Acclaimed novelist Cecelia Ahern's There's No Place Like Here tells the story of Sandy Shortt, an obsessive-compulsive Missing Persons investigator who suddenly finds herself in the mystical land of the missing, desperate to return to the people and places from whom she has spent her life escaping. With this imaginative fourth novel, Ahern, whose P.S. I Love You was made into a major motion picture, continues to establish herself as not only an icon of Irish chick lit, but also a bold and creative thinker. Continuing the whimsical trend she started with If You Could See Me Now, Ahern asks readers to step outside the boundaries of reality, and enter a world where missing people (and possessions) from all over the globe congregate to start anew. When Sandy goes on an early morning jog and strays too far into the forest, she too finds herself "Here," the aptly named home of the missing. In addition to finding her lost socks, diaries, and stuffed animals, she also finds many of the people she has searched for throughout her career. From Bobby Stanley, who disappeared from his mother's house at the age of sixteen, to Terrence O'Malley, a librarian who disappeared on his way home from work at age 55, Sandy is quickly reunited with the people she has come to know only through photos and heartbreaking memories shared by devastated loved ones who enlisted her services. Of course, finding these people and possessions only makes Sandy realize how much she has missed out on in her real life, most notably her concerned parents and her on again off again boyfriend Greg. There's No Place Like Here is often predictable and the premise is a bit hard to swallow at times. Still, readers who take the leap will be rewarded with what is ultimately a witty, compassionate, and captivating love story.

Light marks that fine writer M John Harrison's first return to the heartland of SF--including spaceships and hair-raising interstellar chases--since his apocalyptic anti-space opera The Centauri Device (1975). The heavy SF action begins in 2400. Space-going humanity is the latest of many civilizations to be baffled by the impenetrable Kefahuchi Tract; that vast stellar region where an unshielded singularity makes physics itself unreliable. Along its accessible fringe, the "Beach", solar systems are littered with crazy, abandoned devices used to probe the Tract since before life began on Earth. A whole dead-end culture is based on beachcombing this rubble of industrial archaeology... 25th-century characters include a woman who's sacrificed almost everything to merge with the AI "mathematics" of a crack military spacecraft; a former daredevil who once surfed black holes but has retreated into a virtual reality tank; the lady proprietor of the Circus of Pathet Lao, with an alien freakshow and a hidden agenda; and a variety of raunchy, smelly, gene-sculpted lowlife, some comic, some menacing. Many are not what they seem. Meanwhile in 1999 London, physicists Kearney and Tate--remembered in 2400 as the fathers of interstellar flight--are getting nowhere. Kearney's personal problems occupy familiar Harrison territory: urban paranoia, a seedily unreliable guru, bad sex, guilty rituals to propitiate a metaphysical-seeming threat called the Shrander--a pursuing image out of nightmare. In the lab, both Kearney and Tate fear the increasing quantum strangeness of their results. The cosmological wonders and hazards of the Beach form a backdrop to space pursuits and violent skirmishes whose duration is measured in nanoseconds, reported in tensely lyrical prose. Eventually everything comes together as it should--even that oppressive 1999 story strand--with revelations, transformation, transcendence, and ultimate hope. Harrison demands your full attention and rewards it richly. -- David Langford

A passion fiercer than the Montana heat...When rugged rancher Colby Holmes wanted to solve his aunt's murder, he reluctantly enlisted the help of stunning psychic Tessa Madison. Despite her mysterious beauty, Colby swore that he would never let a woman near his heart again. But it wasn't long before a burning desire tantalized him each time he looked Tessa's way.With a past that proved falling in love only brought pain, Tessa kept her heart under lock and key. But Colby's kiss brought on a sweet emotion that left her enchanted. So when the town's skeptics tried to force her from her home, would the love of one handsome cowboy be enough to make her stay?

ONE MAN, ONE WOMAN... ONE VERY TINY CABIN Because of the terms of a will, Garrett Holden had to share his stepfather's tiny cabin in Maine with Ana Birch for one month. A hardened businessman, Garrett was lost moments after meeting the beautiful stranger, and he knew spending thirty days together would be pure torture on his libido. But as hard as he tried to resist Ana's charms, the die-hard bachelor was quickly captivated by her compassionate nature, her zest for life...and her tempting curves. Still, Ana's true identity remained a mystery--who exactly was the lovely Ana Birch, why was she named in the will...and how could he walk away from her once the thirty days were up?

Prize-winning author Benjamin Hale's fiction abounds with a love of language and a wild joy for storytelling. In prose alternately stark, lush and hallucinatory, occasionally nightmarish and often absurd, the seven stories in this collection are suffused with fear and desire, introducing us to a company of indelible characters reeling with love, jealousy, megalomania, and despair.As in his debut novel, The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore, the voices in these stories speak from the margins: a dominatrix whose longtime client, a US congressman, drops dead during a tryst in a hotel room; an addict in precarious recovery who lands a job driving a truck full of live squid; a heartbroken performance artist who attempts to eat himself to death as a work of art. From underground radicals hiding in Morocco to an aging hippy in Colorado in the summer before 9/11 to a young drag queen in New York at the cusp of the AIDS crisis, these stories rove freely across time and place,...

Lost in the forest, Emelin runs for her life after her traveling party is massacred by outlaws. Sir Allard de Gerril is in pursuit of the ruthless Archer and his band when he finds Emelin. Bound by vengeance the pair seek out Archer, but as they journey through the dark woods revenge gives way to passion. With each passing day, Emelin dares to dream that there is a place for a lowly trinket seller's daughter by the knight's side. Yet as Archer begins to hunt the couple, Emelin fears that she and Allard will not have a future together as they may never escape the tangled wood alive.

In the sequel to Venus Rising, drama thrives as Levi moves to a private island to oversee the development of the new resort and unravels clues to the mysterious disappearance of the woman who is reported to haunt the island. Levi finds herself hopelessly in love with Vanessa, while Simone tries every devious trick in the book to win Levi back. Wedding bells ring, but for whom will they toll?

In Alan Coren's world, children, threatened by Josef Mengele's poisoned chickens, still turn to Winston Churchill to save them from school dinners, Clark Gable snuggles, as ever, against the bristly chest of his lover Errol Flynn (despite having been captured on video by the entire British delegation of a Hong Kong sales conference), and, though the NHS budget has soared to record heights, hysterectomies throughout the queendom continue to be performed by enthusiastic poulterers. As for Coren himself, despite bearing the distinguished rank of full colonel in the Confederate Air Force, he remains plagued by recurrent nightmares that his membership of the P.G. Wodehouse Society has been poached by a Polish imposter in spats. Nightmares can get that way if your every waking moment is infested with worries about the American takeover of HP Sauce. Nevertheless, England's best-loved humorist still found time between these covers to explain why Cannon & Ball have relaunched...

Fantasy/Erotica. 81390 words long. First published in 2007, 2007

SUMMARY: "Chassée de la tribu, Ayla erre à travers les steppes du nord de l'Europe. Elle trouve refuge dans une vallée où vit des chevaux sauvages. Luttant pour sa survie, elle découvre le secret du feu, adopte une pouliche et un lionceau avec lesquels elle va parcourir le monde. Il ne manquerait qu'un compagnon pour son bonheur, mais le destin veille...