Galley Beggar Press

Set in Santiago towards the end of Pinochet''s dictatorship, TELENOVELA explores the secret lives of a family swept up in this dark period of Chile''s history. There is Lucho: bullied by fellow soldiers for his love of poetry, thwarted in his ambitions to become a writer, unhappy at work. He seems like a loving father. He seems plain loveable, in fact. And maybe he is. But as TELENOVELA unfolds, other things come to light about Lucho that are less easy to indulge - or forgive. There is Ramona, Lucho''s wife: tormented by anxiety, overwhelmed by self-loathing and body image problems. As a drama student, Ramona once hoped to become a Telenovela star; she secretly daydreams that she might still get her big break. Guileless, gentle, Ramona seems like an innocent. But is she? Then there is Pablo, their son: dreamy, gentle, eager to make friends, to form his own band and write some worthwhile songs. Desperate to be cool... And increasingly, just desperate. Gonzalo C. Garcia makes us feel for these characters and want to understand them - but, as the novel unfolds, come to the frightening realisation of what it really means to have such understanding. And so it is that deeply human and deeply personal stories of mislaid ambition, failure and intergenerational trauma take on national - and universal significance.

ALL MY PRECIOUS MADNESS is the story of a man at odds with the world. A man who wants to escape his violent past but instead - most emphatically repeats it. Henry Nash has hauled his way from a working class childhood in Bradford, through an undergraduate degree at Oxford, and into adulthood and an academic elite. But still, he can''t escape his anger. As the world - and men in particular - continues to disappoint him, so does his rage grow in m omentum until it becomes almost rapturous. And lethal. A savagely funny novel that disdains literary and moral conventions, All My Precious Madness is also a work of deep empathy even if when that also means understanding the darkest parts of humanity. It is, as critic Stephen Mitchelmore says, the book for everyone who longs for ''an English Bernhard'' - and to read one of the most electric debuts of the last decade.

THE DEAD ARE RISING. Nathan Treeves leads an army of ghosts from the underwater city of Waterblack, heading to the final, destructive confrontation with the forces ranged against him. But although he is more powerful than ever, he also has new challenges to face. Most notably, Sharli, an assassin whose journey we follow - from her perilous childhood in Malarkoi, to slavery in Mordew, working in a nail factory, to making murder her trade under the ever watchful eye of the terrifying Mr Padge, and on to the final climactic encounter between Nathan, The Master, The Mistress and the Atheistic Crusade In this, the monumental conclusion to the Cities of the Weft trilogy, Waterblack pushes the boundaries and possibilities of the fantasy genre further than ever, with more style than ever, posing vital questions about the way power can be abused, who decides who has power - and what it means to have none. It''s a book that speaks to and about our own times with magnificent eloquence. And it is a book for all time.

Told in a series of cascading vignettes, featuring a multitude of voices, After Sappho is Selby Wynn Schwartz's joyous reimagining of the lives of a brilliant group of feminists, sapphists, artists and writers in the late 19th and early 20th century as they battle for control over their lives; for liberation and for justice.

Latticing one cherry pie after another, an Ohio housewife tries to bridge the gaps between reality and the torrent of meaningless info that is the United States of America. She worries about her children, her dead parents, African elephants, the bedroom rituals of 'happy couples', Weapons of Mass Destruction, and how to hatch an abandoned wood pigeon egg. Is there some trick to surviving survivalists? School shootings? Medical debts? Franks 'n' beans? A scorching indictment of America's barbarity, past and present, and a lament for the way we are sleepwalking into environmental disaster, Ducks, Newburyport is a heresy, a wonder - and a revolution in the novel.