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In the Sicily of the 1950s, still haunted by memories of Fascism and the war, Giuseppe Tomasi, the last Prince of Lampedusa, struggles to complete the novel that will be his lasting legacy, The Leopard. In 1943, an Allied bomb destroyed the Lampedusa palace in Palermo; in 1955, Giuseppe Tomasi is diagnosed with advanced emphysema. Shortly after, profoundly aware of his mortality, he begins work on a novel, imagining the life of his great-grandfather Don Giulio, astronomer prince and head of the family at the time of the Risorgimento. Giuseppe Tomasi is a veteran of the previous war, while his wife Alexandra - `Licy' - a Baltic German aristocrat, now lives in exile, after her native Latvia was absorbed into the Soviet Union. The childless couple are survivors of a vanishing world of European aristocracy, living in the present yet profoundly aware of the past. Steven Price takes us into the mind of the writer, his memories of war and loss, his complex relationships with his family, and inhabits the heart of a man facing down the end of his life and the end of his line, struggling to make something of lasting worthwhile there is still time. Achingly haunting and beautifully conceived, Steven Price's Lampedusa tells the intensely moving story of one man's awakening to the possibilities of life, as he nears its end.

'A highly entertaining story of literary friendship, epic legal battles and cultural politics centred on one of the most enigmatic writers of the 20th century' Financial Times When Franz Kafka died in 1924, his friend Max Brod could not bring himself to fulfil the writer's last instruction: to burn his remaining manuscripts. Instead, Brod took them with him to Palestine in 1939, and devoted the rest of his life to editing and canonizing Kafka's work. By betraying his last wish, Brod twice rescued his legacy - first from physical destruction, and then from obscurity. In Kafka's Last Trial, Benjamin Balint offers a gripping account of the contest for ownership that followed, ending in Israeli courts with a controversial trial - brimming with legal, ethical, and political dilemmas - that would determine the fate of Kafka's manuscripts. This is at once a biographical portrait of a literary genius, and the story of two countries whose national obsessions with overcoming the traumas of the past came to a head in a hotly contested trial for the right to claim the literary legacy of one of our modern masters.

In 1922, Paul Beckermann arrives at the Bauhaus art school and is immediately seduced by both the charismatic teaching and his fellow students. Eccentric and alluring, the more time Paul spends with his new friends the closer they become, and the deeper he falls in love with the mesmerising Charlotte. But Paul is not the only one vying for her affections, and soon an insidious rivalry takes root. As political tensions escalate in Germany, the Bauhaus finds itself under threat, and the group begins to disintegrate under the pressure of its own betrayals and love affairs. Decades later, in the wake of an unthinkable tragedy, Paul is haunted by a secret. When an old friend from the Bauhaus resurfaces, he must finally break his silence. From the author of the award-winning Mrs Hemingway, Naomi Wood's The Hiding Game is a beautifully written, powerful and suspenseful novel about the dangerously fine line between love and obsession, set against the most turbulent era of our recent past.

In 2013 Guy Stagg walked from Canterbury to Jerusalem. Though a non-believer, he began the pilgrimage after suffering several years of mental illness, hoping the ritual would heal him. For ten months he hiked alone on ancient paths, crossing ten countries and more than 5,500 kilometres. Travelling without support, he had to rely each night on the charity of strangers. The Crossway is an account of Stagg's extraordinary journey. It describes the dangers he faced on the road, captures the people he met and the landscapes he experienced, offers a unique insight into contemporary faith, and - most movingly - lays bare his struggle to escape the past and walk towards recovery. It was a BBC Radio 4 'Book of the Week' on publication.

From the best-selling author of Gratitude and On the Move, a final volume of essays that showcase Sacks's broad range of interests-from his passion for ferns, swimming, and horsetails, to his final case histories exploring schizophrenia, dementia, and Alzheimer's. Oliver Sacks, scientist and storyteller, is beloved by readers for his neurological case histories and his fascination and familiarity with human behavior at its most unexpected and unfamiliar. Everything in Its Place is a celebration of Sacks's myriad interests, told with his characteristic compassion and erudition, and in his luminous prose.

