Who better to tell the story of the gentrification of a musical genre than the man who started out as Jungle's most streetwise ambassador and went on to collect an MBE from Buckingham Palace?

Fictional characters jostle for space with real life stars - from John Lennon to Doris Day and Sammy Davis Jnr - as Burn, in a breathtaking act of appropriation, reinvents the popular culture of the post-war years.

Every week a supply boat leaves provisions, yet the fishermen never leave their boat, and never meet him. Years spent on this deserted rock, with imagination his sole companion, has made the lighthouse keeper something more than alone, something else entirely.

My Family and Other Animals meets The Secret Life of Cows: this rediscovered gem of a memoir tells the charming tale of how a baby llama transformed a Welsh farming family forever.

Theodore becomes an object of derision and morbid curiosity to the press, a prized specimen for scientists and Satan incarnate to an obscure religious cult deep in the desert.

Jonathan Lethem, acclaimed author of The Fortress of Solitude and Motherless Brooklyn, here takes the reader on a road trip through a post-apocalyptic USA. Since the war came and the bombs fell, Hatfork, Wyoming, has been a broken-down, mutant-ridden town.

But as his memories continually return to the past - to a life and career deeply touched by the rise of Japanese militarism - a dark shadow begins to grow over his serenity. If you enjoyed An Artist of the Floating World, you might also like Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day, now available in Faber Modern Classics.

The government has cleaned up Harare for the Queen of England's visit. 'The townships are too full of people, they said, gather them up and put them in the places the Queen will not see.' Four waves of people have settled on Easterly Farm since then, living on the margins in homes that will soon be destroyed. Among them is Martha Mupengo.