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Seeking the truth behind organized crime in Naples, Roberto Saviano bravely brings to light the monstrous activities and far-reaching influence of the notorious Camorra - locally known as 'the System'. Unveiling the Camorra's involvement in high fashion to illegal drugs and even toxic waste disposal, Gomorrah unflinchingly explores the syndicate's iron grip on the Neapolitan coast, stretching beyond traditional depictions of Italian life. The book oscillates between exhilarating investigative journalism and a poignant memoir, painting both a factual and emotional picture of life in the shadow of organized crime. Saviano's courageous work has earned him global acclaim . . . and police protection. This is not just a story; it's a dramatic reveal of a dark criminal reality - which will shatter your understanding of Naples' hidden underbelly. Now part of the Picador Collection.

When paramedic Bruce Pike is called out to deal with another teenage adventure gone wrong, he knows better than anyone what happened and how. Thirty years before, that dead boy could have been him. Bruce remembers what it was like to be a risk-taking kid, to feel that thrill and that fear . . . Breath by Tim Winton is the story of Bruce and his best friend Loonie, and the surfing obsession that changed both of their lives. It is about the exhilaration of the sea and the waves, the treacherous addiction to risk, and the intoxicating power of forbidden love. Part of the Picador Collection.

Bridget Jones is back and her life is as chaotic as ever in The Edge of Reason, the number one bestseller from Helen Fielding and the major motion picture starring Renée Zellweger. 'Could The Edge of Reason really be as funny as its predecessor? The answer is yes . . . Bridget, the original Singleton, is on ripping form' - Daily Express Bridget Jones has finally found love with man-of-her-dreams Mark Darcy. The Wilderness Years are over! But for how long... and is the relationship really all she dreamed it would be? Struggling with the challenges of a boyfriend-stealing beauty, an eight-foot hole in the wall and lunatic advice from her best friends, Bridget decides it's time for a spiritual epiphany. And so she departs Notting Hill for the sparkling shores of Thailand . . .

An Oprah's Book Club Pick. Moving from the gritty 90s Chicago art scene to a suburbia of detox diets and home renovation hysteria, Wellness is a story of marriage, middle age, our tech-obsessed health culture, and the bonds that keep people together. When Jack and Elizabeth meet as college students in the 90s, the two quickly join forces and hold on tight, each eager to claim a place in Chicago’s thriving underground art scene with an appreciative kindred spirit. Fast-forward twenty years to married life, and the no-longer-youthful dreamers are forced to face their demons, from unfulfilled career ambitions to painful childhood memories of their own dysfunctional families. In the process, Jack and Elizabeth must undertake separate, personal excavations, or risk losing the best thing in their lives: each other.

Need a rental person who does nothing?Shoji Morimoto provides a fascinating service to the lonely and socially anxious. After an old boss told him that he contributed nothing and that it made no difference whether he showed up to work or not, he wondered if a person who ‘does nothing’ could still have a place in the world. With a tweet, his Rental Person service was born. - Have a deep secret you desperately need to reveal, so deep that you can’t tell a friend or family member?- Have you spent a long time home alone, and want to know what it’s like to have somebody with you at your apartment?- Or for someone to simply think of you on a stressful day? Or wave to you as you leave the train station on a long journey?Morimoto is dependable, non-judgmental and committed to remaining a stranger throughout each request, and his encounters are revelatory about both Japanese society and human psychology. In Rental Person Who Does Nothing, Morimoto chronicles his extraordinary experiences in his unique line of work and reflects on how we consider relationships, jobs and family in our search for meaningful connection and purpose in life.

In Ashleigh Nugent's dynamic coming-of-age comedy of errors, Locks, teenager Aeon is on a quest for belonging. Locks is the story of Aeon, a mixed-up and mixed-race teenager from a leafy Liverpool suburb, who is desperate to find his Black roots and understand the Black identity foisted upon him by his community. To his growing shame, the only Black people in his life are his dad and his cousin, Increase - but they don't count. Aeon's dad is intent on ignoring race and climbing the social ladder. And Increase has taken to demeaning all Black culture since the shady and unresolved death of his own father, a 'Yardie' gangster. Aeon's quest seems set to be fulfilled when he and Increase travel to Jamaica. But Aeon soon finds that smoking loads of weed, growing messy dreadlocks and wearing massive red boots don't, necessarily, help him to fit in. He gets mugged, stabbed, arrested and banged up in a Jamaican detention centre, where he is beaten unconscious for being the 'White boy'. And then things really start to go wrong . . .

