When Kristin Kimball fell in love with a farmer and left behind her life in Manhattan to start a new farm with him in the Adirondacks, she had to learn a lot about farming - and fast. But, it turns out that starting a farm is not as challenging as sustaining it. Over the next five years, as two children are born and more land is acquired, the farm has its...

'What are you afraid of, he asks me and the answer of course is dentistry, humiliation, scarcity, then he says what are your most useful skills?

People think I'm funny'

Lizzie Benson slid into her job as a librarian without a traditional degree. But this gives her a vantage point from which to practise her other calling: as an unofficial shrink. For...

A portrait of Malaysian society in nine stories, by an author described by critics as 'the most accomplished Malaysian writer, full stop'. Lake Like a Mirror is a scintillating exploration of the lives of women buffeted by powers beyond their control. Squeezing themselves between the gaps of rabid urbanisation, patriarchal structures and a theocratic...

Adam Gordon is a senior at Topeka High School, class of '97. His parents are psychologists, his mom a famous author in the field. A renowned debater and orator, an aspiring poet, and - although it requires a lot of posturing and weight lifting - one of the cool kids, he's also one of the seniors who brings the loner Darren Eberheart into the social scene...

A pair of girls, Lethe and Lois, navigates the perimeters of a segregated city, armed with canisters of killing gas. Another child, Lessen, is at the centre of a bizarre cultural ritual that could be the subject of a Goya painting.

Centring on the garish festivals of an allegorical nation, The Divers' Game moves through worlds in which kindness is no longer...

Warrior tells the story of forgotten man, a man whose bones were found in an Anglo-Saxon graveyard at Bamburgh castle in Northumberland. It is the story of a violent time when Britain was defining itself in waves of religious fervour, scattered tribal expansion and terrible bloodshed; it is the story of the fighting class, men apart, defined in life and...

Over the course of a year, Esther Rutter - who grew up on a sheep farm in Suffolk, and learned to spin, weave and knit as a child - travels the length of the British Isles, to tell the story of wool's long history here. She unearths fascinating histories of communities whose lives were shaped by wool, from the mill workers of the Border countries, to the...

WINNER OF THE PRIX ANAIS NIN

Jeanne moves from room to room. In the anonymous hotel bedrooms of Paris - Hotel Agate, Hotel Prince Albert, Hotel Prince Monceau, Hotel Coypel, Hotel Nord & Champagne - she undresses man after man, forgetting faces, names, pleasures, thoughts, and all physical attributes but one. In her head, a palace of memories is being built...

'Midway through my fortieth year, I reached a point where the balance of the past and all it contained seemed to outweigh the future, my mind so full of things said and not said, done and undone, I no longer understood how to move forward'

May is at a crossroads. Although her career as a gardener for the university is flourishing, the rest of her life has...

New York, 2000. Kate and Ben meet at a party and fall instantly, irrevocably in love. Around them, the city glows. It is the first year without a war anywhere. A woman is president, and an air of camaraderie permeates the streets of Manhattan. Kate falls asleep, knowing she is loved.

London, 1593. Kate wakes as Emilia - the mistress of a nobleman - and finds...

It is 1940. Guernsey has been bombed, and is now occupied, by the Germans. A year earlier, young, naïve and recently married Helene, waved goodbye to her husband, who enlisted in the British army. Protected only by her father and Nanna, Helene must carve out a life on the island for the length of the war.

Forty years later, her daughter Roz begins a search...

In an America convulsed by political upheaval, cultural discord, environmental collapse and spiritual confusion, many folks are searching for peace, salvation, and - perhaps most immediately - just a little damn focus. Enter Hark Morner, an unwitting guru whose technique of "Mental Archery" - a combination of mindfulness, mythology, fake history, yoga, and...

"This book ratcheted the breath out of me so skilfully, that as soon as I'd finished, the only thing I wanted was to read it again." JESSIE BURTON

Teenage Silvie is living in a remote Northumberland camp as an exercise in 'experimental archaeology'. Her father is an abusive man, obsessed with recreating the discomfort, brutality and harshness of Iron Age...

Keiko has never really fitted in. At school and university people find her odd and her family worries she'll never be normal. To appease them, Keiko takes a job at a newly opened convenience store. Here, she finds peace and purpose in the simple, daily tasks and routine interactions. She is, she comes to understand, happiest as a convenience store worker...

Yoshiro celebrated his hundredth birthday many years ago, but every morning before work he still goes running in the park with his rent-a-dog. He is one of the many aged-elderly in Japan and he might, he thinks, live forever. Life for Yoshiro isn't as simple as it used to be. Pollution and natural disasters have scarred the face of the Earth, and even...

In 1933, President Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt took up residence in the White House. With them went the celebrated journalist Lorena Hickok - Hick to friends - a straight-talking reporter from South Dakota, whose passionate relationship with the idealistic, patrician First Lady would shape the rest of their lives.

White Houses is the story of Eleanor and...

Where is Sabrina?

The answer is hidden on a videotape, a tape which is en route to several news outlets, and about to go viral.

A landmark graphic novel, already hailed as one of the most exciting and moving stories of recent years, Sabrina is a tale of modern mystery, anxiety, fringe paranoia and mainstream misinformation -- a book that tells the story of...

When Cy Bellman, American settler and widowed father of Bess, reads in the newspaper that huge ancient bones have been discovered in a Kentucky swamp, he leaves his small Pennsylvania farm and young daughter to find out if the rumours are true: that the giant monsters are still alive, and roam the uncharted wilderness beyond the Mississippi River.

West is...

When Kapka Kassabova was a child, the borderzone between Bulgaria, Turkey and Greece was rumoured to be an easier crossing point into the West than the Berlin Wall so it swarmed with soldiers, spies and fugitives. On holidays close to the border on the Black Sea coast, she remembers playing on the beach, only miles from where an electrified fence bristled...