Young Alex had barely been out of Kansas, much less go across the pond. While on a study semester, he meets a charming, handsome businessman on holiday named Mason. They strike up a quick, hot romance that is tested by jealousy and a secret admirer (among other things)! Will their love last beyond the London lust, or was it all an illusion in the fog?

A chronicle of London's sexual history encompasses nearly two thousand years and provides accessible coverage of such topics as sexuality in politics, the licentiousness of Victorian London, and the sexual underground of the twentieth century.

Charlie Koolhaas is an artist, photographer, and writer in Rotterdam. City Lust is the name of a fragrance that she found in a Dubai perfumery wholesale showroom, but it is also the starting point of an expedition that leads Koolhaas to a variety of places in Africa, Asia, Europe, the Middle East, and the United States. In Lagos, Guangzhou, Dubai, London, and Huston, she explores the rapid changes that a globalized economy forces upon these so very different metropolises. ​ During extended stays in each place, Koolhaas took a vast number of photographs, many of them of striking intensity. Her aim is not only to show the increasing uniformity of cities around the world, but also to demonstrate the discrepancy between cultural standardization and local diversity in the age of globalization. City Lust is a brilliant combination of everyday photography, pure documentation, and captivating observation. Accompanying the photos is an equally fascinating and illuminating essay by Koolhaas that brings together her own insights into global trade and its protagonists.

'Brand's meticulous research brings to life the colourful characters of the Georgian era's most notorious families with all the verve and skill of the era's finest novelists ... A powdered and pomaded, sordid and silk-swathed adventure' Hallie Rubenhold

If Paris is the city of love, then London is the city of lust. For over a thousand years, England's capital has been associated with desire, avarice and the sins of the flesh. Richard of Devises, a monk writing in 1180, warned that 'every quarter [of the city] abounds in great obscenities'. As early as the second century AD, London was notorious for its raucous festivities and disorderly houses, and throughout the centuries the bawdy side of life has taken easy root and flourished. In the third book of her fascinating London trilogy, award-winning popular historian Catharine Arnold turns her gaze to the city's relationship with vice through the ages. From the bath houses and brothels of Roman Londinium, to the stews and Molly houses of the 17thand 18thcenturies, London has always traded in the currency of sex. Whether pornographic publishers on Fleet Street, or fancy courtesans parading in Haymarket, its streets have long been witness to colourful sexual behaviour. In her usual accessible and entertaining style, Arnold takes us on a journey through the fleshpots of London from earliest times to present day. Here are buxom strumpets, louche aristocrats, popinjay politicians and Victorian flagellants - all vying for their place in London's league of licentiousness. From sexual exuberance to moral panic, the city has seen the pendulum swing from Puritanism to hedonism and back again. With latter chapters looking at Victorian London and the sexual underground of the 20thcentury and beyond, this is a fascinating and vibrant chronicle of London at its most raw and ribald.

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A blackly comic late 20th-century murder mystery set against the looming end of the millennium, in which a woman tries to orchestrate her own extinction—from "one of the most gifted novelists of his generation" (TIME). “Lyrical and obscene, colloquial and rhapsodic." —The New York Times First published in 1989, London Fields is set ten years into a dark future, against a backdrop of environmental and social decay and the looming threat of global cataclysm. As the dreaded Y2K approaches, Nicola Six, a “black hole” of sex and self-loathing, has chosen her thirty-fifth birthday, November 5, 1999, as the date of her own murder. Whom to manipulate into killing her is the question; her choice wavers between violent lowlife Keith Talent, who is obsessed with winning a darts tournament, and a dimly romantic banker named Guy Clinch. When Samson Young—a writer suffering from a long bout of writer’s block—stumbles upon these three, he believes he has found a story that will write itself. A highly unusual mystery with an unexpected twist at the end, London Fields is also a corrosively funny narrative of pyrotechnic complexity and scalding moral vision.

What to read next is every book lover's greatest dilemma. Nancy Pearl comes to the rescue with this wide-ranging and fun guide to the best reading new and old. Pearl, who inspired legions of litterateurs with "What If All (name the city) Read the Same Book," has devised reading lists that cater to every mood, occasion, and personality. These annotated lists cover such topics as mother-daughter relationships, science for nonscientists, mysteries of all stripes, African-American fiction from a female point of view, must-reads for kids, books on bicycling, "chick-lit," and many more. Pearl's enthusiasm and taste shine throughout.