NOW IN B FORMAT. At the heart of this epic saga, set just before the Opium Wars, is an old slaving-ship, The Ibis. Its destiny is a tumultuous voyage across the Indian Ocean, its crew a motley array of sailors and stowaways, coolies and convicts. In a time of colonial upheaval, fate has thrown together a truly diverse cast of Indians and Westerners, from a bankrupt Raja to a widowed villager, from an evangelical English opium trader to a mulatto American freedman. As their old family ties are washed away they, like their historical counterparts, come to view themselves as jahaj-bhais or ship-brothers. An unlikely dynasty is born, which will span continents, races and generations. The vast sweep of this historical adventure spans the lush poppy fields of the Ganges, the rolling high seas, and the exotic backstreets of China. But it is the panorama of characters, whose diaspora encapsulates the vexed colonial history of the East itself, which makes Sea of Poppies so breathtakingly alive a masterpiece from one of the world s finest novelists.

Bullied at school for his suspiciously dark skin and lack of a father, Hart soon learns to fight and win. At eighteen, his world is shaken by his mother s revelation that his anonymous father is willing to give him a vast inheritance provided he can prove himself worthy of the prize as an officer in the King s Dragoon Guards. At a time when racism and prejudice are rife in Victorian society, Hart struggles to come to terms with his identity. Forced to leave the army, he decides to head to South Africa, and a fresh start. But George Hart has soldiering in his blood, and once in Africa the urge to serve again is strong. Yet now he is caught between two fierce and unyielding forces as Britain drives towards war with the Zulus. Hart must make a choice and fight for his life.

NOW B FORMAT. Something to Tell You follows the fortunes of a successful psychoanalyst who, as the book opens, is reflecting on his coming-of-age in 1970s suburbia; on his first love (a relationship that continues to haunt him), and on a brutal act of violence from which he can never escape. The book brilliantly captures that decade's sense of sexual freedom, and the exhilaration of the drug culture - as well as the violent struggle between the forces of labour and capital. The events of those years provide a vivid backdrop to the drama that develops thirty years later as the characters face an encroaching middle age with the traumas of their youth still unresolved.

Settled in London and with their own delicious slice of home in the form of Beppi's restaurant, 'Little Italy', the Martinelli's are a typical Italian family; fighting, eating and loving in equal measure. Now, Pieta's sister Addolorata is getting married.Since Pieta is a bridal designer it falls to her to make the wedding gown. But she is distracted by a series of family mysteries. Why is her father feuding with another Italian in the neighbourhood? Why is her mother so faded and sad? And could the man she's always held a torch for really be getting married to someone else? As Pieta stitches and beads her sister's wedding gown she uncovers the secrets that have made her family what it is and that stand between her and happiness.THE ITALIAN WEDDING is a feast of food and love. It's about discovering who your family really are. And who you really want to be.

Following White Rapids—named Best Comic of 2007 by The Onion—Pascal Blanchet brings us Baloney. Winds swirl and darkness reigns over a hamlet perched atop a craggy peak. Russian fatalism sets the tone as Blanchet orchestrates the tale of a village butcher, his disabled daughter, and her tutor in their doomed uprising against the swaggering Duke Shostakov, local governor and owner of the only heating company in town. Curvy, retro lines and atmospheric, full-page panels evoke plaintive melodies, staccato passages, and soaring solos. In a graphic novel about love and despair that is also a homage to the music of the 1930s and ’40s, double bassists and trombonists lean into the frame, striking up a score that blends vaudeville with Kurt Weill and Russia’s great modern composers. Rendered in two-color, red-and-black chiaroscuro, light struggles to emerge from darkness and endurance makes way for heroism, all to no avail. Read Baloney as a reverie composed to the melodies of Prokofiev and Shostakovich: a beautiful conjuring of moods, or a call to arms against the exorbitant rates charged by utilities.

Catherine Hall was born in the Lake District in 1973. She worked in documentary film production before becoming a freelance writer and editor for a range of charities specialising in human rights and development. This is her first novel.

