Books published by publisher Black Swan

Three women, smart and successful, working in the fast and furious world of magazines, meet for cocktails and gossip once a month. Roxanne: glamorous, self-confident, with a secret lover - and hoping that one day he will leave his wife and marry her. Maggie: capable and high-achieving, until she finds the one thing she can't cope with - motherhood. Candice: honest, decent, or so she believes - until a ghost from her past turns up, and almost ruins her life. A chance encounter in the cocktail bar sets in train an extraordinary set of events which upsets all their lives and almost destroys their friendship.

In At Home, Bill Bryson applies the same irrepressible curiosity, irresistible wit, stylish prose and masterful storytelling that made A Short History of Nearly Everything one of the most lauded books of the last decade, and delivers one of the most entertaining and illuminating books ever written about the history of the way we live. Bill Bryson was struck one day by the thought that we devote a lot more time to studying the battles and wars of history than to considering what history really consists of: centuries of people quietly going about their daily business - eating, sleeping and merely endeavouring to get more comfortable. And that most of the key discoveries for humankind can be found in the very fabric of the houses in which we live.This inspired him to start a journey around his own house, an old rectory in Norfolk, wandering from room to room considering how the ordinary things in life came to be. Along the way he did a prodigious amount of research on the history of anything and everything, from architecture to electricity, from food preservation to epidemics, from the spice trade to the Eiffel Tower, from crinolines to toilets; and on the brilliant, creative and often eccentric minds behind them. And he discovered that, although there may seem to be nothing as unremarkable as our domestic lives, there is a huge amount of history, interest and excitement - and even a little danger - lurking in the corners of every home.

Turner's Rebellion took place in the long hot summer of 1831, in the state of Virginia. When it was over, 59 white people were dead; the insurgents were rounded up and either hanged or worse; and Nat Turner, a preacher, confessed to his part in the only effective revolt in the annals of American Negro slavery. In his introduction of this Pulitzer Prize winner, Styron says "it has been my own intention to try to re-create a man and his era, and to produce a work that is less an historical novel in conventional terms than a meditation on history."

Welcome to Mount Misery psychiatric hospital, home of the crazed, the suicidal, the Machiavellian and the wicked. And that's just the doctors. For Dr Roy Basch, proudly starting his residency there, it is a bewildering and nightmarish experience. The different disciplines appear to compete with one another to find the best ways to reduce the patients to gibbering wrecks. As he immerses himself in the system, he discovers that the process of treating the patients has less to do with making them better and more with maintaining the flow of insurance company money. Basch believes that he can find meaning here, but in an enclosed world which has lost its head, he soon finds that survival, not meaning, is the most valuable lesson he will learn.Mount Misery is hilarious, provocative and terrifying. Filled with biting irony and a wonderful sense of the absurd, it is an absorbing and authentic report from within the crumbling fortress of psychiatry and tells you everything you'll never learn in therapy. And it's a hell of a sight funnier too.