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My name was Salmon, like the fish, first name, Susie. I was fourteen when I was murdered on December 6, 1973. My murderer was a man from our neighborhood. My mother liked his border flowers, and my father talked to him once about fertilizer. This is Susie Salmon. Watching from heaven, Susie sees her happy, suburban family devastated by her death, isolated even from one another as they each try to cope with their terrible loss alone. Over the years, her friends and siblings grow up, fall in love, do all the things she never had the chance to do herself. But life is not quite finished with Susie yet ..."The Lovely Bones" is a luminous and astonishing novel about life and death, forgiveness and vengeance, memory and forgetting - but, above all, about finding light in the darkest of places. 'Spare, beautiful and brutal prose ..."The Lovely Bones" is compulsive enough to read in a single sitting, brilliantly intelligent, elegantly constructed and ultimately intriguing.' - "The Times". 'Moving and compelling ...It will put an imperceptible but stealthily insistent hold on you. I sat down in the morning to read the first couple of pages, five hours later, I was still there, book in hand, transfixed.' - Maggie O'Farrell, "Sunday Telegraph".

Amsterdam, 1667. Pieter Blaeu, a young publisher, meets the aged, destitute painter Rembrandt van Rijn, and is powerfully drawn into his orbit. Together with a poet named Clara he begins a pursuit of the elusive man's confidence, in a quest that is at once a love affair and a layered, luminous portrait of a most mysterious artist and his world. "Here are the sights, smells, sounds and colours of the Dutch golden age alchemised into fictional gold...The marriage of art, history and fiction has rarely been so alive. A cause for celebration" - "The Times". "It is no mean feat for a young writer to pitch herself against the great master and attempt to achieve in prose the explorations of identity that Rembrandt achieved in paint...Van Rijn returns us to [the paintings] with a renewed sense of wonder" - "TLS". "An enticing journey into the past, well observed and researched, and providing a tour of the alternative artistic life of the seventeenth century" - "Sunday Times".

As a novelist, Graham Swift delights in the possibilities of the human voice, imagining his way into the minds and hearts of an extraordinary range of characters. In Making an Elephant, his first ever work of non-fiction, the voice is his own. Swift brings together a richly varied selection of essays, portraits, poetry, and reflections on his life in writing, full of insights into his passions and motivations, and wise about the friends, family, and other writers who have mattered to him over the years. Kazuo Ishiguro advises on how to choose a guitar, Salman Rushdie arrives for Christmas under guard, and Ted Hughes shares the secrets of a Devon river. There are private moments, too, with long-dead writers, as well as musings on history and memory that readers of Swift’s novels will recognize and love.

TEST Takeo and the exquisite Kaede, still only teenagers, are now married, but the implacable forces of destiny that rule their lives tear them apart. Takeo, a battle-hardened warrior at the head of an army fighting for his Otori birthright, finds his courage and leadership forged in the fire of bloodshed and sacrifice, while his legendary magical powers are tested to their limits against the invisible assassins of the Tribe. Kaede, determined to reclaim her own lands, is treacherously betrayed and forced into marriage. Their love will survive until death but death, in this savage, beautiful world, is always only a moment away.

'The most compelling novel to have been published this year' - Amanda Craig, "Observer". In his palace at Inuyama, Lord Iida Sadamu, warlord of the Tohan clan, surveys his famous nightingale floor. Its surface sings at the tread of every human foot, and no assassin can cross it. But 16-year-old Otori Takeo, his family murdered by Iida's warriors, has the magical skills of the Tribe - preternatural hearing, invisibility, a second self - that enable him to enter the lair of the Tohan. He has love in his heart and death at his fingertips...The stunningly powerful bestseller, "Across the Nightingale Floor", is an epic story for readers young and old. Set in a mythical, feudal, Japanese land, a world both beautiful and cruel, the intense love story of two young people takes place against a background of warring clans, secret alliances, high honour and lightning swordplay.

All the Pretty Horses is an acknowledged masterpiece and a grand love story: a novel about childhood passing, along with innocence and vanished American age.

Cities of the Plain, the final volume of Cormac McCarthy's Border Trilogy, binds together the separate tales of John Grady Cole from All the Pretty Horses and Billy Parham from The Crossing to create a more realistic Billy and a more mythic John Grady. Within the confines of a relatively spare 293 pages, the classic "all-american cowboy" John Grady devotes himself to saving every hurt or wounded creature that crosses his path, a noble and impossible task that leads ultimately to his own destruction. The tragedy of his failed rescue of the epilectic prostitute Magdalena makes a martyr of the near-faultless John Grady, yet McCarthy stubbornly refuses to let the novel backslide into blubbery melodrama. Told in both McCarthy's signature lyrical style and his dead-on ranchero dialogue, Cities of the Plain ends the trilogy at the height of McCarthy's storytelling skill.

