If you complete a bike race, overcoming mountain ranges and merciless weather conditions while enduring physical and psychological agony, in the slowest time, should you be branded the loser? This title flips the Tour de France on its head and tells the forgotten, often inspirational and occasionally absurd stories of the last-placed rider.

Once America's capitalist dream town, the Silicon Valley of the Jazz Age, Detroit became the country's greatest urban failure, having fallen the longest and the furthest. The city of Henry Ford, modernity, and Motown found itself blighted by riots, arson, unemployment, crime and corruption.

At the end of the twentieth-century an old woman sits among the birch trees and thinks back over her life, her loves, and the joys and tragedies that have befallen her family and her people. She is a member of the Evenki tribe who wander the remote forests of north-eastern China with their herds of reindeer.

A city of heat and dirt, of guns and militia. Alone in its crowded streets, Captain Roland Nair has been given a single assignment. He must find Michael Adriko - maverick, warrior, and the man who has saved Nair's life three times and risked it many more.

In the doorway of an elegant New York apartment, blood seeps over silk negligee, over polished wood floors and plush carpet: a beautiful young woman lies dead, her face disfigured by a single gun shot. But who was Laura? What power did she hold over the very different men in her life?

Leela - alluring, taciturn, haunted - is moving back to Delhi after years of exile in New York. She knows her return will disrupt precariously balanced lives. Twenty years ago her sister Meera died, taking a devastating secret with her. Now, as the family gathers for a wedding, Leela must sift truth from fiction.

While tending to his father's business affairs, John Lempriere, a young scholar, discovers a 150-year-old conspiracy that has kept his family from its share of the fabulously wealthy East India Company. But as John begins to untangle the years of mystery and deceit, people begin to die, in ways that mirror the very myths he is researching.