Edgar Allan Poe's "Murders in the Rue Morgue" launched the detective story in 1841. The genre began as a highbrow form of entertainment, a puzzle to be solved by a rational sifting of clues. In Britain, the stories became decidedly upper crust: the crime often committed in a world of manor homes and formal gardens, the blood on the Persian carpet u...more
"Very funny and moving...The glimpses of rare fauna seem to have enlarged [Adams'] thinking, enlivened his world; and so might the animals do for us all, if we were to help them live."THE WASHINGTON POST BOOK WORLDJoin bestselling author Douglas Adams and zooligist Mark Carwardine as they take off around the world in search of exotic, endangered cr...more
From the author of the bestselling The Science of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy comes another incredible trip to an even more mysterious terrain. Michael Hanlon identifies ten scientific questions that we simply can't seem to answer and explains why these compelling mysteries will remain unsolved for years to comeHow did life begin? Why are ...more
Richard Mayhew is a young man with a good heart and an ordinarylife, which is changed forever when he stops to help a girl he finds bleeding on a London sidewalk. His small act of kindness propels him into a world he never dreamed existed. There are people who fall through the cracks, and Richard has become one of them. And he must learn to survive...more
Despite being mostly known for his fantastical graphic novels and adult fiction, Neil Gaiman's first book for children is everything that you would expect from such a massive imagination as his. It's special and wonderful and very weird indeed. Described by some as the new Alice in Wonderland, Coraline is actually more bizarre than that, much more ...more
Neil Gaiman follows up his bestselling 2005 novel, ANANSI BOYS, with this collection of poems and short prose culled from the same imaginative territory as much of his work: a mix of modern popular culture, myth, and the tropes of sci-fi and horror. A story that turns the months of the year into characters will remind readers of his Sandman comic s...more