Alexander Short, a stylish young reference librarian, is hired by Henry James Jesson III for some after-hours research on a mysterious 18th-century inventor. As his investigation heats up, Alexander realizes there are many more secrets lurking in Jesson's cloistered world than were first apparent.

Meg Finn is in trouble, unearthly trouble. Cast out of her own home by her stepfather after her mother's death, Meg is a wanderer, a troublemaker. After a botched attempt to rob a pensioner's flat, Meg and her partner in crime, Belch, end up in a very sticky situation.

Evil pixie, Opal Koboi, is back and she's more dangerous than ever. This time she doesn't just want power over the fairy People - this time she wants the humans too. Captain Holly Short is the only fairy with a hope of stopping her, but as Holly knows, it takes one genius criminal mastermind to fight another.

Fourteen-year-old Cosmo Hill longs to escape from the Clarissa Frayne Institute for Parentally Challenged Boys. When a rare chance to get away comes, he grabs it, but the attempt goes fatally wrong. He can feel his life force ebbing away, sucked out of him by a strange blue Parasite until a wisecracking gang of kids burst in, blast the creature and save him. They are the Supernaturalists, ...

13-year-old criminal mastermind Artemis Fowl has constructed a supercomputer from stolen fairy technology. In the wrong hands it could be fatal for humans and fairies alike. But Artemis has a plan. He's not going to use the computer; he's just going to show it to an American businessman with Mafia connections. What could possibly go wrong...?

An anthology of short stories in defence of reading by some of the greatest practitioners of the genre, including Isaac Babel, Italo Calvino, Jorge Luis Borges, Alice Munro, Lori Moore and H.H. Munro (Saki). IN THE STACKS, edited by America's leading librarian, is a volume of most unusual stories about that most evocative place: the library. For many writers and bookworms the local public library