Jack McNulty is a ‘temporary gentleman’, an Irishman whose commission in the British army in the Second World War was never permanent.  In 1957, sitting in his lodgings in Accra, where he has washed up, he sets out to write his story.  He is an ordinary man, but he has seen extraordinary things.  He was wandered around the world, as a soldier, an engineer, a UN observer.  And he has had a strange and tumultuous marriage.  Mai Kirwan was the greatest beauty of Sligo in the 1920s, an elusive and in some ways terrifying figure.  Jack snared her, and shared his life with her, but in time she slipped from his grasp, her melancholy unequal to the forces that rent them apart, unequal to Jack’s weaknesses and evasions. 

In THE TEMPORARY GENTLEMAN Sebastian Barry has once again mined the rich seam of his family’s history, a history that is one with and inextricably linked to the larger history of Ireland in the twentieth century.

UK: Faber; US: Viking

DODGER is an ebullient, charming and very funny novel about the continuing misadventures of Jack Dawkins, better known as the Artful Dodger from OLIVER TWIST.

The story follows the iconic and irrepressible thief as he returns from exile in Australia aged 19. Now posing as a gentleman, with an official letter of pardon and a valet called Warrigal, he heads back to London to reunite with his old friend Fagin. Once there he must confront his past and look ahead to the future.

UK: Quercus 

FBI agent Franco Patrese is no stranger to harrowing cases. But the discovery of two decapitated bodies outside the main gate of Yale University plunges him into an investigation unlike any he has yet known. 

One of the corpses is that of Regina King, whose son Kwasi - hailed as the new Bobby Fischer - is about to defend his world chess title. And as Patrese chases leads across the Ivy League, he realises that he's playing the most dangerous game of all - and that his unknown opponent is both genius and madman.

UK: HarperCollins

The small Tuscan town of Castelluccio is preparing for its annual festival, a spectacular pageant in which a leading role will be taken by the self-exiled English painter Gideon Westfall. A man proudly out of step with modernity, Westfall is regarded by some as a maestro,  but in Castelluccio – as in the wider art world – he has his enemies, and his niece – just arrived from England – is no great admirer either. And a local girl is missing, a disappearance that seems to implicate the artist.

But the life and art of Gideon Westfall form just one strand of NOSTALGIA, a novel that teems with incidents and characters, from religious visionaries to folk heroes. Constantly shifting between the panoramic and the intimate, between the past and the present, NOSTALGIA is a fiction into which are woven the narratives of history, legend, architecture and much more, creating a kaleidoscope of facts and invention.

UK: Sort Of Books

Beth should be just like any other student. Living away from home for the first time, her life should be a haze of boozy nights out and snoozing through morning lectures. Except Beth is beginning to realise that she isn’t normal. She has started to wake up each morning with dirt under her fingernails, an insatiable appetite, and the unmistakeable smell of death follows her everywhere. Either this is the mother of all hangovers, or some more sinister force is at work - and when bodies start to go missing from a nearby graveyard, Beth fears that this cannot be a coincidence. Unable to control or understand what’s happening to her, she enlists the help of her friends to work out the truth – but none of them is prepared for what they are about to discover.

HUNGER is a gripping horror story from YA author Melvin Burgess that delves into a shadowy realm of violent bodies and supernatural curses. Maybe some things are best left buried…

UK: Random House/Hammer

It’s one minute to midnight on 27^th October 1962. The Cuban missile crisis is entering its final countdown as the world prepares for nuclear winter.

But in Istanbul’s old bohemian quarter, a confederacy of free spirits has gathered around a baby grand to see the night out in style. The moment is captured in a legendary photograph.

Behind them, dark ships pass along the Bosphorus. Some could be Soviet tankers, smuggling missiles to Cuba, but tonight no one is looking. All eyes are on Grace, the dark-haired singer. All that matters is her sublime voice, and her song: Stormy Weather.

The girl crouched beneath the piano is the discordant note in the flamboyant scene. This is Mimi, Grace’s nine year old daughter. Until tonight she believed every word her mother uttered. Now she sees a byzantine web of lies. Who abandoned whom that night? And why did it change her life forever?

On 27^th October 2012, Mimi has come back, haunted by these unanswered questions, to make her peace with the past.

World: Linen Press

It is Thanksgiving Day, and three generations of Hutchinsons are gathering in their family home in Steubenville, Ohio. They all have something to look forward to. The grandfather, Jack, is keen to uncover his son Preston’s latest deception, while Preston’s wife Kelly is eager to rekindle her affair with brother-in-law Blar. No one knows whether troubled sister Danielle will actually turn up this year, even though (as everyone knows but does not say) Jack’s illness means it is his last Thanksgiving. Meanwhile, precocious eleven year old Tavish looks on, wondering whether he will learn anything from the day.   

The centrepiece of the story is, naturally, the Thanksgiving meal. Their turkey is bought from a local old-fashioned farm where each bird is named and personally put down by the kindly owner. In all the holiday rush, though, the dead bird is left to sit for a day or two and goes bad – but not visibly so. The Hutchinsons cook and all but two eat it. The novel twists excruciatingly as the characters’ interiors – both gastric and psychological – are exposed for all to see, unleashing the insecurities and secrets that have hitherto been so carefully repressed.

Written in razor-sharp prose, Habash concocts a claustrophobic story of familial dysfunction that is equal parts tragic and comic, invoking the spirit of Richard Yates, Paul Murray and Wells Tower.

I know you are not new to this.

You have read many books and every time you pick one up you want to know just what you are getting yourself into. I do not blame you. There are many, many books out there and when you are still limited to reading them with your eyes alone, the choice must seem quite overwhelming. I do not have this problem of course, because of what you might call my superior capabilities, but I want to help you.

So what can I tell you about this book*? It is set on Earth, though like all things involves the entire cosmos too. It is about the meaning of life and peanut butter. It is about a relatively clever mathematician and also his wife, son and dog – I mean my wife, son and dog. It is a love story and a murder story, but above all it is a story about how to become a human. This book, in short, is about you: catastrophic, mortal, wonderful you.

*This book comes with a title and a named author because apparently you are a species which values the individual above the collective identity. And because it helps with shelving.**

**Talking of shelving, I suppose you found this book under 'Fiction'. As you'll see, that is an incorrect categorisation.

 Watch the all-human trailer here.

World All Languages excluding Italian: Canongate; Italian: Einaudi Stile Libero

Book 1 in The Mistra Chronicles

Set in the last decade of the fourteenth century, WALLS OF BYZANTIUM, opens as the Ottoman Turk, Sultan Bayezid, prepares his final assault on the Byzantine Empire. Only the little Despotate of Mistra in the Greek Peleponnese stands between him and his ultimate prize -  Constantinople.

Four young people are drawn into this turbulent world.  Anna Laskaris is the feisty daughter of the most noble family in Mistra.  She has been betrothed in a political alliance to Damian Mamonas, but loves another: Luke Margoris, a Varangian guardsman whose ancestors,  centuries before, hid a secret which has the power to unite the Christian world in its hour of need. Damian’s twin sister, Zoe, who is as cunning as she is beautiful, denied the Mamonas inheritance which she feels is hers, also sets out to find the Varangian treasure with, or without, Luke.

