Queen Elizabeth’s spymasters recruit an unlikely agent—the only Muslim in England—for an impossible mission in a mesmerizing novel from “one of the best writers in America” (The Washington Post) “Evokes flashes of Hilary Mantel, John le Carré and Graham Greene, but the wry, tricky plot that drives it is pure Arthur Phillips.”—The Wall Street Journal NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW AND THE WASHINGTON POST The year is 1601. Queen Elizabeth I is dying, childless. Her nervous kingdom has no heir. It is a capital crime even to think that Elizabeth will ever die. Potential successors secretly maneuver to be in position when the inevitable occurs. The leading candidate is King James VI of Scotland, but there is a problem. The queen’s spymasters—hardened veterans of a long war on terror and religious extremism—fear that James is not what he appears. He has every reason to claim to be a Protestant, but if he secretly shares his family’s Catholicism, then forty years of religious war will have been for nothing, and a bloodbath will ensue. With time running out, London confronts a seemingly impossible question: What does James truly believe? It falls to Geoffrey Belloc, a secret warrior from the hottest days of England’s religious battles, to devise a test to discover the true nature of King James’s soul. Belloc enlists Mahmoud Ezzedine, a Muslim physician left behind by the last diplomatic visit from the Ottoman Empire, as his undercover agent. The perfect man for the job, Ezzedine is the ultimate outsider, stranded on this cold, wet, and primitive island. He will do almost anything to return home to his wife and son. Arthur Phillips returns with a unique and thrilling novel that will leave readers questioning the nature of truth at every turn.

Under tennis courts at a ruined Suffolk abbey, archaeologists make a thrilling find: the remains of St Edmund, king and martyr. He was venerated for centuries as England's patron saint, but his body has been lost since the closure of the monasteries. Culture Secretary Marina Spencer, adored by those who don't know her, jumps on the bandwagon. Egged on by her downtrodden adviser Mark Price, she promotes St Edmund as a new patron saint for the United Kingdom, playing up his Scottish, Welsh, and Irish credentials. Unfortunately these credentials are a fiction, invented by Mark in a moment of panic. As crisis looms, the one person who can see through the whole deception is Mark's cousin Hannah, a dig volunteer. Will she blow the whistle or help him out? And what of St Edmund himself, watching through the baffling prism of a very different age? Splicing ancient and modern as he did in The Hopkins Conundrum and A Right Royal Face-Off, Simon Edge pokes fun at Westminster culture and celebrates the cult of a medieval saint in this beguiling and utterly original comedy.

'A brilliant, funny and thought-provoking book' - Jonn Elledge 'Compelling, provocative, and utterly brilliant' - Dr Estelle Paranque THIS PAPERBACK FEATURES ADDITIONAL MATERIAL ON HER MAJESTY QUEEN ELIZABETH II How the monarchs of England and Scotland met their deaths has been a wonderful mixture of violence, infections, overindulgence and occasional regicide. In Mortal Monarchs, medical historian Dr Suzie Edge examines 1,000 years of royal deaths to uncover the plots, accusations, rivalries, and ever-present threat of poison that the kings and queens of old faced. From the "bloody" fascinating story behind Oliver Cromwell's demise and the subsequent treatment of his corpse and whether the arrow William II caught in the chest was an accident or murder, to Henry IV's remarkable skin condition and the red-hot poker up Edward II's rear end, Mortal Monarchs captivates, grosses-out and informs. In school many of us learned the dates they died and who followed them, but sadly never heard the varied - and oft-gruesome - way our monarchs met their maker. Featuring original medical research, this history forms a rich record not just of how these people died, but how we thought about and treated the human body, in life and in death.