On childhood holidays to the western coast, Tim Winton's days followed a joyous rhythm. In the mornings, the sun and surf kept him outside, in the water. In the afternoons, as the horizon wobbled with mirages and the wind came in from the ocean, he was driven inside, to books. In the 'simple, peculiar shack' that his family borrowed each year there was a small library: a room with four walls of books, a world unto itself. In this beautifully delicate memoir, Winton writes about his obsession with what happens where the water meets the shore - about diving, dunes, beachcombing - and the sense of being on the precarious, wondrous edge of things that haunts his novels. It is a book about the ebb and flow that became a way of life, and that shaped one of our finest writers. 'Both a serial romantic and a truly gifted novelist' Mariella Frostrup, Mail on Sunday.

Past Reason Hated

THE NO. 1 BESTSELLER The Wilderness Years are over! But for how long? Bridget's second diary takes us through a year that begins with man-of-her-dreams Mark Darcy (who never does the washing up) and lurches onwards through a sea of self-help books and lunatic advice from her mad friends. Struggling with the challenges of a boyfriend-stealing beauty, an eight-foot hole in the wall and a builder obsessed with large reservoir fish, Bridget decides it's time for a spiritual epiphany. And so she departs Notting Hill for the sparkling shores of Thailand ...Bridget is back. V.g. 'A glorious read ...there is a laugh on every page' Sunday Times 'The best, the original, the seminal' Mail on Sunday 'Devastatingly funny' Daily Telegraph

'Marvellous...I read it with astonished delight..It is equally scholarly and entertaining.' Jan Morris 'Delightfully quirky and compelling' The Times One we've learned it as children few of us think much of the alphabet and its familiar sing-song order. And yet the order if the alphabet, that simple knowledge that we take for granted, plays a major role in our adult lives. From the school register to the telephone book, from dictionaries and encyclopaedias to library shelves, our lives are ordered from A to Z. Long before Google searches, this magical system of organisation gave us the ability to sift through centuries of thought, knowledge and literature, allowing us to sort, to file, and to find the information we have, and to locate the information we need. In A PLACE FOR EVERYTHING, acclaimed historian Judith Flanders draws our attention to both the neglected ubiquity of the alphabet and the long, complex history of its rise to prominence. For, while the order of the alphabet itself became fixed very soon after letters were first invented, their ability to sort and store and organize proved far less obvious. To many of our forebears, the idea of of organising things by the random chance of the alphabet rather than by established systems of hierarchy or typology lay somewhere between unthinkable and disrespectful. A PLACE FOR EVERYTHING fascinatingly lays out the gradual triumph of alphabetical order, from its possible earliest days as a sorting tool in the Great Library of Alexandria in the third century BCE, to its current decline in prominence in our digital age of Wikipedia and Google. Along the way, the reader is enlightened and entertained with a wonderful cast of unknown facts, characters and stories from the great collector Robert Cotton, who denominated his manuscripts with the names of the busts of the Roman emperors surmounting his book cases, to the unassuming sixteenth- century London bookseller who ushered in a revolution by listing his authors by 'sirname' first.

A Guardian, Financial Times, The Millions, Vulture, and Buzzfeed's Most Anticipated of 2020 'An immigrant's view conveyed with authority and wit . . . Adiga is a startlingly fine observer, and a complicator, in the manner of V.S. Naipaul.' New York Times From the bestselling, Man Booker Prize-winning author of The White Tiger and Selection Day, Aravind Adiga, comes the story of an undocumented immigrant who becomes the only witness to a crime and must face an impossible moral dilemma. Danny - Dhananjaya Rajaratnam - is an undocumented immigrant in Sydney, denied refugee status after he has fled from his native Sri Lanka. Working as a cleaner, living out of a grocery storeroom, for three years he's been trying to create a new identity for himself. And now, with his beloved vegan girlfriend, Sonja, with his hidden accent and highlights in his hair, he is as close as he has ever come to living a normal Australian life. But then one morning, Danny learns a female client of his has been murdered. When Danny recognizes a jacket left at the murder scene, he believes it belongs to another of his clients - a doctor with whom he knows the woman was having an affair. Suddenly Danny is confronted with a choice: come forward with his knowledge about the crime and risk being deported, or say nothing, and let justice go undone? Over the course of a single day, evaluating the weight of his past, his dreams for the future, and the unpredictable, often absurd reality of living invisibly and undocumented, he must wrestle with his conscience and decide if a person without rights still has responsibilities. Suspenseful, propulsive, and full of Aravind Adiga's signature wit and magic, Amnesty is both a timeless moral struggle and a universal story with particular urgency today.