As events unfold and the kings of Christendom are persuaded to send the biggest crusade yet to the rescue of Byzantium, Luke finds that his destiny draws him east, away from Anna, to face a threat even more terrifying than Bayezid: the Mongol Horde under the merciless leadership of the murderous Tamerlane.

From Constantinople and Chios to Venice and Samarcand, WALLS OF BYZANTIUM, is an epic novel which brings to dramatic life the battles in the final years of Byzantium in a story of love and honour in a time of colliding empires.

UK: Quercus; Greek: Patakis; Turkish: Epsilon

UK: Quercus US: Penguin; Catalan: Edicions de la Magrana; Danish: Modtryk; Dutch: Meulenhoff Boekerij; German: Wunderlich; Spanish: RBA Libros

WHIRLIGIG is the story of a podgy, ginger child who blossoms into a podgy, ginger man. Gordon Claypole has never pursued a woman, let alone had anything to do with wind-farming. On both these fronts, things are about to change. The free-spirited childhood playmate he now finds so unnervingly attractive might appear safe, but the windy and desolate chunk of Scotland in which she dwells does not.

Plunged into an eccentric and ever-warring community, Claypole wrestles with rural issues of class, money, age, and heritage. But the mortal threat in this twisted environment comes from the secret and dangerous divisions caused by families and their old misdeeds. Can love and nature flourish on the battlefield of this wind-farm war where no one, including Claypole, is quite what they seem?

World English Language: Short Books

To all appearances, Fintan Buckley is part of a conventional middle class family in contemporary Dublin. But strange states of altered consciousness and auditory hallucinations begin to take him out of a linear experience of time, as does a developing interest in old autochrome photographs. Meanwhile, Fintan’s sister Martina also finds herself unearthing memories from the past.

As the Buckley family begin to delve into their memories, so too must they renegotiate their history and the decisions that have brought them to this place in the present.

TIME PRESENT AND TIME PAST, Deirdre Madden’s eighth novel, is an exquisite and extraordinary dissection of the life of an ordinary family.

UK: Faber

Germany, 1926: A baby has gone missing from the home of a village doctor, and the police arrive only to find a household that is wary of talking to outsiders. But when the doctor’s bewitching young wife takes him into her confidence, Constable Theodore Hildebrandt is swiftly drawn into a world of half-whispered secrets and unexpected lusts.

Theo’s fascination with the case – and his new confidante – brings unwonted attention from his superiors. Progress is coming to their quiet corner of Germany, and they are determined that nothing should get in its way. These are unsettled times for a country still struggling with the consequences of defeat, and for a community now feverish with suspicion. Wrestling with his own ghosts and his sense of duty, Theo has been stoking fires best left to burn themselves out, but even the veteran policeman is unprepared for what his investigation will unleash…

Beguiling in its depiction of the lies and lore that can drag people to the brink of madness, A WOLF IN HINDELHEIM is also a poignant and unusual love story.

World Rights: Hutchinson

After three years in the wilderness, hardboiled reporter Gerry Conway is back at his desk at the Glasgow Tribune. But three years is a long time on newspapers and things have changed - readers are dwindling, budgets are tightening, and the Trib's once rigorous standards are slipping. Once the paper's star reporter, Conway now plays second fiddle to his former protégé, crime reporter Martin Moir.

But when Moir goes AWOL as a big story breaks, Conway is dispatched to cover a gangland shooting. And when Moir's body turns up in a flooded quarry, Conway is drawn deeper into the city's criminal underworld as he looks for the truth about his colleague's death. Braving the hostility of gangsters, ambitious politicians and his own newspaper bosses, Conway discovers he still has what it takes to break a big story. But this is a story not everyone wants to hear as the city prepares to host the Commonwealth Games and the country gears up for a make-or-break referendum on independence.

In this, the second book in the Conway Trilogy, McIlvanney explores the murky interface of crime and politics in the New Scotland.

1949.  Lance Curran is set to prosecute a young man for a vile killing in a case which threatens to tear Northern Ireland apart.  Three years from now he will be a judge, his nineteen year-old daughter will be dead at the hands of a still unknown murderer, his wife Doris condemned to an asylum for the rest of her days.  In searing July heat, corruption and justice vie as Harry Ferguson, Judge Curran’s fixer, contemplates his own fall from grace with the beautiful and wilful Patricia. In BLUE IS THE NIGHT, Doris Curran finally emerges from the fog of deceit and blaming to cast new light upon the murder of her daughter: a voice from the shadows, relating the story of a life torn apart.

UK: Faber

Bec and Ritchie's father was shot dead in an act of self-sacrifice when they were children. A generation later Ritchie, a producer of reality TV shows, wants to make a film with their father's killer; Bec, a malaria researcher, is looking for a set of rules to live by. When Bec rejects marriage to a powerful newspaper editor in favour of starting a family with the unworldly biochemist Alex, brother and sister's sense of right and wrong is put to the harshest test.

THE HEART BROKE IN is an old-fashioned story of modern times, an ambitious family drama of love, death and money in the era of gene therapy and Internet exposés. It asks the question where, in our half-Darwinian, half-religious age, human conscience resides.

World excluding US: Canongate; US: FSG

Philip Pullman has selected his favourite tales from the Brothers Grimm and retold them in sparkling, clear and contemporary language. Pullman's selection includes all the most famous, familiar tales - 'Little Red Riding Hood', 'Cinderella', 'Snow White' - alongside other equally delightful but lesser known stories.

World English Language: Penguin UK; Chinese (simplified): Shanghai Insight Media; French: Gallimard; German: Aladin; Greek: Psichogios; Hungarian: Geopen; Italian: Salani; Polish: Albatros; Portuguese (Brazil): Objetiva; Spanish: Ediciones B

Twenty-one years after his wife and daughter were murdered in the bombing of a plane over Scotland, Alan Tealing, a university lecturer, still does not know the truth of what really happened on that terrible night. Obsessed by the details of what he has come to call The Case, he is sure that the man convicted of the atrocity was not responsible, and that he himself has thus been deprived not only of justice but also of any chance of escape from his enduring grief.

When an American intelligence officer, apparently terminally ill and determined to settle his own accounts before death, arrives on his doorstep with information about a key witness in the trial, a fateful sequence of events is set in motion. Alan decides that he must travel to Australia to confront this witness, whose evidence he has always disbelieved, in the hope that this might at last be the breakthrough for which he has waited so long.

THE PROFESSOR OF TRUTH is the latest from prize-winning novelist James Robertson.

UK: Hamish Hamilton; US: Other Press

Jo, a 23-year-old freelance journalist, returns to South Africa after ten years in the UK. She's a foreigner here, as she is back in London. Violence is sweeping through the township she’s working in when Nico, her estranged father, calls and asks for her help to prove his innocence in a decades-old racist murder. As she and her father drive through South Africa's now-unfamiliar landscape, it becomes clear that he knows more about the murder than he's telling, and she is forced to ask herself: how far can the bonds of family be stretched before they snap?

CALL IT DOG is about what it's like to be between countries, feeling at home in neither. It asks the questions: what is it like to feel as though you don't belong anywhere, and how does that affect a young woman, a township full of immigrants and a country still coming to terms with its bloody history and new democracy? What happens when we begin to believe the stories we tell ourselves, from neatly packaged summaries of a country you're no longer familiar with, to dangerous attempts to change history through sheer force of will?

