Michael Marshall Smith's surreal, groundbreaking, and award-winning debut which resonates with wild humour interlaced with dark recollections of an emotional minefield.

May we introduce you to Stark.

Oh, and by the way -- good luck.

Stark is the private investigator who goes to work when Something Happens to you. And when a Something happens it's no good chanting 'go away go away go away' and cowering in a corner, because a Something always comes from your darkest past and won't be beaten until you face it. And that's not easy in a city where reality is twisting and broken, a world in which friends can become enemies in a heartbeat -- and where your most secret fear can become a soul-shredding reality.

And the worst of it is, for this nightmare you don't even have to be asleep...

Considered a modern classic, and consistently featured in lists of Books To Read Before Your Head Explodes, ONLY FORWARD is a novel you'll never forget.

Michael Marshall Smith's surreal, groundbreaking, and award-winning debut which resonates with wild humour interlaced with dark recollections of an emotional minefield.

Stark lives in Colour, a neighbourhood whose inhabitants like to be co-ordinated with their surroundings - a neighbourhood where spangly purple trousers are admired by the walls of buildings as you pass them. Close by is Sound, where you mustn't make any, apart from one designated hour a day when you can scream your lungs raw. Then there's Red - get off at Fuck Station Zero if you want to see a tactical nuclear battle recreated as a sales demonstration.

Stark has friends in Red, which is just as well because Something is about to happen. And when a Something happens it's no good chanting 'Duck and cover' while cowering in a corner, because a Something is always from the past, Stark's past, and it won't go away until you face it full on.

An unpredictable, poignant, and captivating tale for readers of all ages, by the critically acclaimed author of Only Forward.

There are a million stories in the world. Most are perfectly ordinary.

This one... isn't.

Hannah Green actually thinks her story is more mundane than most. But she's about to discover that the shadows in her life have been hiding a world where nothing is as it seems: that there's an ancient and secret machine that converts evil deeds into energy, that some mushrooms can talk -- and that her grandfather has been friends with the Devil for over a hundred and fifty years, and now they need her help.

For young Mark, the world has turned as bleak and gray as the Brighton winter. Separated from his real father and home in London, he's come to live with his mother and her new husband in an old house near the sea. He spends his days alone, trying to master the skateboard, while other boys his age are in school. He hates the unwanted stepfather who barged into Mark's life to rob him of joy. Worst of all, his once-vibrant mother has grown listless and weary, no longer interested in anything beyond her sitting room.

But on a damp and chilly evening, an accident carries Mark into the basement flat of the old woman who lives at the bottom of his stepfather's house. She offers tea, cakes, and sympathy . . . and the key to a secret, bygone world. Mark becomes caught up in the frenetic bustle of the human machinery that once ran a home, and drawn ever deeper into a lost realm of spirits and memory. Here below the suffocating truths, beneath the pain and unhappiness, he finds an escape, and quite possibly a way to change everything.

A richly evocative, poignantly beautiful modern-day ghost story, The Servants marks the triumphant return of Michael Marshall Smith--the first novel in a decade from the multiple award-winning author of Spares.