NOW IN B FORMAT. In a world renowned within a galaxy full of wonders, a crime within a war. For one man it means a desperate flight, and a search for the one - maybe two - people who could clear his name. For his brother it means a life lived under constant threat of treachery and murder. And for their sister, it means returning to a place she'd thought abandoned forever. Only the sister is not what she once was; Djan Seriy Anaplian has become an agent of the Culture's Special Circumstances section, charged with high-level interference in civilisations throughout the greater galaxy. Concealing her new identity - and her particular set of abilities - might be a dangerous strategy. In the world to which Anaplian returns, nothing is quite as it seems; and determining the appropriate level of interference in someone else's war is never a simple matter.

Once, the Blood Orphans had it all: a million-dollar recording contract from Warner Brothers, killer hooks, and cheekbones that could cut glass. Four pretty boys from Los Angeles, they were supposed to be the next big thing, future kings of rock and roll. But something happened on the way to glory, and now, two years later, along with their coke-fueled, mohawked female manager, they have washed up in Amsterdam for the final show of their doomed and dismal European tour. The singer has become a born-again Buddhist who preaches from the stage, the bass player's raging eczema has turned his hands into a pulpy mess, the drummer is a sex-fiend tormented by the misdeeds of his porn-king father, and the guitar player - the only talented one - is thoroughly cowed by the constant abuse of his bandmates. As they stumble through their final day together, the Blood Orphans find themselves on a comic tour of frustration, danger, excitement, and just possibly, redemption.

Brausen lives with his wife, who has undergone major surgery after being diagnosed with breast cancer. To compensate for this physical void which stalls their caresses, Brausen imagines stories: of Santa Maria, and of a doctor named Diaz Grey. But he not only wishes to imagine himself as someone else, he also seeks release from himself and from the world he knows. He leads many lives, some real and some fantastic, in order to experience a moment of psychic weightlessness - a brief life .

NOW IN B FORMAT. After their father's funeral, Erik and Inga Davidsen find a cryptic letter from an unknown woman among his papers, dating from his adolescence in rural Minnesota during the Depression. Returning to his psychiatric practice in New York, Erik sets about reading his father's memoir, hoping to discover the man he never fully understood. At the same time, another woman enters Erik's lonely, divorced life - a beautiful Jamaican who moves into his garden flat with her small daughter. As Erik gets drawn into the cat-and-mouse tactics of someone who appears to be stalking her, he finds out that his sister Inga is also being threatened, by a journalist in possession of a wounding secret from her past. A multi-layered novel that probes the mysteries of the heart and mind, THE SORROWS OF AN AMERICAN is a compulsive, thought-provoking and profoundly affecting novel that resonates long beyond the last page.

An old Englishman sits by a harbour in Spain, hoping each day to hear what might have happened to the son he last saw as a child, many years before. He cannot die in peace until he knows. Dominic was sent to the royal court of Sicily, as page to the great scholar Antioch, and travelled with him on an expedition to the East, from which they never returned. Gradually, through meetings with travellers, the old man puts together most of the story and now the narrative of the expedition alternates with his own. The mission to the East is shrouded in secret motives and mysterious encounters. The boy is befriended by the party's interpreter, Venn, and embroiled in an exotic, dangerous adventure involving lost Cathar treasure, capture by the unimaginably cruel Emperor of China and a plan to bring the Mongol hordes of the Great Khan west to destroy the culture of Christendom. And at the heart of the web of politics and deceit, Venn falls in love with a woman whose sad story he has deciphered from the secret women's language which really existed in China for hundreds of years.

As a child raised by his mother in post-war Germany, Peter Debauer becomes fascinated by a story he discovers in the proof pages of a novel edited by his grandparents. It is the tale of a German prisoner of war who escapes from a Russian camp and braves countless dangers to return home to a wife who believes him to be dead. But the novel is incomplete and Peter becomes obsessed by the question of what happened when the soldier and his wife met again. Years later, the adult Peter remembers the novel and embarks on a search for the missing pages that soon becomes a mysterious search for his own father, a German soldier whom he always believed was killed in the war.

Unlike any other book on war, a graphic novel about one Israeli soldier’s time in Beirut during the massacres at Sabra and Shatila. One night in Beirut in September 1982, while Israeli soldiers secured the area, a Christian militia invaded the refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila and massacred three thousand Palestinians. Ari Folman was one of those Israeli soldiers, but for more than twenty years he remembered nothing of that night. Then came a friend’s disturbing dream and with it Folman’s need to excavate the truth of the war in Lebanon and answer the crucial question: What was he doing during the hours of slaughter at Sabra and Shatila? Stunningly original in form, Waltz with Bashir follows Folman’s journey deep into the darkness of Beirut. Drawing on the stories of other soldiers and his own returning fragments of memory, Folman painfully and candidly pieces together the war and his place in it: the senselessness of the soldiers’ orders; the fear that pervades every moment; the casual bloodshed of civilians, culminating in the massacres themselves.