Three women in their fifties - one widowed, one divorced and one never married - meet when they join a choir. When they decide to combine their talents to restore a run down hotel on the Cornish coast and turn it into a spa offering holiday courses, conflict is bound to result. The choir teaches them a good deal more than just how to sing. This is wonderful women's fiction from cookbook author-turned-novelist Prue Leith.

It is 1913 and ex-soldier turned professional big game hunter, Leon Courtney, is in British East Africa guiding rich and powerful men from America and Europe on safaris in the Masai tribe territories. One of his clients, German industrialist Count Otto Von Meerbach, has a company which builds aircraft and vehicles for the Kaiser's burgeoning army. But Leon had not bargained on falling passionately in love with Eva, the Count's beautiful and enigmatic mistress. Just prior to the outbreak of World War I, Leon is recruited by his uncle, Penrod Ballantyne, Commander of the British Forces in East Africa, to gather information from Von Meerbach. He stumbles on a plot against the British involving the disenchanted survivors of the Boer War, but it is only when Eva and Von Meerbach return to Africa that Leon finds out who and what is really behind the conspiracy.

NOW IN B FORMAT. Elizabeth Stavely sits in the Bodlean library with trembling hands. Before her is a fragment of parchment which has about it a dusty fragrance of roses, of sadness and great age. Here is the clue she has been looking for, to a story that has been untold for four hundred years. It is as though a voice is whispering softly to her across the centuries. Constantinople, 1599: merchants from all over Europe are vying with each other to gain trading rights in the Ottoman empire. Paul Pindar, a wealthy merchant, has been entrusted with the mission to deliver an extraordinary musical clock to the Sultan. But a disaster has befallen it on its journey from England, and the organ-maker Thomas Dallam must attempt to repair the effects of the seawater on the precious artifact. Pindar is troubled too by a secret sadness: the woman he once loved is now lost to him, drowned in a shipwreck. But there have been rumours of a new young slave with golden hair and skin like milk, sighted behind the gates of the Sultan's harem. Could this be his Celia?

The stories in Summer Blonde are longer explorations of the same themes of his earlier collection, Sleepwalk - haunting and spare tales of the loneliness and bleak humour of modern life.

A hot summer's day, a crowded motorway, a split second that changed people's lives forever. Gripping, heartbreaking, exciting and unputdownable, this new novel will be one of 2009's biggest and most enjoyable novels - from the irresistible Penny Vincenzi.

This book has got a lot of good bits. It s got penguins and toasted sandwiches and spotting knives.It s got a dead cat and an incredible climax.It s got a really little dolphin. It s got sea lions.It s got God.It s got a really cool lighthouse.When Nige runs over a Norwegian backpacker while attempting to save petrol, his life really turns to shit. He throws the body in a nearby road works and runs to his best mate of fifteen years, Deano. The trouble is, Deano s not really the guy you should turn to in a crisis.

Set in the American Midwest in 1907, A RELIABLE WIFE is the story of Ralph Truitt, a wealthy but lonely man in his fifties who places an ad in the paper for a reliable wife. Catherine Land, a beautiful thirty-four year old, responds that she is a 'simple, honest woman', but the photo that she sends of a plain woman her cousin is just the first of a series of lies Ralph uncovers.Catherine, it turns out, arrives with the intention of charming Ralph, marrying him and then slowly poisoning him to death with arsenic. But neither Catherine nor Ralph has counted on the secrets they are to uncover about each other, nor on the emotions that will be borne of their unusual arrangement.

Alexander Ahndoril is one of Sweden's most celebrated, dynamic and original younger writers, the author of eight novels and ten plays, as well as short stories, essays and screenplays. This is his debut in English.

The novel centres around 8 hours in the life of the Author (unnamed), a literary celebrity in his forties, who is in Tel Aviv on a stifling hot night to give a reading. Bored, he looks for distraction - and finds copy. On the way he stops at a cafe where he 'bumps into' some of his own characters. In his head he conjures up the life stories of the people he meets, not least Ricky, an equally bored but seductive waitress. Later, even as the reading from his new book is underway, and the obligatory inane questions ("Why do you write? Do you write with a pen or on a computer?) have come and gone - he weaves stories round the audience and the panel. Afterwards, the Author invites the professional reader for a drink before walking her home. It turns out she lives just opposite, so she goes home and he wanders off into the night. But he returns, climbs the many flights of stairs to the flat, where she lives alone with her cat - and they have a brief but steamy sexual skirmish. Or is this merely a middle-aged writer's fantasy? We never quite know where reality ends and invention begins. He spends the rest of the night wandering, smoking, inventing, regretting and thinking till dawn. The Rhyming of the title refers to the popular couplets of a Hebrew poet, once a household name but now virtually forgotten, whose little rhymes about life punctuate the story. At dawn, the Author reads in yesterday's paper that the poet has just died, almost unnoticed.

