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Talking with Serial Killers by Christopher Berry-Dee

Investigative criminologist Christopher Berry-Dee talks to serial killers in an amazing and disturbing collection of interviews with some of the world's most evil men. A true crime classic, this book offers a penetrating insight into the workings of the criminal mind from inside the world's toughest prisons.

The Mulberry Empire by Philip Hensher

In the 19th century the struggle for power in central Asia between the Russian and the British Empires, known as the Great Game, reached its climax. The consequences of this epic and complex struggle continue to reverberate through history to the present day. Set against this dramatic backdrop, The Mulberry Empire is a huge and compelling novel of adventure, intrigue and treachery, which centres on the difficult and shifting relationship between Alexander Burnes, gentleman and explorer, and the Afghan ruler Amir Dost Mohammed Khan. Returning from his Asiatic travels, Burnes is fêted as a hero and lionised by fashionable London. He meets a society beauty named Bella Galloway, an encounter which leads to a brief and fateful liaison. But Burnes soon returns to Afghanistan, where he becomes intimately involved in the complicated jostling for power which results in the arrival of British forces in the spring of 1839. Three years later they retreat in bloody chaos, and a single horseman reaches Jalalabad to tell the story of their destruction. Hensher’s novel teems with extraordinary characters: Burnes himself; the Amir and his son Akbar; Charles Masson, an army deserter who takes up residence in Kabul; the Russian, Vitkevich, linguist and emissary. It is a story of great contrasts and absorbing detail, set against the battleground of opposing and colliding cultures. Moving through time and space, it celebrates, above all, the heartbreakingly beautiful country of Afghanistan, doomed to be battered and plundered endlessly by foreign powers, prey to the intricate dealings and betrayals of agents and their governments. The Mulberry Empire is a historical novel written in a profoundly contemporary style. Hensher's powerful storytelling talent is enriched by an understanding of how history is both made and told. It is a remarkable narrative feat and by far the most ambitious work that Philip Hensher has yet produced.

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