Previous Months' New Titles

OCTOBER 2008

FICTION

HARDBACK

A Most Wanted Man - John Le Carre

A half-starved young Russian man in a long black overcoat is smuggled into Hamburg at dead of night. He has an improbable amount of cash secreted in a purse round his neck. He is a devout Muslim. Or is he? (£16.99 at The Book Case)

The Beacon - Susan Hill

'The farmhouse was called The Beacon and they had been born and reared there.' The story of what happens within a family when one of the brothers publishes his 'misery memoir' (£9 at The Book Case)

The Widows of Eastwick - John Updike

More than three decades have passed since the events described in "The Witches of Eastwick" and the three divorcees - Alexandra, Jane and Sukie - have left town, remarried, and become widows. And then, one summer, they decide to go back to Eastwick. (£16.99 at The Book Case)

PAPERBACK

The Man in the Picture: A Ghost Story - Susan Hill

This book offers the chilling tale of a painting so terrifying, its secrets will haunt those who see it. It is a ghost story by the author of "The Woman in Black", to be read by the fire on a cold winter's night. (£6.99)

People of the Book - Geraldine Brooks

From the author of 'March' and 'Year of Wonders'. In the aftermath of the Bosnian War, a young book conservator arrives in Sarajevo to restore a lost treasure, the Sarajevo Haggadah, a Jewish prayer book. But the trip will also set in motion a series of events that threaten to rock Hannah's orderly life. (£7.99)

Will - Christopher Rush

William Shakespeare is dying - in this novel he looks back over his life. The author has taught Shakespeare for thirty years. Being filmed with Ben Kingsley. (£8.99)

The Last Watch - Sergei Lukyanenko

While on holiday in Scotland, visiting a macabre tourist attraction, 'The Dungeons of Edinburgh', a young Russian tourist is murdered. As the police grapples with the fact that the cause of the young man's death was a massive loss of blood, the Watches are immediately aware that there is a renegade vampire on the loose. (£11.99)

The Almost Moon - Alice Sebold

Helen Knightly has spent a lifetime trying to win the love of a mother who had none to spare. And as this electrifying novel opens, she steps over a boundary she never dreamt she would even approach. (£7.99)

Charlemagne and Roland: A Novel - Allan Massie

A truly European monarch, Charlemagne was king of the Franks from 768 to 814 and for some of that time king of the Lombards, too. Today both France and Germany look to him as a founding figure of their respective countries. (£7.99)

Dark Horse - John Francome

This racing thriller plunges the reader into an exhilarating world of high stakes, wealth and corruption. Ten years ago, a car crash left a girl dead and four friends from racing school with a dark secret. (£6.99)

The Whole Truth - David Baldacci

'I need a war ...' Nicolas Creel, a super-rich arms dealer, decides that the best way to boost his business is to start a new cold war - and he won't let anything or anyone get in his way. (£6.99)

World without End - Ken Follett

On the day after Halloween, in the year 1327, four children slip away from the cathedral city of Kingsbridge. They are a thief, a bully, a boy genius and a girl who wants to be a doctor. In the forest they see two men killed. (£8.99)

A Carrion Death - Michael Stanley

A debut crime novel set against a backdrop of poachers, witch doctors, diamond smugglers and corruption...They find the first body near a waterhole considered magical by the local bush people. (£7.99)

Soul Catcher - Michael White

Augustus Cain has an uncanny, if unwelcome, ability to track the most elusive runaway slaves. And to repay a debt and keep his horse, he must head north from Virginia and retrieve a runaway named Rosetta. But why is the bounty on her head so large? (£7.99)

Illegal Action - Stella Rimington

The third thriller from the former head of MI5, featuring MI5 officer Liz Carlyle, now dealing with the Russian spies who are spying on the international financial community that has made London its base. (£6.99)

Necropath - Eric Brown

From the local author of Helix, this scifi novel is set on the Bengal Space Station. (£7.99)

REISSUES

Another Round of Stories by the Christmas Fire - Charles Dickens et al, ed. Melisa Klimaszewski

Building on the success of his Christmas number for 1852, "A Round of Stories by the Christmas Fire", Dickens used the same framing concept in 1853. This wide-ranging round features tales of angels, ghosts, and marriages that are as treacherous as they are inspiring. (£6.99)

Ghost Stories Vol 2 - M R James, read by Derek Jacobi (2 CDs, 2h30m) (£12.99)

Spine Chillers - M.R. James (1 CD, 1.30 hr)

5 chilling stories from M.R. James, originally recorded for the Radio 4 Woman's "Hour in Christmas 2007". (£8.99)

Lois the Witch: and Other Stories - Elizabeth Gaskell

Fear of Satan becomes murder in the name of God. Newly orphaned, the God-fearing and heart-broken Lois is sent across the Atlantic to live with her uncle's family in Salem, but on her arrival she finds herself the object of cruel hostility, potent jealousy and mad desire. (£7.99)

Complete Prose Tales - Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin (£9.99)

The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists - Robert Tressell (£8.99)

The Dunwich Horror: and Other Stories - H.P. Lovecraft

In the degenerate, unliked backwater of Dunwich, Wilbur Whately is born of unnatural parentage, and grows at an uncanny pace to an unsettling height. The boy's arrival simply precedes that of a true horror: one of the Old Ones, that forces the people of the town to hole up by night, fearful for their lives. (£7.99)

The Oxford Book of English Ghost Stories, ed. Michael Cox; R.A. Gilbert

Ranging from the early 19th century to the 1960s, the collection reveals the development of the genre, and showcases many of its greatest expositors - from Sir Walter Scott, H. G. Wells, M. R. James, T. H. White, Walter de la Mare, and Elizabeth Bowen in the UK to Edith Wharton in America. (£9.99)

The Haunted Dolls' House: and Other Stories - M. R. James

Evil comes with many different faces. M R James' chilling ghost stories reveal a world where the familiar becomes diabolical, the smallest object can lead to unimaginable horror, and evil brushes against everyday life in the most unexpected and sinister of ways. (£7.99)

Little Boy Lost - Marghanita Laski

"If you like a novel that expertly puts you through the wringer, this is the one." An English soldier returns to a blasted and impoverished France during World War Two in order to trace a child lost five years before. But is this small, quiet boy in a grim orphanage really his son? And what if he is not? (£9.00)

Mariana - Monica Dickens

Monica Dickens, the great granddaughter of Charles Dickens, published "Mariana" in 1940 when she was only twenty-four years old. It’s the often-comical story of a typical English girl growing up in the 1930s. (£9.00)

The Fairy Tales of Charles Perrault - Angela Carter

Angela Carter adapted Perrault's work in the 18th century on stories from the oral tradition and set out to adapt the stories for modern readers of English. (£8.99)

Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy, read by Imogen Stubbs (Naxos CDs, £13.99)

NON-FICTION

ART AND CRAFT

Printmaking: Techniques and New Approaches - ed. Blanche Craig (£24.95)

Breakdowns - Art Spiegelman

His legendary first book expanded and revised. (£20)

Inked - Teneues

A fascinating catalogue of visual imagery and personal folly. Tattoos are forever ... (£12.50)

BIOGRAPHY

Graham Greene: A Life in Letters ed. Richard Greene

This substantial volume presents a new and engrossing account of the author’s life constructed out of his own words. (£9.99)

Not Quite World's End: A Traveller's Tales - John Simpson

A lively and upbeat look at the challenges and the changes the world has gone through in his life and long career. (£7.99)

In the Frame: My Life in Words and Pictures - Helen Mirren (£9.99)

COOKERY

The Full English Cassoulet: Making Do In the Kitchen - Richard Mabey

30 years after his "Food for Free", Richard Mabey offers another joyous exploration of local ingredients, broadening your horizons by travelling, vernacular heritage, and making use of everything. "Life's too short NOT to stuff a mushroom." (£16.99)

Gary Rhodes 365: One Year. One Book. One Simple Recipe for Every Day (£25)

Jamie's Ministry of Food: Anyone Can Learn to Cook in 24 Hours - Jamie Oliver

'The aim of this book is to completely inspire people who have no interest in food to have a go' - Jamie Oliver. We need to look back at the way our grandmothers and great- grandmothers cooked - wholesome, tasty food that was simple and quick to prepare. (£25)

The River Cottage Diary 2009 - Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall (£12.99)

A seasonal companion to engage and inspire throughout all the seasons, such as baking bread, bee-keeping, fishing, herb-foraging and roasts for Christmas. Made on 100% recycled paper, with recipe cards, perforated sheets, colour photos, seasonal tables, conversion charts, shooting seasons and a directory of useful websites.

ENVIRONMENT

Renewable Energy: A User's Guide - Andy McCrea

Crowood Press so probably practical. (£16.99)

Sold Out: How I Survived a Year of Not Shopping - Robert Llewellyn

After a long and painful Christmas shopping expedition, Robert Llewellyn had a revelation. He had enough stuff; he'd had enough of rampant consumerism; he would simply stop shopping for a whole year. (£7.99)

Ban the Plastic Bag: A Community Action Plan for a Carrier Bag Free World - Rebecca Hoskins (£4.99)

GARDENING

"Gardeners' World" Top Tips - Louise Hampden (£9.99)

HERITAGE

The Tain - trans. Ciaran Carson

"The Tain Bo Cualinge", centrepiece of the eighth-century Ulster cycle of heroic tales, is Ireland's great epic. It tells the story of a great cattle-raid, the invasion of Ulster by the armies of Medb and Ailill, Queen and King of Connacht, and their allies, seeking to carry off the great Brown Bull of Cualige. The hero of the tale is Cuchulainn, the Hound of Ulster, who resists the invaders single-handed while Ulster's warriors lie sick. (£8.99)

Beowulf - ed. Heather O'Donoghue, trans. Kevin Crossley-Holland

Oxford World’s Classics. (£5.99)

Exeter Book of Riddles - Kevin Crossley-Holland (£8.95)

Eirik the Red and Other Icelandic Sagas ed. Gwyn Jones

The remote and inhospitable landscape of Iceland made it a perfect breeding-ground for heroes. The Icelandic sagas relate the adventurous lives of individuals and families between 930 and 1030, which began as oral tales but were skilfully documented in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, and are now regarded as written literature. (£6.99)

Le Morte Darthur: The Winchester Manuscript - Sir Thomas Malory, ed. Helen Cooper

The definitive English version of the stories of King Arthur, Le Morte Darthur was completed in 1469-70 by Sir Thomas Malory, 'knight-prisoner'. In a resonant prose style, Malory charts the tragic disintegration of the fellowship of the Round Table, destroyed from within by warring factions. (£8.99)

English Fairy Tales and Legends - Rosalind Kerven

Most of our childhood tales are from overseas. This book revives our best home-grown tales, each one linked with a specific place or county in England. (£14.99)

