Abdication
Juliet Nicolson
Bloomsbury, PB, 9781408831793
England, 1936. After the recent death of George V, the nation has a new king, Edward VIII. But for all the confident pomp and ceremony of the accession, it is a turbulent time. Terrible poverty and unemployment affect many, but trouble few among the ruling elite; for others, Oswald Mosley's New Party, which offers a version of the fascism on the ... More/Buy
Albert of Adelaide
Howard L Anderson
Allen & Unwin, HB, 9781742379029
What does it take to become a hero? Albert has escaped from the Adelaide Zoo to go in search of the 'old Australia', somewhere in the desert, north of Adelaide, a 'Promised Land' that he's heard so much about from other animals. Unusually, Albert is a duck-billed platypus. Four days north of Alice Springs and carrying nothing other than an old, almost ... More/Buy
All the Conspirators
Christopher Isherwood
Vintage Classic, PB, 9780099561064
The scene is 1920s Kensington and Philip and Joan are testing the very limits of politeness and restraint as they fight to expunge the oppression of their mother - by whatever means necessary. In his first novel, Christopher Isherwood paints an intimate portrait of the battle between old and young as he explores the destruction of a son by a domineering ... More/Buy
Ancient Light
John Banville
Viking, PB, 9780670920624
'Billy Gray was my best friend and I fell in love with his mother.' Alexander Cleave, an actor who thinks his best days are behind him, remembers his first unlikely affair as a teenage boy in a small town in 1950s Ireland: the illicit meetings in a rundown cottage outside town; assignations in the back of his lover's car on sunny ... More/Buy
The Apartment
Greg Baxter
Penguin, PB, 9781844882861
'I wish we could preserve our relationship as it is now for a long time. I wish we could remain strangers.' A man walks across an old European capital. Heavy snow falls. He has come here from far away, hoping to forget. Instead, he remembers: home, war, lost friends. Complicity. In the company of a new friend and alive to the ... More/Buy
Art in Nature and other stories
Tove Jansson
Profile Books, PB, 9780956308696
An elderly caretaker at a large outdoor exhibition, called Art in Nature, finds that a couple have lingered on to bicker about the value of a picture; he has a surprising suggestion that will resolve both their row and his own ambivalence about the art market. A draughtsman's obsession with drawing locomotives provides a dark twist to a love story. A ... More/Buy
Ashenden
Elizabeth Wilhide
Fig Tree, PB, 9781905490950
Spring 2010, and when Charlie and Ros inherit Ashenden from their aunt Reggie a decision must be made. The beautiful eighteenth-century house, set in acres of English countryside, is in need of serious repair. Do they try to keep it in the family, or will they have to sell? Moving back in time, in an interwoven narrative spanning two and a ... More/Buy
A Better Angel
Chris Adrian
Granta, PB, 9781847084989
In this inventive collection of stories, Chris Adrian treads the terrain of human suffering -illness, regret, mourning, sympathy - in the most unusual ways. A bereaved twin starts a friendship with a homicidal fifth grader in the hope that she can somehow lead him back to his dead brother. A boy tries to contact the spirit of his dead father and ... More/Buy
Between the Lines
Jodi Picoult, Samantha van Leer
Allen & Unwin, PB, 9781743310922
What happens when happily ever after ... isn't? Delilah hates school as much as she loves books. In fact, there's one book in particular she can't get enough of. If anyone knew how many times she has read and re-read the sweet little fairy tale she found in the library, especially the popular kids, she'd be sent to social Siberia ... ... More/Buy
The Big Music
Kirsty Gunn
Faber, HB, 9780571282333
The Big Music tells the story of John Sutherland of 'The Grey House', who is dying and creating in the last days of his life a musical composition that will define it. Yet he has little idea of how his tune will echo or play out into the world - and as the book moves inevitably through its themes of death ... More/Buy
A Bunch of Fives
Helen Simpson
Vintage, PB, 9780099561576
Since the publication of Four Bare Legs in a Bed, her first collection, Helen Simpson has been hailed as one of the best short story writers at work today. These are wickedly funny, heartfelt, and sensuous stories that deal with the full stretch, from birth to death and everything in ... More/Buy
The Cat's Table
Michael Ondaatje
Vintage, PB, 9780099554424