For more than twenty-five years, David Nott has taken unpaid leave from his job as a general and vascular surgeon with the NHS to volunteer in some of the world's most dangerous war zones. From Sarajevo under siege in 1993, to clandestine hospitals in rebel-held eastern Aleppo, he has carried out life-saving operations and field surgery in the most challenging conditions, and with none of the resources of a major London teaching hospital. The conflicts he has worked in form a chronology of twenty-first-century combat: Afghanistan, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Darfur, Congo, Iraq, Yemen, Libya, Gaza and Syria. But he has also volunteered in areas blighted by natural disasters, such as the earthquakes in Haiti and Nepal. Driven both by compassion and passion, the desire to help others and the thrill of extreme personal danger, he is now widely acknowledged to be the most experienced trauma surgeon in the world. But as time has gone on, David Nott began to realize that flying into to a catastrophe - whether war or natural disaster - was not enough. Doctors on the ground needed to learn how to treat the appalling injuries that war inflicts upon its victims. Since 2015, the Foundation he set up with his wife, Elly, has disseminated the knowledge he has gained, training other doctors in the art of saving lives threatened by bombs and bullets. War Doctor is his extraordinary story,

`I'd rather take a photograph than be one,' says Lee Miller, shortly after she arrives in Paris in 1929. Gorgeous and talented, Lee has left behind a successful modelling career at Vogue to pursue her dream of being an artist. There she catches the eye of the famous Surrealist artist Man Ray. An egotistical, charismatic force, Lee is drawn to him immediately. Though he initially wants to use her as a model, Lee is determined to become Man's photography assistant instead. As their personal and professional lives become further entwined, Lee is consumed by two desires: to become a famous photographer and to have a healthy and loving relationship. But as Lee asserts herself and moves from being a muse to an artist, Man's jealousy spirals out of control, and their mutual betrayals threaten to destroy them both. Richly detailed and filled with a cast of famous characters, The Age of Light is a captivating historical novel about ambition, love, and the personal price of making art. In exploring Lee's complicated and fascinating history, Whitney Scharer has brought a brilliant and pioneering artist out of the shadow of a man's story and into the light.

Shortlisted for the 2018 Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction She Has Her Mother's Laugh presents a profoundly original perspective on what we pass along from generation to generation. Charles Darwin played a crucial part in turning heredity into a scientific question, and yet he failed spectacularly to answer it. The birth of genetics in the early 1900s seemed to do precisely that. Gradually, people translated their old notions about heredity into a language of genes. As the technology for studying genes became cheaper, millions of people ordered genetic tests to link themselves to missing parents, to distant ancestors, to ethnic identities . . . But, Zimmer argues, heredity isn't just about genes that pass from parent to child. Heredity continues within our own bodies, as a single cell gives rise to trillions of cells that make up our bodies. We say we inherit genes from our ancestors - using a word that once referred to kingdoms and estates - but we inherit other things that matter as much or more to our lives, from microbes to technologies we use to make life more comfortable. We need a new definition of what heredity is and, through Carl Zimmer's lucid exposition and storytelling, this resounding tour de force delivers it. Weaving together historical and current scientific research, his own experience with his two daughters, and the kind of original reporting expected of one of the world's best science journalists, Zimmer ultimately unpacks urgent bioethical quandaries arising from new biomedical technologies, but also long-standing presumptions about who we really are and what we can pass on to future generations.

Now a Major Motion Picture, Starring Simon Baker, Elizabeth Debicki, and Richard Roxburgh Breath is a story of risk, of learning one's limits by challenging death. On the wild, lonely coast of Western Australia, two thrill-seeking teenage boys fall under the spell of a veteran big-wave surfer named Sando. Their mentor urges them into a regiment of danger and challenge, and the boys test themselves and each other on storm swells and over shark-haunted reefs. The boys give no thought to what they could lose, or to the demons that drive their mentor on into ever-greater danger. Venturing beyond all caution--in sports, relationships, and sex--each character approaches a point from which none of them will return undamaged.

This is the story of two married couples and an affair. The Paper Lovers by Gerard Woodward opens with a man who suddenly develops a crush on one of his wife's friends. As his affections deepen, he becomes aware that she too has feelings for him. Soon they transgress. But what does this mean? Is it love? Will they be caught?The second part of the story is about the crisis of identity that comes with betrayal. If you are no longer faithful to yourself, to your spouse or to your God, who are you now? If you have been deceived, diminished, your world destroyed without your knowledge, who are you now? And in each case: how might you live on, who might you become?

