Mad Men is one of the hottest shows on television, and its fans are dying to know how accurate it is: did people really have that much sex in the office? Were there really three-martini lunches? Were women really second-class citizens? Jane Maas says the answer to all three questions is unequivocally yes.

And her book, based on her own experiences and those of her peers, gives the full stories behind the scenes, from the junior account man whose wife nearly left him when she found the copy of Screw magazine he’d used to find 'entertainment' for a client, to the Ogilvy & Mather agency’s legendary annual sex-and-booze filled Boat Ride, from which it was said no virgin ever returned intact.

Wickedly funny and full of juicy inside information, Mad Women also tackles the tougher issues of the era, such as equal pay, rampant jaw-dropping sexism, and the difficult choice many women faced between motherhood and their careers.

'In the Mad Men TV show, the males are depicted as shtupping their secretaries as they drink and smoke themselves to death, with nary a female copywriter in sight. In this damn funny book, the talented Jane Maas, who lived through those days of struggle and sometimes humiliation, tells it like it really was.’ George Lois, legendary NY ad man

This is the story of the crime that rocked Melbourne – in January 2009 a law-abiding, church-going father of two from Melbourne's leafy eastern suburbs didn't come home after a business trip, and his burnt remains were found in a northern suburb, the wrong side of town, a week later.

A police investigation uncovered the truth – Rockefeller had met with an alcoholic single mum and her older boyfriend for sex, and the liaison went horribly wrong. Was Rockefeller leading a double life as a swinger? How did a successful businessman worth $400 million find himself in the home of two down-and-outers?

While Rockefeller has taken some answers to his grave, Hilary Bonney pulls us right inside the world of the killers in this classic true crime, drawing on past cases to uncover the motivations of the multi-millionaire who fell from grace.

In INSIDE APPLE, Adam Lashinsky provides readers with an insight on leadership and innovation. He introduces Apple business concepts like the 'DRI' (Apple's practice of assigning a Directly Responsible Individual to every task) and the Top 100 (an annual event where that year's top 100 up-and-coming executives are surreptitiously transported to a secret retreat with company founder Steve Jobs). Based on numerous interviews, the book reveals exclusive new information about how Apple innovates, deals with its suppliers, and is handling the transition into the Post Jobs Era. While INSIDE APPLE provides a detailed investigation into the unique company, its lessons about leadership, product design and marketing are universal. INSIDE APPLE will appeal to anyone hoping to bring some of the Apple magic to their own company, career, or creative endeavour.


Author Biography: Adam Lashinsky is a Senior Editor at Large for Fortune magazine. As the magazine's leading correspondent in Silicon Valley, he has interviewed all of the technology industry's top figures. He also is a weekly commentator on the Fox News Channel, and prior to joining Fortune he wrote for TheStreet.com and The San Jose Mercury News.                                            

 Pepys Road: an ordinary street in the Capital. Each house has seen its fair share of first steps and last breaths, and plenty of laughter in between. Today, through each letterbox along this ordinary street drops a card with a simple message: We Want What You Have.
At forty, Roger Yount is blessed with an expensively groomed wife, two small sons and a powerful job in the City. An annual bonus of a million might seem excessive, but with second homes and nannies to maintain, he's not sure he can get by without it. Elsewhere in the Capital, Zbigniew has come from Warsaw to indulge the super-rich in their interior decoration whims. Freddy Kano, teenage football sensation, has left a two-room shack in Senegal to follow his dream. Traffic warden Quentina has exchanged the violence of the police in Zimbabwe for the violence of the enraged middle classes. For them all, this city offers the chance of a different kind of life.
Epic in scope yet intimate, capturing the ordinary dramas of very different lives, this is a novel of love and suspicion, of financial collapse and terrorist threat, of property values going up and fortunes going down, and of a city at a moment of extraordinary tension.



Due for Release April 2012

Pitched between THE CROW ROAD and THE WASP FACTORY, STONEMOUTH is set in a small town north of Aberdeen and involves two warring crime families. Our hero was run out of town five years ago and now he's back for a family funeral - some closeted skeletons are about to appear!