In the early 1950s, an eleven-year-old boy boards a huge liner bound for England - a 'castle that was to cross the sea'. At mealtimes, he is placed at the lowly 'Cat's Table' with an eccentric group of grown-ups and two other boys, Cassius and Ramadhin. As the ship makes its way across the Indian Ocean, through the Suez Canal, into ... More/Buy
The Chateau
William Maxwell
Vintage Classics, PB, 9781860468148
It is 1948 and a young American couple arrive in France for a holiday, full of anticipation and enthusiasm. But the countryside and people are war-battered, and their reception at The Chateau Beaumesnil is not all the open-hearted Americans could wish ... More/Buy
Chinaman
Shehan Karunatilaka
Vintage, PB, 9780099555681
Retired sportswriter WG Karunasena is dying. He will spend his final months drinking arrack, making his wife unhappy, ignoring his son and tracking down Pradeep S. Mathew, a spin bowler who has mysteriously disappeared and who WG considers 'the greatest cricketer to walk the earth'. On his quest to find this unsung genius, WG uncovers a coach with six fingers, a ... More/Buy
Christopher and His Kind
Christopher Isherwood
Vintage Classic, PB, 9780099561071
In November 1929, Christopher Isherwood - determined to become a 'permanent foreigner' - packed a rucksack and two suitcases and left England on a one-way ticket for Berlin. With incredible candour and wit, Isherwood recalls the decadence of Berlin's night scene and his route to sexual liberation. As the Nazis rise to power, Isherwood describes his dramatic struggle to save his ... More/Buy
Closed Horizon
Peter Lantos
Arcadia Books, PB, 9781906413972
The year is 2032. Mark Chadwick is a brilliant psychiatrist who is on the verge of a major scientific breakthrough. By combining functional imaging of the brain with computer technology, he can not only predict intentions but also decode human thought processes. It is this discovery which immediately attracts the attention of Robert Dufresne, a senior officer in Home Security who ... More/Buy
The Colour of Milk
Nell Leyshon
Figtree, PB, 9781905490943
The year is eighteen hundred and thirty one when fifteen-year-old Mary begins the difficult task of telling her story. A scrap of a thing with a sharp tongue and hair the colour of milk, Mary leads a harsh life working on her father's farm alongside her three sisters. In the summer she is sent to work for the local vicar's invalid ... More/Buy
A Dangerous Inheritance
Alison Weir
Hutchinson, PB, 9780091926243
The year is 1562. Lady Catherine Grey, cousin of Elizabeth I, has just been arrested along with her husband Edward. Their crime is to have secretly married and produced a child who might threaten the Queen's title. Alone in her chamber at the Tower of London, Catherine hears ghostly voices, echoes, she thinks, of a crime committed in the same room ... More/Buy
Double Fault
Lionel Shriver
Profile Books, PB, 9781846688478
'Love me, love my game' says twenty-three year-old Willy Novinsky. Ever since she picked up a racquet at the age of four, tennis has been Willy's one love, until the day she meets Eric Oberdorf. She's a middle-ranked professional tennis player and he's a Princeton graduate who took up playing tennis at the age of eighteen. Low-ranked but untested, Eric, too, ... More/Buy
Faces in the Crowd
Valeria Luiselli
Granta, HB, 9781847085061
In the heart of Mexico City's vibrant, urban sprawl a woman, trapped in a house and a marriage she can neither fully inhabit nor abandon, thinks about her past. She has decided to write a novel about her days at a publishing house in New York; about the strangers who became lovers and the poets and ghosts who once lived in ... More/Buy
The Flame Alphabet: A Novel
Ben Marcus
Granta, HB, 9781847086228
A terrible epidemic has struck the country and the sound of children's speech has become lethal. Radio transmissions from strange sources indicate that people are going into hiding. All Sam and Claire need to do is look around the neighborhood: In the park, parents wither beneath the powerful screams of their children. At night, suburban side streets become routes of shameful ... More/Buy
The Folded Leaf
William Maxwell
Vintage Classics, PB, 9781860466960
In the suburbs of 1920s Chicago two boys form an unlikely friendship. Spud Latham is slow at school but quick to fight and a natural athlete - Lymie Peters, thin, pigeon-chested and terrible at games, is devoted to him. As they graduate from school to college, tensions start to surface. It is Lymie who first meets Sally Forbes, but it is ... More/Buy
Friendship Bread
Darien Gee
Allen & Unwin, PB, 9781743310373
