There was no past, no future, no words, nothing - just the light and the yellow and the scent of dry leaves in the sun. Japan's internationally celebrated storyteller returns with five stories of healing and hope.

It takes a village to bury a child . But when a little girl vanishes, it's clear that danger can lurk in the quietest village. In the chaos of war, crime novelist Josephine Tey arrives to help her friend DCI Penrose to investigate the girl's disappearance.

Death Is Hard Work is a tale of three people embarking on an absurd quest - an unforgettable journey into a contemporary heart of darkness. At a hospital in Damascus, Syria, Abdel Latif's final wish is to be buried in the family plot near Aleppo - just a two-hour drive away.

When a young girl is found murdered in a field, the scientific examination of the exhibits is just a routine job for the staff of Hoggatt's forensic science laboratory. When the senior biologist is found dead in his laboratory Commander Dalgliesh is called to the bleak fens of East Anglia, where the murderer is lying in wait to strike again.

Unfinished. Man Dying. A great painter lies on his deathbed. Max Porter translates into seven extraordinary written pictures the explosive final workings of the artist's mind.

They burned down the market on the day Vivek Oji died. One afternoon, a mother opens her front door to find the length of her son's body stretched out on the veranda, swaddled in akwete material, his head on her welcome mat.

Nicholas Rankin's revelatory new book, whose cast of characters includes Haile Selassie, Anthony Burgess and General Sikorski, sets Gibraltar in the wider context of the struggle against fascism, from Abyssinia through the Spanish Civil War.