Author Biography: Iain Banks came to widespread and controversial public notice with the publication of his first novel, THE WASP FACTORY, in 1984. He has since gained enormous popular and critical acclaim for both his mainstream and his science fiction novels.                                            

Marcus and Doro were part of a commune from the late 1960s until the early 1990s: lentils, free love, spliffs, radical politics, cheesecloth blouses, sex, housework and cooking rotas, crochet, allotments. Their children have grown up rather different from them: primary school teacher Clara craves order and clean bathrooms, son Serge is pretending to his parents that he is still doing a Maths PhD at Cambridge, while in fact working making loads of money in the City; while third child Oolie Anna, who has Downs Syndrome, is desperate to escape home and live on her own. Once the truth starts breaking through, who knows what further secrets will be revealed about any of them? Set half in Doncaster, half in London, this is a very funny riff on modern values, featuring hamsters, cockroaches, poodles, a Chicken and multiplying rabbits, told by Marina Lewycka in her unique and brilliant combination of irony, farce and wit.

Author Biography: Marina Lewycka was born in Kiel, Germany at the end of the war and grew up in England. She is married with a grown-up daughter and lives in Sheffield. Her two previous novels, A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian and Two Caravans, are available in Penguin now.                                            


Due for release Late February 2012

The boring debate between fundamentalist believers and non-believers is finally moved on by Alain de Botton's inspiring new book, which boldly argues that the supernatural claims of religion are of course entirely false - and yet that religions still have important things to teach the secular world. Rather than mocking religions, agnostics and atheists should instead steal from them - because they're packed with good ideas on how we live and arrange our societies. Blending deep respect with total impiety, de Botton (a non-believer) proposes that we should look to religions for insights into how to build a sense of community, make our relationships last, get more out of art, overcome feelings of envy and inadequacy, and much more. For too long non-believers have faced a stark choice between either swallowing peculiar doctrines or doing away with consoling and beautiful rituals and ideas. At last Alain de Botton has fashioned a far more interesting and truly helpful alternative.

Author Biography: Alain de Botton was born in 1969 and is the author of non-fiction essays on themes ranging from love and travel to architecture and philosophy. His bestselling books include How Proust Can Change Your Life, The Art of Travel, and The Architecture of Happiness. He lives in London and founded The School of Life (www.theschooloflife.com) and Living Architecture (www.living-architecture.co.uk). For more information, consult www.alaindebotton.com.                                            

Ed Cowan, opening left-hand batsman for Tasmania, has always been a bit of a scribbler. It started with to-do lists and notes to self, but then he started keeping a cricket diary a batting bible with thoughts on the game, other players, motivational philosophies and records of performances. The diary has become so much a part of his routine that he admits to being a little upset if he cant see it in his cricket bag. Other cricketers have found the habit a little odd. But for Cowan its been a way of keeping an uncluttered head and making sense of the game. In the Firing Line, based on the diary Cowan kept while playing his second season for Tasmania over the summer of 2010-11, reveals with intelligence and a touch of humour the excruciatingly shaky position of the domestic cricket player. Its far from the glamour of playing for Australia and uncomfortably close to the long drop to amateurism, yet every match is rife with the possibility of being discovered and propelled into international stardom in the baggy green.                                  

       A bewitching tale of heartbreak and hope set in 1920s Alaska. Jack and Mabel have staked everything on making a fresh start for themselves in a homestead 'at the world's edge' in the raw Alaskan wilderness. But as the days grow shorter, Jack is losing his battle to clear the land, and Mabel can no longer contain her grief for the baby she lost many years before. The evening the first snow falls, their mood unaccountably changes. In a moment of tenderness, the pair are surprised to find themselves building a snowman - or rather a snow girl - together. The next morning, all trace of her has disappeared, and Jack can't quite shake the notion that he glimpsed a small figure - a child? - running through the spruce trees in the dawn light. And how to explain the little but very human tracks Mabel finds at the edge of their property? Written with the clarity and vividness of the Russian fairytale from which it takes its inspiration, The Snow Child is an instant classic - the story of a couple who take a child into their hearts, all the while knowing they can never truly call her their own.

Review: 'This book is real magic, shot through from cover to cover with the cold, wild beauty of the Alaskan frontier. Eowyn Ivey writes with all the captivating delicacy of the snowfalls she so beautifully describes' -- Ali Shaw, author of The Girl With Glass Feet 

Pablo Picasso's endless fascination with his lover's character and form <br>led to radical shifts in his conception of portraiture and the mystical metamorphoses that the act of creation entails. Picasso's secretive love affair with Marie-Therese Walter, which began in 1927, inspired a radical shift in his conception of portraiture. The exhibition and catalogue present Marie-Therese as a primary vehicle for his experimentation during the period, including several works never before seen in the United States as well as previously unpublished personal letters and photographs. Picasso and Marie-Therese sheds new light on the interpretation of one of the most creative relationships in Picasso's rich and varied oeuvre.