The night before her lavish wedding, Cressida Forrest went to bed serene and happy. By morning she had vanished without a trace. Shocked and confused, the two families face a long day of revelations, as a complex, fragile web of sexual, marital and financial secrets is ripped apart by Cressida's disappearance.

Penny Vincenzi, queen of riveting family drama, delivers her most page-turning saga yet in this novel of intrigue, sure to please her legions of fans. The night before her lavish wedding, Cressida Forrest went to bed serene and happy. By morning she had vanished --- without apparent cause, and without a trace. Shocked, anxious, and uncomprehending, the two families face a long day of revelations, as a complex, fragile web of sexual, marital and financial secrets is ripped apart by Cressida's disappearance.

When Charlotte Rainsford, a retired schoolteacher, is accosted by a petty thief on a London street, the consequences ripple across the lives of acquaintances and strangers alike.

When Charlotte Rainsford, a retired schoolteacher, is accosted by a petty thief on a London street, the consequences ripple across the lives of acquaintances and strangers alike. A marriage unravels after an illicit love affair is revealed through an errant cell phone message; a posh yet financially strapped interior designer meets a business partner who might prove too good to be true; an old-guard historian tries to recapture his youthful vigor with an ill-conceived idea for a TV miniseries; and a middle-aged central European immigrant learns to speak English and reinvents his life with the assistance of some new friends.

Through a richly conceived and colorful cast of characters, Penelope Lively explores the powerful role of chance in people's lives and deftly illustrates how our paths can be altered irrevocably by someone we will never even meet.

Pico Iyer sets out to unravel the mysterious closeness he has always felt with English writer Graham Greene. He investigates all he has in common with Greene, and the deeper he delves, the more he begins to wonder if the man within his head is not Greene but his own father --- or even himself.

We all carry people inside our heads --- actors, leaders, writers, people out of history or fiction, met or unmet, who sometimes seem closer to us than people we know.
 
In THE MAN WITHIN MY HEAD, Pico Iyer sets out to unravel the mysterious closeness he has always felt with the English writer Graham Greene; he examines Greene’s obsessions, his elusiveness, his penchant for mystery. Iyer follows Greene’s trail from his first novel, THE MAN WITHIN, to such later classics as THE QUIET AMERICAN and begins to unpack all he has in common with Greene: an English public school education, a lifelong restlessness and refusal to make a home anywhere, a fascination with the complications of faith. The deeper Iyer plunges into their haunted kinship, the more he begins to wonder whether the man within his head is not Greene but his own father, or perhaps some more shadowy aspect of himself.
 
Drawing upon experiences across the globe, from Cuba to Bhutan, and moving, as Greene would, from Sri Lanka in war to intimate moments of introspection; trying to make sense of his own past, commuting between the cloisters of a 15-century boarding school and California in the 1960s, one of our most resourceful explorers of crossing cultures gives us his most personal and revelatory book.