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A A Gill

Andrew Swanston read law at Cambridge, but was inspired to write by his lifelong interest in early modern history. His Thomas Hill novels – The King’s Spy, The King’s Exile and The King’s Return – are set against the backdrops of the English Civil War, Cromwell’s Commonwealth and the early Restoration respectively. He is also the author of Waterloo: The Bravest Man and Beautiful Star and Other Stories. His first historical thriller set during the reign of Elizabeth I – Incendium (published in paperback as The Incendium Plot) – introduced readers to the academic, lawyer and intelligencer Dr Christopher Radcliff, whose adventures continue in Chaos. Andrew Swanston lives in Surrey.

A D Swanston

A E Langsford

A G Hopkins

A. J. BAIME is the New York Times best-selling author of The Arsenal of Democracy: FDR, Detroit, and an Epic Quest to Arm an America at War and Go Like Hell: Ford, Ferrari, and Their Battle for Speed and Glory at Le Mans. Both books are in development for major motion pictures. Baime is a longtime regular contributor to the Wall Street Journal, and his articles have also appeared in the New York Times, Popular Science, and Men’s Journal. He lives in Granite Bay, California. Visit him at facebook.com/ajbaime and trumanbook.com.

A J Baime

A J Jacobs

A J P Taylor

Anthony James Pollard is a British medieval historian, specialising in the fifteenth century and in particular the Wars of the Roses. A leading authority in the field, he is profesor emeritus of Teesside University. His books include North-Eastern England during the Wars of the Roses, Richard III and the Princes in theTower, Imagining Robin Hood: the Late Medieval Stories in Historical Context and Warwick the kingmaker: Politics, Power and Fame.

A J Pollard

A J Rochester

A K Benjamin is a clinical neuropsychologist and the author of Let Me Not Be Mad: A Story of Unravelling Minds.

A K Benjamin

A. L. Berridge read English at Oxford, and taught for ten years before moving into television, where her production credits range from period drama and thrillers to long-running soaps. She has written two previous novels, Top Ten besteller Honour and the Sword and In the Name of the King. Into the Valley of Death is her third novel.

A L Berridge

Alison Gaylin's first job was as a reporter for a celebrity tabloid, which sparked a lifelong interest in writing about people committing despicable acts. More than a decade later, she wrote and published her Edgar-nominated first novel, HIDE YOUR EYES. 
 
She's since published nine more books, including the USA Today and international bestselling Brenna Spector suspense series, which has been nominated for the Edgar, Anthony and Thriller awards and won the Shamus award. 
 
She lives in upstate New York with her husband, daughter, cat and dog.

A L Gaylin

A Maxwell-Hyslop

A McArthur

A P Wavell

A.S. Webb is the Sunday Times bestselling author of Daughter of Chaos, the first instalment of The Dark Pantheon Trilogy. She is inspired by stories rooted in history and mythology, that push the boundaries of imagination and urge us to reflect on what it means to be human.

A S Webb

A. A. Dhand is the author of six previous novels, and has been shortlisted for the CWA Steel Dagger Award. His DI Harry Virdee novels are currently being adapted for TV by the BBC. He was raised in Bradford and spent his youth observing the city from behind the counter of a small convenience store. After qualifying as a pharmacist, he worked in London and travelled extensively before returning to Bradford to start his own business and begin writing. The history, diversity and darkness of the city have inspired all his novels. For more information about A. A. Dhand and his books, follow him on X @aadhand, and on Instagram @aa_dhand.

A. A. Dhand

A. A. Gill

A. A. Milne

A. Anatoli

A. B. Poranek grew up sharing her time between Ontario, Canada and rural Poland, and eventually completed a veterinary degree at the Warsaw University of Life Sciences. A lover of mythology and history, she enjoys exploring both in her writing. Her debut novel, Where the Dark Stands Still, an instant New York Times bestseller, is an ode to Poland's folktales, while A Treachery of Swans transports readers to a world inspired by 17th century France.

A. B. Poranek

A. Bradley

Professor A. C. Grayling is Principal of the New College of the Humanities at Northeastern University, London, and a Supernumerary Fellow of St Anne's College, Oxford. He has written and edited over thirty books on philosophy, history, science and current affairs. For several years he wrote columns for the Guardian newspaper and The Times and was the chairman of the 2014 Man Booker Prize.

