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Last Orders is a much-loved classic of English literature. It won both the 1996 Booker Prize and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. In 2001, it was adapted into an award-winning film starring Michael Caine and Bob Hoskins. Four men once close to Jack Dodds, a London butcher, meet to carry out his peculiar last wish: to have his ashes scattered into the sea. For reasons best known to herself, Jack's widow, Amy, declines to join them. On the surface the tale of a simple if increasingly bizarre day's outing, Last Orders is Graham Swift's most poignant exploration of the complexity and courage of ordinary lives. In 2012 Picador celebrates its 40th anniversary. During that time we have published many prize-winning and bestselling authors including Bret Easton Ellis and Cormac McCarthy, Alice Sebold and Helen Fielding, Graham Swift and Alan Hollinghurst. Years later, Picador continue to bring readers the very best contemporary fiction, non-fiction and poetry from across the globe.

Tim Winton is widely acclaimed as one of Australia's greatest novelists. Dirt Music, first published in 2001, was an international bestseller. In 2002 it won the Miles Franklin Award and was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. Georgie Jutland is a mess. Her days have fallen into social isolation and her nights are a blur of vodka. One morning, in the boozy pre-dawn gloom, she sees a shadow lurking on the beach below, and a dangerous new element enters her life. Luther Fox: local poacher, outcast. So begins an unlikely alliance. In 2012 Picador celebrates its 40th anniversary. During that time we have published many prize-winning and bestselling authors including Bret Easton Ellis and Cormac McCarthy, Alice Sebold and Helen Fielding, Graham Swift and Alan Hollinghurst. Years later, Picador continue to bring readers the very best contemporary fiction, non-fiction and poetry from across the globe.

st published in 2005, The Sea was critically acclaimed as an extraordinary achievement. It went on to win that year's Man Booker Prize, one of the most hotly contested in the history of the award. When Max Morden returns to the seaside village where he once spent a childhood holiday, he is both escaping from a recent loss and confronting a distant trauma. Mr and Mrs Grace and their twin children Myles and Chloe appeared that long-ago summer as if from another world. He grew to know them intricately, even intimately, and what ensued would haunt him for the rest of his years and shape everything that was to follow. In 2012 Picador celebrate our 40th anniversary. During that time we have published many prize-winning and bestselling authors including Bret Easton Ellis and Cormac McCarthy, Alice Sebold and Helen Fielding, Graham Swift and Alan Hollinghurst. Years later, Picador continue to bring readers the very best contemporary fiction, non-fiction and poetry from across the globe.

A fascinating, even compulsory addition to the Bolano fan's bookshelf ...the sentences whizz over your head like bullets' Daily Telegraph Antwerp was Roberto Bolano's first novel, though he chose not to publish it until 2002, more than twenty years after he'd written it. Set amidst the seedy hotels and deserted campsites on the Costa Brava, and filled with hapless girls, failed poets, and shifty policemen, Antwerp is a short and cinematic experimental crime novel spliced together with voices from a dream, from a nightmare, from passers-by, from an omniscient narrator, from 'Roberto Bolano'. Intense and irrepressible, the novel is a personal declaration of the power of literature; reading it is to be present at the birth of Bolano's enterprise in prose, to see the beginning, to witness the moment when his talent explodes. 'It's hard to think of a writer who has multiplied the possibilities more times than Roberto Bolano'.

Eric Packer is a twenty-eight-year-old multi-billionaire asset manager. He lives in Manhattan. We join him on what will become a particularly eventful day in his life. When he woke up, he didn't know what he wanted. Then he knew. He wanted to get a haircut. As his stretch limousine moves across town, his world begins to fall apart. But more worrying than the loss of his fortune is the realization that his life may be under threat.

Babe, Grace and Millie have been best friends since their first day at kindergarten. Now they are newly married, and the men have gone to war. They thrive on letters from their absent sweethearts, and on the closeness they've always shared. And then, on a single morning in 1944, no fewer than sixteen telegrams arrive, bringing news of the worst kind from the War Department. For Babe, Grace and Millie, life will never be the same again. Each must face the challenges of the years ahead, the changes taking place in America and far closer to home, which are enough to test even the deepest of friendships and most hopeful of hearts ...

"First you take a drink," F. Scott Fitzgerald once noted, "then the drink takes a drink, then the drink takes you." Fitzgerald wrote alcohol into almost every one of his stories. On Booze gathers debutantes and dandies, rowdy jazz musicians, lost children and ragtime riff-raff into a newly compiled collection taken from The Crack-Up, and other works. On Booze portrays "The Jazz Age" as Fitzgerald experienced it: roaring, rambunctious, and lush -- with quite a hangover.

'A gripping read as well as an important one.' Rana Mitter, Guardian In October 1839, Britain entered the first Opium War with China. Its brutality notwithstanding, the conflict was also threaded with tragicomedy: with Victorian hypocrisy, bureaucratic fumblings, military missteps, political opportunism and collaboration. Yet over the past hundred and seventy years, this strange tale of misunderstanding, incompetence and compromise has become the founding episode of modern Chinese nationalism. Starting from this first conflict, The Opium War explores how China's national myths mould its interactions with the outside world, how public memory is spun to serve the present, and how delusion and prejudice have bedevilled its relationship with the modern West.

War-games champion Udo Berger and his girlfriend Ingeborg are on holiday. There they meet another vacationing German couple, Charly and Hanna, and a band of shady locals. They have fun, see the sights, relax. Then, late one night, Charly disappears without a trace. Desperate to solve the mystery, Udo refuses to leave, even after Ingeborg returns home. Increasingly frightened, the situation slips beyond his grasp and he suddenly realizes that the consequences of this 'game' are much more serious than he ever imagined.

This is Don DeLillo's first collection of short stories, written between 1979 and 2011; in it he represents the wide range of human experience in contemporary America -- and forces us to confront the uncomfortable shadows lurking in the background. His characters are plagued by their own deep, often unconscious, longings; they are subjected to shocking violations, exposed to unexpected acts of terror. No matter whether he is focused upon the slums of New York or astronauts in orbit around the Earth, DeLillo chooses never to turn away from the unsettling manner in which humans are brought together. These nine stories describe the extraordinary journey of a great American writer who changed the literary landscape.

Architecture, good and bad, is shaped by emotions. In Why We Build Rowan Moore shows how buildings are driven by human emotions and desires -- such as hope, power, money, sex, and the idea of home -- and how buildings then shape our experiences. He explores the making of buildings from conception to inhabitation, and reveals the paradoxical power of architecture: it looks fixed and solid, but is always changing, in response to the lives around it. Moore takes us on a personal journey, moving freely across the globe and through history, through works of folly, beauty, spectacle, and subtlety. He uncovers the doomed mansion of an Atlanta multimillionaire, the phenomenally successful High Line in New York, and the remarkable Museu de Arte in Sao Paulo. He discusses baroque churches and Egyptian pyramids alongside works of the moment. We meet extraordinary characters: Sheikh Mohammed of Dubai, the lecherous Stanford White, and Lina Bo Bardi, the most underrated architect of the twentieth century. Refusing to bow to fashion or reputation, Moore gives a provocative and iconoclastic view of what makes architecture, why it matters, and why we find it fascinating. After reading Why We Build you will never look at a building in the same way again.

A novel that is both slight and profound, a distilled meditation on perception and loss, and a poised, individual ghost story for the twenty-first century' Observer The Body Artist begins with normality: breakfast between a married couple, Lauren and Rey, in their ramshackle rented house on the New England coast. Recording their delicate, intimate, half-complete thoughts and words, DeLillo proves himself a stunningly unsentimental observer of our idiosyncratic relationships. But after breakfast, Rey makes a decision that leaves Lauren utterly alone, or seems to. As Lauren, the body artist of the title, becomes strangely detached from herself and the temporal world, the novel becomes an exploration of a highly abnormal grieving process; a fascinating expose of 'who we are when we are not rehearsing who we are'; and a rarefied study of trauma and creativity, absence and presence, isolation and communion. 'A masterly portrait of the impact of death on those who live' Evening Standard.

In the late summer of 1913, George Sawle brings the charming, aristocratic young poet Cecil Valance to his family's modest home. The shared intimacies of this weekend link the Sawle and Valance families irrevocably, becoming legendary events in a larger story, told and interpreted in different ways over the coming century. Throughout this richly comic history of sexual mores and literary reputation we follow the two families, in a series of widely spaced episodes, through startling changes in fortune and circumstance. An impeccably nuanced exploration of changing taste, class and social etiquette, The Strange's Child, written in deliciously witty and observant prose, is an enthralling novel from one of the finest writers in the English language.

Pat Peoples knows that life doesn't always go according to plan, but he's determined to get his back on track. After a stint in a psychiatric hospital, Pat is staying with his parents and trying to live according to his new philosophy: get fit, be nice and always look for the silver lining. Most importantly, Pat is determined to be reconciled with his wife Nikki. Pat's parents just want to protect him so he can get back on his feet, but when Pat befriends the mysterious Tiffany, the secrets they've been keeping from him threaten to come out ...

Buildings are driven by human emotions and desires; hope, power, money, sex, the idea of home. In Why We Build Rowan Moore explores the making of buildings from conception to inhabitation and reveals the paradoxical power of architecture: it looks fixed and solid, but is always changing in response to the lives around it. Moving across the globe and through history, through works of folly, beauty, spectacle, and subtlety, Moore gives a provocative and iconoclastic view of what makes architecture, why it matters, and why we find it fascinating. You will never look at a building in the same way again.

This book celebrates one of Europe's greatest cities -- a cosmopolitan hub of vibrant architecture, art, culture and nightlife. It moves from the story of the city's founding and its huge expansion in the nineteenth century to the lives of Gaudi, Miro, Picasso, Casals and Dali. It also explores the history of Catalan nationalism, the tragedy of the Civil War, the Franco years and the transition from dictatorship to democracy which Colm Toibin witnessed in the 1970s. Written with deep knowledge and affection, Homage to Barcelona is a sensuous and beguiling portrait of a unique Mediterranean port and an adopted home. 'Toibin has the narrative poise of Brian Moore and the patient eye for domestic detail of John McGahern, but he is very much his own man' Observer 'Having lived in Barcelona off and on since the 70s, Toibin knows all the fascinations of its sensuous Mediterranean history and lifestyle and "the most precious jewels in the city's treasury of bars" ...Toibin is the perfect guide' Chicago Tribune.