HISTORY

Fred Dibnah's Buildings of Britain - David Hall

Fred Dibnah’s interest was not in architectural theory but in the practicalities of how things were built and here he takes us on a tour of Britain's great historic buildings explaining how they managed to build them. (£18.99)

The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World - Niall Ferguson

Shows that finance is in fact the foundation of human progress and financial history is the essential back-story behind all history. The evolution of credit and debt was as important as any technological innovation in the rise of civilization, from ancient Babylon to the silver mines of Bolivia. (£25)

Railway Blunders - A. Vaughan

The two hundred years of railway developmentt in Britain are littered with good intentions and disasters. (£12.99)

Somme Mud - E.P.F. Lynch, ed. Will Davies

In 1916 the majority of the young men proudly waved off by the crowds as they embarked for France had no idea of the reality of the trenches of the Somme. Private Lynch was just 18 when he enlisted; he survived his time in the trenches and upon his return from France in 1919 he wrote "Somme Mud" in pencil in over 20 school exercise books. (£7.99)

Nella Last's Peace: The Post-war Diaries of Housewife 49 - ed. Patricia Malcolmson; Robert Malcolmson

Picking up where bestseller Nella Last's "War" left off, this diary of 1945-48 delves into the private life of housewife and mother Nella Last as well as that of her family, friends and neighbours. Nella, 55 when the war ends, writes of what ordinary people felt during those years of privation, hope and the re-building of Britain, providing a moving and inspiring account of the years that shaped the society we live in today. (£8.99)

The American Future: A History - Simon Schama

America is conducting an intense self-examination about the trajectory of its history; how it came to find itself in multiple crises and how an America that began as 'the last best hope for mankind' came to be so suspected and vilified around much of the world. Simon investigates. (£20)

Remember, Remember (The Fifth of November): The History of Britain in Bite-Sized Chunks - Judy Parkinson (£9.99)

HUMOUR

I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue: v. 11 - BBC (2 CDs, 2 hrs) (£12.99)

"Just a Minute": The Best of 2008 - BBC (2 CDs, 2 hrs) (£12.99)

Colemanballs 14 - ed Barry Fantoni (£4.99)

Private Eye Annual (£9.99)

Isle of Wight to Get Ceefax: And Other Groundbreaking Stories from Newsbiscuit - John O'Farrell (£9.99)

Last Chorus: The Humphrey Lyttleton Collection (£14.99)

Sartre's Sink - Mark Crick

From the author of "Kafka's Soup", essential DIY tips of the world's greatest writers. (£12.99)

Little Black Book of Red Tape - Ian Vince

Based on the popular Social Scrutiny website - the wellies that come with a 24-page instruction book and the council workers who are prohibited from making tea in case they burn themselves. (£6.99)

Your Mother Doesn't Work Here: Painfully Polite and Hilariously Hostile Notes - Kerry Miller

Have you ever been the recipient of a nagging reminder to do the dishes or turn down the music, imbued with a faux friendliness and stuck on a Post-It for all to see? A collection all of the most popular notes submitted to the website, all sharing a common sense of frustration channelled into a 'helpful' note. Welcome to the hilarious and compelling world of the passive-aggressive. (£9.99)

Idler’s Diary 2009 - Tom Hodkinson

Illustrated in technicolour, this diary features appointment pages interspersed with things to do, recipes, drawings, arcana, and poems. It also includes a list of all medieval feast days. A diary for those looking for a less slavish attitude to life.

"FWD This Link": A Rough Guide to Staying Amused Online When You Should be Working - Rhodri Marsden (£5.99)

The Timewaster Diaries: A Year in the Life of Robin Cooper (£6.99)

Daily Mash: Halfwit nation - Neil Rafferty and Paul Stokes (£9.99)

"Halfwit Nation: Frontline Reporting from the War on Stupid by the Daily Mash".

Advanced Banter - Stephen Fry; John Lloyd; John Mitchinson

Those thoughtful gentlemen at QI have come up with this big, useful, funny and really very good book of quotations. (£14.99)

Cat Nav: A Mad Moggy's Road Atlas of Great Britain and Ireland - Mike Mosedale (£4.99)

How to Lose Friends and Alienate People - Toby Young

A hilarious account of the journalist’s five years steadily working his way down the New York food chain, from glossy magazine editor to crash-test dummy for interactive sex toys. (£7.99)

IDEAS

Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth - Margaret Atwood

An intelligent, wide-ranging book that examines the metaphor of debt and the role it takes in our lives. "Debt" is like air - something we take for granted and never think about until things go wrong. (£9.99)

What Should I Believe? - Dorothy Rowe

Religion has suddenly become a political power. It affects us all, whether we're religious or not. Dorothy Rowe separates the political from the personal, the power-seeking from the compassionate. She shows how, if we use our beliefs as a defence against our feelings of worthlessness, we feel compelled to force our beliefs on to other people by coercion or aggression. However, it is possible to create a set of beliefs, expressed in the religious or philosophical metaphors most meaningful to us, which allow us to live at peace with ourselves and other people. (£9.99)

Other Colours - Orhan Pamuk

Essays ranging from lyrical autobiography to criticism of literature and culture, from humour to political analysis, from delicate evocations of his friendship with his daughter Ruya to provocative discussions of Eastern and Western art. (£9.99)

LIFESTYLE

The Spend Less Pocketbook: 365 Tips for a Better Quality of Life While Actually Spending Less - Rebecca Ash (£5.99)

The Lesbian Bible: 101 Titbits from Ladygay Life - Clare Lydon

A wry and witty look at lesbian life in handy pocket form. (£4.99)

The Coming Out Bible: 101 Tales of Pride and Prejudice - Clare Lydon

Aims a modern-day lens at the lesbian and gay community, taking a snapshot of what it's like coming out in the modern era - whether it's to your family, friends, colleagues or the person staring back from the mirror. (£4.99)

How to be a Silver Surfer - Emma Aldridge (£7.99)

Computing for Beginners, Jackie Sherman (£8.99)

The Seniors' Survival Guide: New Tricks for Old Dogs - Geoff Tibballs

The ultimate manual for modern living, "The Seniors' Survival Guide" includes everything from buying and selling on eBay and using that internet thingy, to understanding teen-speak, tackling global warming and negotiating telephone helplines. (£10)

LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE

The Spoken Word: British Writers (3 CDs, British Library)

Around 30 writers talk will be about their lives and work. The recordings derive primarily from BBC broadcasts, the earliest of them dating from the 1930s. Among the writers included will be Rudyard Kipling, Virginia Woolf, Ian Fleming and Harold Pinter. The majority of the recordings have not been published before. (£19.95)

March Hares and Monkeys' Uncles - Harry Oliver (£7.99)

MATHS AND SCIENCE

One Hundred Essential Things You Didn't Know You Didn't Know: Answered! - John Barrow

Mathematics can tell you things about the world that can't be learned in any other way. From winning the lottery, placing bets at the races and escaping from bears to sports, Shakepeare, Google, game theory, drunks, divorce settlements and dodgy accounting; this book has all the answers! (£10)

Professor Stewart's Cabinet of Mathematical Curiosities - Ian Stewart

A book of mathematical oddities: games, puzzles, facts, numbers and delightful mathematical nibbles for the curious and adventurous mind. (£10.99)

Numeroids: Any Number of Things You Didn't Know....and Some You Did - Donough O'Brien; Anthony Weldon (£9.99)

MBS

Benedictus: A Book of Blessings - John O'Donohue

'We have fallen out of belonging. Consequently, when we stand before crucial thresholds in our lives, we have no rituals to protect, encourage and guide us as we cross over into the unknown. For such crossings, we need to find new words. (£6.99)

The Sleepeasy Solution: The Exhausted Parent's Guide to Getting Your Child to Sleep - from Birth to 5 - Jennifer Waldburger; Jill Spivack (£9.99)

Living with Teenagers: It's One Hell of a Bumpy Ride

Based on the anonymous Guardian column of the same name, this is a deliciously painful, unflinchingly honest look at what it's like towatch your children grow up into classic teenagers. (£6.99)

Your Angel is Waiting to Help: Find Her and Let Her Touch You - Cassandra Eason (£8.99)

The Wonder of Unicorns - Diana Cooper

For all those people who aspire to help others and to change the world for the better, even if it is just their small corner of it. Using the meditations, rituals and ceremonies in this book the reader will be able to connect to their own Unicorn just as they would connect to their own Guardian Angel.(£8.99)

Froth on the Cappuccino: How Small Pleasures Can Save Your Life - Maeve Haran (£6.99)

Angel Kids - Jacky Newcomb

Includes the delightful encounters that children have with their guardian angels and loved ones on the other side of life. (£7.99)

Angel Therapy Oracle Cards - Doreen Virtue

A deck which is appropriate for beginners as well as those experienced with divination cards. (£11.99)

Daily Guidance from Your Angels: 365 Angelic Messages - Doreen Virtue (£12.99)

A Field Guide to Demons, Fairies, Fallen Angels and Other Subversive Spirits - Carol Mack; Dinah Mack (£10.99)

The Golden Tarot - Liz Dean

Includes full deck of 78 tarot cards, and a guide book (£12.99)

Quick and Easy Pilates: 5-minute Routines for Anyone, Anytime, Anywhere - Karen Smith (£5.99)

Quick and Easy Face Massage: 5-minute Massages for Anyone, Anytime, Anywhere - Beata Aleksandrowicz (£5.99)

The Secret Pleasures of the Menopause - Christiane Northrup

Dr. Northrup candidly guides you toward experiencing life after 50 as the most pleasurable time of your life.

