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In the relentless summer heat, four abruptly orphaned children retreat into a shadowy, isolated world, and find their own strange and unsettling ways of fending for themselves.

On a beautiful cloudless day in the Chilterns Joe and his girlfriend are about to open a bottle of champagne when a cry interrupts them. A hot-air balloon with a child in the basket and an adult being dragged behind it has been ripped from its moorings. Joe immediately joins in with an effort to bring the balloon to safety, but in the ensuing rescue attempt a man is killed. Witness to this tragic accident is bystander Jed Parry. Joe and Jed exchange a passing glance - a glance which carries devastating consequences and which burns an obsession into Jed's soul. Delusional and dangerous, Jed's fixation gradually uproots Joe's life; testing the limits of his beloved rationalism, threatening his relationship with his girlfriend and driving him to the brink of murder and madness.

In-between the Sheets is a collection of macabre short stories. The short story Pornography tells of a two-timing pornographer who becomes an unwilling object in the fantasies of one of his victims.

Management Teaching use:(Pornography) There are several issues, which can usefully be discussed in consideration of this short story. The shop around which the plot revolves sells pornographic literature and some students might like to comment on the ethical perspectives of business. Equally interesting, however, is the owner's attitude towards his own customers, which is contemptuous. Indeed, throughout the text there is a sense that none of the businesses involved in the sale of the product (pornography) approve of it. Students could consider whether or not an organisation has to have a belief in what it sells to be successful. Is it enough to provide what a market wants? Also how does this conflict with more conventional teaching on management and integrity?

In a hotel on the Dorset coast, overlooking Chesil Beach, Edward and Florence, who got married that morning, are sitting down to dinner in their room. Neither is entirely able to suppress their anxieties about the wedding night to come. This is a story about how the entire course of a life can be changed by a gesture not made or a word not spoken.

Michael Beard is a Nobel prize-winning physicist whose best work is behind him. Trading on his reputation, he speaks for enormous fees, lends his name to the letterheads of renowned scientific institutions and half-heartedly heads a government-backed initiative tackling global warming. A compulsive womaniser, Beard finds his fifth marriage floundering. But this time it is different: she is having the affair, and he is still in love with her. When Beard's professional and personal worlds collide in a freak accident, an opportunity presents itself for Beard to extricate himself from his marital mess, reinvigorate his career and save the world from environmental disaster. Ranging from the Arctic Circle to the deserts of New Mexico, Solar is a serious and darkly satirical novel, showing human frailty struggling with the most pressing and complex problem of our time. A story of one man's greed and self-deception, it is a profound and stylish new work from one of the world's great writers.