It is a foggy day. Ruby Grummett, a railway crossing keeper, opens the gates for a council lorry, thinking that the Skegness train has been cancelled, but it comes looming through the mists and hits the lorry. The train is derailed, one man is killed, another seriously injured, and Ruby's house is destroyed. But who is to blame?

Deaf at Spiral Park is about a bear that shaves off his fur to join humanity. The antagonist, a recruitment consultant, dies several times, and, ultimately, this teaches her nothing. This is a fresh and original novel which remains accessible and funny in spite of its experimental and philosophical concerns.

The new novel from the author of the Man Booker-shortlisted The Lighthouse is a tense and moreish confection of semiotics, suggestibility and creative writing with real psychological depth and, in Bonnie Falls and Sylvia Slythe, two unforgettable characters.

The Fat of Fed Beasts is an ambitious literary mix of existential uncertainty, murder, bureaucracy, unreliable father figures and disaffected policemen. It asks why we do what we do, whether it matters, and what, if anything, our lives are worth. And it's funny.

A long-awaited new collection of Marina Warner's short stories. Like her award-winning novels, Marina Warner's stories conjure up mysteries and wonders in a physical world, treading a delicate, magical line between the natural and the supernatural, between openness and fear.

A comparative account of the musical and cultural acts of Zappa and his cohort, collaborator and antagonist Captain Beefheart. Written in the iconoclastic spirit of Zappa's art, this book traces the mixed media experiments of California freakdom through the dada blues of Beefheart, mapping out the pleasures of imaginative excess.

Set mostly in the early 1950s, this is a highly fictionalised account of an unmarried woman's struggle with her family and with society at large during her pregnancy and the years following. This was unforgiving, post-war Britain. The novel is a tribute to her courage, her strength and determination.

Set in Northern Ireland in the 1980s, The Good Son is a funny, frightening and ultimately moving story centred around Mickey Donnelly, a boy struggling to come of age against the backdrop of bitter and brutal surroundings.