Vin MacKintosh was alive… After five years of mourning her lost love, Moira MacKenzie had finally move on with her life and seek a husband. Finding out Vincent MacKintosh was alive after all those years dealt her the greatest shock of her life. She should have been thrilled to have the man she’d loved her entire life back, but after so long, she’d forgotten one important detail. She might have loved Vin, but he had never loved her back. Vin is a man tormented by the past and, with little hope that her dreams of true love will be fulfilled, Moira instead offers him the friendship he so desperately needs as he integrates himself back into a normal life. He thought he’d never truly live again… After years as a prisoner of war, Vin MacKintosh returns with a scarred and battered soul. Beset by guilt and nightmares from his years of torture and torment, he must readapt to a world where everyone he knew is a different person and the world a vastly different place. While everyone else seems to constantly compare him to the man he was, he cannot help but turn to the one person who gives him encouragement and motivation to move on. As his best friend, Jason MacKenzie’s, younger sister, Vin has known Moira her entire life, her letters during the war provided him comfort and understanding. True friendship. Now that he is back, he needs those things more than ever. However, Vin finds he cannot continue to look at Moira merely as a friend and little sister any longer. He cannot help but see her as a woman…and one too desirable to resist. Moira makes him feel alive again, but he knows it cannot last. While lust can do nothing but ruin the friendship he desperately needs, Vin knows that the truth about her brother’s death would destroy Moira’s affectionate for him forever. Plagued by his guilt, he pushes her away when he needs her most. What will he do when he realizes that what he feels is more than merely a question of lust?

An electrifying new biography about the four Essex lads who became award-winning stadium superstars and champions of synth pop! Jonathan Miller's groundbreaking book features in-depth interviews with founder member Vince Clarke and producers Gareth Jones and Mark Bell, and contains never-before seen interviews with the band members themselves. With additional input from Gary Human, Howard Jones and Thomas Dolby this is a unique portrait of a band that almost lost control when their lives went off the rails and lead singer Dave Gahan's heroin addiction nearly killed him. In the end Depeche Mode not only survived, they triumphed, racking up a staggering 40 million-plus album sales on the way. This is their amazing story, told in full for the first time. Born out of the post-punk backlash in the early 80's, Depeche Mode took their name from a phrase in a French style magazine and became the definitive international synth-pop group. Vince Clarke, Andy Fletcher and Martin Gore had started out as an Essex guitar band but it was their bright and upbeat synthesizer-driven brand of pop fronted by Dave Gahan that was to find global acceptance and enjoy unlikely success in the US. Despite a handful of early plaudits in the music press, the group won only intermittent critical acceptance over the years, its often light musical approach contrasting with lyrics that sometimes plunge into darker topics like S&M, religious fetishism and the scourge of capitalism. But whatever the music press said, the fans finally bought into Depeche Mode in a big way. Their Violator tour at the start of the 90s sold millions of records and turned them into major US concert stars. In true rock style, Depeche Mode's members have suffered their share of internal strife over a long career. Dave Gahan reinvented himself as a lead singer with both a harder musical edge and a near-fatal drug habit, while internal acrimony often marred the later stages of their career. Jonathan Miller has made an exemplary job of telling the Depeche Mode saga in its entirety and goes a long way towards explaining how the group have managed to thrive when almost all their post-punk contemporaries fell by the wayside long ago.

The halls of Glen Cairn Manor churned with so much love and wedded bliss of late the sight had become downright sickening. James MacKintosh couldn’t understand how his brothers had managed to fall love-struck one after another. Not when they all knew as well as he how such an emotion could send a man from heaven straight to the bowels of hell. But, damned if they didn’t somehow make it all look so bloody appealing. New York suffragette Primrose Eames had more than enough men trying to control her already. There was no chance she’d relent and marry again, despite her brothers’ dogged “encouragement” on the matter. More than anything, she wanted independence and the freedom to live life on her own terms. A husband would only serve to snatch that dream away from her forever. What Prim needed was a decoy and James MacKintosh was just the man for the job. Having failed in his search for the perfect woman to wed, James was happy to help Prim with a false courtship, but only because it served his purposes to avoid the matchmakers as well. However, James soon discovers that even a fictitious courtship with a woman set on never remarrying has its own challenges. For Prim, the courtship begins to feel all too real. James is too charming, too engaging and so supportive of her cause. It doesn’t take long before she realizes there is a certain freedom to be found in marriage the right sort of man. If the right sort of man were interested in marriage, that is. It’s only when betrayal and despair leave them both longing for more in their lives that they realize the importance of a love worth having, and a question worth asking.