A. C. Grayling

A.D. Miller is the author of Snowdrops, The Earl of Petticoat Lane and The Faithful Couple. Snowdrops was a bestseller and was shortlisted for many prizes including the Man Booker and the CWA Gold Dagger. It was translated into 25 languages. As Moscow Correspondent of The Economist A.D. Miller has travelled across the former Soviet Union and covered the Orange Revolution in Ukraine; he is now the magazine’s Culture Editor based in London. 
 
admillerbooks.com

A. D. Miller

A. E. Ellis

A. E. W. Mason

A. Humphreys

A. Igoni Barrett was born in Port Harcourt, Nigeria, in 1979 and lives in Lagos. He is a winner of the 2005 BBC World Service short story competition, the recipient of a Chinua Achebe Center Fellowship, a Norman Mailer Center Fellowship, and a Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center Residency. His short story collection, Love is Power, or Something Like That, was published in 2013. In 2014 he was named on the Africa39 list of sub-Saharan African writers under 40. Blackass is his first novel.

A. Igoni Barrett

The short life of A.J.A. Symons (1900-41) was described by his biographer as an intricate and largely harmless confidence trick. His many interests included the collection of musical boxes and rare books as well as the study and practice of forgery; they left him time to edit an anthology of Edwardian verse and compose studies of H.M. Stanley and other notable figures. He is remembered for The Quest for Corvo, one of the most remarkable biographies ever written, and for co-founding the Wine and Food Society.

A. J. A. Symons

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Brian Greene

THE 25th ANNIVERSARY EDITION - INCLUDING A NEW PREFACE AND EPILOGUE FROM BRIAN GREENE 
The iconic bestseller that introduced legions to modern physics and the quest for the ultimate understanding of the cosmos, featuring a new preface and epilogue. With a rare blend of scientific insight and writing as graceful as the theories it explains, The Elegant Universe remains the unrivalled account of the modern search for the deepest laws of nature. In this new 25th anniversary edition, renowned physicist Brian Greene updates his classic work with a new preface and epilogue summarising the significant theoretical and experimental developments over the past quarter-century. From established science, including relativity and quantum mechanics, to the cutting edge of thinking on black holes, string theory, and quantum gravity, The Elegant Universe makes some of the most sophisticated concepts ever contemplated thoroughly accessible and entertaining, bringing us closer than ever to comprehending how the universe works.INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER 
 
PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST 
 
'Compulsively readable...Greene threatens to do for string theory what Stephen Hawking did for holes' New York Times

The Elegant Universe

Andrew Pontzen

**AS SEEN ON BBC BREAKFAST** 
 
Will we ever truly understand our cosmic home? This is the story of the technologies that allow us to look up, to learn and to discover our place in the cosmos. 
 
'An electrifying new history of the universe' 
HANNAH FRY, author of Rutherford and Fry's Complete Guide to Absolutely Everything 
 
We are part of an incredible chain of events stretching 13.8 billion years into the past and even further into the future. But what does that future hold? And how do scientists study the entire universe? 
 
The Universe in a Box is Andrew Pontzen's tribute to simulations - the remarkable computer codes that, over the last century, have allowed us to grasp the distant past and far future of the universe. It reveals the stories of pioneering scientists who unlocked the mysteries of the cosmos, and reframes our understanding of galaxies, black holes and space itself. 
 
'I was enlightened, amazed, and profoundly impressed' 
SIR PHILIP PULLMAN, author of His Dark Materials 
 
'Compelling...a veritable treasure chest filled with captivating stories' 
SCIENCE

The Universe in a Box

A New Cosmic History

Laura Mersini-Houghton

One of the world's most celebrated cosmologists presents her breakthrough explanation of our origins in the multiverse. 
 
In recent years, Laura Mersini-Houghton's ground-breaking theory, spectacularly vindicated with observational evidence, has turned the multiverse from philosophical speculation to one of the most compelling and credible explanations of our universe's origins. 
 
In Before the Big Bang, she interweaves the story of how she arrived at this theory with her journey from communist Albania, where she was born and brought up, to the West, showing how her unconventional path helped her to challenge orthodoxies and become one of the most courageous thinkers on the world stage of theoretical physics.

