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This is a masterly work from one of our greatest writers. On an autumn day in 2006, on the Isle of Wight, Jack Luxton, former Devon farmer and now the proprietor of a seaside caravan park, receives the news that his soldier brother Tom, not seen for years, has been killed in Iraq. For Jack and his wife Ellie this will have a potentially catastrophic impact. For Jack in particular it means a crucial journey - to receive his brother's remains, but also into his own most secret, troubling memories and into the land of his and Ellie's past. "Wish You Were Here" is both a gripping account of things that touch and test our human core and a resonant novel about a changing England. Rich with Graham Swift's love of the local, full of humour and tend erness in the face of tragedy, it is also, inescapably, about a wider, afflicted world. Moving towards an almost unbearably tense climax, it allows us to feel the stuff of headlines - the return of a dead soldier from a foreign war - as heart-wrenchi ng personal truth.

A humane discourse on the fragility of our minds, of the bodies that give rise to them, and of the world they create for us. This book is filled with wonders' Daily Telegraph Oliver Sacks' compassionate tales of people struggling to adapt to different neurological conditions have fundamentally changed the way we think of our own minds. In Musicophilia, he examines the powers of music through the individual experiences of patients, musicians and everyday people -- those struck by affliction, unusual talent and even, in one case, by lightning -- to show not only that music occupies more areas of our brain than language does, but also that it can torment, calm, organize and heal. Always wise and compellingly readable, these stories alter our conception of who we are and how we function, and show us an essential part of what it is to be human. 'Fascinating. Music, as Sacks explains, "can pierce the heart directly". And this is the truth that he so brilliantly focuses upon -- that music saves, consoles and nourishes us' Daily Mail 'An elegantly outlined series of case studies ...which reveal the depth to which music grips so many people' Observer

The centre of the world: 1990s Manhattan. Victor Ward, a model with perfect abs and all the right friends, is seen and photographed everywhere, even in places he hasn't been and with people he doesn't know. On the eve of opening the trendiest nightcl ub in New York's history, he's living with one beautiful model and having an affair with another. Now it's time to move tothe next stage. But the future he gets is not he one he had in mind.

"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." So beg ins Alice Sebold's stunning debut novel. Watching from heaven, Susie sees her happy, suburban family devastated by her death, isolated even from one another as they each try to cope. Her friends and siblings grow up, fall in love, and do all the thin gs she never had the chance to do herselfbut life is not quite finished with Susie yet. This is a luminous novel about life and death, forgiveness and vengeance, memory and forgetting, and about finding light in the darkest of places."Painfully funn y, bracingly tough, terribly sad, it is a feat of imagination and a tribute to the healing power of grief."Michael Chabon

Cosmopolis is Don DeLillo's 13th novel. His reputation as one of the most provocative and innovative of American writers is assured, thanks to such books as Underworld and Americana, but this new outing is as likely to challenge the author's legion o f admirers as much as it will exhilarate them--and there's nothing wrong with that. DeLillo's protagonist this time is a well-heeled American, Eric Packer, who sets out one eventful day for a haircut. Gazing through the windows of his white limousine (and availing himself of its state-of-the-art technology), this self-made millionaire takes in the spectacle of financiers being murdered, the funeral of a rapper and some violent anti-globalisation protests. As we come to know DeLillo's anti-hero, we realise that Eric Packer is by no means the most ingratiating of individuals. Cheating on his new wife, he specialises in using people in a cynical and exploitative way. And as this self-serving captain of industry takes an ever-more dangerous jou rney through a bizarrely rendered New York, it's inevitable that comparisons with Tom Wolfe's classic Bonfire of the Vanities will spring to mind. Resemblances of plot aside, however, the book is a very different animal. Wolfe's narrative had the epi c spread of a latter-day War and Peace, whereas DeLillo sharpens and condenses his prose in Cosmopolis to produce an altogether more concise novel. There are two ways to approach Cosmopolis: as a rudely pointed dissection of the American Dream, or as a surreal, symbolic (and disturbing) road trip. This is not a comforting book, but a bracing and caustic one. --Barry Forshaw--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Jack is five. He lives with his Ma. They live in a single, locked room. They don’t have the key.

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A father and his young son walk alone through burned and ruined America, heading slowly for the coast. Nothing moves in the ravaged landscape save the ash on the wind and those living off it, or trying to. They have nothing but a pistol to defend the mselves against the surviving stalkers of the road, the clothes they are wearing, a shopping cart of scavenged food and each other, living out a poetic nightmare that is both heartless and heartfelt.

Blood Meridian is an epic novel of the violence and depravity that attended America's westward expansion, brilliantly subverting the conventions of the Western novel and the mythology of the Wild West. Based on historical events that took place on the Texas--Mexico border in the 1850s, it traces the fortunes of the Kid, a fourteen-year-old Tennesseean who stumbles into a nightmarish world where Indians are being murdered and the market for their scalps is thriving. 'Cormac McCarthy's violent lyric masterpiece, Blood Meridian acquires an amoral, apocalyptic dimension through the Miltonic grandeur of the language ...It is a barbarously poetic odyssey through a hell without purpose' Irish Times 'McCarthy's achievement is to establish a new mythology which is as potent and vivid as that of the movies, yet one which has absolutely the opposite effect ...He is a great writer' Independent 'A bloody and starkly beautiful tale' Stephen Amidon, Sunday Times.

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.

A father and his young son walk alone through burned and ruined America, heading slowly for the coast. Nothing moves in the ravaged landscape save the ash on the wind and those living off it, or trying to. They have nothing but a pistol to defend the mselves against the surviving stalkers of the road, the clothes they are wearing, a shopping cart of scavenged food and each other, living out a poetic nightmare that is both heartless and heartfelt.

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Susie Salmon looks down from a heaven which looks a lot like her school playground. There are counsellors to help newcomers adjust, and friends to room with. Everything she wants appears as soon as she thinks of it - except the thing she wants most: to be back with the people she loved on Earth.

Moscow, 1929: a city that has lost its way amid corruption and fear, inhabited by people who have abandoned their morals and forsaken spirituality. But when a mysterious stranger arrives in town with a bizarre entourage that includes a giant talking cat and a fanged assassin, all hell breaks loose. Among those caught up in the strange and inexplicable events that transpire in the capital are the Master, a writer whose life has been destroyed by Soviet repression, and his beloved Margarita. Their adventures reveal a story that began two thousand years ago in ancient Jerusalem '" and its resolution will decide their fate.

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.

A father and his young son walk alone through burned and ruined America, heading slowly for the coast. Nothing moves in the ravaged landscape save the ash on the wind and those living off it, or trying to. They have nothing but a pistol to defend the mselves against the surviving stalkers of the road, the clothes they are wearing, a shopping cart of scavenged food and each other, living out a poetic nightmare that is both heartless and heartfelt.