On the first day of the New Year, no one dies. This understandably causes great consternation amongst religious leaders - if there's no death, there can be no resurrection and therefore no reason for religion - and what will be the effect on pensions, the social services, hospitals? Funeral directors are reduced to arranging funerals for dogs, cats, hamsters and parrots. Life insurance policies become meaningless. Amid the general public, on the other hand, there is initially celebration: flags are hung out on balconies and people dance in the streets. They have achieved the great goal of humanity - eternal life. But will death's disappearance benefit the human race, or will this sudden abeyance backfire? How long can families cope with malingering elderly relatives who scratch at death's door while the portal remains firmly shut? Then, seven months later, death returns, heralded by purple envelopes informing the recipients that their time is up. Death herself is now writing personal notes giving one week's notice. However, when an envelope is unexpectedly returned to her, death begins to experience strange, almost human emotions. In his new novel Jose‚ Saramago again turns the world on its head - an everyday event is snatched away, and humankind is left to make of it what it will.

NOW IN B FORMAT. "When I was thirteen, my father killed my mother..." How do you recover from something like that? Carol never quite does. Sent to live with her aunt, who barely tolerates her presence, Carol is grief-stricken and desperate for love. Her Uncle Joey is the only one to notice her; years later, he's also the man with whom she builds a home and a life. But when Carol helps to rescue a young refugee from the sea, that life threatens to unravel, just as surely as it did when she was 13.

Silver Hill Village, 2012. On the twentieth day of the seventh moon Kwok Yun is making her way across the rice fields on her Flying Pigeon bicycle. Her world is upturned when she sights a UFThing - a spinning plate in the sky - and helps the Westerner in distress whom she discovers in the shadow of the alien craft. It's not long before the village is crawling with men from the National Security and Intelligence Agency armed with pointed questions. And when the Westerner that Kwok Yun saved repays her kindness with a large dollar cheque she becomes a local celebrity, albeit under constant surveillance. As UFO Hotels spring up, and the local villagers go out of business, Xiaolu Guo's startling parable of change imagines an uneasy future for rural China and its relations not only with Beijing but the wider world beyond.

NOW IN B FORMAT. The central plot is a contemporary twist on Woody Allen's film Manhattan, with the genders reversed: a woman who is involved with a much younger man falls in love with her married friend's lover. The central character - Holly Frick - has just got divorced, published a distastrous novel, and has been forced to go back to television writing with her gay writing partner, Richard, who is on a self-destructive binge.Holly is Jane Austen's Emma Woodhouse, if Emma had lived in a time and place where married women spoke openly about their lovers, where gay men ordered partners on the Internet, and where answering machines and emails were the locus of romantic miscommunication instead of elegant hand-delivered notes. Like Emma, Holly gets involved in other people's romantic tangles, and she does so armed with unwavering moral certainty. And, like Emma, she's often completely off the mark!

After years on the outside, Bulgaria has finally made it into the EU club, but beyond the clich s about undrinkable plonk, cheap property, and assassins with poison-tipped umbrellas, the country remains a largely unknown quantity. Born on the muddy outskirts of Sofia, Kapka Kassabova grew up under Communism, got away just as soon as she could, and has loved and hated her homeland in equal measure ever since. In this illuminating and entertaining memoir, Kapka revisits Bulgaria and her own muddled relationship to it, travelling back to the scenes of her childhood, sampling its bizarre tourist sites, uncovering its centuries old history of bloodshed and blurred borders, and capturing the absurdities and idiosyncrasies of her own and her country's past.

