Best Selling Books by John Connolly

Try this knockout opening chapter from EMPIRE, the epic follow-up to CONQUEST in the Chronicles of the Invaders trilogy by John Connolly and Jennifer Ridyard. The full novel is on sale from January 2015. She is the trophy of a civilization at war with itself. He is its rebel captive. Separated by millions of light years, they will fight to be united. And they will risk everything to make their world - all worlds - right again.

A strange novel for strange young people. Young Samuel Johnson and his dachshund Boswell are trying to show initiative by trick-or-treating a full three days before Hallowe''en. Which is how they come to witness strange goings-on at 666 Crowley Avenue. The Abernathys don''t mean any harm by their flirtation with Satanism. But it just happens to coincide with a malfunction in the Large Hadron Collider that creates a gap in the universe. A gap in which there is a pair of enormous gates. The gates to Hell. And there are some pretty terrifying beings just itching to get out . . . Can Samuel persuade anyone to take this seriously? Can he harness the power of science to save the world as we know it?

Bursting with imagination and impossible to put down, these novels - ''darkly comic'' (Telegraph) and ''delightfully horrific and hilarious'' (Eoin Colfer) - from The Sunday Times bestselling author John Connolly, are about the pull between good and evil, physics and fantasy - and a quirky boy, who is impossible not to love, and the unlikely cast of characters who give him the strength to stand up to a demonic power. The Gates: Samuel Johnson''s neighbour Mrs Abernathy is trying to open the gates of hell. It''s up to Samuel to stop her, except nobody will believe him, and time is running out. The Infernals (prev. Hell''s Bells): Samuel and Boswell are pulled through a portal into Hell. But Mrs Abernathy has reckoned without their bravery and cleverness, or the loyalty of Samuel''s friend, the demon Nurd, and Mr Merryweather''s Elves. The Creeps: Samuel and Boswell are to be guests of honour at the opening of the greatest toyshop. A splendid time will be had by all, as long as they can ignore the sinister statue that keeps moving around the town, the Shadows that are slowly blocking out the stars, murderous elves, and the fact that, somewhere, a rotten black heart is beating a rhythm of revenge.

DOMINION is the epic follow-up to CONQUEST and EMPIRE in the Chronicles of the Invaders series by John Connolly and Jennifer Ridyard. Fans of Pittacus Lore and Veronica Roth will be entranced. They have cheated death. Defied their people. Changed beyond recognition. Their love has survived the impossible. But now they must learn to trust again: the future of their worlds depends on it.

In this book John Connolly and Paddy Dolan illustrate and explain developments in Gaelic games, the Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA), and Irish society over the course of the last 150 years. The main themes in the book include: advances in the threshold of repugnance towards violence in the playing of Gaelic games, changes in the structure of spectator violence, diminishing displays of superiority towards the competing sports of soccer and rugby, the tension between decentralising and centralising processes, the movement in the balance between amateurism and professionalism, changes in the power balance between ‘elite’ players and administrators, and the difficulties in developing a new hybrid sport. The authors also explain how these developments were connected to various social processes including changes in the structure of Irish society and in the social habitus of people in Ireland.

Set in the rural English village of Underbury in 1915, all the men of the village have gone off to war. In their place, an ancient evil has returned.

The purpose of the thesis is to examine the nature, dynamics and extent of post-crisis change in British crisis management arrangements for veterinary disease induced outbreaks following the 2001 foot and mouth crisis. Two fundamental questions guide the analysis. First, is the process of post-crisis change incremental or does a crisis stimulate radical change? Second, are existing categorisations of the nature of post-crisis change appropriate for understanding change within the veterinary disease policy sector? These questions derive from a wide-ranging review of academic literatures concerned with the politics of crisis management, policy and organisational change, and Europeanisation. In examining the connections between these literatures the thesis identifies a gap in existing knowledge of how the reform of crisis management policies and organisation practices impacts upon specific policy sectors. The 2001 foot and mouth epidemic provides the baseline case study from which the processes of change are analysed. In order to examine the nature and type of change the outbreak of foot and mouth in September 2007 is used as a comparator case study, with the avian influenza outbreak in February 2007 used to broaden the analysis to allow observations to be made about the generic nature of the management of veterinary diseases in Great Britain. The major source of data for this study is semi-structured elite interviews. Major actors in the management of crisis, including UK and EU officials and significant elected representatives, provide deep insights into the nature and extent of organisational and policy change after the 2001 outbreak. The qualitative data derived from interviews is triangulated with official documentary sources and information obtained under the Freedom of Information Act. In examining categorisations of post-crisis change the thesis concludes by calling for the deployment of perspectives from studies of both crisis management and policy and organisational change; and for existing categorisations to be refined to take into account the temporalities of change and the multi-dimensionality of change.