One house, 10 contestants, 30 cameras. Another group of people submit themselves to the exposure of the televised real-life soap opera. But this time it's different. Who is the murderer? How did they manage to kill under the constant gaze of 30 cameras? How did they do it? And who will be next?

Stephen Fry's breathtakingly outrageous debut novel, by turns eccentric, shocking, brilliantly comic and achingly romantic.

Michael is a lonely, rather pathetic writer, obsessed by the film, 'What A Carve Up!' in which a mad kinfeman cuts his way through the inhabitants of a decrepit stately pile as the thunder rages. He is commissioned to write the family history of the Winshaws, an upper class Yorkshire clan whose members have a finger in every establishment pie.

In 1881, a generation after the South won the Civil War, the peace is shattered. Furious over the annexation of American territory, the United States declares total war against the Confederacy. In this second American Civil War the times, stake and battle lines have changed - and so has history.

World War II seethed across the planet. Hostilities spread in ever-widening circles of destruction. Then the real enemy arrived. Out of the skies came an inhuman invasion force, their weaponary overwhelming and with a simple goal: Fleetlord Atvar had arrived to claim Earth for the Empire.

A collection of articles written by Stephen Fry for magazines, newspapers and radio, includes selected wireless essays of Donald Trefusis, the ageing professor of philology brought to life in Fry's novel The Liar and the best of Fry's weekly column for the Daily Telegraph .