This “sobering tale of the real consequences of gender bias” explores how Britain lost its early dominance in computing by systematically discriminating against its most qualified workers: women (Harvard Magazine) In 1944, Britain led the world in electronic computing. By 1974, the British computer industry was all but extinct. What happened in the intervening thirty years holds lessons for all postindustrial superpowers. As Britain struggled to use technology to retain its global power, the nation’s inability to manage its technical labor force hobbled its transition into the information age. In Programmed Inequality, Mar Hicks explores the story of labor feminization and gendered technocracy that undercut British efforts to computerize. That failure sprang from the government’s systematic neglect of its largest trained technical workforce simply because they were women. Women were a hidden engine of growth in high technology from World War II to the 1960s. As computing experienced a gender flip, becoming male-identified in the 1960s and 1970s, labor problems grew into structural ones and gender discrimination caused the nation’s largest computer user—the civil service and sprawling public sector—to make decisions that were disastrous for the British computer industry and the nation as a whole. Drawing on recently opened government files, personal interviews, and the archives of major British computer companies, Programmed Inequality takes aim at the fiction of technological meritocracy. Hicks explains why, even today, possessing technical skill is not enough to ensure that women will rise to the top in science and technology fields. Programmed Inequality shows how the disappearance of women from the field had grave macroeconomic consequences for Britain, and why the United States risks repeating those errors in the twenty-first century.

'A richly textured comic masterpiece' - Thomas Fleming Present day Dublin. Ambrose Sheehy-O'Connor is an unlikely protagonist whose wayward energy and imagination explode in unpredictable directions in a country consuming itself in culture wars. Ambrose is a 23 year old misfit, who has an otherworldly encounter, and becomes convinced he has a mission to convert a secularizing Ireland to his own bizarre religion. His strange appearance, gaucherie and naivety - plus a theology blended from medieval Christianity, fantasy novels and computer games - horrify his mother and spark ridicule and violent hatred. But he also finds devotees looking for any kind of leader. His quest brings him into confused, comical and calamitous contact with believers and unbelievers from disillusioned nuns to glamorous socialites, leftist chat-show hosts to sleazy New Age healers - all brought together in a fable of change and continuity. A Modern Journey is a compelling, complex and well-written literary novel. It is about one man's journey from obscurity to notoriety and indifference to enlightenment in modern Ireland. Praise for A Modern Journey "Catholic conservatives and modernizers, disillusioned nuns, glamorous socialites, ultra-nationalists, leftist chat-show hosts, sleazy New Age healers, pious Travellers - what's not to like in such an irresistible mix!" - Ruth Dudley Edwards, author of Patrick Pearse: The Triumph of Failure "Finely written, deft characterization, funny, compulsive...Turner's concerns are philosophical and portentous, in the European tradition of social movement and ideas, yet he cloaks this evisceration of a corner of our contemporary world in adept drollery. A comic tour de force of import, Joycean in its magnificent flow." - Stoddard Martin , author of Wagner to the Waste Land "A richly textured comic masterpiece that manages to satirize the post-Christian West.... Derek Turner pulls no punches as he takes us on his magic carpet ride through the Irish landscape...This novel... has something to offend every postmodern sensibility." - Thomas Fleming, author of The Morality of Everyday Life "I know of no other living novelist who produces such taut sentences, so barbed, so seamlessly invested with classic references...and so satirically murderous...an author of quicksilver intelligence and X-ray eyes." - Tito Perdue, author of William's House Derek Turner has written for The Times, Daily Mail, Sunday Telegraph, Literary Review, Country Life, and many other journals in Europe and America. He is also the author of the novel Sea Changes and Displacement which is a Kindle Single.

England on Edge traces the collapse of the government of Charles I, the disintegration of the established church, and the accompanying cultural panic that led to civil war. Focused on the years 1640 to 1642, it examines social and religious turmoil and the emergence of an unrestrained popular press. Hundreds of people not normally seen in historical surveys make appearances here, in a drama much larger than the struggle of king and parliament.

In his continuing adventures, Twig, now sixteen years old, joins the crew of his father's sky pirate ship and embarks on a dangerous mission to collect the powerful stormphrax, a substance that purifies water and also prevents the city of Sanctaphrax from floating away.