UK: Atlantic Books

In the back of a police van, Elliott meets Scarlet: moody, bewitching… just really hot. Getting arrested (for the twenty-first time) may well be the best move Elliott’s ever made. Getting involved with the girlfriend of a six-foot dreadlocked gang-leader named Storm – eh, not so much.

For this is London, but not quite as we know it. With schools nearly empty and adults afraid to break curfew, the city is in thrall to its youth gangs and their bitter turf wars. If you’re a long-haired teenage computer nerd like Elliott, it’s generally best to make nice with the gangsters and take care of all their hacking needs. But when a politician’s laptop loaded with high-level secrets falls into Elliott’s hands (okay, so maybe Elliott hotwired the politician’s car and the laptop happened to be in it), life threatens to get a whole lot livelier. Before he can say ‘don’t shoot the IT guy’, Elliott finds himself on the run. Now he’s got a story to break, a nuclear war to avert, a girl to impress – and all before his mum gets home from work.

BATTERSEA PUNKS is a high-octane comic thriller with an endearingly sweet cast of dudes, goons and rock stars. The offspring of SKINS and THE A-TEAM, this is a truly special, truly riotous piece of work.

Since cancer was first identified and named by Hippocrates in Ancient Greece, mankind has struggled to understand the process which transforms the routine and life-giving monotony of cell division – which happens billions upon billions of times every day – into a destructive source of tumour-creation. There have been numerous mini-breakthroughs in the search for a cure to cancer, but by far the most important and far-reaching in its consequences is the discovery of the cancer gene – P53 – a humble protein with a molecular weights of 53,000. This is the story of the international race to identify, understand and tame this tiniest of proteins - the story of the cancer gene.

In this book Sue Armstrong will tell the story of the discovery of P53 with all the drama, mystery and suspense of a crime novel. She will take us through the false starts, contradictory theories and tensions caused by competitive research teams on different sides of the globe making breakthroughs simultaneously. She will people the book with the key scientists associated with P53 and dramatise the role of the pharmaceutical companies as they breathe down the necks of scientists in lab coats in their impatience to transform pure science into drugs.

Today we find ourselves on the brink of utterly radical and groundbreaking new cancer treatments as a result of our understanding of the mechanism through which P53 controls cell division.  And the latest discovery holds the possibility that P53 is also at the heart of the ageing process. This is science we must understand – our very lives depend on it.

World English: Dundee University Press

THE GREAT TAMASHA is the riveting story of modern India - with its vastness and ever-proliferating complexities - told through the prism of the glitzy, scandalous and mind-blowingly lucrative Twenty20 cricket tournament, the Indian Premier League.

When Lalit Modi, an Indian businessman with a criminal record, a history of failed business ventures and a reputation for audacious deal making, came up with the idea of creating a Twenty20 cricket league in India in 2008, the odds were stacked against him. International cricket was still controlled from London, where they played the long, slow game of Test cricket by the old rules. Indians had traditionally underperformed in the sport and the game was a national passion, rather than attracting the tribal following of a league sport. Adopting the highly commercial American model of sporting tournaments, merging the three powerful forces of politics, business and Bollywood, and throwing scantily clad western cheerleaders into the mix, Modi set himself three months to succeed. And succeed he did - dazzlingly.

The emergence of the IPL, transforming cricket and transfixing India, is a remarkable tale. Cricket, as a unique national passion, is at the heart of the miracle that is modern India. As a business, it represents everything that is most dynamic and entrepreneurial about the country's economic boom: including the industrious and aspiring middle-class consumers who are driving it. Most intriguing, as an unholy congregation of the rich and powerful, conspiring grubbily, the IPL reveals, perhaps to an unprecedented degree, the corrupt, back-scratching and nepotistic way in which India is run.

This is a truly original book. It is about an ongoing reappraisal of Indian nationality. It is about rapid economic growth, outlandish corruption and crony capitalism. It is about India's emerging middle-class, their great optimism, industry and vulgar consumerism.

World All Languages: Bloomsbury

Part cricket book, part cycling book, part travelogue, CYCLING TO THE ASHES is the story of a mind-blowingly challenging fourteen-month overland journey across four continents.

In 2009, Oli Broom quit his job as chartered surveyor, got on a bike and set out from Lords on the long road to Brisbane, site of the 2010 Ashes. The idea of chronicling the following year had crossed his mind, but this was never conceived of as a book-in-the-making trip. It was a chance to do something extraordinary, see the world, and spread the gospel of cricket.

UK: Yellow Jersey/Random House 

Our world is increasingly a digital one. Over half of the adult population now spend more of their waking hours ‘plugged in’ than not, whether to the internet, mobile telephones, or other digital media. To email, text, tweet and blog our way through our careers, relationships and even our family lives is now the status quo. But what effect is this need for constant connection really having?

Tom Chatfield examines what our ‘wired’ life is really doing to our minds, for better and for worse. This book asks what it means not simply to live within a digital century, but to live well with it and within it. Unlike most other contemporary accounts, it is neither a tale of technology doom nor technology glory, but a pragmatic guide to what questions we need to ask of the world around us; what it might mean to answer them, and what practical steps might allow us all both to choose and to use the tools at our disposal, and to prosper within a digital century in as fully human a sense as possible.

World All Languages: Macmillan

The hotly anticipated memoir of the British-born creative genius at American Vogue: a dazzling and beguiling story of fifty years in fashion

For decades, Grace Coddington’s personal touch has steered the wildly imaginative fashion spreads in Vogue magazine. Then came The September Issue, the behind-the-scenes documentary that turned the spotlight on a woman with a no-nonsense attitude, unerring visual instinct and flame-red hair. Overnight, Grace became a heroine for fashion insiders and the general public alike.

Witty and forthright, and illustrated throughout with vintage photographs and exclusive line-drawings, Grace: A Memoir shares the excitement and vision that go into producing so many of the magazine’s unforgettable images. Here are the designers, photographers, models, hairstylists, make-up artists and celebrities with whom Grace has created her ‘stories in pictures’  – whether it be Jerry Hall conquering the USSR or Tom Ford falling down a rabbit hole in Annie Leibovitz’s version of Alice in Wonderland.

Grace’s own life has been as dreamlike as one of her mad-cap fashion spreads. Brought up in windswept wartime Anglesey, she arrived in London, aged eighteen, and quickly became a face of the Sixties. The muse behind Vidal Sassoon’s Five Point Cut, she posed for Bailey and Donovan in the East End and Norman Parkinson in the Caribbean. Surviving a serious car-crash, she later became a fashion editor at British Vogue and during the Seventies and the Eighties started to create the fantasy travelogues that would become her trademark.

Friendships bloomed – with Bruce Weber and Calvin Klein, whose offer of a job took Grace to New York. Although marriages to restaurateur Michael Chow and photographer Willie Christie were brief, her romance with the hairdresser Didier Malige has endured. But it is with Anna Wintour – with whom she has been in working partnership for over twenty years – that Grace continues to be an astonishing influence on modern style.

