Dr Alex Hoffman is a legend. An American physicist once employed on the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland, he now uses a revolutionary and highly secret system of computer algorithms to trade on the world's financial markets. None of his rivals is sure how he does it, but somehow Hoffman's hedge fund built around the standard measure of market volatility: the VIX or 'Fear Index' - generates astonishing returns for his investors. Then, late one night, in his house beside Lake Geneva, an intruder disturbs Hoffman and his wife while they are asleep.
Winner of the David J. Langum, Sr., Prize in American Historical Fiction Named one of the best books of the year by The Washington Post and “Required Reading” by the New York Post Edward Rutherfurd celebrates America’s greatest city in a rich, engrossing saga, weaving together tales of families rich and poor, native-born and immigrant—a cast of fictional and true characters whose fates rise and fall and rise again with the city’s fortunes. From this intimate perspective we see New York’s humble beginnings as a tiny Indian fishing village, the arrival of Dutch and British merchants, the Revolutionary War, the emergence of the city as a great trading and financial center, the convulsions of the Civil War, the excesses of the Gilded Age, the explosion of immigration in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the trials of World War II, the near demise of New York in the 1970s and its roaring rebirth in the 1990s, and the attack on the World Trade Center. A stirring mix of battle, romance, family struggles, and personal triumphs, New York: The Novel gloriously captures the search for freedom and opportunity at the heart of our nation’s history.
Cicero is consul, Caesar his ruthless young rival, Pompey the republic's greatest general, Crassus its richest man, Cato a political fanatic, Catilina a psychopath, Clodius an ambitious playboy.
Written by a mountaineer who in 1993, after a terrifying and disastrous attempt to climb K2, drifted cold and dehydrated, into an impoverished Pakistan village in the Karakoram Mountains. It tells how moved by the inhabitants' kindness, he promised to return and build a school. It tells the story of that promise and its outcome.
According to her own complex moral calculations, Katie Carr has earned her affair. She's a doctor, after all, and doctors are decent people and on top of that, her husband David is the self-styled Angriest Man in Holloway. When David suddenly becomes good however, properly, maddeningly, give-away-all-his-money-good, Katie's sums no longer add up and she is forced to ask herself some very hard questions
