Lucy, Hermione and Sam offer to accompany the captain and his dog, Biscuit on the next trip to keep a lookout for danger. But danger is exactly what they run into! The pirates aren't just after more popcorn they want new recruits too! Will three children — and a dog — defeat the greediest gang of grub-guzzling pirates ever to sail the high seas?

Billy, Nicola and Mr Gopal are off to India in a flying boat to solve a baffling mystery! The gum that comes from the wonderful bubblegum trees that grow in the Indian jungle has not been delivered for two months. Without this secret ingredient, there'll be no more Gopal's Best Pink Bubblegum, and even more importantly, no more Bubblegummies — the people who live in the trees and harvest the gum. It's not an easy mystery to solve — and soon the friends are involved in a bungee-jumping, tiger-trouncing, woodcutter-walloping, bubblegum-blowing adventure!

Jim and his friends are upset to hear that their school janitor's car has been stolen, and just before he's due to retire too. So Jim comes up with a bright idea for a way to help raise money to buy a new car: selling doughnuts. They start by making their own very delicious doughnuts to sell, but run into problems when demand exceeds supply. That's when Jim has another brainwave and decides the only way to make enough is to write a chain letter asking people to make more doughnuts. The doughnuts start rolling in and rolling in and soon Jim is up to his ears in them. It takes another inspired business idea to rescue a situation which is rapidly getting out of hand. This is the inspiring story of a boy with a big heart and big business ideas, from bestselling author, Alexander McCall Smith.

Alexander McCall Smith, best-selling author of The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency, has turned his hand to humour. The delightful result is a creation of comic genius. For in the unnaturally tall form of Professor Doctor Moritz-Maria von Igelfeld, we are invited to meet a memorable character whose sublime insouciance is a blend of the cultivated pomposity of Frasier Crane and of Inspecteur Clouseau’s hapless gaucherie. Von Igelfeld inhabits the rarefied world of the Institute of Romance Philology at Regensburg, a world he shares with his equally tall and equally ridiculous colleagues, Professors Florianus Prinzel and Detlev Amadeus Unterholzer. Their unlikely adventures are described in three deliciously funny instalments: Portuguese Irregular Verbs, The Finer Points of Sausage Dogs and At the Villa of Reduced Circumstances.

Precious Ramotswe, that cheerful Botswanan private investigator of 'traditional build', is well-known to millions across the world through the best-selling No.1 Ladies' Detective Agency series. Those who have been following her exploits in five previously published novels will soon be able to savour the next instalment, in which, as usual, circumstances are never as straightforward as they seem and events take a more than unexpected turn. Precious Ramotswe, is now married to Mr J.L.B. Matekoni, of Tlokweng Road Speedy Motors. The Agency is busy, but Mma Ramotswe cannot ignore the plea which is made to her by a woman who comes to her with a tale of particular misfortune. Unfortunately, her attempts to help are interrupted by a close encounter between her tiny white van and a bicycle, and by a spectacular disagreement between her assistant, Mma Makutsi, and one of the apprentices at the garage. This apprentice has found a fancy girlfriend who drives a large silver Mercedes-Benz. How can he be rescued from his folly? And as for Mma Makutsi, she has found a dancing class, and a man who may not be able to dance very well but who admires her greatly. And all of this happens against a background of quiet sessions of bush tea, and of a land that stretches out forever under mile upon mile of empty sky.

Wayward daughters. Missing husbands. Philandering partners. If you've got a problem, and no one else can help you, then pay a visit to Precious Ramotswe, Botswana's only female private detective. Her methods may not be conventional, but she's got warmth, wit and canny intuition on her side.