Everywhere he looks he finds fragments and gaps: disconnected typescripts, bones and husks, boxes of marbles, collections of photographs. Like a shaman flying across the globe, his mind tracks the journeys of his subjects to the deserts of Africa and the maelstroms of the Arctic, where the shapes of myth meet the patterns of science.

Richard Wright's memoir of his childhood as a young black boy in the American south of the 1920s and 30s is a stark depiction of African American life and powerful exploration of racial tension. At four years old, Richard Wright set fire to his home in a moment of boredom;

But she seemed to have locked the door behind her and, as he rattled the latch unavailingly and then rapped the locker, something dark and suffocating was forced down over his head and a pair of hands gripped his throat." Simon, coming to London to study painting with his old friend Dr Field, finds he has vanished without trace.

Whether during a chance reunion in Italy, a romantic exile in Greece, a holiday in Hawaii or in the grip of everyday life, Murakami's characters confront loss, or sexuality, or the glow of a firefly, or the impossible distance between those who ought to be closest of all.

In 1993 Michael Ignatieff set out on a journey to the former Yugoslavia, the Ukraine, Germany, Quebec, Kurdistan and Northern Ireland in order to explore the many faces of modern nationalism at its worst. Modern nationalism is a language of blood: a call to arms that can end in the horror of ethnic cleansing.

Under Hitler and Stalin the Nazi and Soviet regimes murdered fourteen million people in the bloodlands between Berlin and Moscow. The killing fields extended from central Polads to western Russia.

A Book For Her details Christie's twelve years of anonymous toil in the bowels of stand-up comedy and the sudden epiphany that made her, unbelievably, one of the most critically acclaimed British stand-up comedians this decade, drawing together the threads that link a smelly smell in the women's studies section to the global feminist struggle.

Isaac Newton (1642-1727), the English genius, made his greatest contributions to original thought before the age of twenty-five, while at home in Lincolnshire escaping the great plague of 1665, a period of which he wrote: 'I was in the prime of age for invention'. This book demonstrates his perceptions, which changed our world forever.