The Feather Men

The story of a secret organization called The Feathermen and their 14-year attempt to trace the killers of a number of British ex-servicemen in Britain and abroad. Ranulph Fiennes has published eight books, two of which have been in The Sunday Times bestseller list.

As heard on NPR's This American Life “Absorbing . . . Though it's non-fiction, The Feather Thief contains many of the elements of a classic thriller.” —Maureen Corrigan, NPR’s Fresh Air “One of the most peculiar and memorable true-crime books ever.” —Christian Science Monitor A rollicking true-crime adventure and a captivating journey into an underground world of fanatical fly-tiers and plume peddlers, for readers of The Stranger in the Woods, The Lost City of Z, and The Orchid Thief. On a cool June evening in 2009, after performing a concert at London's Royal Academy of Music, twenty-year-old American flautist Edwin Rist boarded a train for a suburban outpost of the British Museum of Natural History. Home to one of the largest ornithological collections in the world, the Tring museum was full of rare bird specimens whose gorgeous feathers were worth staggering amounts of money to the men who shared Edwin's obsession: the Victorian art of salmon fly-tying. Once inside the museum, the champion fly-tier grabbed hundreds of bird skins—some collected 150 years earlier by a contemporary of Darwin's, Alfred Russel Wallace, who'd risked everything to gather them—and escaped into the darkness. Two years later, Kirk Wallace Johnson was waist high in a river in northern New Mexico when his fly-fishing guide told him about the heist. He was soon consumed by the strange case of the feather thief. What would possess a person to steal dead birds? Had Edwin paid the price for his crime? What became of the missing skins? In his search for answers, Johnson was catapulted into a years-long, worldwide investigation. The gripping story of a bizarre and shocking crime, and one man's relentless pursuit of justice, The Feather Thief is also a fascinating exploration of obsession, and man's destructive instinct to harvest the beauty of nature.

The deaths of four British soldiers, two of them ex SAS, appear at first to be accidental. In fact, they have been targeted by a group of hired assassins, known as the Clinic. This group of contract killers is systematically tracking down elite servicemen and killing them one by one... Desperate to stop the murders, a group of four men, the Feather Men, are recruited to hunt down the Clinic and avenge the soldiers' deaths. But will they get to them in time and what's driving the Clinic's own brutal form of justice? Ranulph Fiennes, himself a former SAS officer, uses his unique knowledge to craft this amazing thriller, now a major film, featuring Robert De Niro, Jason Statham and Clive Owen. Previously published as The Feather Men, the film KILLER ELITE was released in the UK on the 23rd September 2011.

From Sigrid Nunez, the National Book Award-winning author of The Friend, comes A Feather on the Breath of God: a mesmerizing story about the tangled nature of relationships between parents and children, between language and love A young woman looks back to the world of her immigrant parents: a Chinese-Panamanian father and a German mother. Growing up in a housing project in the 1950s and 1960s, she escapes into dreams inspired both by her parents' stories and by her own reading and, for a time, into the otherworldly life of ballet. A yearning, homesick mother, a silent and withdrawn father, the ballet--these are the elements that shape the young woman's imagination and her sexuality.

THE SETT is another absorbing thriller by Ranulph Fiennes, the man the Guinness Book of Records called the 'world's greatest living explorer'. 'The book is a tour de force in its scope, ambition and eclecticism'. - The Times A fight that starts when Alex wakes up in a Lancashire hospital severely battered and with no memory of the brutal attack that put him there. A year's struggle reveals his identity. But Alex is driven to spend a further nine years delving into a global criminal underworld, seeking revenge on his family's killers and becoming dangerously entangled with both the Mafia and the CIA, and with some of the most savage and powerful men in the world.

A beautiful book about a tenacious girl in a male household that delivers a message of acceptance, equality, and love.

A British journalist specializing in defense topics offers a readable, useful addition to the literature on American special operations forces.

Fiction. THE HYPOTHETICAL MAN is a darkly humorous collection of stories featuring an assortment of anonymous characters--A, B, and S--all with problems. They work undercover at an amusement park in Illinois or else they work at a secret government facility that would prefer not to be named. They attend a freewheeling sales meeting with death masks on the wall. Some raise pigs, others race goats. One lives in a suburban home where he watches his wife with another man. They are, together, misled, misunderstood, and mistaken often, but their pursuit of answers never ends. "The collaboration of Maliszewski and Weil yields an intellectually frothy collection... The authors display an almost palpable relish in their extended literary jousts. Readers with a similar sensibility will blissfully wallow in these elaborate yarns."--Publishers Weekly "Reading THE HYPOTHETICAL MAN is like eavesdropping on the fevered colloquy of two think-tank eminences expelled for conundrumizing too wisely for their own good about everything crucial and uncomfortable about lives lived with upheaving acuity. Paul Maliszewski and Ryan Weil have written an entrancement of a book, and you'll hang on their every word."--Gary Lutz "These stories? narratives? accusations? recriminations? are the smartest and most fascinating literary inventions you'll read this decade. Imagine an angry, frightened Luis Borges in an argument with himself, or Abbott and Costello if they were very, very well-read. The dueling, hilarious, self-eviscerating, meticulously crafted narratives of A and B make me think of My Dinner with Andre for the era of alternative facts, or Plato and his dialectic transported giddily into contemporary America. Every writer should read these--and anyone else who is interested in the beautiful, confusing disarray of the twenty-first century Western mind."--Clancy Martin "THE HYPOTHETICAL MAN is just the sort of fictional testament our meaning-deficient age demands--hilarious, profound, and relentlessly self-questioning. It is a tale told by two beguiling idiots; the kind of story you'd get if Rosencrantz and Guildenstern were mid-level CIA appointees, Samuel Beckett were a corporate consultant, and modern American life were re-envisioned as one long shaggy tahr story. If there's any justice in our bedraggled world, THE HYPOTHETICAL MAN will attract a grateful horde of real readers."--Chris Lehmann

A blistering new thriller about the horrors of war and the struggle to survive in the face of pure evil. Foreign correspondent Connie Burns is hunting a British mercenary that she believes is responsible for the rape and murder of five women in Sierra Leone in 2002. Two years later she finds him training Iraqi police in Baghdad. Connie is determined to expose his crimes, but then she is kidnapped and released after three days of unspeakable torture. Silently, she returns to England and attempts to isolate herself, but it soon becomes apparent that the horrors of the world and her own nightmarish past aren’t so easy to escape from.