People like to think that money and love are opposites. Anna Moore, tax inspector A2 Grade, has come to be less sure ...'John Law is Anna's latest client, and her most formidable challenge. The 'Cryptographer', people call him. He is mysterious and charming, the world's first quadrillionaire, the inventor of an unbreakable code, the creator of the world's first great electric currency.In the new millenium, it is no longer quite acceptable to admire the rich. But Law is both distrusted and admired more than most, more than Anna understands. That will have to change. Rule number one: information is the inspector's greatest weapon. And Anna needs to know - what is it that a man like John Law would seek to hide, and why?From the acclaimed author of Underground and The Love of Stones, The Cryptographer is a brilliant vision of the London of tomorrow and a thrilling and unforgettable story of codes, love and money.

Among the rush-hour crowds and abandoned levels of the London Underground, someone is pushing women under trains. In his search for the killer, Casimir, a Tube worker, is led ever deeper into this city beneath the city.Below the bright crowds and tunnel musicians is a labyrinth of long-forgotten cross-passages, deep shelters and derelict Victorian stations. Hunting for clues that will lead him to the killer, Casimir is also drawn back into his own past and the terrible secrets of his Polish childhood. In subterranean London, Casimir has gone to ground. But in his desperate search he discovers a chance for forgiveness and the emergence of a new life.Underground is a compelling, intensely atmospheric first novel. It confirms Tobias Hill as an author who, in the words of the Observer, 'writes the kind of fiction that can change the way you look at the world'.

'I am following the traces of a great jewel. All its owners are dead, and the jewel is lost...'Precious stones are thousands of years old. They pass through the hands of owners and smugglers, merchants and thieves. Often the hands leave no trace, but they are there all the same: they leave impressions, invisible, like atoms of hydrogen drawn to the surface of a diamond.The Love of Stones charts three lives linked by one such jewel. Katherine Sterne searches the goldsmiths' quarters and hidden archives of contemporary London, Tokyo and Istanbul, following the trail of a long-lost jewel: a brooch of rubies, diamonds and pearls once worn by Queen Elizabeth I. Two hundred years earlier, a pair of Iraqi Jewish brothers travel to London, their fortunes made by an unearthed jar of mysterious and priceless stones. An epic story spanning two continents and six centuries, The Love of Stones follows three very different people, each in their own way consumed by...

In an isolated trailer home in the far north of Japan, an old criminal scrutinizes his tattooed skin while he waits for the past to catch up with him. A year later, the life of a young policeman breaks down as he investigates a tattooed corpse and the history of death and guilt embedded in its skin.From the Japanese underworld to midnight in the London Zoo aquarium, Skin charts the lives of people in a world made stark and fantastical. The grief of a young computer programmer who cannot erase the ghostly memories of his twins. The vicious logic of the games played by children while their parents sip drinks under parasols. And London Zoo, where the disappearance of dead animals is blamed on the 'Featherman', an eerie bodysnatcher who passes through London's wastelands and derelict spaces, leaving no trace for the feathers of green humming-birds.

In Sparta, southern Greece, a close-knit group search for the buried traces of a formidable ancient power. A latecomer, Ben Mercer finds himself drawn to their brilliance and charisma: to the double-edged friendship of his countryman Jason, the unsettling beauty of the women, Natsuko and Eleschen, and the menace of Max and Eberhard, who idealise the extremes of the ancient Spartans. Thrilled by the possibility of acceptance and excited by the dangerous games they play, Ben gradually wins his way into the circle. But there is more to the group than he understands, and Ben finds out too late that some things should remain hidden. He must decide where his loyalties lie - before the decision is taken for him. Written with astonishing grace and power, "The Hidden" is a novel about the secrets we keep, the ties that bind us and the true cost of fulfilling our desires.

London in the aftermath of war: children run wild on East End bombsites, while their elders strive for better lives in a country beggared by victory. Clarence and Bernadette Malcolm have come five thousand miles in search of prosperity, but find the Mother Country not at all as has been promised them; Solly and Dora Lazarus, too, are strangers in a strange land, struggling to belong even as they try to make sense of their past; and Michael and Mary Lockhart take with both hands all that the world owes them, wherever it leads them, whatever the cost. In the street markets and tenements of Bethnal Green the three families live and work together in uneasy harmony, until Michael shatters the balance between them, his hunger for betterment changing the courses of all their lives over decades and generations.Reaching across forty years and capturing a city and a people in a time of tumultuous change, What Was Promised is a breathtaking novel by a master storyteller.