UK: Chatto & Windus; US: Random House; Chinese (simplified): Hunan; Chinese (complex): Azoth; Dutch: Atlas-Contact; Finnish: Kustannusosakeyhtio Nemo; French: Albin Michel; Korean: Bookie; Portuguese (Brazil only): Record; Russian: Sindbad; Spanish: Turner Libros; Turkish: Sho-pigo Yayinlari

Not a day goes by without Tim Dowling asking himself, ‘How the hell did I end up here?’  Twenty years ago he and his wife embarked on a project so foolhardy that even thinking about it made them shudder. Neither of them dared propose to the other, because neither could make a persuasive case for the idea. They simply agreed - we’ll get married - with the resigned determination of two people plotting to bury a body in the woods. Except that if you did agree to bury a body in the woods, you probably wouldn’t ring your parents straight away to tell them the news.

Two decades on they are still together and still married. This is the story of what it means to be a husband in the 21st century, and what is and isn’t required to hold that office.  “Husband”, Dowling claims, is one of the main things on his CV, right below ‘BA, English’ and just above ‘Once got into a shark cage for money’.  “Husband” is the thing he does that makes everything else he does seem like a hobby. 

UK: Fourth Estate

The Du Mauriers - three beautiful, successful and rebellious sisters, whose lives were bound in a family drama that inspired Angela and Daphne's best novels. Much has been written about Daphne but here the hidden lives of the sisters are revealed in a riveting group biography. The middle sister in a celebrated artistic dynasty, Daphne du Maurier is one of the master storytellers of our time, author of REBECCA, JAMAICA INN and MY COUSIN RACHEL. Her success and fame were enhanced by films of her novels and horrifying short stories, 'Don't Look Now' and the unforgettable 'The Birds' among them. But this fame overshadowed her sisters Angela and Jeanne, a writer and an artist of talent, living quiet lives even more unconventional than Daphne's own. In this group biography they are considered side by side, as they were in life, three sisters brought up in the hothouse of a theatrical family with a peculiar and powerful father. This family dynamic reveals the hidden lives of Piffy, Bird & Bing, full of social non-conformity, creative energy and compulsive make-believe, their lives as psychologically complex as a Daphne du Maurier plotline.

UK: HarperCollins

Histories of science often begin with the heroic battle between Galileo and the Catholic Church, which ignited the Scientific Revolution and led to the world-changing discoveries of Isaac Newton. Virtually nothing is said about the European scholars who came before. In reality, more than a millennium before the Renaissance a succession of scholars paved the way for the discoveries for which Galileo, Newton and others are often credited. In BEFORE GALILEO John Freely examines the pioneering research of the first European scientists, many of them monks whose influence ranged far beyond the walls of the monasteries where they studied and wrote. BEFORE GALILEO fills a notable gap in the history of science and places the great discoveries in their rightful context.

UK: Duckworth; US: Overlook

Throughout his six decades in the public eye, Winston Churchill understood and wielded the power of words. In his speeches, books and newspaper and magazine articles, he expressed his feelings and laid out his vision for the future. His wartime writings and speeches in particular have fascinated generation after generation with their powerful narrative style and thoughtful reflection.

In this book, Martin Gilbert has skilfully selected 200 extracts from Churchill's entire oeuvre of books, articles and speeches that reflect his life story, career and philosophy. They range from intimate memories of his childhood and schooldays to his contributions to more than 50 years of debates on social policy and on war, and his efforts after 1945 to see the world a better place. In them we see how he used words for different purposes: to argue for moral and political causes, to advocate courses of action in the social, national and international spheres, and to tell the story of his own life, struggles, setbacks and achievements.

As Churchill's official biographer, Martin Gilbert is uniquely qualified to select from Churchill's own inimitable words not only those that describe the main adventures of his life and the crises of his career, but also those passages that express the essence of Churchill's thoughts and personality. Gilbert's informed and subtle choice of extracts, together with his illuminating introductory and explanatory text linking them together, create a fascinating and compelling biographical narrative of Churchill's life as recounted in the great man's own words. They provide an invaluable insight into Churchill's character and how he made his mark on Britain and the world stage.

UK: Bantam Press US: Da Capo Press

On a marshy bit of land which once formed part of Heinrich Himmler’s country estate 50 miles north of Berlin are the remains of Ravensbruck concentration camp. Ravensbruck was a unique institution during the Nazi period - a concentration camp created for and staffed by women. Built to house 6,000 German political female prisoners at the beginning of the Nazi period, 160,000 women of all nationalities eventually passed through its gates. Resistance fighters, intelligence agents, communists and Jews were incarcerated and perished here. Among the anonymous thousands were many notable women – Gemma La Guardia, the sister of New York’s wartime mayor, de Gaulle’s niece, Kafka’s mistress and Odette Churchill. And a range of gory gynaecological experiments were carried out here on women and their foetus’.

The book will be much more than a catalogue of atrocity and depravity, however. At the heart of RAVENSBRUCK will be stories of heroism and survival. The narrative will centre on the experiences of women – from the farmer’s wife to the aristocratic intellectual - who had the resilience and mental and physical strength to withstand the systematic brutalisation and emerge from the camp against all the odds, alive. The book will interweave two narrative strands – that of inmates looking out and outsiders trying to comprehend what was going within – until the liberation of the camp by the Red Army, when the two stories naturally collide.

UK: Little, Brown; Dutch: Ambo-Anthos; Portuguese (Brazil): Record;

Weaving together memoir and anecdote with historical example, in ON WHEELS renowned author Michael Holroyd traces his relationship with cars and driving throughout a lifetime of biography.

For Michael, learning to drive is no easy matter: his driving lessons acquire a military precision in learning how to get in and out of the car in the correct fashion. His biographical subject George Bernard Shaw was no less enthusiastic - he continued to drive with reckless gusto into his eightieth year; for Vita Sackville-West her car was a boudoir, a venue for romantic assignations and getaways; and for Augustus John and his family, an opportunity to whizz at great speed through picturesque villages, car piled high with bohemian friends, whilst the poor car stuttered along in first gear.

Wry, thoughtful and very funny, ON WHEELS is an elegy to the glamour of the car - and more; in these five delightful essays Michael Holroyd finds new and surprising ways to understand the past and challenge our view of the future.

UK: Chatto & Windus

Michael Ignatieff is internationally renowned as an author, cultural commentator and academic.  Seven years ago, while teaching at Harvard, he was approached by representatives of the Canadian Liberal Party and asked if he might be interested in entering Canadian politics.  His grand-father had been a politician, and Michael had always been an astute critic of politics in many countries throughout the world.  But as he was to discover, observing political action and engaging in it are two very different things.  FIRE AND ASHES charts Michael’s meteoric rise in Canadian politics and his eventual defeat, as leader of the Liberal Party, at the hands of the party in power, the Conservatives.  Along the way it provides a brilliant analysis of the ways in which politics are conducted in democracies, and wry reflections on just how inadequate good intentions alone can be.  Part Machiavelli, part Castiglione, part Marcus Aurielius, and wholly Michael Ignatieff, this book is in itself an important political document.

Canada: Knopf; UK & US: Harvard U P 

How old is monogamy? Who invented streets? Why did cows change the world? When was the first war and how was it fought?  What is time and how have we measured it?  Who invented cookery? When did we discover medicine, and when did it actually start working? Who wrote the first song? When did we first build permanent homes? How old is fashion?