MEDIA

Who's Who in "The Archers" 2009 - Keri Davies (£5.99)

The Really Bloody Dangerous Book for Boys - Ben Ickenson

Ideas you really shouldn’t try at home under any circumstances - real stuntmen and women explain how they do it. (£9.99)

MUSIC

Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain - Oliver Sacks

Examines the powers of music through the individual experiences of patients, musicians and everyday people - those struck by affliction, unusual talent and even, in one case, by lightning - to show not only that music occupies more areas of the brain than language does, but also that it can calm and organize, torment and heal. (£8.99)

NATURE AND ANIMALS

Know Your Cattle by Jack Byard

A sequel to the popular sheep identification guide. (£4.99)

Notes from Walnut Tree Farm - Roger Deakin

For the last six years of his life, Roger Deakin kept notebooks in which he wrote his daily thoughts, impressions and feelings, whether it be observing the teeming ecosystem that was Walnut Tree Farm, thinking about the wider environment, walking in his fields or on Mellis Common. (£20)

On Cats - Doris May Lessing

A collection of Doris Lessing's charming and celebrated writings about cats - her celebrated collection of stories, 'Particularly Cats and Rufus', and the poignant though unsentimental memoir, 'The Old Age of El Magnifico'. (£6.99)

Ray Mears’ Vanishing World - Raymond Mears

Ray Mears has travelled the world for much of his life learning and teaching wilderness skills. Now he reflects on his experiences in some of the most remote and beautiful places on Earth along with his own stunning photographs of the landscapes and peoples he's encountered.(£20)

Hugh's Hedgehog: Obsession, Nostalgia and a Very British Animal - Hugh Warwick

A Prickly Affair - one man’s quest to better understand our prickly friends. (£14.99)

NOSTALGIA

Barbara Cartland's Etiquette Handbook: A Guide to Good Behaviour from the Boudoir to the Boardroom

An evocative (or hilarious, depending on your point of view) insight into the manners of an England that has largely disappeared. (£8.99)

The Well-dressed Woman's Do's and Don’ts - Elise Vallee (£5.99)

Don'ts for Dancers - Karsinova (£2.99)

Motor Do's and Don’ts - Harold Pemberton (£2.99)

England, Our England - Alan Titchmarsh

An anthology and miscellany of everything an Englishman should know: From Austen to Wordsworth, Jerusalem to Scout's Honour, Kings and Queens of England to Land of Hope and Glory, Savile Row tailors to Jermyn St Shirt Makers, tying a Windsor knot to making a pot of tea, Victoria sponge to fish pie, the rules of cricket to Gilbert and Sullivan operas (£7.99)

OUTDOOR & INDOOR ACTIVITIES

Bear Grylls's Great Outdoors Adventures

Channel 4 tie-in. More of us than ever before are spending weekends and holidays climbing mountains, surfing waves, kayaking on rivers or simply walking in the wilderness. Britain's most intrepid survival expert shares his years of experience of the world's most extreme terrain to help enhance your enjoyment of the wilderness. (£18.99)

The Pocket Dangerous Book for Boys: Wonders of the World - Conn Iggulden; Hal Iggulden

Impress your friends and family with your amazing knowledge of the solar system, your indepth insights into fossils and dinosaurs, your amazing ability to name the seven wonders of the world (£8.99)

The Pocket Daring Book for Girls: Things to Do - Andrea J. Buchanan; Miriam B. Peskowitz

Brilliant things to do selected from The Daring Book for Girls - the only book for all feisty, fun-loving, adventure-seeking girls - How to Make and Fly a Kite, How to Survive in the Wild, How to Make the Best Tree Swing Ever, and many other fun filled activities to keep you entertained. (£8.99)

POETRY

Paradise Lost - John Milton

With 12 black and white engravings from the first illustrated edition 1688. Oxford. (£9.99)

Selected Poetry - Gerard Manley Hopkins, ed. Catherine Phillips (£6.99)

The Not Dead - Simon Armitage
Poems originally aired on Channel 4 in 2007, due to be re-shown in November this year. The poems focus on the testimonies of veterans of the Gulf, Bosnia and Malayan wars. (£6.99)

Answering Back: Living Poets Reply to the Poetry of the Past - Carol Ann Duffy

Carol Ann Duffy has invited fifty of her peers to choose and respond to a poem from the past. (£8.99)

PLAYS AND THEATRE

The Merchant of Venice - William Shakespeare, Read by: Antony Sher & cast (Naxos CDs, £10.99)

The Pantomime Book - Paul Harris

Expanded with a section on classic routines and gags. (£9.95)

Theatre of the Oppressed - Augusto Boal

This new edition of "Theater of the Oppressed" brings a classic work on radical drama fully up to date and includes a new introduction by the author Augusto Boal. Boal restores theatre to its proper place as a popular form of communication and expression. (£12.99)

POLITICS

The Communist Manifesto - Karl Marx; Friedrich Engels (£7.99)

The Voice of Hope: Conversations with Alan Clements - Aung San Suu Kyi

The result of the secret and dangerous meetings Aung San Suu Kyi, under house arrest in Burma, had over several years with Alan Clements: unquestionably the most wide-ranging collection of her views on the political situation inside Burma, her non-violent approach to democracy and human rights, her Buddhist beliefs, her family, and how she keeps a sense of meaning and purpose under the most appalling conditions. (£7.99)

From Anger to Apathy: The Story of Politics, Society and Popular Culture in Britain Since 1975 - Mark Garnett

In 1975, Britons spent much of their time complaining - and for good reasons. Yet evidence suggests that the British people were happier in those days than they have been in the early years of the twenty-first century; they were also much more inclined to cast votes in general elections. (£9.99)

Infinitely Demanding: Ethics of Commitment, Politics of Resistance - Simon Critchley

Identifies a massive political disappointment at the heart of liberal democracy. Arguing that what is called for is an ethics of commitment that can inform a radical politics, it culminates in an argument for anarchism as an ethical practice and a re-motivating means of political organization. (£9.99)

SPORT

Don't Mention the Score: A Masochist's History of England's National Football Team - Simon Briggs (£12.99)

TRAVEL

The Good Pub Guide 2009 - Alisdair Aird; Fiona Stapley (£15.99)

Good Hotel Guide Great Britain & Ireland 2009 (£20)

2009 Collins Map of Europe (£4.99)

2009 Collins Map of France (£4.99)

New Rough Guides to India and South East Asia

The Lonely Planet Best in Travel 2009

The world's hottest trends, destinations, journeys and experiences. (£15.99)

New Lonely Planet Guides to Barcelona and Paris

Touching the Void - Joe Simpson

Reissue of this heart-stopping account of Joe Simpson's terrifying adventure in the Peruvian Andes with his climbing partner Simon. (£7.99)

SEPTEMBER 2008

FICTION

HARDBACK

From A to X: Some Letters Recuperated by John Berger

In the dusty, ramshackle town of Suse lives A'ida. Her letters to her imprisoned insurgent husband tell of daily events in the town, and of its motley collection of inhabitants. But Suse is under threat, and the smallest details and acts of humanity assume for A'ida a life-affirming significance, acts of resistance against the forces that might otherwise extinguish them. (£12.99)

Fine Just the Way it is: Wyoming Stories - Annie Proulx

This new collection of stories returns to the Wyoming of Brokeback Mountain and the familiar cast of hardy, unsentimental prairie folk. (£10.99 at The Book Case)

Indignation - Philip Roth

It is 1951 in America, the second year of the Korean War. A studious, law-abiding, intense youngster is beginning his sophomore year on the pastoral, conservative campus of Ohio's Winesburg College - not at the local college where he originally enrolled because his father, the sturdy, hard-working neighbourhood butcher, seems to have gone mad. (£14.99 at The Book Case)

The Private Patient - P.D. James

A notorious investigative journalist books into a private clinic in Dorset for the removal of a disfiguring facial scar but she was never to leave Cheverell Manor alive. Dalgliesh and his team are called in to investigate the murder. (£16.99 at The Book Case)

PAPERBACK

Exit Ghost - Philip Roth

Nathan Zuckerman comes back to New York, the city he left eleven years before. Alone on his New England mountain, Zuckerman has been nothing but a writer: but now walking the streets like a revenant, he quickly makes three connections that explode his carefully protected solitude. (£7.99)

Real World - Natsuo Kirino

In a suburb on the outskirts of Tokyo, four teenage girls drift through a hot smoggy August and tedious summer school classes. Then dependable Toshi's next-door neighbour is found brutally murdered and the girls suspect Worm, the neighbour's son and a high school misfit. (£7.99)

The Quiet Girl - Peter Hoeg

From the author of "Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow", a fast-paced philosophical thriller set in Denmark in the here and now. (£7.99)

A Thousand Splendid Suns - Khaled Hosseini

Mariam is only fifteen when she is sent to Kabul to marry Rasheed. Nearly two decades later, a friendship grows between Mariam and a local teenager, Laila. When the Taliban take over, life becomes a desperate struggle against starvation, brutality and fear. (£7.99)

The Irresistible Inheritance of Wilberforce - Paul Torday

From the author of "Salmon Fishing in the Yemen". Late one summer evening, Wilberforce - rich, young, and work-obsessed - makes a detour on his way home to the vast undercroft of Caerlyon Hall, and the domain of Francis Black, a place where wine, hospitality and affection flow freely. (£7.99)

The Septembers of Shiraz - Dalia Sofer

Set in Tehran during the aftermath of the 1979 revolution, this understated, beautifully told literary debut follows the Amin family as they cope with their father’s false imprisonment for spying. (£7.99)

Nina Todd Has Gone - Lesley Glaister

Nina Todd is not the sort of person you'd notice - and that's the way she likes it. When she meets Rupert in a hotel, it leads to an empty adulterous encounter that she'd rather forget. But it soon becomes clear that Rupert won't. (£7.99)

The Gum Thief - Douglas Coupland

Roger is a middle-aged and divorced 'aisles associate' at a Staples outlet. His co-worker Bethany is facing fifty more years of shelving Post-it notes. Then Bethany discovers Roger's notebook and finds that he's writing diary entries pretending to be her - and weirdly, he's getting it right. (£7.99)

The Night Climbers - Ivo Stourton

The 'Tudor Night Climbers' scale Cambridge University's turrets after dark, transforming it into a dangerous playground of spiralling heights. A first-year student, James, begins to fall for the only female in the group, the enigmatic and beautiful Jessica. (£6.99)

The Queue - Vladimir Sorokin, trans. Sally Laird

From an innovative young Russian writer - in Soviet Russia people queue patiently even though no one knows what they are queuing for. Sorokin's magic pen turns this framework into a mini-picaresque novel with a hero of sorts. Readers with some imagination will enjoy following Vadim and his co-queuers through their days and nights on line and off (£7.99)

Lords of the Bow - Conn Iggulden

Second novel in Conn Iggulden's bestselling Conqueror series, bringing to the story of Genghis Khan brilliantly to life. (£6.99)

This Year it Will be Different - Maeve Binchy

Stories of the lives of wives, husbands, children, friends and lovers from the bestselling author. (£7.99)

The Bone Garden - Tess Gerritsen

When a human skull is dug up in a garden near Boston, Dr Maura Isles is called in to investigate. She quickly discovers that the skeleton - that of a young woman - has been buried for over a hundred years. (£6.99)

REISSUES

Haunted House - Charles Dickens

A Yuletide gathering in an eerie country retreat inspires ghost stories from Dickens, Gaskell and Wilkie Collins (£6.99)

A Certain Justice - P.D. James

Distinguished barrister Venetia Aldridge agrees to defend Garry Ashe, accused of the brutal murder of his aunt; but just four weeks later, she is found dead. Commander Adam Dalgliesh, is called in to investigate. Tenth in the Dalgleish series. (£7.99)

The Evil Seed - Joanne Harris

Updated reissue of Joanne Harris's first novel. Alice comes to realize that her instinctive hatred of Joe’s new girlfriend may not just be due to jealousy as she’s plunged into a nightmare world of obsession, revenge, seduction – and blood. (£6.99)

NON-FICTION

BIOGRAPHY

Shakespeare's Wife - Germaine Greer

Ann Hathaway has been mocked and vilified by scholars for centuries. Yet Shakespeare became the very poet of marriage, exploring the sacrament in all its aspects, spiritual, psychological, sexual and sociological. Is it possible that Ann was the inspiration? Part-biography, part-history, "Shakespeare's Wife"reconstructs Ann's life, and the daily lives of Elizabethan women. (£8.99)