'Masterful . . . [Thompson] illuminates both the fascinating coders and the bewildering technological forces that are transforming the world in which we live.' - David Grann, author of The Lost City of Z. Facebook's algorithms shaping the news. Uber's cars flocking the streets. Revolution on Twitter and romance on Tinder. We live in a world constructed of computer code. Coders - software programmers - are the people who built it for us. And yet their worlds and minds are little known to outsiders. In Coders, Wired columnist Clive Thompson presents a brilliantly original anthropological reckoning with the most influential tribe in today's world, interrogating who they are, how they think, what they value, what qualifies as greatness in their world, and what should give us pause. One of the most prominent journalists writing on technology today, Clive Thompson takes us into the minds of coders, the most quietly influential people on the planet, in a journey into the heart of the machine - and the men and women who made it.

'Cleanness is stunning, provocatively revelatory and atmospherically profound. Here is love and sex as art, as pulse, as truth' - Lisa Taddeo, author of Three Women Sofia, Bulgaria, a landlocked city in southern Europe, stirs with hope and impending upheaval. Soviet buildings crumble, wind scatters sand from the far south, and political protesters flood the streets with song. In this atmosphere of disquiet, an American teacher navigates a life transformed by the discovery and loss of love. As he prepares to leave the place he's come to call home, he grapples with the intimate encounters that have marked his years abroad, each bearing uncanny reminders of his past. A queer student's confession recalls his own first love, a stranger's seduction devolves into paternal sadism, and a romance with a younger man opens, and heals, old wounds. Each echo reveals startling insights about what it means to seek connection: with those we love, with the places we inhabit, and with our own fugitive selves. Cleanness revisits and expands the world of Garth Greenwell's beloved debut, What Belongs to You, declared 'an instant classic' by the New York Times Book Review. In exacting, elegant prose, Greenwell transcribes the strange dialects of desire, cementing his stature as one of our most vital living writers.

'Europe where the sun dares scarce appear For freezing meteors and congealed cold.' - Christopher Marlowe In this innovative and compelling work of environmental history, Philipp Blom chronicles the great climate crisis of the 1600s, a crisis that would transform the entire social and political fabric of Europe. While hints of a crisis appeared as early as the 1570s, by the end of the sixteenth century the temperature plummeted so drastically that Mediterranean harbours were covered with ice, birds literally dropped out of the sky, and 'frost fairs' were erected on a frozen Thames - with kiosks, taverns, and even brothels that become a semi-permanent part of the city. Recounting the deep legacy and sweeping consequences of this 'Little Ice Age', acclaimed historian Philipp Blom reveals how the European landscape had ineradicably changed by the mid-seventeenth century. While apocalyptic weather patterns destroyed entire harvests and incited mass migrations, Blom brilliantly shows how they also gave rise to the growth of European cities, the appearance of early capitalism, and the vigorous stirrings of the Enlightenment. A sweeping examination of how a society responds to profound and unexpected change, Nature's Mutiny will transform the way we think about climate change in the twenty-first century and beyond.

An Observer 'Best Debut Novelist of 2020' It is 1981. Glasgow is dying and good families must grift to survive. Agnes Bain has always expected more from life. She dreams of greater things: a house with its own front door and a life bought and paid for outright (like her perfect, but false, teeth). But Agnes is abandoned by her philandering husband, and soon she and her three children find themselves trapped in a decimated mining town. As she descends deeper into drink, the children try their best to save her, yet one by one they must abandon her to save themselves. It is her son Shuggie who holds out hope the longest. Shuggie is different. Fastidious and fussy, he shares his mother's sense of snobbish propriety. The miners' children pick on him and adults condemn him as no' right. But Shuggie believes that if he tries his hardest, he can be normal like the other boys and help his mother escape this hopeless place. Douglas Stuart's Shuggie Bain lays bare the ruthlessness of poverty, the limits of love, and the hollowness of pride. A counterpart to the privileged Thatcher-era London of Alan Hollinghurst's The Line of Beauty, it also recalls the work of Edouard Louis, Frank McCourt, and Hanya Yanagihara, a blistering debut by a brilliant writer with a powerful and important story to tell.