Told in a cheerful and wry style, A MILLION YEARS IN A DAY will answer all these questions and more. Drawing on his experience in making the past both fun and accessible on the award-winning Horrible Histories television series, Greg Jenner will narrate the variety of ordinary life in easily-digestible thematic snippets, while also reminding us that our ancestors were not as different as they might at first appear.

A MILLION YEARS IN A DAY will be a populist and approachable social history of daily life, covering one theme per chapter, revealing the astonishing origins and development of the world we take for granted.  This is a history of everything you never considered, a smorgasbord of learning. It is the story of your life, one million years in the making.

World: Orion

Graham Johnson was a fresh-faced journalist with an ambition to break the big news stories and make his name as a star reporter when an offer came in to work at a leading tabloid.  He couldn't say no. Instantly he found himself drawn into a world of sleaze, spin and corruption, where bending the law was justifiable in the hunt for the big story and bending the truth was the norm. Against his better judgement Graham found his niche in this new world and, what's more, he found that he was good at it. In his time first at the News of the World then the Sunday Mirror, he made a name for himself as a man who could deliver the story, no matter what - a kind of tabloid terrorist who rifled through celebrities' rubbish bins, staked out politicians' hotel rooms, and paid-up Page Three girls to seduce Premiership footballers, all in the name of selling newspapers.

HACK is a compelling and intoxicating story of one man's time in the tabloid jungle - a world that in its heady mix of sex, drugs and casual immorality is reminiscent of the City - and how he ultimately saved himself.

UK: Simon & Schuster 

CARTEL describes a global workforce that generates billions in sales.  But unlike Tesco or BP, few have heard of it.  The Cartel is Britain’s biggest drugs organisation. It is a shadowy network stretching from the freezing, foggy banks of the Mersey to the glittering marinas of Marbella, from the coffee shops of Amsterdam to the trading floors of Canary Wharf. It is run by godfathers as rich as Branson who are kept in line by a new generation of teenage killers.

Here is the inside story.

UK: Mainstream 

Jemima Goldsmith was just 21 when she married Imram Khan, converted to Islam, began to learn Urdu and moved into his extended family house in Lahore. During the next decade she came to know and love Pakistan, “the land of the Pure”, in all its bewildering complexity and contradictions. In this book she revisits the country she got to know in the 1990s, undertaking a journey which begins in Lahore, moves north to Peshawar and Islamabad, and then heads down to Karachi. Along the way she encounters a dazzling array of people – the ordinary and the extraordinary - who illustrate the paradoxes of this remarkable country. Pakistan encompasses 165 million people, several hundred tribes and more than a dozen languages, and is a very different place from the land of bearded zealots and military dictators of Western stereotype.

PAKISTAN will be accessible and anecdotal, a witty and revealing portrait of a country at the febrile epicentre of world affairs.

UK: Virago

THE ART OF THE RESTAURATEUR is a compelling look behind the scenes at some of the world's best restaurants, and celebrates the complex but unsung art of the restaurateur. In his first ever book, acclaimed Financial Times restaurant critic (and former restaurateur) Nicholas Lander reveals everything you ever wanted to know about the highs and lows of the restaurant business, presenting the untold stories of the world's best restaurateurs, from luxurious Michelin-starred restaurants, to bustling neighbourhood bistros, to stylish fast-food cafes. Every story is fascinating, entertaining and has something to tell about the creation of a successful restaurant, from finding the right location to deciding what kind of food to serve. Engaging, erudite and packed with insights, it's a must-read for anyone interested in food, and for anyone who's ever dreamed of opening a restaurant.

Click here for a trailer for The Art of the Restaurateur

World all languages: Phaidon

A true story of obsessive love turning to obsessive hate, GIVE ME EVERYTHING YOU HAVE chronicles James Lasdun's strange and harrowing ordeal at the hands of a former student, a self-styled “verbal terrorist,” who began trying, in her words, to “ruin him”. Hate mail—much of it violently anti-Semitic—online postings, and public accusations of plagiarism and sexual misconduct were her weapons of choice and, as with more conventional terrorist weapons, proved remarkably difficult to combat.

James Lasdun’s account, while terrifying, is told with compassion and humour, and brilliantly succeeds in turning a highly personal story into a profound meditation on subjects as varied as madness, race, Middle Eastern politics, and the meaning of honour and reputation in the Internet age.

UK: Jonathan Cape; US: Farrar, Straus & Giroux

Having described his not entirely successful efforts at being the perfect father in his Guardian column 'Slack Dad', Nick Lezard is currently describing the aftermath in a column in the New Statesman. Kicked out of the family home by his wife, he now dosses on a friend's couch and cadges booze and cigarettes where he can. But Nick Lezard also remains one of our most incisive writers, his weekly paperback review in the Guardian being a model of its kind. In BITTER EXPERIENCE HAS TAUGHT ME he will combine his literary talents with his lack of life talents in a hilarious and touching way.

UK: Faber

Why are kangaroos found only in Australia? What created the Niagara Falls? Why did horses have to be introduced to the Americas? How were volcanoes created? Why are the rock formations of the Alps so twisted? Did the Biblical Flood really happen?

These were the kinds of far-reaching questions that a 19th century club of gentlemen scientists set themselves the task of answering – and their ground-breaking discoveries shaped the way we understand the world today. Based in a gaslit debating chamber by the River Thames, members of the Geological Society would roam the world to gather fossils, bones and rocks as evidence for their theories. With technological advances opening up the possibilities of science to the masses, geology quickly became the most popular and dynamic of the new sciences, and the Society’s findings were delivered to an eager public.

But the Geological Society found itself at the centre of an intense debate that rocked society to its core. If a geologist could prove that the world was formed billions of years before human life emerged, then a man could deny the hand of God in creating the world. For some members of the Society, these geological revelations would enable them to develop yet more radical theories – Charles Darwin based his theory of evolution on the geological work done by his mentor Charles Lyell. But for others, including Lyell, the full implications of their work were a profoundly frightening prospect. Although he gave Darwin his public support and recognised his own role as the ‘missing link’ in the younger man’s research, Lyell was nonetheless a reluctant evolutionist who would struggle for the rest of his life to reconcile himself to the damage done to his religious beliefs.

READING THE ROCKS tells the compelling story of Lyell, Darwin, and the other key geologists of the era: men who first learned how to read the layers of rock and mud to tell a new history of the world, and who in doing so precipitated a severe crisis of faith and had as wide an impact as the ideas of Copernicus and Freud.

UK: Bodley Head

It is one of man’s greatest inventions, designed to set us free – but we have become its slaves. It dominates our lives – but how much do we understand about it?

Money has come in many different forms: sugar in the West Indies, tobacco in Virginia, dried cod in Newfoundland. And where did it start? Orthodox economics says that today’s financial structure evolved from bartering. In fact this is the first misconception in a false history which has led to some very flawed assumptions.

MONEY: AN UNAUTHORISED BIOGRAPHY unfolds nothing less than a panoramic alternative, secret history of money – what it is and how it works. Drawing on stories from throughout human history and around the globe, Money will radically reconfigure your understanding of our greatest invention and rearrange your understanding of the world.