Before the Big Bang

Our Origins in the Multiverse

The Origin of Our Universe from the Multiverse

Julian Barbour

What is time? The Janus Point offers a ground-breaking solution to one of the greatest mysteries in physics. 
 
For over a century, the greatest minds have sought to understand why time seems to flow in one direction, ever forward. In The Janus Point, Julian Barbour offers a radically new answer: it doesn't. 
 
At the heart of this book, Barbour provides a new vision of the Big Bang - the Janus Point - from which time flows in two directions, its currents driven by the expansion of the universe and the growth of order in the galaxies, planets and life itself. What emerges is not just a revolutionary new theory of time, but a hopeful argument about the destiny of our universe. 
 
'Both a work of literature and a masterpiece of scientific thought' Lee Smolin, author of The Trouble with Physics 
 
'Profound...original...accessible to anyone who has pondered the mysteries of space and time' Martin Rees, Astronomer Royal 
 
'Takes on fundamental questions, offering a new perspective on how the Universe started and where it may be headed' Science Magazine

The Janus Point

A New Theory of Time

Janna Levin

What would happen if you fell into a Black Hole? 
 
Black holes are found throughout the universe. They can be microscopic. They can be billions of times larger than our Sun. They are dark on the outside but not on the inside. Anything that enters them can never escape, and yet they contain nothing at all. 
 
In Black Hole Survival Guide physicist and novelist Janna Levin takes you on a journey into a black hole, explaining what would happen to you and why. In the process you'll come to see how their mysteries contain answers to some of the most profound questions ever asked about the nature of our universe. 
 
'Astrophysics at its sexiest...hugely enjoyable' Sunday Times

Black Hole Survival Guide

Philip Ball

PHYSICS WORLD 2018 BOOK OF THE YEAR 
 
‘A clear and deeply researched account of what’s known about the quantum laws of nature, and how to think about what they might really mean’ Nature 
 
 ‘I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics.’ Richard Feynman wrote this in 1965 – the year he was awarded the Nobel prize in physics for his work on quantum mechanics. Over the past decade, the enigma of quantum mechanics has come into sharper focus. We now realise that quantum mechanics is less about particles and waves, uncertainty and fuzziness, than a theory about information: about what can be known and how. 
 
 The quantum world isn’t a different world: it is our world, and if anything deserves to be called ‘weird’, it’s us. This exhilarating book is about what quantum maths really means – and what it doesn’t mean. 
 
 ‘Gorgeously lucid…takes us to the edge of contemporary theorizing about the foundations of quantum mechanics… Easily the best book I’ve read on the subject’ Washington Post

Beyond Weird

The full inside story of the detection of gravitational waves at LIGO, one of the most ambitious feats in scientific history 
 
*Selected as a Book of the Year 2016 in the Sunday Times* 
 
'This is empirical poetry. A fascinating tale of human curiosity beautifully told, and with black holes and lasers too' Robin Ince 
 
In 1916 Albert Einstein predicted the existence of gravitational waves: miniscule ripples in the very fabric of spacetime generated by unfathomably powerful events. If such vibrations could somehow be recorded, we could observe our universe for the first time through sound: the hissing of the Big Bang, the low tones of merging galaxies, the drumbeat of two black holes collapsing into one… 
 
 In 2016 a team of hundreds of scientists at work on a billion-dollar experiment made history when they announced the first ever detection of a gravitational wave, confirming Einstein’s prediction a century ago. 
 
 Based on complete access to LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory) and the scientists who created it, Black Hole Blues offers a first-hand account of this astonishing achievement: an intimate story of cutting-edge science at its most awe-inspiring and ambitious.

Black Hole Blues and Other Songs from Outer Space

Lisa Randall

The most thrilling, genre-busting, unlikely science book you’ll ever read, from the world-renowned, multi-award-winning, superstar physicist Lisa Randal. 
 
 
66 million years ago, a ten-mile-wide object from outer space hurtled into the Earth at incredible speed. The impact annihilated the dinosaurs, along with three-quarters of the other species on the planet. But what if this catastrophe was the sign of something greater: an opening vista onto the interconnectedness of the universe itself? 
 
