When Darren wins a trip for two to an exclusive holiday resort and invites his work buddy Jamie to share it with him, they are the only two men in the office who know they won’t be enjoying a typical lads weekend away. Neither of them has any intention of chasing after girls—or even chasing after any guys other than each other. After months of subtle flirtation, Darren and Jamie are finally ready to do a hell of a lot more than stare longingly across the office. They both know they’re going to get laid, have a laugh and maybe even fall in lust. But neither realizes the weekend has other surprises in store for them—perhaps lust won’t be the only thing they fall in. Especially when one of them realizes that the other man doesn’t just have swimming trunks in his weekend bag—he’s packing leather.

In this highly acclaimed novel by the author of The Emperor's Children, life isn't all Emmy and Virginia Simpson might have hoped. When Emmy's marriage to an Australian man ends, she flees her home in Sydney for the tropical paradise of Bali to "find herself"--only to become embroiled with an eclectic crew of international misfits and smugglers. Her sister Virginia, meanwhile, has never wandered far outside of London. Prim and pious, Virginia is struggling to find meaning in her life and her aging mother thinks a visit to the Isle of Skye is just what she needs. On these two islands halfway around the world, the middle-aged sisters confront their lives and their destinies with unexpected consequences.BONUS: This edition includes an excerpt from Claire Messud's The Woman Upstairs.

One foggy day in San Francisco brings together bloody ghosts, a dandyish thug, capricious cops, a suicidal punk rocker, a hyperliterate slumlord, and a sweet old lady sent by God to hand out cash from a hijacked armored car. In Fogtown, Peter Plate uses a loving hand to carve his characters out of hallucination, perversity, and tenacity. Plate's noir sensibility gives him special fluency with the weary souls of urban America's down and out; Fogtown describes a new age unmistakably built on the twentieth century of Nelson Algren and Charles Bukowski.

The writing career of John Berger--poet, storyteller, playwright, and essayist--has yielded some of the most original and compelling examinations of art and life of the past half century. In this essential volume, Geoff Dyer has brought together a rich selection of many of Berger's seminal essays. Berger's insights make it impossible to look at a painting, watch a film, or even visit a zoo in quite the same way again. The vast range of subjects he addresses, the lean beauty of his prose, and the keenness of his anger against injustice move us to view the world with a new lens of awareness. Whether he is discussing the singleminded intensity of Picasso's Guernica, the parallel violence and alienation in the art of Francis Bacon and Walt Disney, or the enigmatic silence of his own mother, what binds these pieces throughout is the depth and fury of Berger's passion, challenging us to participate, to protest, and above all, to see.From the Trade Paperback...

But there I go, getting ahead of myself. Skipping straight to the part where I was front-page news and they were calling me Dorothy, instead of starting at the beginning . . . When Dodie's parents go missing just as final year exams are about to start, she convinces herself they're fine. But when the least likely boy in class holds the key — quite literally — to the huge secret her parents have been hiding all these years, it's up to Dodie, her sister, the guy from school, and two guys she's never met before, to take on the challenge of a lifetime. So now Dodie's driving — unlicensed — to Sydney, and being chased by bad guys, the police, and one very handsome good guy.From the acclaimed author of Beatle Meets Destiny

From Publishers WeeklyHanson (Warfare and Agriculture in Classical Greece, etc.) presents an elegant, lucidly written analysis of the 27-year civil war, a "colossal absurdity," that ended in Athens's 5th-century B.C. loss to Sparta and the depletion of centuries of material and intellectual wealth. Hanson deftly chronicles these destructive decades, from the conflict's roots (e.g., the fundamental mutual suspicion between Athens and Sparta) to its legacy (the evolution of the nature of war to something "more deadly, amorphous, and concerned with the ends rather than the ethical means"). Hanson considers the war's economic aspects and the ruinous plague that struck Athens before delving into his discussion of warfare. He offers a tour de force analysis of hoplite (or infantry) combat, guerrilla tactics, siege operations and sea battles in the Aegean. Though landlocked Sparta ultimately brought down Athens's once-great naval fleet and replaced democracy with oligarchy by 404 B.C., Hanson complicates the received notion of a lost Hellenic Golden Age. Throughout this trenchant military and cultural history, he draws parallels between the Peloponnesian War and modern-day conflicts from WWII to the Cold War and Vietnam. Across the centuries, these are lessons worth remembering. (Oct.) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. From BooklistBy the standards of modern mass warfare, the Peloponnesian War, which ravaged Greece for 27 years, was a small-scale affair. The military forces were relatively small, and the weapons seem primitive. But by the standards of the classical Greek world, this conflict was massive and devastating. Hanson is a classicist and military historian, and his concise and stirring account of the war lacks the comprehensive scope of Donald Kagan's definitive work, * The Peloponnesian War (2003). However, as a strictly military account, Hanson has written a first-rate chronicle, capturing the intensity and savagery of ancient warfare and conveying how ordinary warriors must have experienced it. Hanson has a gift for explaining both strategic objectives and relatively complicated tactical maneuvers in terms easily understandable by laymen. In his portrayals of some of the key players, Hanson provides interesting insights, especially concerning some rather obscure but important figures. For general readers and history buffs who hope to gain a solid understanding of this seminal and tragic conflict, this is an ideal. Jay FreemanCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved*