The second of the mysteries featuring the foul-mouthed Kinky Friedman, ace private eye. It is Thanksgiving at the legendary Lone Star Cafe, a raucus little corner of Texas right in the middle of Manhattan. Larry Barkins is found dead in his dressing room, his head bashed in with his own guitar.

Set in the port of Brest, this book is the story of a young sailor and the evil and mysterious people whom he attracts. The author has also written "Our Lady of the Flowers" and "Funeral Rites" and was closely allied to the French intellectuals led by the late Jean Cocteau.

Set in the world of horse racing, this novel puts us amongst trainers, horse-obsessed girls, billionaire breeders and restless track wives, painting a picture of a world that is passionate, cold-hearted, pure and corrupt.

Precious stones pass through the hands of many people, hands that leave no apparent trace. But traces are there all the same - impressions, like the atoms of hydrogen drawn to the surface of a diamond. This story charts three lives linked by one such jewel.

Meet Joey Tallon, the overweight, caravan-dwelling resident of Scotsfield, the quintessential one-horse town. A man of disrepute perhaps, but when he sees Boyle Henry, Hoss and the other heavies of the town move into positions of wealth and respectability, Joey decides that enough is enough.

John Law is a man full of secrets. People call him the Cryptographer, or the Codebreaker. He is mysterious and charming, the world's first quadrillionaire. When tax inspector Anna Moore is assigned Law as a new client, her first task is to discover just what he is trying to hide.

New York, a small town on the tip of Manhattan island, 1746. One rainy evening in November, a handsome young stranger fresh off the boat pitches up at a counting-house door in Golden Hill Street: this is Mr Smith, amiable, charming, yet strangely determined to keep suspicion simmering.

Opens as Lilly Bere mourns the loss of her grandson, Bill. The story then goes back to the moment she was forced to flee Dublin, at the end of the First World War, and follows her life through into the new world of America, a world filled with both hope and danger.

Clifford, Annette and their parents Gillian and Arthur move through the 1950s into the psychedelic sixties in wholly surprising ways as their troubled family life results in devastating consequences. Offering details of Britain throughout the second half of the twentieth century, this work charts one family's moral decline.

Dramatises and explores the rumours of complicity, conspiracy and cover-up that surround the chilling case of the Teikoku Bank Massacre: of the man who was convicted of the crime, of the legacy of biological warfare programmes, and of the victims and survivors themselves.

Pepys Road: an ordinary street in the Capital. Each house has seen its fair share of first steps and last breaths, and plenty of laughter in between. At forty, Roger Yount is blessed with an expensively groomed wife, two small sons and a powerful job in the City.

January, 1916, and the rooftops of Leeds creak with the weight of the winter's snows. William Redmond, soon to join the Chapeltown Rifles, wanders with his younger brother Samuel through the old haunts of their childhood - and, there, at the top of the Moor across which they are forbidden to walk, Samuel, stoves William's head in with a stone.

A book on the complications of being an ambivalent mum in an age of white-washed, Annabel Karmel'd new families.

Features Orhan Pamuk's Nobel Lecture, delivered in December 2006.

Eight-year-old Finn lives with his father, Pa, and sisters Alice and Daisy on the wreck of an ark on a remote and isolated island. For Finn, the island and his relationship with Pa encompass his entire world. But Alice begins despairingly to seek contact with the outside world.

Continues the history of John Cromer begun by "Pilcrow".

A collection of poems that is by turns a voice and a chorus: a hyper-vivid array of dramatic monologues, allegories, parables and tall tales. It creates world after world, peculiar yet always particular, where the only certainty is the unexpected.

It's 2002. A young American woman stumbles one morning from the forest outside Berlin - hands dirty, clothes torn. She can remember nothing of the night. She returns to the life she once knew, but soon an enigmatic letter arrives from an unknown doctor claiming to be concerned for her fate.

Urania Cabral, a New York lawyer, returns to the Dominican Republic after a lifelong self-imposed exile. Once she is back in her homeland, the elusive feeling of terror that has overshadowed her whole life suddenly takes shape. Urania's own story alternates with the powerful climax of dictator Rafael Trujillo's reign.

Set in mid-1970s India, this title presents a narrative about four unlikely characters who come together in circumstances no one could have foreseen soon after the government declares a 'State of Internal Emergency'.

In February 1940, the Nazis established what would become the second largest Jewish ghetto in the Polish city of Lodz. Its chosen leader: Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski, a sixty-three-year-old Jewish businessman sustains the ghetto's very existence. This book chronicles the tale of Rumkowski's monarchical rule over a quarter of a million Jews.

It's 1965, on a small island in the South Pacific, a group of astronomers gather to witness the passing of a comet, but when a young boy dies during a meteor shower, the lives of the scientists and their loved ones change in subtle yet profound ways.