 
This is the story of the astounding forces that underpin our existence; a horizon-expanding tour of the cosmos that unifies what we know about the universe with new thinking. From the far-flung reaches of space, the makeup of the universe and our solar system's place within it, to the mysterious and elusive stuff of dark matter and how it affects life here on Earth. 
 
 
‘A fascinating, and surprisingly simple, theory…and a tantalising premise’ The Times 
 
‘Extremely engaging’ BBC Focus

Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs

The Astounding Interconnectedness of the Universe

Jean-Claude Carrière

A young woman enters a building in a nameless contemporary European city. She walks into a waiting room where a dozen other people, with briefcases or sheaves of documents, are gathered. Ushered into a large office, she meets Albert Einstein, who is engaged in trying to figure out the equation that explains the universe. He is charmed by her, and agrees to answer her questions. 
 
Einstein and the young woman begin discussing the concepts of time and space. He explains his theories about relativity and his responsibility in the creation of nuclear weapons. Einstein also talks about the problem of being famous, about his life in Nazi Germany and how his dreams of worldwide peace were shattered. He appears bright, witty, hugely sympathetic, but also tormented and dreamy.

Please, Mr Einstein

Serving the Reich tells the story of physics under Hitler. While some scientists tried to create an Aryan physics that excluded any ‘Jewish ideas’, many others made compromises and concessions as they continued to work under the Nazi regime. Among them were world-renowned physicists Max Planck, Peter Debye and Werner Heisenberg. 
 
After the war most scientists in Germany maintained they had been apolitical or even resisted the regime: Debye claimed that he had gone to America in 1940 to escape Nazi interference in his research; Heisenberg and others argued that they had deliberately delayed production of the atomic bomb. 
 
In a gripping exploration of moral choices under a totalitarian regime, here are human dilemmas, failures to take responsibility and three lives caught between the idealistic goals of science and a tyrannical ideology.

Serving the Reich

The Struggle for the Soul of Physics under Hitler

Sunday Times Science Book of the Year 2011. 
 
We are poised on the edge of discovery in particle physics (the study of the smallest objects we know of) and cosmology (the study of the largest), and when these breakthroughs come, they will revolutionise what we think we know about the universe, and the modern world. 
 
Lisa Randall guides us through the latest ideas, charting the thrilling progress we have made in understanding the universe – from Galileo and Newton to Einstein and the Large Hadron Collider and the search for the Higgs boson. Yet it's about more than just physics - Randall explains how we decide what questions to ask; how risk, beauty, creativity and truth play a role in scientific thinking; and how answering the big questions will ultimately tell us who we are and where we came from.

Knocking On Heaven's Door

How Physics and Scientific Thinking Illuminate our Universe

John D. Barrow

This is a book about universes. It tells a story that revolves around a single extraordinary fact: that Albert Einstein's famous theory of relativity describes a series of entire universes. Not many solutions to Einstein's tantalising universe equations have ever been found, but those that have are all remarkable. Some describe universes that expand in size, while others contract. Some rotate like a top, while others are chaotically unpredictable. Some are perfectly smooth, while others are lumpy. Some permit time travel into the past. Only a few allow life to evolve within them; the rest, if they exist, remain unknown and unknowable to conscious minds. 
 
Here, in The Book of Universes, we are confronted with the most fantastic and far-reaching speculations within the entire realm of science.

The Book of Universes

Roger Penrose

**WINNER OF THE 2020 NOBEL PRIZE IN PHYSICS** 
 
 What came before the Big Bang? 
 
 How did the universe begin and must it inevitably end? 
 
 In this remarkable book Roger Penrose brilliantly illuminates some of the deepest mysteries of the universe. 
 
 Cycles of Time contains a penetrating analysis of the second law of thermodynamics - according to which the 'randomness' of our world is continually increasing - and a thorough examination of the light-cone geometry of space-time. It combines these two central themes to show how the expected ultimate fate of our accelerating, expanding universe can actually be reinterpreted as the 'big bang' of a new one. 
 
 Presenting various standard and non-standard cosmological models, discussing black holes in depth as well as taking in the role of the cosmic microwave background along the way, Roger Penrose argues that the Big Bang was not actually the beginning of everything - nor will it signal the end. 
 