UK: Bodley Head; US: Knopf; Canada: Doubleday; Dutch: Atlas-Contact; German: DVA; Japanese: Toyo Keizai; Portuguese (Brazil): Companhia das Letras; Portuguese: Temas & Debates; Russian: Sindbad

At the dawn of the nineteenth century Russia made a serious attempt to colonize America: by 1818 the westernmost settlements of the Tsar’s Empire were in Sonoma County, California, and on the Hawaiian Islands. The dreamer behind this grand Imperial vision was Nikolai Rezanov - diplomat, adventurer, courtier, millionaire and gambler. His quest to transform the desperate fur-hunting stations of the Alaskan coast into the hub of a Russian colony stretching from Siberia to California led him to Spanish San Francisco, where he became captivated by Conchita, the fifteen-year-old daughter of the Spanish Governor, a ‘dark-eyed angel’ who embodied his dreams of both love and empire.
 
Reaching from the intrigues of the glittering court of Catherine the Great to the wilds of the New World, Matthews uses first-hand accounts, archives and personal travel experiences to create a brilliantly original history of one of Russia’s most eccentric Empire-builders.

GLORIOUS MISADVENTURES: NIKOLAI REZANOV AND HIS DREAM OF RUSSIAN AMERICA is the fascinating untold story of a man who nearly made Northwest America Russian.
 

World All Languages: Bloomsbury

Nick Papadimitriou has spent a lifetime living on the margins, walking and documenting the landscapes surrounding his home in Child's Hill, North London, in a study he calls Deep Topography. Part meditation on nature and walking, part memoir and part social history, his arresting debut is first and foremost a personal inquiry into the spirit of a place: a 14-mile broken ridge of land on the fringes of Northern London known as Scarp.

Conspicuous but largely forgotten, a vast yet largely invisible presence hovering just beyond the metropolis, Scarp is a vast storehouse of regional memory. We join the author as he explores and reimagines this brooding, pregnant landscape, meticulously observing his surroundings, finding surprising connections and revealing lost slices of the past. SCARP captures the satisfying experience of a long, reflective walk. Whether talking about the beauty of a bird or a telegraph pole, deaths at a roundabout or his own troubled past, Papadimitriou celebrates the poetry in the everyday. His captivating prose reveals that the world around us is alive and intrinsically valuable in ways that the trappings of day-to-day life lead us to forget, and allows us to re-connect with something more authentic, more immediate, more profound.

UK: Sceptre 

It is a maxim of international diplomacy: do not negotiate with terrorists. In his new book TALKING TO TERRORISTS, Jonathan Powell will argue otherwise, drawing on his first-hand experience with issues such as the return of Hong Kong to China, human rights and arms control in the Soviet Union, as well as German unification and the Northern Ireland peace talks. 

TALKING TO TERRORISTS will look at the subterranean world of secret discussions between terrorist groups and governments, expanding the material in Powell’s 2010 series for Radio 4 with new interviews with negotiators, government officials and former terrorists to whom he has privileged access because of his work in the field. It will also introduce an historical perspective, with case studies drawn from the end of the nineteenth century to the present day. 

No one is better placed than Powell to write a book about negotiating with the enemy. As Tony Blair’s chief of staff, he spent ten years talking to IRA leaders in Dublin, Derry and Belfast. Since he has worked between governments and insurgent groups in Europe and Asia as well as founding Inter Mediate, an organisation dedicated to political conflict resolution. TALKING TO TERRORISTS will be a colourful description of this secret, dangerous and incredibly difficult process, often in the words of the participants themselves, and will draw lessons for the future handling of terrorism based on that collective experience.

World English language: The Bodley Head

Benjamin Britten was born into a family of dentists in Suffolk in November 1913. His musical mother knew that her youngest child was destined for greatness - he was going to be “the fourth B” after Bach, Beethoven and Brahms. Ben did not let her down, precociously composing "Quatre Chansons Francaises" while still at prep school, and heading for London and a scholarship at the Royal College of Music after only two years at secondary school.

In the 1930s Britten quickly established himself as the leading British composer, befriending and collaborating with a strikingly gifted circle of literary and musical friends including W H Auden, Christopher Isherwood, Lennox Berkeley and Frank Bridge. Later he met the singer who was to form the centre of his emotional and musical life, Peter Pears. Conscientious objectors, Britten and Pears headed for America before the war began, until intense homesickness, provoked in part by Britten’s reading of George Crabbe’s poem "Peter Grimes", drove him home to East Anglia in 1942 and gave him the inspiration for his finest opera. Together the men established the Aldeburgh Festival and Snape Maltings, which they ran with such flair.

This centenary biography of Benjamin Britten will place the composer firmly in the East Anglian landscape which he loved so much. It will also tell the story of an openly gay “marriage”, at a time when homosexuality was still illegal, one which survived every pressure, including Britten’s series of attachments to young boys.

UK: Hutchinson; US: Holt

EVERYTHING IS WONDERFUL describes Sigrid Rausing's experiences in Estonia in the early 1990s.  This was a strange place at a strange time, in the immediate post-communist period. Sigrid becomes not merely an observer of but also a participant in the lives of the people struggling to understand their new lives in a new nation.  Full of vivid imagery and colourful characters, EVERYTHING IS WONDERFUL is a portrait of a country we know almost nothing about.

US & Canada: Grove Atlantic; Swedish: Bonniers

Alice Rawsthorn brings her vast experience to this definitive survey of design of all kinds over the past few decades, and demonstrates the central role that design plays in our lives.

World All Languages: Hamish Hamilton

'Was rich Mrs Gertrude Hullett murdered at her luxurious 15-room home on Beachy Head? Detectives are tonight trying to establish the cause of the 50-year old widow's sudden death...' Daily Mail, 1957

In July 1957, the press descended in droves on the south-coast town of Eastbourne. An inquest had just been opened into the suspicious circumstances surrounding the death of Mrs Bobbie Hullett. She died after months of apparent barbiturate abuse - the drugs prescribed to calm her nerves by her close friend and doctor, Dr John Bodkin Adams.

The inquest brought to the surface years of whispered suspicion that had swept through the tea rooms, shops and nursing homes of the town. The doctor's alarming influence over the lives, deaths and finances of wealthy widows had not gone unnoticed - it was rumoured that the family doctor had been on a killing spree that spanned decades and involved 300 suspicious cases. Superintendent Hannam of Scotland Yard was called in to investigate.

THE CURIOUS HABITS OF DR ADAMS brilliantly brings to life the atmosphere of post-war England, and uses a wealth of new documents to follow the twists and turns of an extraordinary Scotland Yard murder enquiry. As expertly crafted as the best period detective novel, this book casts an entertainingly chilling light on a man reputed to be one of England's most prolific serial killers.

UK & British Commonwealth: John Murray

Jon Ronson is fascinated by madness, extraordinary behaviour and the human mind. He has spent his life investigating crazy events, following fascinating people and unearthing unusual stories. Collected here from various sources (including the Guardian and GQ America) are the best of his adventures. Always intrigued by our ability to believe the unbelievable, Jon meets the man preparing to welcome the aliens to earth, the woman trying to build a fully-conscious robotic replica of the love of her life and the Deal or No Deal contestants with a foolproof system to beat the Banker. Jon realizes that it's possible for our madness to be a force for good when he meets America's real-life superheroes or a force for evil when he meets the Reverend 'Death' George Exoo, who has dubiously assisted in more than a hundred mercy killings. He goes to a UFO convention in the Nevada desert with Robbie Williams, asks Insane Clown Posse (who are possibly America's nastiest rappers) whether it's true they've actually been evangelical Christians all along and rummages through the extensive archives of Stanley Kubrick. Frequently hilarious, sometimes disturbing, always entertaining, these compelling encounters with people on the edge of madness will have you wondering just what we're capable of.

