I decorated with the Victoria Cross but who is destined to be caught in a no man's land where memory, history, and myth collide. As we hear Ramsey tell his story, we begin to realize that, from childhood, he has influenced those around him in a perhaps mystical, perhaps pernicious way.

It's 1910, and Daniel Pitt is a reluctant lawyer who would prefer to follow in the footsteps of his detective father. When the biographer Russell Graves, who Daniel is helping defend, is sentenced to execution for the murder of his wife, Daniel's Pitt-family investigative instincts kick in, and he sets out to find the real killer. With only 21 days before Graves is to be executed, Daniel learns that Graves is writing a biography of Victor Narraway, the former head of Special Branch and a close friend of the Pitts. And the stories don't shed a positive light. Is it possible someone is framing Graves to keep him from writing the biography-maybe even someone Daniel knows in Special Branch? The only answer, it seems, lies in the dead woman's corpse.

When Anna Durrant is reported missing her friends seem unconcerned at her disappearance. After all, her life has been one of concealment. For years Anna submitted to the protective dependence of her mother, and even after Amy Durrant’s death she simply conformed to the expectations of others. Increasingly, Anna feels herself trapped by these expectations.

Join chaotic 1920s reporter and accidental sleuth Freddy Pilkington-Soames on his adventures in this series of light-hearted mysteries. This omnibus edition contains the first three books in the Freddy Pilkington-Soames Adventure series.

1996. Northern Israel. Lola leaves an unhappy home life in England for the fabled utopian life of a kibbutz. But this heavily guarded farming community on the Arab-Israeli border isn't the idyll it seems, and tensions are festering. Hundreds of miles away, in the Jerusalem offices of the International Tribune newspaper, all eyes are on Israel's response to a spate of rocket attacks from Lebanon - until cub reporter Jonny Murphy gets a tip from a mysterious source that sends him straight into the danger zone.

When Megan’s father gets a letter containing a secret from the past, he asks her to go to the Cornish village of St Mawgen Cove to get to the bottom of the mystery. Megan is happy to take a holiday after a challenging year but as soon as she checks into The Ship Inn something feels amiss. There are noises in the room above, the locals tell tales of smugglers and shipwrecks and she can’t escape the story of the witch who waits and watches, weeping on the top of the cliff.

Lestari Aris is a woman on the edge. Her tattoo studio on Karangahape Road is hammered by burglaries; the hangers-on in her life, from a teenage runaway to a married cop, are bonded to her for reasons she can’t fathom. And years after Lestari’s father disappeared, her Indonesian mother is still lost in a self-medicated blur. When a murder in Symonds Street Cemetery whirls Lestari into the orbit of an unpredictable drug, she uncovers a decades-long covert clinical study targeting rough sleepers and others on the fringes – and its dark connections with her own life and history.

Swordsman Richard Hughes has arrived on the banks of the Grand Canal looking for a simpler life, only to be plunged—alongside Phillip de Chambray, a remarkable woman unable to show her true self—into the thick of the murkiest, most dangerous European politics, at a moment when someone is trying to destroy the opera, and Venice itself.