 'Science needs more people like Penrose, willing and able to point out the flaws in fashionable models from a position of authority, and to signpost alternative roads to follow' Independent

Cycles of Time

An Extraordinary New View of the Universe

Colour in art - as in life - is both inspiring and uplifting, but where does it come from? How have artists found new hues, and how have these influenced their work? Beginning with the ancients - when just a handful of pigments made up the artist's palette - and charting the discoveries and developments that have led to the many splendoured rainbow of modern paints, Bright Earth brings the story of colour spectacularly alive. Packed with anecdotes about lucky accidents and hapless misfortunes in the quests for new colours, it provides an entertaining and fascinating new perspective on the science of art.

Bright Earth

The Invention of Colour

Peter Woit

Not Even Wrong is a fascinating exploration of our attempts to come to grips with perhaps the most intellectually demanding puzzle of all: how does the universe work at its most fundamnetal level? 
 
The book begins with an historical survey of the experimental and theoretical developments that led to the creation of the phenomenally successful 'Standard Model' of particle physics around 1975. Despite its successes, the Standard Model does not answer all the key questions and physicists continuing search for answers led to the development of superstring theory. However, after twenty years, superstring theory has failed to advance beyond the Standard Model. 
 
The absence of experimental evidence is at the core of this controversial situation which means that it is impossible to prove that superstring theory is either right or wrong. To date, only the arguments of the theory's advocates have received much publicity. Not Even Wrong provides readers with another side of the story.

Not Even Wrong

The Failure of String Theory and the Continuing Challenge to Unify the Laws of Physics

Seth Lloyd

IN THE BEGINNING WAS THE BIT... 
 
The universe is made of bits of information and it has been known for more than a century that every piece of the the universe - every electron, atom and molecule - registers these bits and that information. It is only in the last years, however, with the discovery and development of quantum computers, that scientists have gained a fundamental understanding of just how that information is registered and processed. 
 
Building on recent breakthroughs in quantum computation, Seth Lloyd shows how the universe itself is a giant computer. Every atom and elementary particle stores these bits, and every collision between those atoms and particles flips the bits into a new arrangement and effortlessly spins out beautiful and complex systems, including galaxies, planets and life itself. 
 
But every computer needs a program, the set of instructions that tell it what patterns to create. Where did the bits come from that tell the universe to create its magnificent complexity? Who - or what - is programming the universe?

Programming The Universe

A Quantum Computer Scientist Takes on the Cosmos

**WINNER OF THE 2020 NOBEL PRIZE IN PHYSICS** 
 
 The Road to Reality is the most important and ambitious work of science for a generation. It provides nothing less than a comprehensive account of the physical universe and the essentials of its underlying mathematical theory. It assumes no particular specialist knowledge on the part of the reader, so that, for example, the early chapters give us the vital mathematical background to the physical theories explored later in the book. 
 
 Roger Penrose's purpose is to describe as clearly as possible our present understanding of the universe and to convey a feeling for its deep beauty and philosophical implications, as well as its intricate logical interconnections. 
 
 The Road to Reality is rarely less than challenging, but the book is leavened by vivid descriptive passages, as well as hundreds of hand-drawn diagrams. In a single work of colossal scope one of the world's greatest scientists has given us a complete and unrivalled guide to the glories of the universe that we all inhabit. 
 
'Roger Penrose is the most important physicist to work in relativity theory except for Einstein. He is one of the very few people I've met in my life who, without reservation, I call a genius' Lee Smolin

The Road to Reality

A Complete Guide to the Laws of the Universe

‘A delight. Popular science doesn’t come much better than this’ Independent 
 
Everything you might want to know about infinity - in history and all the way to today's cutting-edge science. 
 
Infinity is surely the strangest idea that humans have ever had. Where did it come from and what is it telling us about our Universe? Can there actually be infinities? Can you do an infinite number of things in a finite amount of time? Is the Universe infinite? 
 
 
Infinity is also the place where things happen that don't. What is it like to live in a Universe where nothing is original, where you can live forever, where anything that can be done, is done, over and over again? 
 
 
These are some of the deep questions that the idea of the infinite pushes us to ask. Throughout history, the infinite has been a dangerous concept. Many have lost their lives, their careers, or their freedom for talking about it. 
 