UK: Picador; US: Riverhead; Audio: Audible; Russian: AST-Publishers

The life of young people around the world has become more complicated in the past two decades. The pressure is on, and the race for children to outperform and succeed in life starts earlier than ever before. Unfortunately the teaching of life skills required to succeed in this new competitive landscape has in general not kept up with these developments. The outcome is inevitable. High expectations, both of individuals and those around them, collide with a lack of relevant preparation and result in unhappiness. It is the universities and corporations across the world that later face the consequences of these problems. Too often students and recent graduates are either relaxed and 'happy', or successful, but rarely both. Numerous cases of burn-outs on the one hand and drop-outs on the other illustrate the problem. It is unfortunate, albeit perfectly understandable, that only a small proportion of students and graduates succeed in finding the elusive 'work-life' balance, and outperform in a way that leads to happiness. Why? Nobody has ever taught the majority of them how to do it.

Finally, here comes a book for a generation that is often almost as confused as it is ambitious. RACING TOWARDS EXCELLENCE fills the gap explains how and when outperformance happens, how it leads to happiness, and how to practically achieve both. Its principles are surprisingly universal and applicable to any field or activity, e.g. academia, business, entrepreneurship, finance, sports, arts etc.

Among the thousands of self-help books this book stands out, with its refreshing attitude, well executed combination of theory and practice, and the unique background of the authors. Covering areas ranging from inspiration, vision, love and responsibility to habits, study skills, health and fitness, communication, networking, mentoring and productive leisure, RACING TOWARDS EXCELLENCE is a must-read for all ambitious students and recent graduates.

UK: Leveraged Publishing 

Labor Day, 1969. two recent Harvard graduates move to New York to edit a new magazine called The National Lampoon. The two brilliant humorists, Henry Beard and Doug Kenney, presided over a team that within a decade transformed American culture and conquered the mainstream with a brand of subversive humor that provoked, offended, and illuminated.

With unparalleled access to the impresarios of this boom, journalist Ellin Stein takes us behind the jokes to witness the fighting and partying, collaboration and competition of those who led a rebellion of the self-consciously disenchanted. At its zenith, the brand birthed the anarchic earthiness of John Belushi, the suave slapstick of Chevy Chase, and the deadpan wit of Bill Murray. Set against the roiling political and cultural landscape of the 1970s, THAT'S NOT FUNNY, THAT'S SICK brims with insiders' stories while offering crucial insight into a transformation in comedy that still echoes today.

World Rights: Norton

Written by Matthew Todd, editor-in-chief of Attitude, the UK's biggest-selling gay magazine, STRAIGHT JACKET is a revolutionary self-help book for gay men. Following the massive response from readers to his original article, Matthew used it as the basis for his keynote address at the Terrence Higgins Trust annual conference, where it met with a standing ovation.

Groundbreaking in its approach, STRAIGHT JACKET looks beneath the shiny facade of contemporary gay culture and confronts the harsh truths and realities facing many gay men today. Frank and uncompromising, it looks at...

* why gay people suffer from disproportionately high rates of depression, addictions, suicidal thoughts and behaviour, and how many experience great difficulty in sustaining meaningful relationships

* how growing up in the closet can overwhelm the gay child with a deep shame that constrains the development of self-esteem, and explains how problems emerge in adulthood in diverse ways

* how gay men overcompensate for gay shame by pursuing unobtainable perfection - aspiring to have perfect bodies, boyfriends, lives - and how gay culture, which celebrates drug abuse, body fascism and sex addiction, is built on this collective shame which serves to compound these problems

Offering practical solutions to difficult problems and advice on how gay men can find happiness, self-fulfillment and secure relationships, STRAIGHT JACKET is a call-to-arms for the gay and wider community to acknowledge the damage done to gay people by societal shame across the world. It also recognizes the vital importance of putting into place systems that offer help and support to the many hundreds of thousands who need it.

UK: Bantam Press

A new drug is out. Everyone is talking about it. The Hit. Take it, and you have one amazing week to live. It's the ultimate high - at the ultimate price.

Adam is tempted. Life is rubbish: his girlfriend's over him, his brother's gone. So what's he got to lose? Everything, as it turns out. It's up to his girlfriend Lizzie to show him...

World all languages: Chicken House

UK: Macmillan US: HarperCollins; Chinese (simplified): Beijing Children's and Juvenile; German: Hanser; Russian: Atticus-Azbooka

World All Languages: Macmillan

It's Christmas Eve and there's one very important question on everyone's mind - have YOU been good this year?

For twins Sam and Charlie this is a big worry. Charlie has been especially naughty and everyone is sure that she won't get any presents AT ALL. But when Santa makes a mistake, it's up to naughty Charlie to put things right. Will her last-minute secret act of kindness be enough to redeem her after all?

THE EMPTY STOCKING is the first picture book by filmmaker and comedy legend Richard Curtis, who also wrote Blackadder, Mr Bean, Four Weddings And A Funeral, Notting Hill, Love Actually, The Vicar of Dibley...

World All Languages: Puffin

World All Language rights: Macmillan Children's Books

It’s Kitchen Disco – yeah yeah yeah!

Shake your belly like a pear

Wave your stalks up in the air

Kitchen Disco –  yeah yeah yeah!

World all languages: Faber

Delilah Smart must not eat ice cream, must not have friends and must only play with toys that teach. And because her parents are far too busy to look after her, they order a childcare robot. But they hadn't bargained on Granny Grabbers - the robot determined to teach Delilah about FUN.

Until DISASTER! Happy Home Robotics send in Nanny Deluxe - wired to ensure NO IMAGINATION whatsoever. Is Granny Grabbers for the scrapheap? Not without a battle...

World All Languages: Hodder Children's Books

Charlotte Haptie’s Otto books have been sold into seventeen languages. Her gripping new novel wonderfully displays her unique blend of magic, fantasy and adventure.
Publisher: World excluding US & Canada: Hodder Children's
Schedule: Delivered

Delilah Smart's life hasn't been the same since childcare robot Granny Grabbers entered her world and made it whizz bang wonderful fun, no matter how determined her parents are to make it dull dull dull. And it's not long before Granny Grabbers and Delilah stumble upon their next adventure ...
   

When local department store Blingman's hires an army of robotic cleaning personnel made by Happy Home Robotics, Granny Grabbers recognises a dear friend from her 'childhood' in the Happy Home Robotics Laboratory - PUG is clearly asking to be rescued from a life of cleaning servitude, and so it's action stations for Granny Grabbers and the team. Soon they devise a cunning plan that involves covert shopping trips, Easter bunny disguises, magic vanishing acts and a troupe of Paintball Pirates.

And of course no daring rescue is complete without a grabbmobile ...

World all languages: Hodder Children's Books

The day before yesterday, Jack was an ordinary nearly-13-year-old kid. Well, apart from the albino thing, which is turning out to be more of a thing than he thought it would be.