Final Curtains: Top Drawer Memorial Services 1993-2007, Reviewed by Ned Sherrin for the Pages of the Oldie (£7.99)

Driving Miss Smith: A Memoir of Linda Smith - Warren Lakin (£7.99)

Miracles of Life - J. G. Ballard

Beginning with the events that inspired his classic novel, 'Empire of the Sun', in this revelatory autobiography Ballard charts the course of his astonishing life. (£7.99)

Spilling the Beans - Clarissa Dickson Wright

Clarissa was born into wealth and privilege, as a child. Her mother was an Australian heiress, her father was a brilliant surgeon to the Royal family. But he was also a tyrannical and violent drunk. Clarissa’s ambition led her to a career in the law. but when her adored mother died suddenly, it was to lead to a mind-numbing decade of wild over-indulgence. (£7.99)

Travels on the Dance Floor: One Man's Journey to the Heart of Salsa - Grevel Lindop

When poet and biographer Grevel Lindop took up salsa dancing in rainy Manchester, his qualifications were size 12 feet and excruciating adolescent memories of ballroom dancing lessons. But salsa has a way of taking over your life. (£14.99)

CURRENT AFFAIRS

Turning Back the Clock - Umberto Eco

With his customary sharpness and wit, Umberto Eco explains the tragic steps backwards that have been taken since 2000. After the Cold War, the "Hot War" has made its come-back in Afghanistan and Iraq. Exhuming Kipling's "Great Game", we have gone back to the clash between Islam and Christianity. This book proposes not so much that we resume a forward march, but at the very least that we cease marching backwards. (£9.99)

Gomorrah: Italy's Other Mafia - Roberto Saviano

The Camorra, an organized crime network with a global reach and large stakes in construction, high fashion, illicit drugs and toxic-waste disposal, is the deciding factor in why Campania has the highest murder rate in all of Europe and why cancer levels there have skyrocketed in recent years. Since publishing his expose the author has received so many death threats that he has been assigned police protection. (£8.99)

Real England: The Battle Against the Bland - Paul Kingsnorth

Kingsnorth is concerned over the "Bluewatering" of the landscape, the steamrollering of big business and the effect of globalisation on our country. He is an excellent guide to what we are losing, how it’s happening and why. (£7.99)

The Uses of Disorder: Personal Identity and City Life - Richard Sennett

First published in 1970, this book is an exploration of communities and how they live in cities, putting forward the view that order breeds narrow, violence-prone lives, while an 'equilibrium of disorder' brings vigour and diversity to urban life. (£10.99)

The Rough Guide to Conspiracy Theories - James McConnachie; Robin Tudge (£12.99)

FOOD AND DRINK

WI Book of Preserves - Carol Tennant (£14.99)

50 Step-by-step Home Made Preserves: Delicious Easy-to-follow Recipes for Jams, Jellies and Sweet Conserves - Maggie Mayhew (£4.99)

Good Beer Guide 2009 - ed. Roger Protz (£14.99)

100 Belgian Beers to Try Before You Die! - Tim Webb; Joris Pattyn (£12.99)

Cooking in a Bedsitter - Katharine Whitehorn

From pre-microwave days, the classic, practical and entertaining handbook of quick, simple meals when you only have one burner and very little space. (£8.99)

GAMES, HOBBIES, ACTIVITIES & NOSTALGIA

Card Games for One - Peter Arnold (£5.99)

Bridge: Winning Ways to Play Your Cards - Paul Mendelson (£5.99)

The "Antiques Roadshow" Book of Collectables (£20)

Miller's Antiques Price Guide 2009: 30th Edition - Judith Miller (£30)

Guinness World Records 2009 (£20)

In Fact - Prospect Magazine
Thousands of 'did-you-knows' that will make you think - the Gaza strip is slightly smaller than Sheffield; Queen Victoria spoke Urdu and Hindi; peanuts are an ingredient in dynamite; by the age of five, children have acquired 85 per cent of the language they will have as adults. (£12.99)

The Really Useful Grandparents' Book - Eleo Gordon; Tony Lacey; Nanette Newman

Like the Dangerous Book for Boys from a grandparent’s perspective - what to do with your grandchildren when you have them for a long weekend - build a tree house, make a curiosity box, play chess ... (£18.99)

Visual Aid: Stuff You've Forgotten and Lesssons You Didn't Quite Get Round to Learning ed. Duncan McCorquodale

Provides the answers to the little questions in life in a simple colourful and engaging way. Included are: colour wheels, universal flags, star constellations, correct tablesettings, how reflexology works, the Italian wine regions, how to tie a knot, how to use chopsticks, sign language, morse code and many more. (£7.95)

The "Eagle" Annual of the Cutaways - ed. Daniel Tatarsky

After Dan Dare, the most famous and fondly remembered part of the Eagle comic was the cutaway: beautifully detailed drawings of the inner workings of pretty much anything: from steam trains, jet liners and racing cars, to oil wells, suspension bridges and tube lines beneath Piccadilly Circus. (£14.99)

The Bumper Book of Roy of the Rovers

Collects together 20 years’ worth of classic material from the Golden Age of British Annuals. (£12.99)

"Daily Telegraph" Cryptic Crosswords: No. 62 (£4.99)

"Daily Telegraph" Quick Crosswords: No. 48 (£4.99)

How to Do Just About Anything in Excel - Reader's Digest (£9.99)

GARDENING

The Bedside Book of the Garden - D.G. Hessayon (£12.99)

HISTORY

A Little History of the World - E.H. Gombrich

Now in paperback the young Gombrich’s attractive and concise version of the story of man from the stone age to the atomic bomb. (£6.99)

Lancashire's Sacred Past - Linda Sever

From Prehistory to the Viking Period - monuments, buildings, copses, stone circles and early churches. (£14.99)

Infamous Lancashire Women - Issy Shannon

From the well-known local journalist, a collection of female Lancastrian witches, thieves, fraudsters and murderers with 100 photos and engravings! (£12.99)

The Knights Templar in Yorkshire - Diane Holloway

Takes the reader on an intimate tour of the ten major Templar sites established in Yorkshire, and reveals what life was like for their inhabitants - how the land was farmed, what the population ate, how they were taxed and local legends. (£12.99)

Reading Matters: Five Centuries of Discovering Books - Margaret Willes

It is easy to forget in our own day of cheap paperbacks and mega-bookstores that until very recently books were luxury items. This book examines how people acquired and read books from the sixteenth century to the present, focusing on the personal relationships between readers and the volumes they owned. (£19.99)

The Hell-fire Clubs: Sex, Satanism and Secret Societies - Evelyn Lord

The Hell-Fire Clubs scandalized eighteenth-century English society as rumours of their orgies, recruitment of prostitutes, extensive libraries of erotica, extreme rituals, and initiation ceremonies spread. This thoroughly researched book gives an accurate portrait of their membership, beliefs, activities, and the reasons for their proliferation, first in the British Isles and later in America. (£19.99)

We Saw Spain Die - Paul Preston

Based on a huge trove of diary and personal letter material regarding principally British and American, but also Russian and French, correspondents, "We Saw Spain Die" is a study of how the war correspondent came of age. (£20)

HUMOUR

Britain at Play - Heath Robinson

British pastimes and their eccentricities. (£21.99)

How to Avoid Huge Ships: And Other Implausibly Titled Books - Diagram Group

2008 marks the 30th anniversary of the Diagram Prize, the momentous annual contest to determine the oddest book title of the year. Here is a joyous celebration of the barmy side of publishing.(£9.99)

Medicine Balls: Consultations with the World's Greatest TV Doctor - Dr. Phil Hammond

The world is full of TV doctors, but only Dr Phil has appeared on "Have I Got News For You" seven times and "Countdown" nineteen times. He is also Private Eye's medical correspondent. Transcripts of his most life-enhancing consultations and comedy, including 89 Minutes to Save the NHS. (£6.99)

Lost in the Post - Kevin Boniface

A postman’s eye of provincial English life by Huddersfield postman of more than 15 years. (£8.99)

The Pub Landlord's Book of British Common Sense - Al Murray

We live in an age of waffle, mumbo-jumbo and bad thinking. We're forever being fed dodgy information by so-called experts. Thank God then for Al Murray. here to put good old-fashioned British common sense back where it belongs. (£7.99)

The "Oldie" Annual 2009 - Richard Ingrams (£9.99)

I Once Met: A Collection of Chance Meetings from "The Oldie" - Richard Ingrams (£7.99)

How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read - Pierre Bayard

In this provocative book, Pierre Bayard contends that in this age of infinite publication, the truly cultivated person is not the one who has read a book, but the one who understands the book's place in our culture. (£8.99)

MBS

Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth, and Art - Lewis Hyde

The Trickster spirit, playful, mischievous, subversive, amoral, is a great bother to have around, but paradoxically also indispensable. (£8.99)

Witches Almanac Spring 2009 to Spring 2010 - Theitic (£8.99)

Hedge Witch: Spells, Crafts and Rituals for Natural Magick - Silver RavenWolf (£13.99)

The Angel Almanac - Angela McGerr

Packed within vocations, affirmations and a host of heavenly information, this beautiful package also includes a CD containing angelic meditations to aid life balance and inner peace. (£12.99)

Why is God Laughing?: One Man's Journey to Joy and Spiritual Optimism - Deepak Chopra

A profound and light-hearted, look at the connection between spiritual awareness, optimism and humour (£12.99)

Meditation for Beginners - Jack Kornfield

Guided meditations, including a CD. (£11.99)

MUSIC

The Right Way to Read Music - Harry Baxter

Whether you are learning to play a piano, blow a trumpet, conduct an orchestra or sing, the essentials of music notation are the same. This book is a complete approach to musical study, from the first note you read to the beginnings of harmony. (£5.99)

NATURE & OUTDOOR ACTIVITIES

"Guardian" Book of the Countryside - Phil Daoust

From the spread of the railways and flight to the cities in the early nineteenth century, through to the floods and global warming on the 21st century, this is a timely reminder of just how much the British countryside has endured over the last 200 years. (£12.99)

Collins Mushroom Miscellany - Patrick Harding

A compilation of all of the fascinating biological , folklore, uses and history. (£14.99)

Dry Store Room No. 1: The Secret Life of the Natural History Museum - Richard Fortey

An intimate biography of the Natural History Museum, celebrating the eccentric personalities who have peopled it and capturing the wonders of scientific endeavour, academic rigour and imagination. (£8.99)

Beechcombings: The Narratives of Trees - Richard Mabey

Beech trees reached Britain about 8,000 years ago, and they were workhorses, not ornaments. Mabey covers Europe as well as Britain, and his beeches are characterful; he writes about the bluebells, orchids, fungi, deer and badgers associated with them, as well as the narratives we tell about trees and the images we make of them. (£8.99)