The Infinite Book will take you on a tour of these dangerous questions and the strange answers that scientists, mathematicians, philosophers and theologians have come up with to deal with its threats to our sanity.

The Infinite Book

A Short Guide to the Boundless, Timeless and Endless

What can we never do? Barrow looks at what limits there might be to human discovery, and what we might find, ultimately, to be unknowable, undoable, or unthinkable. Science is a big success story, but where will it end? And, indeed, will it end? Weaving together a tapestry of surprises, Barrow explores the frontiers of knowledge. We find that the notion of 'impossibility' has played a striking role in our thinking. Surrealism, impossible figures, time travel, paradoxes of logic and perspectives - all stimulate us to contemplate something more than what is. Using simple explanations, it shows the reader that impossibility is a deep and powerful notion; that any Universe complex enough to contain conscious beings will contain limits on what those beings can know about their Universe; that what we cannot know defines reality as surely as what we can know.

Impossibility

The Limits of Science and the Science of Limits

‘One of the most important works…of the twentieth century’ The Times 
 
Shadows of the Mind is a profound exploration of what modern physics has to tell us about the human mind. 
 
A visionary description of what a new physics - one that is adequate to account for our extraordinary brain - might look like. It is also a bold speculation on the biological process that makes consciousness what it is. 
 
 
In this illuminating book Penrose provides powerful arguments to support his conclusion that there is something in the conscious activity of the brain that transcends computation – something that can’t be explained by present-day science.

Shadows Of The Mind

A Search for the Missing Science of Consciousness

The Holy Grail of modern scientists is 'The Theory of Everything', which will contain all that can be known about the Universe - the magic formula that Einstein spent his life searching for and failed to find. In this elegant and exciting book, John D. Barrow challenges the quest for ultimate explanation.

Theories Of Everything

The Quest for Ultimate Explanation

George Johnson

The newest Pentium chip powering PCs and laptops contains 40 million electronic switches packed onto a piece of silicon about the size of a thumbnail. Several years from now, if this incredible shrinking continues, a single chip will hold a billion switches, then a trillion. The logical culmination is a computer in which the switches are so tiny that each consists of an individual atom. At that point something miraculous happens: quantum mechanics kick in. 
 
Anyone who follows the science news or watches 'Star Trek' has at least a notion of what that means: particles can be in two or more places at once. Atoms obey a peculiar logic of their own - and if it can be harnessed society will be transformed. Problems that would now take forever would be solved almost instantly. Quantum computing promises nothing less than a shortcut through time.

A Shortcut Through Time

The Path to A Quantum Computer

Lawrence Krauss

Will the universe continue to expand forever, reverse its expansion and begin to contract, or reach a delicately poised state where it simply persists forever? The answer depends on the amount and properties of matter in the universe, and that has given rise to one of the great paradoxes of modern cosmology; there is too little visible matter to account for the behaviour we can see. Over 90 percent of the universe consists of 'missing mass' or 'dark matter' - what Lawrence Krauss, in his classic book, termed "the fifth essence". In this new edition of The Fifth Essence, retitled Quintessence after the now widely accepted term for dark matter, Krauss shows how the dark matter problem is now connected with two of the hottest areas in recent cosmology: the fate of the universe and the "cosmological constant." With a new introduction, epilogue and chapter updates, Krauss updates his classic and shares one of the most stunning discoveries of recent years: an antigravity force that explains recent observations of a permanently expanding universe.

Quintessence

How do you begin to understand the concept of nothing? 
 
Where does it begin and where does it end? 
 
From the zeros of the mathematician to the void of the philosophers, from Shakespeare to the empty set, from the ether to the quantum vacuum, from being and nothingness to creatio ex nihilo, there is much ado about nothing at the heart of things. 
 
Recent exciting discoveries in astronomy are shown to shed new light on the nature of the vacuum and its dramatic effect upon the explanation of the Universe. This remarkable book ranges over every nook and cranny of nothingness to reveal how the human mind has had to make something of nothing in every field of human enquiry.

The Book Of Nothing

No scientist has done more to shape our understanding of the universe than Murray Gell-Mann, the Nobel Prize-winner considered by many colleagues to be the most brilliant physicist of his generation. His discovery of the quark and the Eightfold Way were cornerstones for all that followed in particle physics, the effort to understand the very stuff of creation, In this, the first biography of Gell-Mann, George Johnson tells the story of a remarkable life.