One afternoon, Julia Evarts and her five-year-old daughter, Gracie, arrive home to find an unexpected gift on the front porch - a homemade loaf of Amish Friendship Bread and a simple note: I hope you enjoy it. Also included are a bag of starter, instructions on how to make the bread herself, and a request to share it with others. Still reeling ... More/Buy
A Game of Groans
George R R Washington
Virgin Books, PB, 9780753540992
There was a bloodied knife on Allbran's bed. Lady Gateway Barker knew what she had to do; what all the royals in Summerseve did when somebody tried to kill a member of their family: gather up a bunch of people and horses, and go from one place to another.' In the land of the Eight (or was it Six?) Kingdoms - ... More/Buy
Half of the Human Race
Anthony Quinn
Vintage, PB, 9780099531944
London. In the sweltering hot summer of 1911, The Streets ring to the cheers for a new king’s coronation, and to the cries of suffragist women marching for the vote. One of them is twenty-one-year-old Connie Callaway, daughter of a middle-class Islington family fallen on hard times since the death of her father. Forced to abandon her dream of a medical ... More/Buy
The Happy Numbers of Julius Miles
Jim Keeble
Bloomsbury, PB, 9781846881817
Julius Miles is a mathematical genius, but he is hefty of frame, awkward with the opposite sex and struggling to bring his existence into balance. When he stumbles across the girl next door naked and dead on her Victorian tiles, he starts to unravel the one equation that's eluded him: that of his own life. And so it is that with ... More/Buy
The Harbour
Francesca Brill
Bloomsbury, PB, 9781408814826
It is the summer of 1940, and for Stevie Steiber, a young American journalist in Hong Kong, the war raging in Europe is a world away. While longing to be taken seriously as a writer, she keeps her readers informed about society gossip from the Orient, her days at the Happy Valley race-course slipping into dangerous, hedonistic nights. Major Harry Field has ... More/Buy
Hate: A Romance
Tristan Garcia
Faber, PB, 9780571251841
NOW IN B FORMAT. In a controversial first novel that took the French literary world by storm and won the Prix de Flore, Tristan Garcia uses sex, friendships and love affairs to show what happens to people when political ideals - Marxism, gay rights, sexual liberation, nationalism - come to an end. As Elizabeth Levallois, a cultural journalist, looks back on ... More/Buy
Honour
Elif Shafak
Viking, PB, 9780670921157
'My mother died twice. I promised myself I would not let her story be forgotten . . .' Leaving her twin sister behind, Pembe leaves Turkey for love - following her husband Adem to London. There the Topraks hope to make new lives for themselves and their children. Yet, no matter how far they travel, the traditions and beliefs the Topraks ... More/Buy
In the Kingdom of Men
Kim Barnes
Hutchinson, PB, 9780091944216
Raised by her grandfather, a strict Pentecostal minister, in a two-room shack, Gin McPhee never imagined she'd have a husband she loved and a houseboy making her breakfast. When Mason takes a job at the Arabian American Oil company in Saudi Arabia, Gin finds herself a company wife, in a company house, in the company compound. Her new life is one ... More/Buy
The Innocents
Francesca Segal
Chatto & Windus, HB, 9780701186999
'It was more than possession, more than union, more than love. It was absolute confidence. It was certainty, and a promise of certainty always'. Adam and Rachel, childhood sweethearts, are getting married at last. Rachel is everything Adam has ever imagined in a wife and her parents adore him. A life of easy contentment awaits, at the heart of the community. ... More/Buy
Lionel Asbo: State of England
Martin Amis
Jonathan Cape, PB, 9780224096218
Lionel Pepperdine is England's pre-eminent yob. A churlish and unashamedly savage reprobate, he was served his first Anti-Social Behaviour Order aged three, for the application of explosives to excrement. It was the start of an inimitable career. By the age of twenty-two, Lionel is a hardened petty criminal enjoying the rewards of extortion and stolen property, and the thrills of Grievous ... More/Buy
The Long Earth
Terry Pratchett, Stephen Baxter
Doubleday, PB, 9780857520104
2015: Madison, Wisconsin. Junior cop Sally Jansson is called out to the house of Willis Lynsey, a reclusive scientist, for an animal-cruelty complaint: the man was seen forcing a horse in through the door of his home. Inside there is no horse. But Sally finds a kind of home-made utility belt. She straps this on - and ‘steps’ sideways into an ... More/Buy
The Memorial
Christopher Isherwood
Vintage Classic, PB, 9780099561125
