"The New York Times" bestselling author of "The Case for Israel" takes on the greatest threats faced by Israel today. Who are Israel's most dangerous enemies? Not Hamas and other Palestinian terrorists, argues Alan Dershowitz. In this passionate and powerfully written new book, he challenges those he considers to be the most critical threat to the existence of Israel, including Jimmy Carter and other Western leaders who would delegitimize Israel as an apartheid regime subject to the same fate as white South Africans; Israel's academic enemies, led by professors Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer, who would accuse Israel's supporters of dual loyalty - or even disloyalty - to America; certain religious groups, such as the Presbyterian Church, which would divest from Israel - and Israel alone - for its alleged human rights violations; and Iran, led by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, which threatens Israel with the possible development of nuclear weapons that it has publicly warned it could use against the Jewish state. At a time when the future existence of Israel is increasingly imperiled, Dershowitz persuasively demonstrates that these enemies of Israel are also enemies of peace, who imperil not only Israel but the rest of the world.

Friendly Fire

A. B. Yehoshua

HB £12.99

A long-married couple are spending an unaccustomed week apart. The wife has flown to East Africa to grieve the death of her sister with her brother-in-law, who had suffered worse heartbreak years earlier. The husband, a familiar Yehoshua character, stays behind in Israel for his busy lift engineering consultancy, and his large demanding family. The chapters alternate between husband and wife, creating a complex web of family relations, memories and discoveries, with death looming large over all. Friendly Fire explores themes touched upon in A.B. Yehoshua's earlier novels, with the author's customary stylistic brilliance, imagination and humour.

Past-It Notes

Maureen Lipman

HB £18.99

Maureen Lipman was born and it was only after that, that her life really began. Her birthplace, Hull, twinned naturally with Sierra Leone, has produced many pioneers but, unlike Sir William Wilberforce, Amy Johnson and J Arthur Rank, Ms Lipman has shown little altruism and has chosen instead to do what the late actor Patrick Troughton called, 'Shouting in the Evening'. She is 62, 47 or 109 depending on which paper you read and has never been in The Bill . She has a dog, a rabbit and no love-children. 

Chocolate and Cuckoo Clocks

Alan Coren

HB £20.00

Edited by his children, Giles and Victoria, "Chocolate and Cuckoo Clocks" is an anthology of writing from the former editor of "Punch" and Radio 4 national treasure Alan Coren, who died in October 2007. In a prolific forty-year career Alan Coren wrote for "The Times", "Observer", "Tatler", "Daily Mail", "Mail on Sunday", "Listener", "Punch" and the "New Yorker", and published over 20 books including "The Sanity Inspector", "Golfing for Cats" and "The Collected Bulletins of Idi Amin" (he turned down an invitation from Amin to visit Uganda saying, 'I'll probably end up as a sandwich').Even twenty years ago he estimated that he had published six million words, or ten copies of War and Peace. This anthology draws together the best of Coren's previously published material as well as new unpublished autobiographical material.

The Courilof Affair

Irene Nemirovsky

PB £7.99

In 1903, Leon M - a devout terrorist - is given the responsibility of 'liquidating' Valerian Alexandrovitch Courilof, the notoriously brutal and cold-blooded Russian Minister of Education, by the Revolutionary Committee. The assassination, he is told, must take place in public and be in most grandiose manner possible in order to strike the imagination of the people. Posing as his newly appointed personal physician, Leon M takes up residence with Courliof in his summer house in the Iles and awaits instructions.But over the course of his stay he is made privy to the inner world of Courliof - his failing health, his troubled domestic situation and, most importantly, the tyrannical grip that the Czar himself holds over all his Ministers, forcing them to obey him or suffer the most deadly punishments.Set during a period of radical upheaval in European history, "The Courliof Affair" is an unsparing observation of human motives and the abuses of power, an elegy to lost world and an unflinchingly topical cautionary tale.

Gentlemen of the Road

Michael Chabon

PB £7.99

Gentlemen of the Road is set in the Kingdom of Arran, in the Caucasus Mountains, between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea, A.D. 950. It tells the tale of two wandering adventurers and unlikely soulmates, variously plying their trades as swords for hire, horse thieves and con artists - until fortune entangles them in the myriad schemes and battles that follow a bloody coup in the medieval Jewish empire of the Khazars. Hired as escorts for a fugitive prince, they quickly find themselves half-willing generals in a mad rebellion, struggling to restore the prince's family to the throne. As their increasingly outrageous exploits unfold, they encounter a wondrous elephant, wily Rhadanite tradesmen, whores, thieves, soldiers, an emperor, and discover the truth about their young royal charge.Beautifully illustrated throughout, this is a novel brimming with raucous humour and cliff-hanging suspense, combining the spirit of The Arabian Nights "with the action of The Three Musketeers".