Documentary-maker Aoyama hasn't dated anyone in the seven years since the death of his beloved wife, Ryoko. Now even his teenage son Shige has suggested he think about remarrying. So when his best friend Yoshikawa comes up with a plan to hold fake film auditions so that Aoyama can choose a new bride, he decides to go along with the idea.Of the thousands who apply, Aoyama only has eyes for Yamasaki Asami, a young, beautiful, delicate and talented ballerina with a turbulent past. But there is more to her than Aoyama, blinded by his infatuation, can see, and by the time he discovers the terrifying truth it may be too late ...Ryu Murakami delivers his most subtle and disturbing novel yet, confirming him as Japan's master of the psycho-thriller.

An astonishingly funny and poignant new collection of short stories from Jay McInerney - the master of modern American prose - which, in true McInerney style, examines post-9/11 America in all its dark and morally complex glory.His characters include a young woman holed up in a remote cabin while her (married) boyfriend campaigns for the highest of all offices, a couple whose sexual experiments cross every line imaginable, a young socialite called home to nurse her mother, and an older one scheming for her next husband.From the streets of downtown New York during the 2003 anti-war march and the lavish hotel rooms of the wealthy social elite, to a husband and wife who share their marital bed with a pot-bellied pig, the characters in these stories - steeped in betrayal and infidelity - search for meaning while struggling against each other, colliding as the old world around them fractures and dissolves into a modern era full of new uncertainties, where ghosts of loss hang in the air.McInerney's writing has a crackling humour and a feverish, clear-sighted brilliance that perfectly underpins the lives of people living in modern America. These stories are deftly constructed, subtle, insightful and heartbreaking.

At night Banjo, Malty, Ginger, Dengel, Bugsy, Taloufa, Goosey, and even Jake of Home to Harlemprowl the rough waterfront bistros, drinking, looking for women, playing music, fighting, loving, and talking - about their homes in Senegal, the West Indies, or the American South; about Garvey's Back-to-Africa Movement; about being black. When Ray, a writer, joins the group, it triggers his rediscovery of his African roots and his feeling that, at last, he belongs to a race, weighed, tested and poised in the universal scheme.

It should have been an ordinary birth, the start of an ordinary happy family. But the night Dr David Henry delivers his wife's twins is a night that will haunt five live for ever. For though David's son is a healthy boy, his daughter has Down's syndrome. And, in a shocking act of betrayal whose consequences only time will reveal, he tells his wife their daughter died while secretly entrusting her care to a nurse. As grief quietly tears apart David's family, so a little girl must make her own way in the world as best she can.

Cristiano is sixteen. Home life is far from perfect, and when his drink-sozzled father and two reprobate friends come up with a plan to rob a bank, Cristiano sees the chance of a better life. But as a tremendous storm brews that night, the perfect crime will have shocking consequences for all involved. And Cristiano must put childhood behind him once and for all. The utterly absorbing novel has pace, plot twists and glorious characters. An epic drama of innocence and delusion, The Crossroads is Ammaniti's most engaging novel yet.

This paperback is the film tie-in edition to the much-anticipated major motion picture starring Jeff Goldblum and Willem Dafoe: Adam Resurrected. One of the most powerful works of Holocaust fiction ever written, Adam Resurrected is now a major motion picture starring Jeff Goldblum and Willem Dafoe. Adam Stein, a former circus clown who was spared the gas chamber so that he might entertain thousands of other Jews as they marched to their deaths, is now the ringleader at an asylum in the Negev desert populated solely by Holocaust survivors. Alternately more brilliant than the doctors and more insane than any of the patients, Adam struggles wildly to make sense of a world in which the line has been irreversibly blurred between sanity and madness. With the biting irony of Catch-22, the intellectual vigour of Saul Bellow, and the pathos and humanity that are Kaniuk's hallmarks, Adam Resurrected offers a vision of a modern hell that devastates even as it inches toward redemption.

Four years after 'Mothers', Granta 104sets its sights on fathers. Look out for Hisham Matar on his father, who was kidnapped while living in Egypt and imprisoned by Muammar al-Gaddafi in Libya; Helen Epstein on 'fatherhood' within the prisons of San Francisco; a dictator who has styled himself as the Father of the Nation; Rawi Hage on Beirut, as seen through his father's eyes; becoming a father again in middle age and Junot Diaz on Latin American 'Big Men'. Plus: writers, including Margaret Atwood and Ali Smith, on their favourite pictures of their fathers.

NOW IN B FORMAT. Friday nights, the best night of the week, the night they all looked forward to more than they cared to admit - talking, drinking, laughing and crying together. They were six female friends, different in age and circumstances, but with one common need: the warmth and support of their Friday nights. It was a time to share secrets and fears, triumphs and tragedies and, above all, to feel safe in the company of women friends. But things never stay the same forever, especially when a man is introduced into the mix.

