The Gulag Archipelago is Solzhenitsyn's masterwork, a vast canvas of camps, prisons, transit centres and secret police, of informers and spies and interrogators and also of heroism, a Stalinist anti-world at the heart of the Soviet Union where the key to survival lay not in hope but in despair.

Why has human history unfolded so differently across the globe? The author puts the case that geography and biogeography, not race, moulded the contrasting fates of Europeans, Asians, Native Americans, sub-Saharan Africans, and aboriginal Australians.

Gustav grows up in a small town in Switzerland, where the horrors of the Second World War seem a distant echo. But Gustav's father has mysteriously died, and his adored mother Emilie is strangely cold and indifferent to him. Gustav's life is a lonely one until he meets Anton.

Jimmy Rabbitte is back. The man who invented the Commitments in the eighties is now forty-seven, with a loving wife, four kids ... and bowel cancer. He isn't dying, he thinks, but he might be. On his path through Dublin he meets two of the Commitments - Outspan, whose own illness is probably terminal, and Imelda Quirk, still as gorgeous as ever.

As a child, Helen Macdonald was determined to become a falconer, learning the arcane terminology and reading all the classic books. Years later, when her father died and she was struck deeply by grief, she became obsessed with the idea of training her own goshawk.

Tells the story of the author's struggle with grief during the difficult process of the hawk's taming and her own untaming.

At first, it seemed like a small story. The royal correspondent of the News of the World was caught listening in on Buckingham Palace voice mails. He was quietly sent to prison and the case was closed. But Nick Davies felt sure there was a lot more going on.

Felix is at the top of his game as Artistic Director of the Makeshiweg Theatre Festival. His productions have amazed and confounded. Now he's staging a Tempest like no other. It will boost his reputation. It will heal emotional wounds. Or that was the plan. Instead, after an act of unforeseen treachery, Felix is living in exile.