Moveable Feasts: An Outdoor Enthusiast's Guide to What to Eat and How to Cook it - Amy-Jane Beer; Roy Halpin

A guide to optimal nutrition and camp cooking for anyone that needs to cook or eat outdoors, in two parts: information and practical advice on everything from choosing the best energy-giving foods to building a fire pit and avoiding water borne illnesses; and over a hundred easy-to-follow recipes for nutritious, mouth-watering camp meals that will fuel you well into the next day's action. (£12.95)

The Southern Fells - Mark Richards

The modern rucksack reference for the discerning fell adventurer. One of eight books providing a comprehensive and contemporary guide to the fells of the English Lake District. (£12.95)

The Stargazer's Guide: How to Read Our Night Sky - Emily Winterburn

A starry sky has the capacity to fill us with wonder. A stargazer is anyone who's ever found themselves looking at the stars and wanting to know a bit more. This book will guide you through what there is to see in the sky, why it's interesting and how previous generations have viewed and interpreted it, organised month by month. (£14.99)

Stargazers' Almanac 2009: Monthly Guide to the Stars and Planets (£14.99)

PHILOSOPHY

Towards the Light: The story of the struggles for Liberty and Rights that made the modern West - A.C. Grayling

The often-violent conflicts of the 15th and 16th centuries were sparked by the pursuit of freedom of thought: the English Civil War and revolutions in America and France. Now governments under pressure find it necessary to restrict rights in the name of freedom. (£8.99)

The Atheist's Bible: An Illustrious Collection of Irreverent Thoughts - Joan Konner

Brings together the best of the great scientists, writers, philosophers, and comedians throughout history who have questioned the wisdom (and sanity) of organised religion. (£9.99)

Introducing Logic - Dan Cryan; Sharron Shatil; Bill Mayblin (£6.99)

Introducing Nietzsche - Laurence Gane (£6.99)

Introducing Ethics - Dave Robinson; Chris Garratt (£6.99)

POETRY & DRAMA

The Cambridge Introduction to Sylvia Plath - Jo Gill (£10.99)

The Brontes, Selected Poems - York Notes (£6.99)

Penguin's Poems for Life - ed. Laura Barber

Taking its inspiration from Shakespeare's idea of the "seven ages" of a human life, this new anthology brings together the best-loved poems in English to inspire, comfort and delight readers for a lifetime. (£9.99)

Under Milk Wood and Other Plays - Dylan Thomas (Naxos CD)

Read by Richard Burton, Hugh Griffith and Richard Bebb (£10.99)

Gerard Manley Hopkins (Naxos CD)

Read by: Jeremy Northam (£8.99)

POLITICS

Citizens to Lords: A Social History of Western Political Thought from Antiquity to the Late Middle Ages - Ellen Meiksins Wood

An innovative approach to the history of political theory, tracing the development of the Western tradition from classical antiquity through the late Middle Ages and examining the ideas of canonical thinkers as creative responses to the social relations and conflicts of their time and place. (£19.99)

More Time for Politics: Diaries 2001-2007 - Tony Benn (£8.99)

SCIENCE AND MATHEMATICS

Smoot's Ear: The Measure of Humanity - Robert Tavernor

Measures are the subject of this unusual book, in which Robert Tavernor offers a fascinating account of the various measuring systems human beings have devised over two millennia. (£10.99)

SPORT

A Cultured Left Foot: The Eleven Elements of Footballing Greatness - Musa Okwonga

Laid out here are the eleven key elements that make up footballing greatness, in a thinking-man's study of the beautiful game. Highlighting such elements as Vision, Toughness, Graft, Endurance and Madness, "A Cultured Left Foot" is an insightful and amusing study into the finer points of the world's favourite game. (£8.99)

The Original Rules of Rugby - The Bodleian Library

Reproduces both the first rules of the game, drawn up at Rugby School in 1845 and the first rules of the Rugby Football Union, published in 1871. It also includes images from the unique manuscript held at the Rugby Football Union as well as nineteenth-century illustrations of the game. (£5.99)

TRAVEL

India's Unending Journey: Finding Balance in a Time of Change - Mark Tully

Sir Mark Tully embarks on a journey that takes in the many faces of India, and explores how successfully India reconciles opposites, marries the sensual with the sacred, finds harmony in discord, and treats certainty with suspicion. (£8.99)

Biografi - Lloyd Jones

Biografi became become the centre of a heated controversy. Was it fact or fiction? Had Lloyd Jones concocted his story of life in the new Albania? Or was it travel literature as its publishers insisted? Equal parts travelogue, political reportage and bizarre mystery novel, Lloyd Jones crosses Albania as it reinvents itself - a volatile, surreal wonderland where nothing is quite as it seems. (£7.99)

Lonely Planet Travel Book: Mini

A diminutive, square re-packaging of the original The Travel Book, with every country on the planet captured in photographs and evocative text both updated for this re-incarnation. (£9.99)

New Lonely Planet guides to New Zealand, "Brussels Bruges Antwerp & Ghent" and

New York City and a new Rough Guide to New Zealand

CHILDREN’S BOOKS

For babies and toddlers

There’s a Yeti in My Shed – Daniel Postgate
There’s a yeti in our potting shed./I can’t believe my eyes./I never thought you’d get a yeti/In a shed that size!" Meet a new and entertaining character, a gigantic but friendly YETI! Full of energetic pictures. (£5.99)

For younger children

How the Whale Became by Ted Hughes, illustrated by Jackie Morris
Long ago when the world was brand new, before animals or birds, the sun rose into the sky and brought the first day. Ted Hughes' classic version of the creation myths is beautifully illustrated by Jackie Morris. (£9.99)

Mr Gum and the Dancing Bear by Andy Stanton
Do you like bears called Padlock? Course you do. Do you like hot-air balloons? Course you do. Do you like tall sailing ships with mad sea captains, and horrifying old villains and words like 'wab!', 'tungler' and 'kelp'? COURSE you do! Well, this book's got all of those things - and a lot more besides! For 7+ (£4.99)

For older children

Tamburlaine’s Elephants by Geraldine McCaughrean
Rusti is a Tartar, travelling and pillaging with the legendary Horde of Tamburlaine, Conqueror of the World. He dreams of honour and riches, and is proud to capture his first prisoners - an elephant and her keeper. Amidst the death and destruction, an unlikely friendship takes hold. For 11+. (£5.99)

Oathbreaker by Michelle Paver
To fulfil his oath of revenge, Torak must brave the hidden valleys of the Deep Forest, where the clans have reverted to the savagery of an earlier time. Here, he finally learns why he is the Sprit Walker and discovers the true cost of revenge. (£9.99)

Cherub:The General - Robert Muchamore
Tenth instalment in the hugely successful series and James and Lauren are off to America to help train the army, getting into trouble in Las Vegas. (£6.99)

AUDIO

Alan Bennett Children's Collection (BBC CDs)

Boxed set collection of stories read by Alan Bennett: Winnie the Pooh, House at Pooh Corner, Wind in the Willows, Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass. (£35)

AUGUST 2008

FICTION

HARDBACK

Man in the Dark - Paul Auster

Seventy-two-year-old August Brill is recovering from a car accident. Plagued by insomnia, he tries to push back thoughts of things he would prefer to forget by telling himself stories about a parallel world in which America is not at war with Iraq but with itself. (£12.99 at The Book Case)

PAPERBACK

Harm - Brian Aldiss

In the very near future Paul Ali, a young science fiction writer, has been arrested for no compelling reason. He is held as prisoner B, without a lawyer and isolated, beaten up and questioned. To escape from this humiliation he writes - in the privacy of his mind - a science fiction novel set on a planet in every sense a thousand light years away. But gradually the two worlds start to converge ... (£7.99)

Life Class - Pat Barker

In the spring of 1914 a group of students at the Slade School of Art have gathered for a life-drawing class. Paul Tarrant withdraws from an intriguing fellow student, Elinor Brooke, in the face of competition from a well-known painter, but finally, in the first few days of war, they turn to each other. (£7.99)

Pontoon - Garrison Keillor

Welcome to Lake Wobegon and another classic humorous tale of small-time life and colourful characters. (£7.99)

The Careful Use of Compliments - Alexander McCall Smith

More from the Sunday Philosophy Club, as Isabel Dalhousie tries to get through life with a clear conscience despite baby Charlie, his father Jamie, her furious niece Cat, her son and her formidable housekeeper Grace. (£6.99)

What I Was - Meg Rosoff

Coming of age story set in the early ‘60s on the East Anglian coast where a fragile wooden hut owned by an enigmatic and beautiful Finn. is battered daily by the sea. (£6.99)

The Point of Rescue - Sophie Hannah

Sally is watching the news with her husband when she hears a name she ought not to recognise: Mark Bretherick. But the man on the news is someone she has never seen before. (£6.99)

Tree of Smoke - Denis Johnson

Set in south-east Asia and the US, and spanning two decades, it ostensibly tells the story of Skip Sands, a CIA spy who may or may not be engaged in psychological operations against the Viet Cong - but also takes the reader on a surreal and vivid journey. (£8.99)

Exit Music - Ian Rankin

It's late autumn in Edinburgh and late autumn in the career of Detective Inspector John Rebus. As he tries to tie up some loose ends before retirement, a murder case intrudes. A dissident Russian poet has been found dead in what looks like a mugging gone wrong. (£7.99 but due to be part of our 3/2 offer)

The Draining Lake - Arnaldur Indridason

In the wake of an earthquake, the water level of an Icelandic lake drops suddenly, revealing the skeleton of a man half-buried in its sandy bed. There is a large hole in the skull and a heavy communication device is attached to it, bearing inscriptions in Russian. (£6.99)

REISSUES

Medieval Comic Tales - ed. Derek Brewer

From humour to farce, from sophisticated literary parody to blunt crudeness. Piety jostles blasphemy, and sex and death are everywhere good for a joke. From the French, Spanish, Dutch, German, medieval Latin, Italian and English. (£9.99)

Sylvia’s Lovers - Elizabeth Gaskell (£7.99)

The Mayor of Casterbridge - Thomas Hardy

'The woman is no good to me. Who'll have her?' (£5.99)

In a Glass Darkly - J Sheridan Le Fanu

‘The ideal reading...for the hours after midnight'. Le Fanu’s writings draw on the Gothic tradition, elements of Irish folklore, and even on the social and political anxieties of his Anglo-Irish contemporaries. (£7.99)

Law and the Lady, Wilkie Collins (£8.99)

Under Western Eyes - Joseph Conrad (£7.99)

The Awakening: And Other Stories - Kate Chopin

'She wanted to swim far out, where no woman had swum before.' Kate Chopin was one of the most individual and adventurous of nineteenth-century American writers, whose fiction explored new and often startling territory. (£7.99)

