Orion Publishing Group

Here are all three volumes of Michael Palin's bestselling diaries, covering 30 years from 1969 to 1998. All three are boxed together and Michael Palin has signed the back.

A young woman is making a living faking it as a cut-price psychic (with some illegal soft-core sex work on the side). She makes a decent wage mostly by telling people what they want to hear. But then she meets Susan Burke. Susan moved to the city one year ago with her husband and 15-year-old stepson Miles. They live in a Victorian house called Carterhook Manor. Susan has become convinced that some malevolen...

A warm and funny account of what it is like to live in and run a National Trust house: Felbrigg Hall in Norfolk. When Mary Mackie's husband became Houseman at Felbrigg Hall in Norfolk she suddenly found herself running one of the most elegant 17th-century houses in East Anglia. During their first year living in the National Trust house she was endlessly running up and down corridors, making visitors welcome...

On the evening of 15 June 1815, the great and the good of British Society have gathered in Brussels at what is to become one of the most tragic parties in history - the Duchess of Richmond's ball. For this is the eve of the Battle of Waterloo, and many of the handsome young men attending the ball will find themselves, the very next day, on the battlefield.

What did it feel like to be a woman living in Paris from 1939 to 1949? These were years of fear, power, aggression, courage, deprivation and secrets until - finally - renewal and retribution. Even at the darkest moments of Occupation, glamour was ever present. French women wore lipstick. Why? It was women who came face to face with the German conquerors on a daily basis - perhaps selling them their clothes...

It is 11 April 1982 and a smell is coming down John Golding Road right alongside the boy-child, something attached to him, like a spirit but not quite. Ma Taffy is growing worried. She knows that something is going to happen. Something terrible is going to pour out into the world. But if she can hold it off for just a little bit longer, she will. So she asks a question that surprises herself even as she ask...

When Jon Holmes became a father (twice), he was asked to fill in a form detailing his family medical history. Except he couldn't, because he has no idea who his family are. Born to an unnamed, unmarried mother and an unknown father and given up for adoption at four weeks old, Jon decided to document his own history, so that one day he could pass it on to his children. It's a story of how boys grow up to bec...

Andrew Landford is driving home one night, along a dark country lane, when a barn owl flies into his windscreen. It is an accident, nothing more. However Andrew is in line to be the country's next prime minister. And he has recently been appointed to a parliamentary committee concerned with the Wildlife and Countryside Act. Barn Owls are protected species, and it is a crime to kill one. If Andrew acknowl...

For the great majority of his long life, Benjamin Franklin was a loyal British royalist. In 1757, having made his fortune in Philadelphia and established his fame as a renowned experimental scientist, he crossed the Atlantic to live as a gentleman in the heaving metropolis of London. With just a brief interlude, a house in Craven Street was to be his home until 1775. From there he mixed with both the brilli...

HEYDAY brings to life one of the most extraordinary periods in modern history. Over the course of the 1850s, the world was reshaped by technology, trade, mass migration and war. The global economy expanded fivefold, millions of families emigrated to the ends of the earth to carve out new lives, technology revolutionised communications, while steamships and railways cut across vast continents and oceans, shr...

A fully updated edition of one of the most original accounts of evolution ever written, featuring new fractal diagrams, six new 'tales' and the latest scientific developments. THE ANCESTOR'S TALE is a dazzling, four-billion-year pilgrimage to the origins of life: Richard Dawkins and Yan Wong take us on an exhilarating reverse journey through evolution, from present-day humans back to the microbial beginnin...

Malaysian food has long been the hidden jewel of South-east Asian cookery - it's a fusion of the Chinese, Malay and Indian cultures that make up Malaysia itself. In her debut book Malaysia Ping Coombes shares all the secrets and delights of this extraordinary cuisine. Drawing inspiration from her mother and from the late-night stalls and street markets in her hometown of Ipoh, Ping has put together over 10...

Literary legend James Bond returns to his 1950s heyday in this exhilarating thriller by Sunday Times bestselling author Anthony Horowitz. It's 1957 and James Bond (agent 007) has only just survived his showdown with Auric Goldfinger at Fort Knox. By his side is Pussy Galore, who was with him at the end. Unknown to either of them, the USSR and the West are in a deadly struggle for technological superiority....