When a boy named Will meets Alice, he can't believe his luck. She's smart, sexy and, much to Will's surprise, in love with him. Alice brings meaning to his urban existence and his McJob. But the course of modern love did never run smooth and soon devotion leads Will to something darker. Elsewhere in the city Helen is an actress. Or she will be one day. For now she finds work as a model. She used to be called Clair, but she wants to be something new and she can be anyone. She's an actress, remember. A love story with a twist, this explosive debut novel brings Will and Helen's lives together in a tale as tight as rope and as black as tar. The Bird Room is a candid, funny, intimate portrait of a generation.

In the heart of the tranquil countryside, a young puppy leaves his home to eagerly follow his mother and master. But away from the safe haven of the farm, the puppy soon becomes lost and is left to struggle for survival in the wild.Suddenly, he must find food and a safe place to sleep, and outwit his competitor, the fox. The puppy becomes wild himself, trusting no human and furiously fighting the hunting dogs that enter his domain. But one man is intrigued by the now-unruly dog and very slowly begins to gain his trust. Each day he visits the dog, bringing food and awakening memories of his distant domestic past.The lost relationship between man and dog is rebuilt in this sensitive and intelligent story about the true nature of trust and friendship.

NOW IN B FORMAT. Pippa seems to have everything in life. But suddenly she finds her world beginning to unravel. Amid the buzzing lawnmowers and suburban coffee mornings, she starts to wonder how she came to be in this place. The answer is a story of wild youth, unexpected encounters, affairs and betrayals, and the dangerous security of marriage. It brilliantly reveals the challenges of modern life - and all the possibilities that it holds.

Harry Dresden, professional wizard, has done his best to keep his nose clean where the White Council of Wizards is concerned. Even so, his past misdeeds have cast a constant shadow of suspicion over him in the eyes of the Wardens, those wizards responsible for enforcing the Laws of Magic. Now Dresden finds himself faced with a nightmarish dilemma: Morgan, formerly his chief persecutor among the Wardens, has been wrongly accused of treason against the White Council - and has come to Harry for help. Dresden faces a daunting task: clear Morgan s name while simultaneously hiding him from the Wardens and the supernatural bounty hunters sent to find him, discover the identity of the true turncoat and, of course, avoid accusations of treachery of his own. A single mistake may mean that heads - quite literally - will roll. And one of them could be his own...

Up here, far away from everybody, the night is peaceful; there's no sound except the hum of the Earth. At school, when I sang the note to Mr Hughes he said it was B flat but he laughed when I said it was the note the Earth hummed. Gwenni Morgan can fly in her sleep-that's how she sees what's going on in the village, and how she tries to make some sense of her family and her world. But Gwenni's mother isn't too keen on her daughter's imaginative ways of looking at things; she doesn't want anyone thinking her odd. When Ifan Evans goes missing, Gwenni takes an interest in trying to help find him, much to her mother's distress, and uncovers a terrible truth. Set in a remote Welsh village in the 1950s, The Earth Hums in B Flat is a story of dark family secrets. It's filled with wonderful characters and written with insight and sparkling tenderness.

The life and death of an entire community is told by a dead boy. His story reveals the moral vacuum at the heart of Communist-capitalist China. During a blood-contamination scandal in Henan province, villagers sell their blood, their coffins, and then arrange marriages for their own dead family members in the afterlife. Dream of Ding Village will make you laugh out loud just as you are gasping in horror. Yan Lianke is a genius storyteller of the moving and absurd antics of people forced to live under an inhuman regime.

1765. Filipo di Vecellio of Florence, portrait painter, is the toast of London: rich, successful, and married to Angelica, known as the most beautiful woman in the city. Their Pall Mall home is the hub of the art world; their impressive social gatherings run so smoothly by Filipo s silent sister, Francesca. But beneath the surface, the house conceals a swarm of dangerous secrets. Where does Francesca di Vecellio go as the sun sets over Covent Garden? And why are there always candles lit in her attic, while no candles burn for her brother s exquisite wife?Within the bustling artistic lives of the di Vecellios hides corruption and lies; love and tragedy. And wild ambition unbalances the capital s art world as, finally, a wonderful portrait battles for the right to paint the truth...