The First World War is over. Eric Vernon is on the cusp of adulthood. Tall, bony and awkward he finds himself torn between a desire to emulate his heroic father, who led a life of quiet sacrifice, and resentment toward his father's roguish friend Edward Blake, who survived the war only to throw himself into gay life in Berlin. With subtle ... More/Buy
The Missing Rose
Serdar Ozkan
Rider, PB, 9781846043413
This is the story of Diana, a wilful young woman who, following the death of her mother, sets out on a quest to find the twin she never knew she had. Although she is both beautiful and wealthy, Diana is confused and angry with life. Her overwhelming desire for approval has caused her to let go of her dreams, and now ... More/Buy
Mrs Harris Goes to Moscow
Paul Gallico
Bloomsbury, PB, 9781408832004
Responsible for cleaning the homes of the rich, Mrs Harris is a humble charlady with a knack for putting things in order wherever she goes. When, much to her surprise, she wins a trip for two beyond the Iron Curtain, she has no idea of the adventure that lies ahead of her. Ever the loyal servant, however, Mrs Harris (accompanied by ... More/Buy
Mrs Harris Goes to Paris and Mrs Harris Goes to New York (The Bloomsbury Group)
Paul Gallico
Bloomsbury, PB, 9781408808566
Part of The Bloomsbury Group, books chosen by readers for readers Mrs Harris is a salt-of-the-earth London charlady with just one wish - to own a Dior dress. In all her years cleaning other people's houses she's never seen anything as beautiful or magical as the couture dresses hanging in Lady Dant's wardrobe and she's never wanted anything as much before. ... More/Buy
Mrs Harris MP
Paul Gallico
Bloomsbury, PB, 9781408832028
Mrs Harris is a salt-of-the-earth charlady, content with her lot, cleaning the homes of the rich. However, her knack of setting things straight often has the tendency to stray beyond keeping things neat and tidy... In Mrs Harris MP, the honest as-ever old char impresses her employer with her no-nonsense political views to such an extent that he - an MP, no ... More/Buy
Northern Girls: Life Goes On
Sheng Keyi
Penguin, PB, 9780670080953
Qian Xiaohong is born into a sleepy Hunan village, where the new China rush towards development is a mere distant rumour. A buxom, naive sixteen-year-old, she yearns to leave behind hometown scandal, and joins the mass migration to the bustling boomtown of Shenzhen. There, she must navigate dangerous encounters with ruthless bosses, jealous wives, sympathetic hookers and corrupt policemen as she ... More/Buy
The Panopticon
Jenni Fagan
William Heinemann, HB, 9780434021772
Panopticon ( noun). A prison so constructed that the inspector can see each of the prisoners at all times, without being seen. Anais Hendricks, 14, is in the back of a police car, headed for The Panopticon, a home for chronic young offenders.She can't remember the events that led her here, but across town a policewoman lies in a coma and ... More/Buy
Paris Trance: A Romance
Geoff Dyer
Canongate, PB, 9780857864055
In Paris, two couples form an intimacy that will change their lives forever. As they discover the clubs and cafes of the eleventh arrondissement, the four become inseparable, united by deeply held convictions about dating strategies, tunnelling in P.O.W. films and, crucially, the role of the Styrofoam cup in American thrillers. Experiencing the exhilarating highs of Ecstasy and sex, they reach a ... More/Buy
Prater Violet
Christopher Isherwood
Vintage Classic, PB, 9780099561132
"A deliberate historical parable "Prater Violet" resembles episodes in "Goodbye to Berlin" and keeps up the same high level of excellence". (Edmund Wilson). An impatient phone call from the temperamental Austrian director, Friedrich Bergmann, introduces a young Christopher Isherwood to the film industry. Isherwood's job is to rescue the script of a sentimental love story set in nineteenth-century Vienna, a film ... More/Buy
The Restored Finnegans Wake
James Joyce
Penguin, HB, 9780141192291
The dream-like, comic tale of a family in Ireland, Finnegans Wake is written in Joyce's unique personal language that echoes and plays with many tongues other than English, and uses parables, phrases, wordplay, puns, ballads, philosophy and religious texts to capture an extraordinary invented world. During the seventeen years of its composition, sections of Finnegans Wake were re-written and revised ... More/Buy
Satantango
Laszlo Krasznahorkai
Atlantic, PB, 9780857896179
In the darkening embers of a Communist utopia, life in a desolate Hungarian town has come to a virtual standstill. Flies buzz, spiders weave, water drips and animals root desultorily in the barnyard of a collective farm. But when the charismatic Irimias - long-thought dead - returns to the commune, the villagers fall under his spell. The Devil has arrived in ... More/Buy
