English books

C.R.O.P.: Covert Rural Observation Posts are places where men like Danny 'Badger' Baxter hide for endless, motionless hours, secretly recording criminal or terrorist activity.But now Badger has a bigger job than photographing dissident Republicans in muddy Ulster fields or Islamic extremists on rainswept Yorkshire moors.I.E.D.: Improvised Explosive Devices are the roadside bombs which account for 80% of British casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan.MI6 have a plan to assassinate the leading maker of these weapons when he leaves his house in Iran to visit Europe. But first, they need to know when he is leaving, and where he is going.So it is that Badger finds himself on the wrong side of the Iranian border, lumbered with a partner he loathes, lying under a merciless sun in a mosquito-infested marsh, observing the house. And knowing that if they are caught, Her Majesty's Government will deny all knowledge of them.Welcome to A Deniable Death.

Shiraz Bailey Wood is back! Having just about recovered from her stint in London with Carrie Draper, Shiraz is prepared to overlook Carrie's totally out of order flaky behaviour because Carrie's just talked her dad into paying for two flights to Ibiza in the summer and no one needs a holiday more than Shiraz BW! Or so she thought.... Put it this way, the sleepy town of San Antonio, Ibiza ain't gonna know what's hit it once a few other randoms from Goodmayes have pitched up and caused havoc. Uma's in, hurrah! But then Wesley of all people decides to bring stupid Sooz away to top up her tan. Not to mention Mrs Diane Wood! Still, Shiraz and Carrie are lovin' it, even if money is running out and the only jobs on offer seem to ben bog cleaning and bottle washing at the local bar ... Will, Uma, Carrie and our Shizza have the holiday of a lifetime? It's all in the diaries, bruv. Read on!

December 1767. Alistair Douglas has been using the Decipherers, a secret network of contacts in London, to attempt to find two men implicated in a series of political murders in the mutinous American colonies. Rumours fly as anonymously printed attacks on the King and his ministers flow through the city. But, frustratingly, there are few leads. Douglas is therefore pleased when he is assigned to a new duty. He must travel to Paris and ensure the outlawed radical writer and politician John Wilkes returns to England – the stipulation being that Wilkes must return of his own volition. It is soon clear there is a serious conspiracy afoot – and John Wilkes is first on the list of suspects. But the Decipherers have reason to believe there is a highly placed intimate of the present government also involved . . .

The second in a new series of three HALO novels, Greg Bear's Halo: Primordium dives back into the Forerunner saga. A long time ago, I was a living, breathing human being. I went mad. I served my enemies. They became my only friends. Since then, I've traveled back and forth across this galaxy, and out to the spaces between galaxies--a greater reach than any human before me. You have asked me to tell you about that time. Since you are the last true Reclaimer, I must obey. Are you recording? Good. Because my memory is failing rapidly. I doubt I'll be able to finish the story. Once, on my birth-world, a world I knew as Erde-Tyrene, and which now is called Earth, my name was Chakas... In the wake of apparent self-destruction of the Forerunner empire, two humans--Chakas and Riser--are like flotsam washed up on very strange shores indeed. Captured by the Master Builder, misplaced during a furious battle in space, they now find themselves on an inverted world where horizons rise into the sky, and where humans of all kinds are trapped in a perilous cycle of horror and neglect. For they have become both research animals and strategic pawns in a cosmic game whose madness knows no end--a game of ancient vengeance between the powers who seeded the galaxy with life, and the Forerunners who expect to inherit their sacred Mantle of duty to all living things. In the company of a young girl and an old man, Chakas begins an epic journey across a lost and damaged Halo in search of a way home, an explanation for the warrior spirits rising up within, and for the Librarian's tampering with human destiny. This journey will take them into the Palace of Pain, the domain of a powerful and monstrous intelligence who claims to be the Last Precursor, and who now has control of both this Halo and the fate of Forerunners and Humans alike. Called the Captive by Forerunners, and the Primordial by ancient human warriors, this intelligence has taken charge of, and retasked, the Master Builder's cruel researches into the Flood--which it may have itself unleashed on the galaxy more than ten thousand years before.

“The good thing is, no one will ever die again. The bad thing is, everyone will want to.” A physicist receives a mysterious paper. The ideas in it are far, far ahead of current thinking and quite, quite terrifying. In a city of “fast ones,” shadow players, and jinni, two sisters contemplate a revolution. And on the edges of reality a thief, helped by a sardonic ship, is trying to break into a Schrödinger box for his patron. In the box is his freedom. Or not. Jean de Flambeur is back. And he’s running out of time. In Hannu Rajaniemi’s sparkling follow-up to the critically acclaimed international sensation The Quantum Thief, he returns to his awe-inspiring vision of the universe…and we discover what the future held for Earth.