No one knows for sure precisely when and where Shakespeare wrote his sonnets or more intriguingly who he wrote them for. In this wonderfully entertaining novel acclaimed author Warwick Collins imagines the circumstances that inspired 30 of the Bards most popular sonnets. The young Will Shakespeare is living under the patronage of Henry Wriothesley Earl of Southampton. The controversial earl is under pressure from his family and those close to the royal court to settle down but he is far too busy drinking carousing and cavorting with his motley band of acquaintances to pay attention. Not then the obvious setting for poetic genius but within the politics (both State and sexual) of this lofty household Will finds lots to inspire his pen and a few attractive distractions too. Collins has crafted a clever witty and enjoyable novel from fragments of history. He interweaves 30 sonnets into the text in seamless fashion. The Sonnets wears its scholarship lightly and its love of Shakespeare and poetry proudly.

In the provincial town of Muddy Waters in China a young woman named Gu Shan is sentenced to death for her loss of faith in Communism. She is twentyeight years old and has already spent ten years in prison. The citizens stage a protest after her death and over the following six weeks the town goes through uncertainty hope and fear until eventually the rebellion is brutally suppressed. Sumei a mother of a young child is sentenced to death as an antiCommunist activist. They are all taken on a painful journey; from one young womans death to another. We follow the pain of Gu Shans parents the hope and fear of the leaders of the protest and their families. Even those who seem unconnected to the tragedy an elevenyearold boy seeking fame and glory a nineteenyearold village idiot in love with a young and deformed girl and old couple making a living by scavenging the towns garbage cans are caught up in remorseless turn of events. Yiyun Lis novel is based on the true story which took place in China in 1979.

At the news of what has happened to her son BJ‚ Idora Morrison collapses in her basement apartment. For four days and nights she retreats into a vortex of memory‚ pain‚ and disappointment that becomes a riveting expos é of her life as a black immigrant from the Caribbean. While she struggled to make ends meet for twenty-five years‚ her deadbeat husband abandoned her for a better life in New York. Left alone to raise her son‚ Idora has done her best to survive against immense odds. But now that BJ has disappeared into a life of crime‚ she recoils from his loss and tries to understand how her life has spiralled into this tragic place. More is an extraordinary story of oppression‚ redemption and hope. From a master of the novel form‚ this is very much a book for our times.

Elena Alvarez?s passion for creating sublime recipes inspired by her Mexican upbringing has made her reputation as a chef in a man?s world. But for Elena‚ her kitchen is her sanctuary‚ the only place where she can keep the ghosts of her tragic past at bay. When a glowing newspaper review leads to her being fired and the end of an affair‚ Elena is made an offer she can?t refuse by enigmatic film director-turned-restaurateur Julian Liswood to create a unique new restaurant. Packing up her old life and her faithful hound Alvin‚ the first of her many challenges is a cook-off to tame a brilliant but resentful sous chef and win over her unruly new kitchen crew. However the most difficult task of all is resisting a dangerous attraction to her new employer. But through the inspired new dishes she creates and the friendships she forges‚ Elena is gradually learning to lay her ghosts to rest. Interwoven with the mouth-watering recipes she creates along the way‚ THE LOST RECIPE FOR HAPPINESS is a celebration of the healing power of love - and good food.

A blind man approaches his one hundredth birthday in Sofia, the Bulgarian capital. Frail and introspective, he spends his time musing on a magazine piece he read some years ago, before he lost his sight: explorers had come upon a company of jungle parrots that still spoke snatches of the language of an extinct society. The birds were then captured, caged and sent home, in the hope that linguists might begin to piece together the lost language from their puzzling squawks and screeches. But the birds died on the way back, taking with them the last remnants of a disappeared civilisation. The parallels are all too apparent to the blind man: he fears that he too carries within him only a shredded inheritance, and that he is too concussed, too remote to pass anything on. Wondering what wisdom he has to leave to the world, he embarks on an epic armchair journey through history, memory, and prophecy that he writes up in the Book of Life and the Book of Daydreams.Throughout this lyrical, moving and deeply imaginative novel, the blind man leads us through the twists and turns of his country's turbulent century and his own, equally engaging story of enlightenment, love and loss.

Three young people, born thousands of miles apart, each cut themselves adrift from their birthplaces and set out to discover what - or who - might anchor them in their lives. Over the course of the next ten years, Noah, Joyce and an unnamed narrator will each settle for a time in Montreal, their paths almost criss-crossing and their own stories weaving in and out of other wondrous tales, about such things as a pair of fearsome female pirates, a team of urban archaeologists, several enormous tuna fish, a mysterious book without a cover, and a broken compass whose needle obstinately points to the north Alaskan village of Nikolski.Intricately plotted and shimmering with originality, Nikolskicharts the curious courses of migration that can eventually lead to home.

NOW IN B FORMAT. No one in the neighbourhood had seen the Gutteridges' little girl Samantha for months. But Brendan and Sherilyn look happier than ever, so nothing is wrong. Is it? For the Gutteridges, Samantha was just a thing that threatened to worm its way into their perfect love. For everyone else, her story is the stuff of tabloid headlines. But this time it's not in a newspaper, it's happening right next door . . .