State of Wonder
Ann Patchett
Bloomsbury, PB, 9781408821886
NOW IN B FORMAT. There were people on the banks of the river. Among the tangled waterways and giant anacondas of the Brazilian Rio Negro, an enigmatic scientist is developing a drug that could alter the lives of women for ever. Dr Annick Swenson's work is shrouded in mystery; she refuses to report on her progress, especially to her investors, whose ... More/Buy
The Storyteller of Marrakesh
Joydeep Roy-Bhattacharya
Bloomsbury, PB, 9781846881824
Each year the storyteller Hassan gathers listeners to the city square to share their recollections of a young foreign couple who mysteriously disappeared some time ago. As various witnesses describe their encounters with the couple - their tales overlapping, confirming and contradicting each other - Hassan hopes to light upon details that will explain what happened to them, and to absolve ... More/Buy
Submergence
J M Ledgard
Vintage, PB, 9780099555384
J. M. Ledgard's first novel, Giraffe, was published to great praise on both sides of the Atlantic in 2006. The Independent called it 'a masterpiece'; the Chicago Tribune said it was 'inspired'; Esquire hailed it as 'W.G. Sebald meets Milan Kundera'. Submergence is another bravura performance from this remarkable writer.This is a story with two protagonists - James More, an Englishman ... More/Buy
The Tale of Brin and Bent and Minno Marylebone
Ravi Thornton
Jonathan Cape, HB, 9780224093743
Brin and Bent are poolkeepers at The House for the Grossly Infirm. Their days are spent abusing the House residents with bleach and chlorine, spying on them through holes they have drilled in the walls. They do not know that someone else comes to the pool at night: Minno Marylebone, a child like no other. Pure and beautiful, every night the ... More/Buy
Tell the Wolves I'm Home
Carol Rifka Brunt
Macmillan, PB, 9781447202134
There's only one person who has ever truly understood fourteen-year-old June Elbus - and that's her uncle, the renowned painter Finn Weiss. Shy at school and distant from her once inseparable older sister, June can only be herself in Finn's company. He is her godfather, confidant, and best friend. So when he dies at a young age of a mysterious illness ... More/Buy
The Truth
Michael Palin
Weidenfeld & Nicolson, PB, 9780297860228
From the inimitable Michael Palin comes a novel about the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth... Keith Mabbut is at a crossroads in his life. When he is offered the opportunity of a lifetime - to write the biography of the elusive Hamish Melville, a highly influential activist and humanitarian - he seizes the chance to write something ... More/Buy
The Uncommon Reader
Alan Bennett
Profile Books, PB, 9781781250143
What would happen if the Queen became a reader of taste and discernment rather than of Dick Francis? The answer is a perfect story. The Uncommon Reader is none other than HM the Queen who drifts accidentally into reading when her corgis stray into a mobile library parked at Buckingham Palace. She reads widely ( JR Ackerley, Jean Genet, Ivy Compton Burnett ... More/Buy
Vicky Swanky is a Beauty
Diane Williams
Transit Lounge, HB, 9781921924200
In Vicky Swanky Is a Beauty, Diane Williams lays bare the urgency and weariness that shape our lives in stories honed sharper than ever. With sentences auguring revelation and explosion, Williams's unsettling stories - a cryptic meeting between neighbours, a woman's sexual worries, a graveside discussion, a chimney on fire - are narrated with razor-sharp tongues and naked, uproarious irreverence. These ... More/Buy
Where'd You Go, Bernadette
Maria Semple
W & N Fiction, PB, 9780297867296
Bernadette Fox is notorious. To Elgie Branch, a Microsoft wunderkind, she's his hilarious, volatile, talented, troubled wife. To fellow mothers at the school gate, she's a menace. To design experts, she's a revolutionary architect. And to 15-year-old Bee, she is a best friend and, quite simply, mum. Then Bernadette disappears. And Bee must take a trip to the end of the ... More/Buy
While the Sun Is Above Us
Melanie Schnell
Freehand Books, PB, 9781554810611
While the Sun is Above Us takes us deep into the extraordinary world of South Sudan through the eyes of two women: Adut, a Dinka woman and Sandra, a Canadian aid worker. In the midst of a bloody civil war, chance brings Adut and Sandra unexpectedly together in a brief but profound moment that irrevocably changes both their lives. Here is ... More/Buy