Best Selling Books by Frank Cottrell Boyce

Heart-achingly funny, touching and brilliantly clever, Millions is a fantastic adventure about two boys, one miracle and a million choices. Brothers Damian and Anthony didn''t mean to get caught up in a botched train robbery. But what would you do if a massive bag of cash dropped from the sky and you had only a few days to spend it before it became worthless? Buy a million pizzas? End world poverty? Not such an easy decision, is it? The boys soon find out that being rich is a mug''s game. Not only is the clock ticking, the bank robbers want their money back . . . This edition of Frank Cottrell-Boyce''s Carnegie Medal-winning Millions features fantastic cover artwork from the brilliant Steven Lenton. Millions is a major film directed by Oscar-winner Danny Boyle.

When two Mongolian brothers inexplicably appear one morning in her sixth grade class, Julie, who lives in a town near Liverpool, England, named Bootle, becomes their new friend and "Good Guide," navigating them through soccer, school uniforms, and British slang.

Liam has always felt a bit like he''s stuck between two worlds. This isprimarily because he''s a twelve-year-old kid who looks like he''s about thirty. Sometimes it''s not so bad, like when his new principal mistakes him for a teacher on the first day of school or when he convinces a car dealer to let him take a Porsche out on a test drive. But mostly it''s just frustrating, being a kid trapped in an adult world. And so he decides to flip things around. Liam cons his way onto the first spaceship to take civilians into space, a special flight for a group of kids and an adult chaperone, and he is going as the adult chaperone. It''s not long before Liam, along with his friends, is stuck between two worlds again—only this time he''s 239,000 miles from home. Frank Cottrell Boyce, author of Millions and Framed, brings us a funny and touching story of the many ways in which grown-upness is truly wasted on grown-ups.

Dylan and his sisters have some ideas about how to make Snowdonia Oasis Auto Marvel into a more profitable business, but it is not until some strange men arrive in their small town of Manod, Wales with valuable paintings, and their father disappears, that they consider turning to crime.

Two refugee brothers from Mongolia are determined to fit in with their Liverpool schoolmates, but bring so much of Mongolia to Bootle that their new friend and guide, Julie, is hard-pressed to know truth from fantasy.

The Tootings are stuck in 1966! Somebody''s stolen Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and left them behind. But that''s not their biggest problem. Their biggest problem is that Little Harry''s been kidnapped by whoever nicked their magical car. There''s only one solution. The Tootings must find the Potts - the family that originally built Chitty. Sharing their combined knowledge of how Chitty works, the families stand a chance of rescuing Little Harry and finding the most brilliant car in the world. But a fiendish criminal has different plans, ones that involve flying Chitty Chitty Bang Bang to the moon and putting an explosive scheme into action . . .

We know Stanislaw Lem, whether or not we consciously know that we do. He may only be recognised in the West as the author of the twice-filmed novel, Solaris, but the influence of his other work is legion. From computer games (The Sims was inspired by one of his short stories), to films (the red and blue pills of The Matrix owe much to his Futurological Congress); from the space comedies of Red Dwarf to the metaphysical satires of Douglas Adams... the presence of this masterly Polish writer can be traced far and wide. Nor was his genius confined to fiction. Lem''s essays and pseudo-essays borne out of the military industrial tensions of the Cold War have outlived their original context and speak to the most current developments in virtual reality, nanotechnology, and artificial intelligence. To celebrate his name, as well as his vision, this anthology brings together writers, critics and scientists who continue to grapple with his concerns. British and Polish novelists join screenwriters, poets, computer engineers, and artists, to celebrate and explore Lem''s legacy through short stories and essays - two literary forms that, as Lem knew well, can blend together to create something altogether new. As one of the barriers to Lem''s fame was language, this book also features specially commissioned translations: three stories never to have appeared in English before. Lem was always ahead of us. It''s time we caught up.

When the Prime Minister begins making Ted''s great ideas a reality, he suddenly has a lot of responsibility on his shoulders ... A hilarious comedy caper from Waterstones Children''s Laureate Frank Cottrell-Boyce.

** Winner of the 2008 Shirley Jackson Award for Best Anthology** In 1919 Sigmund Freud published an essay that delved deep into the tradition of horror writing and claimed to understand one of its darkest tricks. Like a mad scientist, he performed literary vivisection on a still-breathing body of work, exploring its inner anatomy, and pulling out mysterious organs for classification. His aim: to present to the world a complete theory of ‘das unheimliche’, the uncanny. In the spirit of this great experiment, 14 leading authors have here been challenged to write fresh fictional interpretations of what the uncanny might mean in the 21st century, to update Freud’s famous checklist of what gives us the creeps, and to give the hulking canon of uncanny fiction a shot in the arm, a shock to the neck-bolts... ''It’s not too great a stretch to see Comma as the literary equivalent of Factory Records.'' - The Herald, 2 Dec. ''Delightful and disturbing'' - The Independent on Sunday, 14 Dec. ''A masterclass in understated creepiness... a deliciously macabre collection that the old Austrian might well have enjoyed.'' - Book of the Week, Time Out, 12 Jan. ''If we need the uncanny – and I suspect we do – then we also need it updating... laudable.'' - Book of the Week, The Independent, 2 Jan. ''A bold idea.'' - The Guardian, 3 Jan.

Down on their luck, the Tooting family buys an old camper van and begins repairing it, but after installing an engine that once belonged to an extraordinary car, they are off to find other original parts, pursued by a sinister man who wants Chitty for himself.