Simon Prebble

Portrays life in a future time when a totalitarian government watches over all citizens and directs all activities. In 1984, London is a grim city in the totalitarian state of Oceania where Big Brother is always watching you and the Thought Police can practically read your mind. Winston Smith is a man in grave danger for the simple reason that his memory still functions. Drawn into a forbidden love affair, Winston finds the courage to join a secret...

"Inspector Ian Rutledge's 22nd case revolves around two young women found dead in utterly unexpected places. Scheduled to give evidence in an ongoing investigation, Rutledge can't go to the village of Avebury--where a body has been found stabbed to death in the center of a circle of prehistoric stones--in the place of Chief Inspector Brian Leslie when Rutledge's nemesis, Chief Superintendent Markham, sends Leslie there when he'd been looking forward...

Here is Kazuo Ishiguro's profoundly compelling portrait of Stevens, the perfect butler, and of his fading, insular world in post-World War II England. Stevens, at the end of three decades of service at Darlington Hall, spending a day on a country drive, embarks as well on a journey through the past in an effort to reassure himself that he has served humanity by serving the "great gentleman," Lord Darlington. But lurking in his memory are doubts about...

An original debut novel set in Ghana, this is the story of Detective Inspector Darko Dawson, who's sent from the big city to the village of Ketanu to solve the murder of an accomplished young AIDS worker. Darko's own mother disappeared from this same village many years ago, and as the mystery unfolds, the reader meets a rich cast of characters, and learns about Trokosi, a system where young teenage girls are sent to live with fetish priests to bring...

Three men dare to adventure into a subterranean world full of danger and beauty discovering many unusual things on their trip to the Earth's mysterious core.

Investigating the suspicious death of an unidentified man who may have been hunted by the British War Office, 1920s Scotland Yard Inspector Ian Rutledge experiences powerful roadblocks throughout the case and finds his own life in danger.

Terence Moongrove's estate is turned upside down by the cosmological experiments of two New Age operators, while literary agent Barbara Ragg takes on a companion of the Abominable Snowman and Pimlico terrier Freddie de la Hay is recruited by MI6.

"It's back to Corduroy Mansions--the slightly dilapidated but well-lived-in mansion block in London's hip Pimlico neighborhood--for the third installment in Alexander McCall Smith's newest popular series. There's never a dull moment for the residents of Corduroy Mansions: Berthea Snark is still at work on her scathing biography of the only loathsome Liberal Democrat member of Parliament--her own son, Oedipus; literary agents Rupert Porter and Barbara...

An astonishing tip from a grateful ex-convict seems implausible--but Inspector Ian Rutledge is intrigued and brings it to his superior at Scotland Yard. Alan Barrington, who has evaded capture for ten years, is the suspect in an appalling murder during Black Ascot, the famous 1910 royal horserace honoring the late King Edward VII. His disappearance began a manhunt that consumed Britain for a decade. Now it appears that Barrington has returned to England,...

Susanna Clarke's novel is an epic tale of nineteenth-century England and the two magicians who emerge to change its history. In the year 1806, in the midst of the Napoleonic Wars, most people believe magic to have long since disappeared from England -- until the reclusive Mr Norrell reveals his powers and becomes a celebrity overnight. Another practising magician emerges: the young and daring Jonathan Strange. He becomes Norrell?s pupil and the two...