Lewis Sullivan, is approaching retirement when he wonders for the first time whether he ought to have chosen a more dramatic career. He lives in a village in the Midlands, less than a mile from the house in which he grew up. But when an unusual childhood friend appears on the scene, Lewis finds his life and comfortable routine shaken up.

Lydia's London life lacks purpose. Her discovery of mystical Islam, with its Arabic language and Shia rituals, offers her a new beginning. Lydia becomes Kauthar. When she falls in love with Rafiq, an Iraqi-born doctor, her life appears complete. Then Rafiq decides to return to war-torn Baghdad. For Kauthar love of God replaces love of her husband.

On the outer deck of a North Sea ferry stands Futh, a middle-aged and newly separated man, on his way to Germany for a restorative walking holiday. As he contemplates an earlier trip to Germany and the things he has done in his life, he does not foresee the potentially devastating consequences of things not done.

On the surface, his move to the isolated village on the coast makes perfect sense. But the experience is an increasingly unsettling one for Timothy Bucchanan. A dead man no one will discuss. Wasted fish hauled from a contaminated sea. The dream of faceless men. Questions that lead to further questions. What truth are the villagers withholding?

At 2 p.m. on 9th June 1999, on a small street in Hanford, Stoke-on-Trent, a young girl dies of leukaemia; at that moment, everyone on the street experiences the same musical hallucination. Jonathan Taylor's new novel explores the phenomenon and after-effects, as the girl's family gradually disintegrates over the course of a year.

In the idyllic little village of Champfleury in south-west France, a web of lives interconnect, ready to unravel at the first touch. Into this world comes a walker who speaks to no one and moves on, but the smallest of his actions changes everything, and for everyone in this small community nothing will ever be the same.

The Pre-War House and Other Stories is the debut collection from Alison Moore, whose first novel, The Lighthouse, was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2012.

Reaching for Utopia brings together insightful essays and profiles chronicling the remarkable political and cultural transformations of the last decade - from the fall of Blair to the rise of Corbyn and Brexit. He has met and interviewed all the major political players shaping and changing the way we live today.