Books in Signature Lives series

In their new home in the country, Graham and his small sister, Matty, sense terrifying secrets are hidden there. Graham's father works on a state-of-the-art computer-guided weapons system for the future - shortly to be shown to the big players in the international weapons market. Troubled by the shifting presences and his small sister's conversations with an unseen young man she calls Paul, Graham looks for the key to the past. What he uncovers shakes the foundations of his existence: a secret First World War research establishment using British military prisoners as guinea-pigs, and a young man executed for speaking out. Past and future come together when his father is arrested for treason: the codes for the new weapons' operating system have been published on the Internet. By his father? Or, as Graham believes, the final act of the ghost of 'a young man who felt he'd failed in his own life and has seen the demons driven away in ours .

Madame Chiang Kai-shek was a powerful figure in Chinese politics. As wife of the Nationalist leader, she helped modernize China through the New Life Movement of the 1930s. She was educated in the United States and developed a unique understanding of American culture. She used this background to win U.S. support for the Nationalists in their struggles against Japan and the communists. Her diplomatic skills won her many admirers, but others criticized her obvious wealth at a time when most Chinese suffered from great poverty.

Cora lives with her mother and grandmother in a hamlet in the Yorkshire dales. The three are close, but Cora longs to meet her father, whom she has never seen. She likens him to an unknown man who is reported to have disappeared - 'vanished in a puff of smoke'. Chance events lead Cora to build a fantasy that, in the past, her father has come back to the neighbourhood in order to contact her. A burnt-out car on the moor; burglaries; stolen food - all convince her that her father is nearby and wants to meet her. But the moor is prohibited, and to search for him she has to ignore her loyalty to her mother and grandmother, the warnings given by her mother about her father, and the sensible caution of her friend, Emma...

Elizabeth Dole has spent most of her life serving the public. She held U.S. Cabinet positions as secretary of transportation and secretary of labor, and served as president of the American Red Cross. Her husband, Bob Dole, was a U.S. senator and was the Republican Party nominee for the presidency in 1996. While her husband lost his race, Elizabeth Dole won many admirers traveling the United States on the campaign trail. In 2002, she was elected U.S. senator, representing her home state of North Carolina.

Sixteenth-century geographer Gerardus Mercator was born in 1512 in Rupelmonde, Flanders. He lived during a time of religious strife and for a time was imprisoned for heresy. Mercator began his career as a maker of mathematical instruments, but he won lasting renown with his world map of 1569, which introduced a new way of showing the spherical earth on a flat sheet of paper. This method, called the Mercator projection, is still used today. His 1585 book, titled Atlas, was the first to use that word to describe a collection of maps.