You Know You're Past it When...

Shelley Klein

HB £10.00

From the author of "Senior Moments".
You know you're past it when... your back goes out more often than you do; it takes twice as long to look half as good; you forget you have a car, let alone where you parked it; you throw a party and the neighbours don't even notice; and you're given this book as a timely birthday gift. If any of the above seem familiar, then you are most definitely in need of this book. "You Know You're Past It When..." celebrates the inevitable fate that awaits all of us and makes the best out of growing old. Including hundreds of telltale signs, real-life case studies and quirky top-ten clues that wryly prove when someone is past their prime, you can learn to embrace the ageing process.

Churchill's Wizards

Nicholas Rankin

HB £25.00

By June 1940, most of Europe had fallen to the Nazis and Britain stood alone. To protect itself, the nation fell back on cunning and camouflage. With Winston Churchill in charge, the British bluffed their way out of trouble - lying, pretending and dressing up in order to survive. The British had developed this uncommon talent during the trench and desert fighting of the First World War, when writers and artists created elaborate camouflages and fiendish propaganda. So successful were these deceptions they gave rise to the German belief that they hadn't been beaten fairly - in which case why not 'have a second go'? By the Second World War, the British were masters of the art. Churchill adored stratagems, ingenious devices and special forces: pretend German radio stations broadcast outrageous British propaganda in German... Culminating in the spectacular misdirection that was so essential to the success of D-Day in 1944, Churchill's Wizards is a thrilling work of popular military history. Above all, Nicholas Rankin reveals the true stories of those brave and creative mavericks who helped win what Churchill called 'the war of the Unknown Warriors'.

Chagall: Love and Exile

Jackie Wullschlager

HB £30.00

'When Matisse dies, Chagall will be the only painter left who understands what color really is'. Picasso said this in the 1950s, when he and Chagall were eminent neighbors living in splendor on the Cote d'Azur. But behind Chagall's role as a pioneer of modern art lay struggle, heartbreak, bitterness, lost love, exile, and the miracle of survival. Born the son of a Russian Jewish herring merchant, Chagall fled the repressive 'potato-colored' czarist empire in 1911 to develop his genius in Paris, living alongside Modigliani and Leger in La Ruche, the artist's colony where 'you either died or came out famous'.Through war and revolution in Bolshevik Russia, Weimar Berlin, occupied France and 1940s New York, he gave form to his dreams, longings and memories in paintings which are among the most humane and joyful of the 20th century. Wullschlager has had exclusive access to hundreds of hitherto unseen and unpublished letters from the Chagall family collection in Paris, which are quoted here for the first time, lending Chagall's own unique voice to this account. Drawing also on numerous interviews with the artist's family, friends, dealers, collectors, and illustrated with two hundred paintings, drawings and photographs, many also previously unseen, this elegantly written biography gives for the first time a full and true account of Chagall the man and the artist - and of a life as intense, theatrical and haunting as his paintings.

Notes from Walnut Tree Farm

Roger Deakin

HB £20.00

For the last six years of his life, Roger Deakin kept notebooks in which he wrote his daily thoughts, impressions, feelings and observations. Discursive, personal and often impassioned, they reveal the way he saw the world, whether it be observing the teeming ecosystem that was Walnut Tree Farm, thinking about the wider environment, walking in his fields, on Mellis Common or on his travels at home, or contemplating his past and his present life. "Notes from Walnut Tree Farm" collects the very best of these writings, capturing Roger's extraordinary, restless curiosity about the natural and human worlds, his love of literature and music, his knack for making unusual and apposite connections, and of course his distinct and subversive charm and humour. Together they cohere to present a passionate, engaged and - in spite of the worst pressures of contemporary life - optimistic view of our changing world .

Arrivals for October 2008

Arrivals for September 2008

Arrivals for August 2008

Arrivals for July 2008

Arrivals for June 2008

Arrivals for May 2008

Arrivals for April 2008