But everything started to go wrong for Jack last night when a man turned up on his doorstep, covered in blood. He needs Jack to undo a terrible curse that began with a harmless-looking white cat and an innocent little game of dice, and now threatens to engulf the whole city. Jack can’t refuse him, because this shadowy, skittish figure of doom also happens to be his godfather. Now he’s caught up in all kinds of danger – and if you think that’s bad luck, you have no idea…

RED-EYED JACK spins its eerie yarn of myth and menace around a boy who doesn’t even believe in curses (probably) and who just wants things to go his way for once. Funny, smart and compulsive, this is a hoodoo of a debut novel from award-winning playwright and BBC1’s SPOOKS writer Zinnie Harris.

The sun is shining and Florentine knows the best way to celebrate: a glorious picnic with delicious treats like apple and carrot muffins. But Pig has eaten the last apple! Now how can they bake their favourite muffins? Luckily, Pig may be small but he has a BIG idea for how to save the day . . .

Introducing two delightful new characters, this lively and playful book includes recipes and more from the story for children and adults to enjoy making together.

Join in the fun with Florentine and Pig!

World All Languages: Bloomsbury

I know for an absolute honest-to-goodness fact that life can kick you to pieces, break you into a thousand little shards, and you can get up again and mend yourself.

                I promise.

                And maybe, by the time I’m finished, you will believe me.

How does the daughter of an exceptionally wealthy London banker celebrate the end of her A-Levels? If you’re Amy Fields, you find yourself being escorted from the school premises for some minor infraction, and the next thing you know, your dad and his new wife have tricked you into some awful family bonding exercise disguised as a round-the-world yacht trip.

But then the family yacht is hijacked by pirates off the coast of Somalia, and Amy is forced into a new kind of hell. Stripped of her identity and renamed Hostage Three, she is now at the mercy of a terrifying and unpredictable group of captors – yet she finds herself drawn to a young, grey-eyed pirate named Farouz. Meeting in secret under the cover of stars, Farouz reveals to Amy a world she never imagined – or noticed – before; and she in return opens up the painful secrets of her own past. But as the boundaries of her life as Hostage Three begin to blur, and with tension hanging heavy in the air, Amy will need to choose where her loyalties lie, and what she is prepared to do in order to survive.

A stunning depiction of a turbulent and unknown part of the world, HOSTAGE THREE is also a beautifully accomplished tale of one girl’s discovery of love in all its unexpected forms.

World English Language: Bloomsbury

My name is Melon – no, you didn’t read that wrong, my name IS Melon, like the fruit. My mum called me that because it reminded her of her family’s melon farm back in Crete. She didn’t stop to think what it would be like to be a fifteen year-old schoolgirl with big boobs and a stupid name like Melon.

She also didn’t stop to get out the way of the bus that knocked her down, so now it’s just me – and Paul, Mum’s boyfriend. He’s a social worker too so he keeps asking if I’m OK. I’d be a lot better if he’d Just. Stop. Asking.

There’s someone else as well, I suppose – my dad. I’ve never met him, but Mum told me The Story so many times that I know it by heart. It’s got everything: a family curse, a family feud, forbidden love. It’s very Greek. Everyone else thinks it’s just a fairy-tale, and Paul says he was told a different story altogether, but I reckon that’s just because Mum wanted him to like her – because if The Story turns out to be a lie, then all this is going to be a lot harder than I thought…

Funny, fierce and tender, RED INK is a powerful tale of adolescence and loss - and of the stories we choose to tell ourselves in order to survive.

World All Languages: Hot Key Books

In this exhilarating conclusion to the Ring of Five trilogy, Eoin McNamee's twists and turns will have readers wondering who they can believe in this dangerous world.
Publisher: UK: Quercus; US: Random House
Schedule: Publication: March 2012

Lily thought her parents’ break-up was the worst thing that could possibly happen. That was before she found herself stuck in a rundown cottage, during the bleakest winter storm on record, with only a high-spirited dog for company. Moving to the country was Mum’s idea, but - as ever - Mum is nowhere to be seen.

As darkness closes in, an unlikely duo comes to Lily’s rescue: an eccentric old lady named Kingsley with her never-ending supply of meat stews and terrifying knitwear, and her lodger, the mysterious Marin. With the help of her strange new friends, and with the snowdrifts settling around them, Lily begins to put her life back together - but questions linger in the frosty air: why can she not stop thinking about Marin and his teasing smile? What secrets does Kingsley know about Lily’s family? And what will the future hold for her once the snows melt?

Exploring the distress of a broken family and the obsessive wonder of sexual awakening, HALO MOON is a beautifully-crafted debut novel about having to grow up too fast. Written with grace and humour, this is a spell-binding tale of how things can change in a storm.

For thirteen year old Jakob, the summer is looking pretty bleak. His only friend has moved away, and no one else seems to have any time for him, except the girl who lives downstairs, but she’s a little weird. Then again, so is Jakob. A few months ago, he was in a car accident that killed both his parents – and though he’s unable to remember exactly what happened, he can’t stop turning it over in his mind. No wonder people leave him alone.

Then out of nowhere a stray dog befriends Jakob, and together they begin to roam the city streets by night, discovering an exhilarating secret world where they can both taste a new kind of freedom. But as their nocturnal adventures take Jakob further and further away from the safety of home, the truth of that awful night starts to emerge. Will he be strong enough to face it – and who will be there for him when he does?

Exploring the heartbreaking loneliness of grief with sensitive assurance, NOBODY'S DOG is above all a powerful and uplifting tale about friendship found in the most unexpected places.

Canada: Scholastic

Written entirely in poems as self-confessed poetry geek Gretchen finds new ways of expressing herself, GEEK IS A FOUR-LETTER WORD is a tale of haiku, high-fives and heartache. It explores with rich humour all the anguished details of teenage life – unrequited crushes, younger sisters with enviable dating records, the comforting properties of chocolate brownies…A sensitively-drawn chronicle of the unnerving process of growing up, GEEK is above all a funny and heartfelt novel about a girl finding her feet.
Publisher: Canada: Scholastic
Schedule: Publication: 2013

In the back of a police van, Elliott meets Scarlet: moody, bewitching… just really hot. Getting arrested (for the twenty-first time) may well be the best move Elliott’s ever made. Getting involved with the girlfriend of a six-foot dreadlocked gang-leader named Storm – eh, not so much.

For this is London, but not quite as we know it. With schools nearly empty and adults afraid to break curfew, the city is in thrall to its youth gangs and their bitter turf wars. If you’re a long-haired teenage computer nerd like Elliott, it’s generally best to make nice with the gangsters and take care of all their hacking needs. But when a politician’s laptop loaded with high-level secrets falls into Elliott’s hands (okay, so maybe Elliott hotwired the politician’s car and the laptop happened to be in it), life threatens to get a whole lot livelier. Before he can say ‘don’t shoot the IT guy’, Elliott finds himself on the run. Now he’s got a story to break, a nuclear war to avert, a girl to impress – and all before his mum gets home from work.

BATTERSEA PUNKS is a high-octane comic thriller with an endearingly sweet cast of dudes, goons and rock stars. The offspring of SKINS and THE A-TEAM, this is a truly special, truly riotous piece of work.