Shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers' Prize, the DSC Prize and the Vodafone Crossword Award

One small act can make a big difference

The charming and enthralling story of an idiosyncratic English-language newspaper in Rome and the lives of its staffers as the paper fights for survival in the internet age.

His tautest, most compulsively readable work since American Psycho. A sequel to Less Than Zero, it imagines what became of that book's group of over-privileged, dead-eyed kids as forty-year-olds' Hari Kunzru, Observer

When Tiro, the confidential secretary of a Roman senator, opens the door to a terrified stranger on a cold November morning, he sets in motion a chain of events which will eventually propel his master into one of the most famous courtroom dramas in history.

Malcolm Fox returns in the stunning second novel in Ian Rankin's series...

A moving and original examination of Stefan Zweig's tragic decline from universal acclaim to obscurity and suicide in exile.

It's 1987. Billy Marvin, the tallest boy in ninth grade, has just witnessed history. Wheel of Fortune presenter Vanna White is on the cover of Playboy. Billy and his friends, Alf and Clark, know that if they can get hold of the magazine, their world will change. For ever.

And Wheel of Fortune hostess Vanna White is on the cover of Playboy. Billy and his friends are desperate to get hold of a copy, but no shopkeeper is going to sell one to three fourteen-year-old gaming nerds. But as they set out on their mission to enter one impossible fortress, they have no idea what lies ahead .

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.

Three years after Lord Byron dismissed, Dr John Polidori has fallen on hard times. And then a woman mistakes the doctor for the poet. As the pair fall in love, Polidori knows that he can only emerge from Byron's shadow if he confesses his true identity to the girl; but was it only Byron's shadow that led her to love him in the first place?

The first of Roussel's two major prose works, Impressions of Africa is not, as the title may suggest, a conventional travel account, but an adventure story put together in a highly individual fashion and with an unusual time sequence, whereby the reader is even made to choose whether to begin with the first or the tenth chapter.

From the author of the best-selling This Book Will Save Your Life, an intense, thrilling portrait of the patient-analyst relationship gone awry

Nora hasn't seen Clare for ten years. Not since the day Nora walked out of her old life and never looked back. Until, out of the blue, an invitation to Clare's hen party arrives. A weekend in a remote cottage - the perfect opportunity for Nora to reconnect with her best friend, to put the past behind her. But something goes wrong. Very wrong.

"The five stories [in this collection first published in 1872] are purported to be cases by Dr. Hesselius, a 'metaphysical' doctor, who is willing to consider the ghosts both as real and as hallucinatory obsessions. The reader's doubtful anxiety mimics that of the protagonist, and each story thus creates that atmosphere of mystery which is the supernatural experience"--Amazon.com.

Memories she had long chosen to forget begin to resurface. Memories of an eccentric childhood in a large and shabby house, where the children were very much left to fend for themselves within the loose boundaries of their parents' unorthodox values. A chaotic existence peopled by a rich collection of feckless 'guests'.

The iconic Ian Rankin returns with a new Detective John Rebus novel: an instant Number One bestseller in hardback, and this summer's essential must-read paperback.

In a small town in the middle of England, the aftermath of the Second World War brings change. As the children grow and struggle with the hazards of adulthood, Charles' business expands in direct proportion to his girth and becomes a symbol of the town's fortunes as Britain claws its way back from the grey austerity of wartime Britain.

SHORTLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE 2010 Damon Galgut's masterful novel of longing and thwarted desire following one man on three very different journeys.

Damon Galgut's masterful Man Booker-shortlisted novel of longing and thwarted desire following one man on three very different journeys