She lost faith in the person she loved most Lady Piper Brudenall hoped, prayed, and pleaded for her brother to return to London and rescue her from the marriage her mother arranged for her to a despicable nobleman. Heartbroken by her brother’s apparent abandonment but with nowhere left to turn, Piper knew she had no one left to trust. No one to count on. No choice but to save herself. Leaving behind life as she knew it, she ran away from it all. Living right under their noses. Fearing what would become of her if she were ever discovered. He found love in the most unexpected place Connor MacKintosh relishes the chance to take control of the Marquis of Aylesbury’s estate, Dinton Grange, while his sister and her new husband were on their honeymoon. Getting his hands dirty evolves into a far more fascinating undertaking when he encounters a bonny lass with a smile potent enough to leave a man weak in the knees. As taken as he is by her, Connor realizes the mysterious woman is running from something, or someone. Unfortunately, he can be of no help to her if she persists in running from him. Wariness of strangers has kept Piper’s presence at the Grange a secret for more than two years. However, while distrust hasn’t entirely guaranteed security… it has ensured loneliness. When Connor comes along offering a friendly ear, a helping hand, and something more unexpected, she’s torn between her head and her heart. One knows she’d be a fool to put her faith in another man. The other promises that he is a man like no other. As Piper’s past threatens to catch up with her, Connor will do anything he can to keep her safe. Whether she will trust him with her life and her heart… That’s a question for the ages.

For four decades, Depeche Mode dominated electronic music, from the naïve melodies of 1981’s Speak & Spell through to 2023’s Memento Mori. Through changing line-ups featuring Vince Clarke, Alan Wilder, and Andy Fletcher, singer Dave Gahan and main songwriter Martin Gore have been the band’s core. Starting as teenagers and now in their 60s, they have survived worldwide fame, addictions to drink and drugs, and near-death experiences, while continuing to innovate as technology and the music business evolved. An acclaimed live band, it is through their fifteen studio albums that Depeche Mode have best expressed themselves, from the industrial darkness of Black Celebration (1986) to their popular breakthroughs with Music For the Masses (1987) and Violator (1990) and the emotional upheaval of 1993’s Songs of Faith and Devotion. The band survived the chaotic fallout from that album and tour in the mid-1990s, with Gahan experiencing a near-fatal drug overdose, to regroup with Ultra (1997). They continued their explorations of love, death, sex, and politics on acclaimed albums Playing the Angel (2005), Delta Machine (2013), and Spirit (2016). Inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2020, proven survivors Depeche Mode have their story told here in song-by-song detail. Brian J. Robb is the New York Times and Sunday Times bestselling biographer of Leonardo DiCaprio, Johnny Depp, and Brad Pitt. He has also written books on silent cinema, the films of Philip K. Dick, Wes Craven, Laurel and Hardy, the Star Wars movies, Superheroes, Gangsters, and Walt Disney, as well as science fiction television series Doctor Who and Star Trek. His illustrated books include an Illustrated History of Steampunk and Middle-earth Envisioned, a guide to J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings (Winner, Best Book, Tolkien Society Awards). He is a Founding Editor of the Sci-Fi Bulletin website and lives near Edinburgh, UK.

Scientists Kate and Mitch adopt a young chimp, Lulu, in pursuit of their research into the development of language. Growing fonder of Lulu than is perhaps scientific, Kate and Mitch could never have guessed at the creaking shifts of affection and desire that will be played out around her, the newly dark centre of their household. Comic, bizarre, perceptive and beautiful, Lulu explores the intricacies of love in the modern world.