The Tortoise and the Hare - Elizabeth Jenkins

Imogen, the beautiful and much younger wife of a distinguished barrister Evelyn Gresham, is facing the greatest challenge of her married life. Their neighbour Blanche Silcox, competent, middle-aged and ungainly, the very opposite of Imogen, seems to be vying for Evelyn's attention - and she may be succeeding. (£7.99)

The Day of the Triffids - John Wyndham

When a freak cosmic event renders most of the Earth's population blind, Bill Masen is one of the lucky few to retain his sight. (£7.99)

Trouble with Lichen - John Wyndham

The classic story of the power wielded by science in our lives, asking how much trust we should place in those we appoint to be its guardian. (£7.99)

God on the Rocks - Jane Gardam

During one glorious summer between the wars, the realities of life and the sexual ritual dance of the adult world creep into the life of young Margaret Marsh. (£7.99)

The Rough Guide to Graphic Novels - Danny Fingeroth

Includes the medium's history, from sequential art in Egyptian tombs, through the superhero boom of the 1940s to the birth of the graphic novel movement and the latest online offerings. (£11.99)

NON-FICTION

ART

How to Read Chinese Paintings - Maxwell K. Hearn

Spanning a thousand years of Chinese art, these landscapes, flowers, birds, figures, religious subjects, and calligraphies illuminate the main goal of every Chinese artist: to capture not only the outer appearance of a subject but also its inner essence. Beautiful book. (£18.00)

Tiger Seen on Shaftesbury Avenue: The National Gallery's Grand Tour

Over the course of twelve weeks in summer the London streets of Soho, Piccadilly and Covent Garden were lined with some of the world's most famous paintings, turning the West End into a giant gallery. This book shows the pictures on the streets and some reactions. How about something similar in Hebden Bridge? (£10.95)

BIOGRAPHY

Katherine Swynford: The Story of John of Gaunt and His Scandalous Duchess - Alison Weir

Katherine Synford was first the mistress, and later the wife, of John of Gaunt, the Duke of Lancaster. Her charismatic lover was one of the most powerful princes of the fourteenth century and Katherine was renowned for her beauty and regarded as enigmatic, intriguing and even dangerous. (£8.99)

Selective Memory - Katharine Whitehorn

Katharine Whitehorn pioneered the first of the personal columns. She told us how it really was. She was funny - and smart. The Observer's star columnist for 40 years, she is also famous for Cooking in a Bedsitter. (£8.99)

Penguin Great Ideas Series, £4.99 each, including:

A Confession - Leo Tolstoy

Days of Reading - Marcel Proust

ENVIRONMENT

Seven Wonders for a Cool Planet: Everyday Things to Help Solve Global Warming - Eric Sorensen

What do a clothesline, a locally grown tomato, and a microchip have in common? They're all ordinary things, or ""wonders"", that can have extraordinary impact in the fight against global warming. (£5.99)

FOOD

Preserves: River Cottage Handbook No. 2 - Pam Corbin

Preserving is a centuries-old way to make the most out of every season, stretching the more bountiful months into the sparser ones - and what's more, it is fun, rewarding and easy to learn. (£12.99)

The Really Useful Ultimate Vegetarian Student Cookbook - Helen Aitken

Packed with recipes that are cheap, good for you and very easy to cook with limited equipment. Everything you need to know about buying and storing food, which equipment is really necessary, what to eat to keep you healthy, and useful tips about food hygiene. (£4.99)

GARDENING

The Organic Fruit and Vegetable Gardener's Year: A Seasonal Guide to Growing What You Eat - Graham Clarke

An indispensable guide for the aspiring organic gardener from the Guild of Master Craftsmen. (£14.99)

HISTORY

Roman Roads - Hugh Davies

The vast networks of roads throughout the Roman Empire were vital to the expansion of Roman culture, power and influence across the world and one of their principal uses was the transportation of the Legions to strategic bases in the most direct way possible. This book details the planning, construction and maintenance of these road networks, and discusses the different types of Roman road found in areas of Britain, and their many uses. (£6.99)

Tickets Please!: A Nostalgic Journey Through Railway Station Life - Paul Atterbury

A winning mix of railway and social history, all brought to life by wonderful photographs and illustrations, many never seen before. (£14.99)

LANGUAGE

Collins Scrabble Dictionary (£5.99)

Teach Yourself Beginner's Polish - Nigel Gotteri; Joanna Michalak-Gray (£9.99)

There are also CDs available.

Linguistics for Beginners - Terrence W. Gordon (£8.99)

LIFESTYLE

The Siblings' Busy Book - Lisa Hanson; Heather Kempskie

200 activities that kids of different ages can enjoy together. (£6.95)

Napkin Origami: 25 Creative and Fun Ideas for Napkin Folding - ed. Brian Sawyer

Why fold a napkin into an ordinary square when it can become a swan, bread holder, or pirate's ship?

NATURE

This Birding Life: The Best of the "Guardian's" Birdwatch - Stephen Moss

A birdwatching autobiography, from early cootwatching as a young boy, through teenage cycle trips toDungeness, to adult travels around the world as a TV producer. (£7.99)

A Sky Full of Starlings: A Diary of a Birding Year - Stephen Moss

Stephen Moss began on 1 January 2007, to chronicle each species of bird as he was seeing it for the first time last year, and continued to do so until 31 December. The result is both a unique chronicle of Britain's natural history and a touching and funny piece of autobiography - a year of life measured out in birds. (£12.99)

Crow Country - Mark Cocker

Rooks and jackdaws are both members of the same bird family, corvids or "crows". Prompted by the twice-daily flight-lines of rooks and jackdaws over over his house, Mark Cocker followed them and began a nationwide search, piecing together their inner lives, the British relationship with the rook and the richness hidden in that sombre voice. "Crow Country" is a prose poem in a long tradition of English pastoral writing. and a powerful restatement of the central importance of nature in human affairs. (£8.99)

Corvus: A Life with Birds - Esther Woolfson

Living with a talking magpie named Spike, Chicken the rook, and, recently, a baby crow named Ziki, Esther Woolfson has been amazed by the corvids’ intelligence, personality and capacity for affection, and has learnt aspects of bird behaviour which would otherwise have been impossible to know - the way they happily become part of the structure of a family, how they communicate, their astonishing empathy. (£16.99)

In Her Element: Women and the Landscape - An Anthology, ed. Jane MacNamee
20 women writers from all over Wales recount their deep personal connections to the landscapes which have shaped their lives, presenting nature as a healer and teacher.

The Edible Mushroom Book - Anna Del Conte; Thomas Laessoe

A gourmet's guide to foraging and cooking mushrooms. From common puffballs to golden wax caps, morels to chanterelles, find out how to forage, prepare and cook delicious mushrooms that are wild, fresh and free. (£12.99)

The Emerald Planet: How Plants Changed Earth's History - David Beerling

Puts plants centre stage, revealing the crucial role they have played in driving global changes in the environment, in recording hidden facets of Earth's history, and in helping us to predict its future. Reveals how plummeting carbon dioxide levels removed a barrier to the evolution of the leaf; how plants played a starring role in pushing oxygen levels upwards, and it strengthens fascinating and contentious fossil evidence for an ancient hole in the ozone layer. (£8.99)

Silent Fields: The Long Decline of a Nation's Wildlife - Roger Lovegrove

Since time immemorial mankind has taken it upon himself to wage war against nature -- against those species of birds and mammals which he believes conflict with his livelihood. This remarkable book is about that war of attrition against the native mammals and birds of England and Wales from the middle ages to the present day. (£12.99)

PHILOSOPHY

Kierkegaard for Beginners - Donald D Palmer (£8.99)

Foucault for Beginners - Lydia Alix Fillingham (£8.99)

Penguin Great Ideas Series, £4.99 each, including: Man Alone with Himself - Friedrich Nietzsche

PLAYS & FILM

Made in Yorkshire - Tony Earnshaw
A glorious celebration of all the feature films shot in the county from the inception of film to the present day, including in-depth accounts of more than 30 movies. With a foreword by the Oscar-winning screenwriter Ronald Harwood, whose film The Dresser, shot in Bradford, York and and Halifax, features prominently. (£25.00)

Antigone, Oedipus the King and Electra - Sophocles

Love and loyalty, hatred and revenge, fear, deprivation, and political ambition: these are the motives which thrust the characters portrayed in these three Sophoclean masterpieces on to their collision course with catastrophe. (£5.99)

Shakespeare for Beginners - Brandon Toropov (£8.99)

Reel to Real: Race, Sex and Class at the Movies - Bell Hooks

Movies matter - that is the message of this classic collection of essays on film. They matter on a personal level, providing us with unforgettable moments, even life-changing experiences and they can confront us, too, with the most profound social issues of race, sex and class. (£11.99)

POLITICS & CURRENT AFFAIRS

I Wouldn't Start from Here: Travels in Twenty-first Century Terror, Torture and Torpor - Andrew Mueller

A journey through 21st-century warzones and hotspots in the company of Mueller who asks awkward questions of perpetrators, vicitms and optimists alike (£8.99)

Citizenship: A Very Short Introduction - Richard Bellamy

Interest in citizenship has never been higher. But what does it mean to be a citizen of a modern, complex community? Why is citizenship important? Can we create citizenship, and can we test for it? (£7.99)

NHS Plc: The Privatisation of Our Health Care - Allyson M Pollock (reissue)(£9.99)

Penguin Great Ideas Series, £4.99 each, including:

Useful Work v. Useless Toil - William Morris

An Appeal to the Toiling, Oppressed and Exhausted Peoples of Europe - Leon Trotsky

Concerning Violence - Frantz Fanon

REFERENCE

Pears Cyclopaedia 2008-2009, ed. Chris Cook (£20)

Official DSA Theory Test For Car Drivers & Highway Code - new edition

TRAVEL

Great British Journeys - Nicholas Crane

Eight traveller-chroniclers - Gerald of Wales, HV Morton, Celia Fiennes, John Leland, Daniel Defoe, William Cobbett, Thomas Pennant, and William Gilpin, who travelled through the north of England by boat in 1770. (£8.99)

A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush - Eric Newby

When Eric Newby, improbably earning his living in the London haute-couture trade, sent his fateful cable - 'Can You Travel Nuristan June?' - it was the first step on a legendary journey from Mayfair to Afghanistan and the mountains of the Hindu Kush, north-east of Kabul. 50th anniversary ed. (£8.99)

Flightless: Incredible Journeys without Leaving the Ground

Inspires readers to visit new destinations, and to find new way to get there other than by flying. The stories remind us that reducing one's carbon emissions also brings with it the joy of travel. (£7.99)

The Kindness of Strangers - ed. Don George

A collection of original stories by acclaimed writers, including Jan Morris, Tim Cahill, Simon Winchester, Dave Eggers, and Anthony Sattin, exploring the theme of finding good fortune on the road. With a preface by His Holiness the Dalai Lama. (£7.99)

I Was a Potato Oligarch: Travels and Travails in the New Russia - John Mole (£9.99)

Meeting the Medicine Men: An Englishman's Travels Among the Navajo - Charles Langley (£9.99)

Lake District - Lesley Anne Rose
From Crimson Publishing, an attractive and colourful guide to help visitors get the most out of their time in the Lake District, be it a two-week holiday, short break or long weekend.

