This is the summer that Lewis Little, precocious thirteen-year-old, is spending in Paris with his mother, Alice. Alice is translating the latest medieval romance by Valentina Gavrilovich, Lewis is there to make his first acquaintance with one of the greatest cities in the world; neither can foresee the momentous events that lie in wait for them.

The citizens of the One State live in a condition of 'mathematically infallible happiness'. D-503 decides to keep a diary of his days working for the collective good in this clean, blue city state where nature, privacy and individual liberty have been eradicated.

The Swallows are staying on the Suffolk coast while they wait for their father to return home from China. But although the harbour is bursting with bobbing yachts, barges and steamers, this year there's no chance of any sailing for the landlocked Swallows.

Darling and her friends live in a shanty called Paradise, which of course is no such thing. It isn't all bad, though. There's mischief and adventure, games of Find bin Laden, stealing guavas, singing Lady Gaga at the tops of their voices. They dream of the paradises of America, Dubai, Europe, where Madonna and Barack Obama and David Beckham live.

'There are times, though, that no matter how much food I eat, I find the food does nothing for me, like I am hungry for my country and nothing is going to fix that' This is the story of Darling, uprooted from her family home by paramilitary police, and living in a Zimbabwean shanty called Paradise.

In an age when a storm was evidence of God's wrath, pioneering meteorologists had to fight against convention and religious dogma to realise their ambitions. This book features Luke Howard, the first to classify the clouds, Francis Beaufort, quantifier of the winds, and, James Glaisher, explorer of the upper atmosphere by way of a hot air balloon.

A diabolical government asserts control by eliminating orgasms from sex in the title story of Welcome to the Monkey House, which gathers together twenty-five of Kurt Vonnegut's short stories from the 1950s and 1960s.

In 1982, having sold his jazz bar to devote himself to writing, the author began running to keep fit. A year later, he'd completed a solo course from Athens to Marathon, and now, after dozens of such races, he reflects upon the influence the sport has had on his life and on his writing. This title presents his portrait.