Strange Beauty

Marcus Chown

Every atom in our bodies has an extraordinary history. Our blood, our food, our books, our clothes - everything contains atoms forged in blistering furnaces deep inside stars, which were blown into space by those stars' cataclysmic explosions and deaths. From red giants - stars so enormous they could engulf a million suns - to supernova explosions - the most violent events in the universe - the birth of every atom was marked by cosmic events on an enormous scale, against a backdrop of unimaginable heat and cold, brightness and darkness, space and time.  But how did we discover the astonishing truth about our cosmic origins? THE MAGIC FURNACE is Marcus Chown's extraordinary account of how scientists unravelled the mystery of atoms, and helped to explain the dawn of life. It is one of the greatest detective stories in the history of science. In fact, it is two puzzles intertwined, for the stars contain the key to unlocking the secret of atoms, and the atoms the solution to the secret of stars.

The Magic Furnace

The Search for the Origins of Atoms

Alan H Guth

This classic Big Bang text neatly describes what happened after the bang. Yet, until recently, particle physicists and cosmologists were stuck on many questions that the Big Bang Theory still couldn't answer, primarily: If matter can neither be created nor destroyed, how could so much matter arise from nothing at all? Alan Guth's Inflationary Universe Theory answers these vexing questions. When NASA's Cosmic Background Explorer satellite measured the non-uniformities of the cosmic background radiation for the first time in 1992, the patterns agreed exquisitely with the theory's predictions.

The Inflationary Universe

The Quest for a New Theory of Cosmic Origins

Colin Bruce

Learning the basic laws of physics - mechanics, thermodynamics, relativity, quantum mechanics - can be a struggle. But when that master of deduction, Sherlock Holmes, leads the way, those difficult concepts become crystal clear. Colin Bruce brings Holmes, Dr. Watson, Professor Challenger of Lost World fame, and other favourite Conan Doyle characters to life to solve a Baker Street dozen baffling science mysteries: Murder on a royal train - divers dead of heatstroke at the bottom of an icy sea - a mysterious lady whose brilliance is matched only by her evil - an epidemic of insanity among the world's top scientists. Bruce works out the apparent paradoxes of special relativity and quantum theory in visual and logical terms. The effect is extremely lucid, and very entertaining for the armchair scientist in all of us.

The Strange Case Of Mrs Hudson's Cat

or Sherlock Holmes Solves the Einstein Mysteries

James Gleick

Uncover one of the most exciting frontiers of modern physics in this fascinating, insightful and accessible overview of Chaos theory. 
 
‘An exceedingly readable introduction to a new intellectual world’ Observer 
 
From the turbulence of the weather to the complicated rythmns of the human heart, ‘chaos’ is at the centre of our day to day lives. Cutting across several scientific disciplines, James Gleick explores and elucidates the science of the unpredicatable with an immensely readable narrative style and flair. 
 
‘An awe-inspiring book. Reading Chaos gave me the sensation that someone had just found the light-switch’ Douglas Adams

Chaos

Steven Weinberg

An understanding of nature's final laws may be within our grasp - a way of explaining forces and symmetries and articles that does not require further explanation. 'This starting point, to which all explanations can be traced, is what I mean by a final theory', says Steven Weinberg in this extraordinary book. In it he discusses beauty, the weakness of philosophy, the best ideas in physics and the honour of accepting a world without god.

Dreams Of A Final Theory

The Search for The Fundamental Laws of Nature

The year is 1Q84. This is the real world, there is no doubt about that. But in this world, there are two moons in the sky. Discover the 1Q84 Trilogy by Haruki Murakami.

1Q84

365 Days of Art

A BBC Christmas

A Black Book Thriller

A Box Full of Murders

A Cal Leandros Novel

A Christmas Mystery

The intelligent and capable police commissioner Guido Brunetti confronts crime in and around his home town of Venice.

A Commissario Brunetti Mystery

A DC Smith / Kings Lake Investigation Series

A Daisy Story

Chronicling the lives of over three hundred characters, unrivalled for its scope and humour, this is a unique evocation of life in twentieth-century England.

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