From Blue Guides, the little “art/shop/eat” guides to Paris and Barcelona at £4.99 each

From Explorer, a selection of city mini maps (£2.99 each) and mini guides (£5.99 each)

A new Sunflower Guide to Eastern Crete

DIARIES AND CALENDARS

2009 is on its way! We already have in stock the Hebden Bridge calendar, a range of Moleskine diaries and New Internationalist Planner 2009 (£8.95) Our excellent range of colourful calendars and other posh diaries will start arriving this month.

CHILDREN'S BOOKS

Ages 0-5yrs

From publishers with the enchanting name of Picthall and Gunzi, a range of colourful board books.

Little Mouse’s Big Book of Fears - Emily Gravett

The paperback edition of the novelty picture book, with elements including flaps, die-cuts and a fold-out map. Young children will identify with the little mouse who uses the pages of this book to document his fears - from loud noises and the dark to being sucked down the plughole. Ages: 0-3 yrs. (£6.99)

Ages 5-9yrs

My Dad's a Birdman- David Almond

Lizzie and Dad live in a rainy town in the north of England. It's just the two of them, and Auntie Doreen, who pops round to check Lizzie's spellings and tell Dad he's daft - and make them nice hot dumplings. But today there's something unusual going on: why is Dad building himself a pair of wings and studying the birds to see how they fly? . Ages: 8+ yrs (£6.99)

Ages 9-11yrs

Firestorm: Dragon Orb - Mark Robson

Dragons in Areth each have a single predestined rider and a single life mission, given to them by the Oracle. But this once-powerful being is now fatally damaged. Only the dragons and their riders can save it! Ages: 10+ yrs (£6.99)

Teenage Artemis Fowl and the Time Paradox - Eoin Colfer

The eagerly anticipated 6th book in the multi-award winning series and teenage criminal mastermind, Artemis Fowl has a new mission - and this time, it's personal. His mother is dangerously ill, and the only way to find a cure is for Artemis - with Holly Short by his side - to go back in time to battle his younger and more evil self. Ages 10+ (£12.99)

JULY 2008

FICTION

PAPERBACK

The Road Home - Rose Tremain

Lev is on his way to Britain to seek work, so that he can send money back to Eastern Europe to support his mother and little daughter. We see the road through Lev's eyes, and we share his dilemmas. (£7.99)

The Uncommon Reader - Alan Bennett

HM the Queen drifts accidentally into reading when her corgis stray into a mobile library parked at Buckingham Palace. She reads widely and intelligently. Her reading naturally changes her world view and her relationship with people like the oleaginous prime minister and his repellent advisers. (£6.99)

Starbook - Ben Okri

The tale of a prince and a maiden in a mythical land where a golden age is ending. Their fragile story considers the important questions we all face, exploring creativity, wisdom, suffering and transcendence in a time when imagination still ruled the world. (£7.99)

The People on Privilege Hill - Jane Gardam

On a wet day in Dorset, Sir Edward Feathers QC, his scruffy neighbour and sparring partner, Veneering, and Fiscal-Smith, the meanest lawyer ever to make a fortune at the Bar, walk to a luncheon party at Privilege Hill, an old house with a chequered history. (£7.99)

The Ghost - Robert Harris

Britain's former prime minister is holed up in a remote, ocean-front house in America, struggling to finish his memoirs, assisted by a professional ghostwriter - a man more used to working with fading rock stars and minor celebrities than ex-world leaders. (£7.99)

Crime - Irvine Welsh

Detective Inspector Ray Lennox, recovering from a mental breakdown, meets two women in a seedy bar in strip-mall Florida, and finds himself resonsible for a terrified ten-year-old girl. (£12.99)

The Anti-Social Behaviour of Horace Rumpole - John Mortimer

ASBOs may be the pride and joy of New Labour, but they don't cut much ice with Horace Rumpole - he takes the old-fashioned view that if anyone is going to be threatened with a restriction of their liberty then some form of legal proceeding ought to be gone through first. (£7.99)

The Stone Gods - Jeanette Winterson

On the airwaves, all the talk is of the new blue planet - pristine and habitable, like our own 65 million years ago, before we took it to the edge of destruction. And off the air, Billie and Spike are falling in love. (£7.99)

First Among Sequels - Jasper Fforde

Thursday Next is back. And this time it's personal ... In this world of dangerously short attention spans, there's no rest for the literate. Can Thursday stop Pride and Prejudice being turned into a vote-em-off reality book? Who killed Sherlock Holmes? And will Thursday get her teenage son out of bed in time for him to save the world? (£6.99)

Not in the Flesh - Ruth Rendell

Searching for truffles in a wood, a man and his dog unearth something less savory. The body, as Chief Inspector Wexford is informed later, has lain buried for ten years or so, and the post-mortem can not reveal the precise cause of death. (£6.99)

End Games - Michael Dibdin

Aurelio Zen is posted to Calabria, where in the heart of a tight-knit traditional community there has been a brutal murder. The final Aurelio Zen novel from the late master of Italian crime fiction.(£6.99)

Stone Cold - David Baldacci

Oliver Stone and the Camel Club are back for their most dangerous adventure yet. Casino king and vicious thug Jerry Bagger is hunting Annabelle Conroy, who conned him out of millions. (£6.99)

The Return - Hakan Nesser

An unmissable hospital appointment is looming for Inspector Van Veeteren when a corpse is found rolled in a rotting carpet by a young child playing in a local beauty spot. From the popular Swedish crime author of "Borkmann’s Point". (£7.99)

REISSUES

The Man in the High Castle - Philip K. Dick

It is 1962 and the Second World War has been over for seventeen years: people have now had a chance to adjust to the new order. The Mediterranean has been drained to make farmland, the population of Africa has virtually been wiped out and America has been divided between the Nazis and the Japanese. (£6.99)

New Oxford World’s Classics editions:

The Professor - Charlotte Bronte

The Professor challenged contemporary expectations of the novel by its brevity, realism, and insistence on a working career both before and after marriage for its hero and heroine. The action begins against a background of the fight for better factory conditions in the 1830s. (£6.99)

Agnes Grey - Anne Bronte

Anne Bronte's first-person narrative describes the pressures endured by nineteenth-century governesses - the isolation, the frustration, and the insensitive and sometimes cruel treatment meted out by employers and their families. (£5.99)

Germinal - Emile Zola

Zola's 1885 masterpiece of working life, exposing the inhuman conditions of miners in northern France in the 1860s. New edition from Oxford World’s Classics. (£8.99)

The Ladies' Paradise - Emile Zola

Octave Mouret, the owner-manager of a great Parisian late 19th-century department store, masterfully exploits the desires of his female customers. In his private life as much as in business he is the great seducer. But one of his salesgirls refuses to be commodified. (£6.99)

The Masterpiece - Emile Zola

The most autobiographical of the twenty novels in Zola's Rougon-Macquart series. Set in the 1860s and 1870s, it provides a unique insight into his career as a writer and his relationship with Cezanne, a friend since their schooldays in Aix-en-Provence. It also presents a well-documented account of the turbulent Bohemian world in which the Impressionists came to prominence despite the conservatism of the Academy and the ridicule of the general public. (£7.99)

No Name - Wilkie Collins

Two young women find they are legally illegitimate and struggle to cope with their changed status, by very different methods. (£6.99)

Basil - Wilkie Collins

In Basil's secret and unconsummated marriage to the linen-draper's sexually precocious daughter, and the shocking betrayal, insanity, and death that follow, Collins reveals the bustling, commercial London of the nineteenth century wreaking its vengeance on a still powerful aristocratic world. (£7.99)

About Love and Other Stories - Anton Chekhov (£7.99)

The Riddle of the Sands: A Record of Secret Service - Erskine Childers

Sardonic civil servant Carruthers reluctantly accepts an invitation to join a college friend on a sailing holiday in the Baltic - where they discover a German plot to invade England. (£7.99)

NON-FICTION

BIOGRAPHY

The Lodger: Shakespeare on Silver Street - Charles Nicholl

In 1612 Shakespeare gave evidence at the Court of Requests in Westminster - the only occasion his spoken words were ever recorded. A remarkable work of detection to reveal a portrait of Shakespeare as a lodger in a house in Silver Street in bustling Elizabethan London. (£8.99)

The Grasmere and Alfoxden Journals - Dorothy Wordsworth

A unique record of her life with her brother William, at the time when he was at the height of his poetic powers, with valuable insights into the daily life of the poet and his friendship with Coleridge, and remarkable for their spontaneity and immediacy, and for the vivid descriptions of people, places, and incidents. New OWC edition. (£8.99)

80 Years in the Dales - Hannah Hauxwell

This first major book on Hannah for eight years traces the extraordinary life of a delightful personality who has never lost her links with the Dales countryside. It includes many hitherto unpublished photographs. (£15.99)

A Voyage Round John Mortimer - Valerie Grove

Novelist, playwright and barrister John Mortimer has led an extraordinarily rich life, privately and professionally, much of it in the public eye. This is a riveting account of the life of one of the great figures of our time. (£9.99)

My Booky Wook - Russell Brand

'My life is a series of embarrassing incidents strung together by telling people about those embarrassing incidents.' (£7.99)

HISTORY

Rock Art and Ritual: Interpretive Studies within Prehistoric Landscapes of the North York Moors - Brian A. Smith; Alan A. Walker

The first major interpretive work about prehistoric rock motifs in this area based on the authors' extensive fieldwork. It includes new interpretations of the Brow Moor monument and cup-marked stones, while studying the monuments in relation to the surrounding landscape and re-evaluating astronomical and calendrical associations. (£14.99)

Discovery of France - Graham Robb

A stunning journey through the historical landscape of France. (£9.99)

HOBBIES AND PUZZLES

"Guardian" Crosswords: Quick One - Hugh Stephenson (£6.99)

LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE

The Writer's Handbook 2009 - ed. Barry Turner (£14.99)

MUSIC

Humphrey Lyttelton's Best of Jazz

Looks in detail at a wide range of great jazz figures and their classic recordings, with plenty of lively historical background, from the late great Humph. (£9.99)

NATURE

The Wild Places - Robert Macfarlane

An intellectual and physical journey in time as well as space. Mixes history, memory and landscape in a strange and beautiful evocation of wildness and its vital importance. (£8.99)

A Gleaming Landscape: A Hundred Years of the "Guardian's" Country Diary, ed. Martin Wainwright

Martin Wainwright's sparkling compilation of a hundred years of the "Guardian's" much-loved Country Diary includes neighbours woken at midnight to be shown a glow-worm; a beached shark to be saved from the council binmen; a peregrine flushed during the Normandy landings; the prevalence of owls in First World War trenches full of vermin, and an earnest preoccupation with stoats. (£7.99)