From the editor of Empire magazine, this is the behind-the-scenes story of the golden age of the action movie, the stars who ruled 80s and 90s Hollywood and the beloved films – from Die Hard to The Terminator – that made them famous. Charting Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger’s carnage-packed journey from enmity to friendship against the backdrop of Reagan’s America and the Cold War. It also reveals the untold stories of the colourful characters, from Steven Seagal to Bruce Willis, who ascended in their wake. These invincible action heroes used muscle, martial arts or the perfect weapon to save the day, becoming pop-culture titans. Drawing on candid interviews with the action stars themselves, plus their collaborators, friends and foes, The Last Action Heroes chronicles how, as the 1990s rolled in, the glory days of these macho men began to fade, but how the mayhem they wrought on screen and off excites us still.

A Times, Financial Times and Telegraph Political Book of the Year In a series of vivid, empathetic portraits of other people’s lives, journalist Ben Judah invites us to meet some of the people who call Europe their home. Who makes up this population of some 750 million, sprawled from Ireland to Ukraine, from Sweden to Turkey? Who has always called it home? Who has newly arrived from elsewhere? Who are the people who drive our long-distance lorries and steward our criss-crossing planes? Who lovingly crafts our legacy wines and fishes our depleted waters? And who risks life itself in search of safety and a new start? Drawn from hours of painstaking interviews, these vital stories reveal a frenetic and vibrant continent which has been transformed by diversity, migration, the internet, climate change, Covid, war and the quest for freedom. Laid dramatically bare, it may not always be a Europe we recognize – but this is Europe.

From the internationally bestselling, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Interpreter of Maladies comes an exquisitely crafted work of fiction. In these short stories Jhumpa Lahiri sets her gaze on the eternally beautiful city of Rome, illuminating the frailties of the human condition and dissecting lives lived on the margins. A man recalls a summer party that awakens an alternative version of himself. A couple haunted by a tragic loss return to seek consolation. An outsider family is pushed out of the block in which they hoped to settle. A set of steps in a Roman neighbourhood connects the daily lives of the city’s myriad inhabitants. This is an evocative fresco of Rome, the most alluring character of all: contradictory, in constant transformation and a home to those who know they can’t fully belong but choose it anyway. Rich with Lahiri’s signature gifts, Roman Stories is a masterful work from one of the finest writers of our time. Translated from the Italian by Jhumpa Lahiri and Todd Portnowitz

‘A garden contains secrets, we all know that: buried elements that might put on strange growth or germinate in unexpected places. The garden that I chose had walls, but like every garden it was interconnected, wide open to the world . . .’ In 2020, Olivia Laing began to restore a walled garden in Suffolk, an overgrown Eden of unusual plants. The work drew her into an exhilarating investigation of paradise and its long association with gardens. Moving between real and imagined gardens, from Milton’s Paradise Lost to John Clare’s enclosure elegies, from a wartime sanctuary in Italy to a grotesque aristocratic pleasure ground funded by slavery, Laing interrogates the sometimes shocking cost of making paradise on earth. But the story of the garden doesn’t always enact larger patterns of privilege and exclusion. It’s also a place of rebel outposts and communal dreams. From the improbable queer utopia conjured by Derek Jarman on the beach at Dungeness to the fertile vision of a common Eden propagated by William Morris, new modes of living can and have been attempted amidst the flower beds, experiments that could prove vital in the coming era of climate change. The result is a beautiful and exacting account of the abundant pleasures and possibilities of gardens: not as a place to hide from the world but as a site of encounter and discovery, bee-loud and pollen-laden.

