'Light puts most modern fiction to shame. It's a magnificent book' China Mieville

An idea that predates both THE TRUMAN SHOW and THE MATRIX from one of SF's greats.

Grace Sachs, a happily married therapist with a young son, thinks she knows everything about women, men and marriage. She is about to publish a book called You Should Have Known, based on her pet theory: women don't value their intuition about what men are really like, leading to serious trouble later on.

Set in Bombay against the backdrop of war in the Indian subcontinent and the birth of Bangladesh, this book tells the story of the peculiar way in which the conflict impinges on the lives of Gustad Noble, an ordinary man, and his family.

Nearing her one-hundredth birthday, Roseanne McNulty faces an uncertain future, as the Roscommon Regional Mental hospital where she's spent the best part of her adult life prepares for closure. Over the weeks leading up to this upheaval, she talks often with her psychiatrist Dr Grene, and their relationship intensifies and complicates.

It's Christmas at Hampstead's Beresford Lodge. A group of relatives and intimate friends gather to celebrate the festive season, but their party is rudely interrupted by a violent death. It isn't long before a second body is discovered. Can the murderer be one of those in the great house?

Complicated, awkward, funny, cruel, heartbroken, mysterious, this is forms an idiosyncratic guide to female existence. It shows you how to deal with divorce, adultery, cancer, how to talk to your mother or become a writer, the author's way.

Christopher Martin, the sole survivor of a torpedoed destroyer, is stranded upon a rock in the middle of the Atlantic. Pitted against him are the sea, the sun, the night cold and the terror of his isolation. Through the long hours with only himself to talk to, Martin must try to assemble the truth of his fate, piece by terrible piece.

A trilogy of three cleverly interconnected novels that exploit the elements of standard detective fiction.

Marito is a young Peruvian who toils away at his local radio station, dreaming of becoming a writer, before his life is torn apart by two arrivals. The first is his recently divorced Aunt Julia, with whom he begins an affair. The second is Pedro Camacho, an eccentric scriptwriter whose radio dramas are keeping the whole city enthralled.

George was born into a world of village cricket matches and fox-hunting, but his failing income and the onset of war threatens his way of life. This is a coming-of-age story which follows George from a shy and awkward childhood, through shiftless adolescence, to an officer just beginning to understand the horrors of trench warfare.

A love story and a historical tour de force set in Victorian times which deals with the undeclared love between clergyman Oscar Hopkins and the heiress Lucinda Leplastrier. Made for each other, the two are gamblers - one obsessive, the other compulsive - incapable of winning at the game of love.

1946, Texarkana: a town on the border of Texas and Arkansas. Disgraced New York reporter Charlie Yates has been sent to cover the story of a spate of brutal murders - young couples who've been slaughtered at a local date spot. Charlie finds himself drawn into the case by the beautiful and fiery Lizzie, sister to one of the victims, Alice.

For almost a decade Rachel Caine has turned her back on home, kept distant by family disputes and her work monitoring wolves on an Idaho reservation. But now, summoned by the eccentric Earl of Annerdale and his controversial scheme to reintroduce the Grey Wolf to the English countryside, she is back in the peat and wet light of the Lake District.

When Paul Casablancas, Claire DeWitt's musician ex-boyfriend, is found dead in his home in San Francisco's Mission District, the police are convinced it's a simple robbery. But, as Claire knows, nothing is ever simple.

When their traditional business - selling saris - is increasingly sidelined by the new fashion for jeans and stitched salwar kameez, the Banwari Lal family must adapt. But instead of branching out, the sons remain apprenticed to the struggling shop and the daughters are confined to the family home.

To the authorities in pursuit of him, outlaw Ned Kelly is a horse thief, bank robber and police-killer. But to his fellow ordinary Australians, Kelly is their own Robin Hood. In an act of ventriloquism, the author brings the famous bushranger wildly and passionately to life.

Tells the heartbreaking story of a man torn between the warm heart of Mexico and the cold embrace of 1950s America in the shadow of Senator McCarthy.

Twenty-year-old Tassie Keltjin, a 'half-Jewish' farmer's daughter from the plains of the Midwest, has come to university. When she takes a job as a part-time nanny to a couple who seem at once mysterious and glamorous, Tassie is drawn into the life of their newly-adopted child and increasingly complicated household.

Sinuously constructed in four interlocking parts, this title opens in New York City in the spring of 1967 when twenty-year-old Adam Walker, an aspiring poet and student at Columbia University meets the enigmatic Frenchman Rudolf Born, and his silent and seductive girlfriend Margot.

1949. Lance Curran is set to prosecute a young man for a brutal murder, in the 'Robert the Painter' case, one which threatens to tear society apart. In the searing July heat, corruption and justice vie as Harry Ferguson, Judge Curran's fixer, contemplates the souls of men adrift, and his own fall from grace with the beautiful and wilful Patricia.

When Fintan Buckley develops an interest in old autochrome photographs, strange things start to happen. To all appearances, Fintan holds down a successful job and enjoys life with his conventional middle-class family in Dublin, yet inwardly he starts to experience states of altered consciousness, with unsettling hallucinations and sudden insights.

It is 1985, and Greta Wells wishes she lived in any time but this one: she has lost her brother to AIDS, her lover Nathan to another woman, and can not seem to go on alone. To ease her sadness, her doctor suggest an unusual procedure, one that opens doors of insight into the relationships in her life, and her conflicting affections.

Shortlisted for the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award, this book explores the passing of time and summons up its inevitable sorrows and comic pitfalls.