Adam Pollo, an amnesiac ex-student, has broken into an empty seaside villa. He visits the town at rare intervals and as briefly as his scanty purchases - cigarettes, biscuits, beer - permit. Soon lack of human contact affects him like a drug and he experiences other modes of being: through a dog's eye or a rat's... states of heightened consciousness which build up into a terrifying world of glaring hallucinatory experience. Then Adam addresses a small crowd in the town. His unnerving rhetoric ends in arrest and removal to an asylum. And there the interrogation begins . . With this stunning debut novel Le Clézio was acclaimed as the most exciting figure to appear on the French literary scene since the death of Camus. The Interrogation still holds the power to grip and astonish today.

Broken Glass himself is a disgraced alcoholic school teacher with a love of French language and literature which he has largely failed to communicate to his pupils but which he displays in the pages of his notebook. The notebook is also a farewell to the bar and to his fellow drinkers. After writing the final words Broken Glass will go down to the River Tchinouka and throw himself into its murky waters, where his lamented mother also drowned.

'Loyalty (and the damnable lack of it in his wife) was the thought uppermost in the mind of Sir Andrew Millbanke as he looked down at Lady Alexandra's dead body, spread-eagled on the paved pathway of the Residency.'And so begins an engrossing and dramatic family drama, set against the backdrop of Ceylon's bumpy evolution into Sri Lanka, as the Wijesinha clan struggle to balance their staunch political ambition against the ignominy of an embarrassing family scandal. And when two young family members, cousins Tsunami and Latha, meet and become firm friends no one can guess that their triumphant friendship will be played out over the passing years against both the best and the worst the newly independent Sri Lanka can offer as these two smart and Westernised young women pursue their own personal freedoms.

Egypt, 1964. The great temple at Abu Simbel must be rescued from the rising waters of the Aswan Dam. Block by block it is to be dismantled and resurrected sixty metres higher. This most delicate and daunting of tasks is overseen by Avery, a young engineer who at the same time is carefully, and joyfully, constructing a shared life with his new wife, Jean.But not everything can be saved once the floodgates have opened. Villages will be deluged. Graves will be moved. Thousands will be exiled from their ancient homes and from the river that has been their lifeblood, and no feat of engineering can prevent this.As the temple is taken apart and rebuilt, Avery and Jean suffer a terrible loss of their own. Their separate journeys through the landscape of grief will take them from Egypt, to Canada, to lands that have been flooded and reconfigured and homes that have been lost, to a guerrilla painter of the past whose story of destruction, reconstruction and replication in war-devastated Poland is built out of equal parts hope and despair.

As King Raven, Bran is Lord of the Forest. But his true crown seems out of reach. Bran is still fighting to bring his people justice from the shadows of the green wood. But Abbot Hugo is used to playing the long game and has been watching - and learning.Abbot Hugo plans to bring the invading Norman marchogi to the forest in force, heralding the start of a campaign to wipe out King Raven and his band once and for all. Their merciless attack, the first of many, marks a dark day for the realm. And the dream of seeing a true king take the throne of Elfael seems increasingly remote. Bran and his few stalwarts desperately need encouragement and reinforcement if they are to survive. But Friar Tuck, a most unconventional priest, may just have a solution to their dilemma...

Amanda is a 29-year-old yoga teacher and travel writer who is struggling with the daily realities of life and her obsession with her commitment-phobic photographer boyfriend. When Amanda gets an assignment to travel to the spiritual sites of India to research a series' latest guidebook, Enlightenment for Idiots, it seems like the answer to her prayers. She has one last fling with the photographer and then sets off on her journey, swearing never to see him again. She travels from yoga centres to ashrams to Buddhist temples on a quest for true awakening, but her illusions quickly begin to fade as she meets a string of eccentric teachers. At one yoga centre she badly injures her knee and at an ashram that extols the virtues of celibacy, Amanda discovers that her roommate is sleeping with the guru. And then, two months into her journey, she realises that her goodbye fling has gotten her pregnant. Amanda grapples with what seem like impossible options: terminate her pregnancy so she can research enlightenment, or give up her spiritual journey and budding career to return home and become a mother. She is forced to look deep within herself for the answers she has been seeking from yogic masters.