Get ready to meet the goddesses, from the Sunday Times bestselling author of Stone Blind and Pandora's Jar, Natalie Haynes. These are the stories of the Greek goddesses. As fearsome, powerful and beloved as their male counterparts, it's time to look beyond the columns of a ruined temple to the awesome power within . . . We meet Hera, who, whilst most often known for enacting vicious, creative revenge on the women - mortal or otherwise - who catch the wandering eye of her husband Zeus, turns out not to be such a villain after all. We meet Demeter, a mother who will go to any lengths, no matter the cost, to retrieve her daughter Persephone from Hades' clutches. We'll be introduced to The Furies, three women who will literally go to the ends of the earth to enact bloody vengeance but who, surprisingly, are the goddesses who can teach us the most about the way we live now. Examining the role of these goddesses and more, Divine Might will change everything you thought you knew about our most ancient stories. Full of fire, fury and devotion, Natalie Haynes brings the divine women of Olympia kicking and screaming into the modern age.

What if a tiny, shadowy elite rule the world from a secret room? In Them Jon Ronson sets out to find this room, with the help of the extremists - Islamic fundamentalists, neo-Nazis, Ku Klux Klansmen - that believe in it. Along the way, he is chased by men in dark glasses, unmasked as a Jew in the middle of a Jihad training camp, and witnesses international CEOs and politicians participate in a bizarre pagan ritual in the forests of northern California. A Sunday Times bestseller and the book that launched Jon Ronson's inimitable career, Them is an eye-opening outrageously funny exploration of extremism, which makes both author and reader think twice about the looking-glass world of 'us' and 'them' . . .

An Unquiet Mind is a definitive examination of manic depression from both sides: doctor and patient, the healer and the healed. A classic memoir of enormous candour and courage, it teems with the wit and wisdom of its creator. Dr Kay Redfield Jamison is one of the foremost authorities on manic depression (bipolar disorder), but she has also experienced its terrors and cruel allure first-hand. While pursuing her career in medicine, she was affected by the same exhilarating highs and catastrophic lows that afflicted many of her patients. From her jubilant childhood to the disquiet that has dominated her adult life, she charts a journey through her own mind, and those of others.

With Stories of Your Life and Others, his masterful debut collection, multiple-award-winning author Ted Chiang deftly blends human emotion and scientific rationalism in eight remarkably varied stories. From a soaring Babylonian tower that connects a flat Earth to the firmament above, to a world where angelic visitations are a wondrous and terrifying part of everyday life; from a neural modification that eliminates the appeal of physical beauty, to an alien language that challenges our very perception of time and reality, Chiang’s unique imagination invites us to question our understanding of the universe and our place in it. The title novella 'Story of Your Life' was the basis for the Academy Award-winning film Arrival, starring Amy Adams and Jeremy Renner. Part of the Picador Collection, a series showcasing the best of modern literateure.

Cormac McCarthy plumbs the depths of human degradation in Child of God, his most brutally violent, shocking work. From the author of Blood Meridian and The Road. 1960s, Tennessee. Lester Ballard is a violent, solitary and introverted young backwoodsman, dispossessed on his ancestral land. Homeless, indulging in voyeurism, he is accused of rape. When he is released from jail, he begins to haunt the hilly landscape - preying upon its population, unleashing his impulse for sexualised violence. Commonplace humanity becomes grotesque and, as the story hurtles toward its unforgettable conclusion, McCarthy depicts the most sordid aspects of life with empathy and lyricism.

Jon Krakauer's Into the Wild examines the true story of Chris McCandless, a young man who walked deep into the Alaskan wilderness and whose SOS note and emaciated corpse were found four months later. In April 1992, Chris McCandless set off alone into the Alaskan wild. He had given his savings to charity, abandoned his car and his possessions, and burnt the money in his wallet, determined to live a life of independence. Just four months later, Chris was found dead. An SOS note was taped to his makeshift home, an abandoned bus. In piecing together the final travels of this extraordinary young man's life, Jon Krakauer writes about the heart of the wilderness, its terribly beauty and its relentless harshness. Into the Wild is a modern classic of travel writing, and a riveting exploration of what drives some of us to risk more than we can afford to lose. From the author of Under the Banner of Heaven and Into Thin Air. A film adaptation of Into the Wild was directed by Sean Penn and starred Emile Hirsch and Kristen Stewart.