Anna gave up everything she had in London - her flat, her job, her friends - to run away to Spain and live the dream with the handsome, complicated artist she had fallen in love with. They were building a life together, renovating a beautiful finca in the mountains - but then Michael left, with little more than a note to say goodbye, and Anna's future crashed around her ears. Now she runs a bar in the sleepy beach town of Marea, surrounded by British expats who moved out to find their own place in the sun and are secretly as homesick and stuck as Anna now feels. When a local man, Simon, offers to rent her house, Anna hopes it will pave the way for her escape. But Simon is not who he says he is, and it soon transpires that his tenants are a group of African migrants that Anna fears he may be exploiting. When a dead body washes up on the beach in mysterious circumstances, Anna realises she alone has the power to unravel the truth... Gripping, poignant, witty and brilliantly observed, Under the Sun is an unforgettable novel about heartbreak, identity, migration and finding a place to call home.

A startlingly beautiful story of a family's survival, The End We Start From is a haunting but hopeful dystopian vision of a familiar world made dangerous and unstable. Megan Hunter's honed and spare prose paints an imagined future as realistic as it is frightening. Though the country is falling apart around them and its people are forced to become refugees, this family's world - of new life and new hope - sings with love. In the midst of a mysterious environmental crisis, as London is submerged below flood waters, a woman gives birth to her first child. Days later, the family are forced to leave their home in search of safety. As they move from place to place, shelter to shelter, their journey traces both fear and wonder as the baby's small fists grasp at the things he sees, as he grows and stretches, thriving and content against all the odds. With Benedict Cumberbatch calling it `a stunning tale of motherhood', film rights have been sold to his production company SunnyMarch.

In October 1940, the handsome young David Sparsholt arrives in Oxford. A keen athlete and oarsman, he at first seems unaware of the effect he has on others - particularly on the lonely and romantic Evert Dax, son of a celebrated novelist and destined to become a writer himself. While the Blitz rages in London, Oxford exists at a strange remove: an ephemeral, uncertain place, in which nightly blackouts conceal secret liaisons. Over the course of one momentous term, David and Evert forge an unlikely friendship that will colour their lives for decades to come . . . Alan Hollinghurst's masterly new novel evokes the intimate relationships of a group of friends bound together by art, literature and love across three generations. It explores the social and sexual revolutions of the most pivotal years of the past century, whose life-changing consequences are still being played out to this day. Richly observed, disarmingly witty and emotionally charged, The Sparsholt Affair is an unmissable achievement from one of our finest writers.

`Painfully funny. The pain and the funniness somehow add up to something entirely good, entirely noble and entirely loveable.' - Stephen FryWinner of the Books Are My Bag Non-Fiction Book of the YearWinner of the Books Are My Bag Readers Choice AwardWinner of Blackwell's Debut Book of the YearWinner of iBooks' Book of the Year97-hour weeks. Life and death decisions. A constant tsunami of bodily fluids. And the hospital parking meter earns more than you. Welcome to the life of a junior doctor. Scribbled in secret after endless days, sleepless nights and missed weekends, Adam Kay's diaries provide a no-holds-barred account of his time on the NHS front line. Hilarious, horrifying and heartbreaking, this is everything you wanted to know - and more than a few things you didn't - about life on and off the hospital ward.

'I devoured A Manual for Heartache in one sitting . . . a kind, honest and wise book about how to make a friend of sadness.' Rachel Joyce When Cathy Rentzenbrink was still a teenager, her happy family was torn apart by an unthinkable tragedy. In A Manual for Heartache she describes how she learnt to live with grief and loss and find joy in the world again. She explores how to cope with life at its most difficult and overwhelming and how we can emerge from suffering forever changed, but filled with hope. This is a moving, warm and uplifting book that offers solidarity and comfort to anyone going through a painful time, whatever it might be. It's a book that will help to soothe an aching heart and assure its readers that they're not alone.

'A sweet winter light blushed as Pablo Picasso walked his dog under the cypress trees and the bell of the old chapel guessed at the hour. It was Christmas Eve.' Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy's new Christmas poem, Pablo Picasso's Noel follows the famous painter as he moves through a small town in the south of France on Christmas Eve, drawing the residents and the festive scenes he encounters. Accompanied by his small dog, he brings delight as he sketches wherever he goes. A wonderful, moving new poem capturing both the magic of Christmas and artistic inspiration. Beautifully illustrated and produced in a gorgeous small format, this is an irresistible festive gift and Christmas stocking must-have for all book lovers.