NOW IN B FORMAT. Under his railway arch in Loughborough Junction, South London, Robert Sutton is taking leave of a lifetime of hard work. His dry-cleaning shop lies at the heart of a lively community, a fixed point in a changing world. And, as he explains to his successor, young East Londoner Akeel, it is also the resting place for the contents of his customers pockets - and for their secrets and lies.As he helps Akeel to make a new life out of his old one, Robert also hands on all he knows of his world: the dirty dip of the Thames; the parks, rare green oases in a desert of high-rises and decaying mansion blocks; and the varied lives that converge at the junction. Humming with life, packed tight with detail, The Room of Lost Things is a hymn of love to a great and overflowing city, and a profoundly human story that holds us in its grip from the first sentence until the last.

Twenty-two-year-old Skeeter has just returned home after graduating from Ole Miss. She may have a degree, but it is 1962, Mississippi, and her mother will not be happy till Skeeter has a ring on her finger. Skeeter would normally find solace with her beloved maid Constantine, the woman who raised her, but Constantine has disappeared and no one will tell Skeeter where she has gone. Aibileen is a black maid, a wise, regal woman raising her seventeenth white child. Something has shifted inside her after the loss of her own son, who died while his bosses looked the other way. She is devoted to the little girl she looks after, though she knows both their hearts may be broken. Minny, Aibileen's best friend, is short, fat, and perhaps the sassiest woman in Mississippi. She can look like nobody's business, but she can't mind her tongue, so she's lost yet another job. Minny finally finds a position working for someone too new to town to know her reputation. But her new boss has secrets of her own. Seemingly as different from one another as can be, these women will nonetheless come together for a clandestine project that will put them all at risk. And why? Because they are suffocating within the lines that define their town and their times. And sometimes lines are made to be crossed. In pitch-perfect voices, Kathryn Stockett creates three extraordinary women whose determination to start a movement of their own forever changes a town, and the way women – mothers, daughters, caregivers, friends – view one another. A deeply moving book filled with poignancy, humour, and hope, The Help is a timeless and universal story about the lines we abide by, and the ones we don't.

Paul Sturgis is a retired banker manager who lives alone in a dark little flat. He walks alone and dines alone, seeking out and taking pleasure in small exchanges with strangers: the cheerful Australian girl who cuts his hair, the lady at the dry cleaners. His only relative, and only acquaintance, is a widowed cousin by marriage – herself a virtual stranger – to whom he pays ritualistic visits on a Sunday afternoon. Trying to make sense of his current solitary state, and fearing that his destiny may be to die among strangers, Sturgis trawls through memories of his failed relationships and finds himself longing for companionship, or at the very least a conversation. But then a chance encounter with a stranger – a recently divorced and demanding younger woman – shakes up his routine, and when an old girlfriend appears on the scene, Sturgis is forced to make a decision about how (and with whom) he wants to spend the rest of his days . . .

May Woodlea is the 3 a.m. failure in us all. She is not writing the proposal for her PhD. She lives in a grotty bedsit with her long-suffering partner Jansen. She is plagued by her unforgivably cheerful younger sister Elizabeth. How will May find purpose in her life and escape the daily grind? Can May and Jansen rescue their relationship from a seeming eternity of grudge-holding, competitive tiredness, imagined slights and absolutely no sex? And what will happen when a glamorous, domineering French writer and an old flame of Jansen's come on the scene? Footnotes to Sex is a painfully funny novel about procrastination, double-chocolate biscuits, the importance of commitment and what happens in relationships when the sex isn't happening . . .

NOW IN PAPERBACK. Under the brooding eye of his father he spends his days alone on the moors tending sheep, watching wide-eyed ramblers march past and 'towns' move in, turning farms into second homes. Then a new family arrives, eager for 'welly weekends and a postcard view out the bedroom window', and Marsdyke catches sight of their young daughter. What begins as an unlikely friendship turns into something altogether more unnerving. Brilliantly comic and deeply unsettling. God's Own Country traces a journey across the Yorkshire landscape and into the mind of one of the most unforgettable characters in recent fiction.