How to be Wild - Simon Barnes

From the author of "How To Be A Bad Birdwatcher", this takes the reader on a journey through a year, with sparrows and flying squirrels, elephants, badgers and mosquitoes as companions. (£8.99)

Philip's Mini Guide to Mushrooms - Geoffrey Kibby (£4.99)

Philip's Mini Guide to Trees - Chris Humphries; Bob Press; David Sutton (£4.99)

Philip's Mini Guide to Weather - Storm Dunlop (£4.99)

POETRY AND DRAMA

New editions from Oxford World's Classics:

The Odyssey - Homer, trans. Walter Shewring (£5.99)

The Iliad - Homer, trans. Robert Fitzgerald (£6.99)

Aeneid - Virgil, trans. Frederick Ahl

The story of Aeneas' seven-year journey from the ruins of Troy to Italy, where he becomes the founding ancestor of Rome, is a narrative on an epic scale. Frederick Ahl's new translation echoes the Virgilian hexameter. (£8.99)

Tales of the Elders of Ireland - ed. Ann Dooley; Harry Roe

The first complete translation of the late Middle Irish Acallam na Senorach. It contains the earliest and most comprehensive collection of Fenian stories and poetry, intermingling the contemporary Christian world of Saint Patrick, the earlier pagan world of the ancient, giant Fenians and Irish kings, and the parallel, timeless Otherworld, peopled by ever-young, shape-shifting fairies. (£7.99)

Othello - William Shakespeare (Naxos CDs)

This highly acclaimed performance, which ran recently at the Donmar Warehouse in London, features Chiwetel Ejiofor as the Moor Othello, Ewan McGregor as the scheming Iago, and Kelly Reilly as the gentle Desdemona. (£13.99)

SCIENCE AND MATHS

Making Time: Why Time Seems to Pass at Different Speeds and How to Control it - Steve Taylor (£8.99)

One to Nine: The Inner Life of Numbers - Andrew Hodges (£7.99)

SMALLHOLDING

Choosing and Keeping Ducks and Geese - Liz Wright (£12.99)

THOUGHT

Chomsky: A Guide for the Perplexed - John Collins

Shows how Chomsky's linguistic theory, philosophy and politics are all connected, and by so doing helps the reader to understand this key thinker's massive contribution to twentieth-century thought. (£12.99)

TRAVEL

Narrowboat Dreams: A Journey North by England's Waterways - Steve Haywood

"A cantankerous old git" travels by traditional narrowboat along two newly opened Pennine canals from Banbury through the vibrant modernity of Manchester, to "the trendy affluence of Hebden Bridge, West Yorkshire's answer to London's ciabatta belt". Hurrah! (£7.99)

From the Mull to the Cape: A Gentle Bike Ride on the Edge of Wilderness - Richard Guise

Richard Guise went on a 600-mile, 16-day bike ride through the Highlands of Scotland, from the Mull of Kintyre in the south to Cape Wrath in the north, taking in long sections of the dramatically beautiful west coast along the way. Includes midges and severe bouts of traditional Highland weather. (£7.99)

The Oregon Trail - Francis Parkman

The gripping account of Francis Parkman's journey west across North America in 1846. (£8.99)

2009 Road Atlases of Britain from the AA, Collins and Philip’s.

Toxic Airlines - Tristan Loraine

Tells the story of contaminated air on aircraft - an issue that those who fly need to know. (£9.99)

CHILDREN'S BOOKS

Ages 0-5yrs

Hairy Maclary’s Hat Tricks - Lynley Dodd

It's a blusterous, gusterous, dusterous day and Hairy Maclary is ready to play. The rhyming text, appealing characters and illustrations make these firm picture book favourites with generations of children. Ages: 2+ yrs. (£5.99)

Ages 5-9yrs

Roman Things To Make and Do - Leonie Pratt

Suitable for gung ho gladiators, striving centurions and aspiring Caesar's, this title contains Roman themed activities, including a soldier's helmet and sword. It contains information boxes with facts about the Romans.Ages: 5+ yrs (£4.99)

Ages 9-11yrs

Percy Jackson & The Battle Of The Labyrinth - Rick Riordan

Percy Jackson, young demi-god, is back in a 4th adventure and with a striking new foil cover look. A dangerous enemy has found his way through an ancient labyrinth built by the legendary Daedalus, and is intent on destruction. Can Percy and his friends find Daedalus and unlock the mysteries of the maze? Ages: 10+. (£9.99)

Teenage

Superior Saturday - Garth Nix

Arthur Penhaligon has wrested five of the Keys from their immortal guardians, the Trustees of the Will. But gaining the Sixth Key poses a greater challenge than any he has ever faced before. Ages: 9-12 yrs (£5.99)

JUNE 2008

FICTION

HARDBACK

Vows of Silence - Susan Hill

A gunman is terrorising young women in the Cathedral town of Laffteron. What - if anything - links the apparently random murders? Is the marksman with the rifle the same as the killer with the handgun? "The Vows of Silence" is a sequel to the "Various Haunts of Men", "The Pure in Heart" and "The Risk of Darkness". (£10.99 at The Book Case)

Sea of Poppies - Amitav Ghosh

From the author of "Glass Palace", an epic saga, set just before the Opium Wars, centred on an old slaving-ship, The Ibis. Its destiny is a tumultuous voyage across the Indian Ocean, its crew a motley array of sailors and stowaways, coolies and convicts. (£16.99 at The Book Case)

PAPERBACK

Falling Man - Don DeLillo

There is September 11 and then there are the days after, and finally the years. "Falling Man" begins in the smoke and ash of the burning towers and traces the aftermath of this global tremor in the intimate lives of a few individuals. (£7.99)

Making Money - Terry Pratchett

The long-awaited, brand new adult Discworld novel no 31. Who would not to wish to be the man in charge of Ankh-Morpork's Royal Mint and the bank next door? But the Chief Cashier is almost certainly a vampire and there's something nameless in the cellar ... (£7.99)

Where Three Roads Meet - Salley Vickers

It is 1938 and Sigmund Freud, suffering from cancer, has been permitted by the Nazis to leave Vienna for England. But his last months are made vivid by the arrival of a stranger, who comes and goes according to Freud's state of health. (£7.99)

Michael Tolliver Lives - Armistead Maupin

Michael Tolliver, the sweet-spirited Southerner in "Tales of the City" series, now 55, tells his story in his own voice. (£7.99)

After Dark - Haruki Murakami

Murakami, acclaimed master of the surreal, returns with a stunning new novel, where the familiar can become unfamiliar after midnight, even to those that thrive in small hours. (£7.99)

If You Liked School, You'll Love Work - Irvine Welsh

His first short-story collection since "The Acid House", Irvine Welsh sets us five tricky questions. (£7.99)

The Forgotten Garden - Kate Morton

A lost child, a terrible secret and a mysterious inheritance. From the author of "The House at Riverton". (£7.99)

Girl Meets Boy - Ali Smith

Ali Smith's re-mix of Ovid's most joyful metamorphosis is a story about the kind of fluidity that can't be bottled and sold. It is about girls and boys, girls and girls, love and transformation, a story of puns and doubles, reversals and revelations. Funny and fresh, poetic and political, "Girl Meets Boy" is a myth of metamorphosis for the modern world. (£7.99)

The End of Mr. Y - Scarlett Thomas

When Ariel Manto uncovers a copy of "The End of Mr. Y" in a second-hand bookshop, she can't believe her eyes. She knows enough about its author, the outlandish Victorian scientist Thomas Lumas, to know that copies are exceedingly rare. And, some say, cursed.With Mr. Y under her arm, Ariel finds herself thrust into a thrilling adventure of love, sex, death and time-travel. (£7.99)

Mad Woman on the Bridge and Other Stories - Su Tong

From the author of "Raise the Red Lantern". Set during the fall-out of the Cultural Revolution, these bizarre and delicate stories capture magnificently the collision of the old China of vanished dynasties, with communism and today's tiger economy. (£7.99)

Love Falls - Esther Freud

When Lara's father, a man she barely knows, invites her to accompany him on holiday, she finds herself far away from the fumes of London's Holloway Road in the sun-scorched hillsides of Tuscany. (£7.99)

Attack of the Unsinkable Rubber Ducks - Christopher Brookmyre

New satirical crime novel from the author of "Quite Ugly One Morning" - Jack Parlabane finds himself coming back from the dead. (£7.99)

The Rain Before it Falls - Jonathan Coe

A story of three generations of women whose destinies reach from the English countryside in World War II to London, Toronto, and southern France at the turn of the new century. From the author of "The Rotters' Club". (£7.99)

What Will Survive - Joan Smith

Lebanon makes the British headlines when an Englishwoman dies in a landmine explosion near the town of Nabatiyeh. Reporters descend on her Somerset home. (£7.99)

Playing for Pizza - John Grisham

Rick Dockery provides the worst single performance in the history of American Football, is dropped from the team and finds himself playing for the mighty Panthers of Parma, Italy. (£6.99)

Self's Deception - Bernhard Schlink

Private investigator Gerhard Self receives a request to track down the daughter of Herr Salger, the Assistant Secretary of Bonn, who's been absent from her translation classes at the university. Repelled by the pomposity of the government official, he rejects the case. But an insistent letter--and five thousand marks--changes his mind. (£6.99)

The Twilight Watch - Sergei Lukyanenko

Third of the Night Watch series of vampire novels set in post-Soviet Moscow. Agent Anton Gorodetsky's holiday is abruptly shortened when an urgent call from his boss Gesar forces him to return to work. (£7.99)

The Ice People - Maggie Gee

The earth is slowly returning to aridity and cold. A universal freeze has also descended upon relationships between men and women, who live in morbid segregation, with feathered robots as sexual partners. (£7.99)

Spellbound: The Legend of the Ice People - Margit Sandemo

Silje Angrimsdotter's life is turned upside down when the streets of Trodheim on Norway's northern coast is stricken by the plague. It has gripped her village and wiped out her family and she is forced to flee. (£7.00)

REISSUES

The Arabian Nights: based on the text edited by Muhsin Mahdi, trans. Husain Haddawy

A new deluxe trade paperback edition, the well-received translation being based on a landmark reconstruction of the earliest extant manuscript version. (£9.99)

To Build a Fire and Other Favorite Stories - Jack London (£3.50)

The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Other Tales - Washington Irving (£3.50)

Ulysses - James Joyce

Set entirely on one day, 16 June 1904, "Ulysses" follows Leopold Bloom and Stephen Daedalus as they go about their daily business in Dublin. From this starting point, James Joyce constructs a novel of extraordinary imaginative richness and depth. This edition is the accepted reference text for James Joyce studies. (£8.99)

We - Yevgeny Zamyatin, trans. Hugh Aplin

Written in 1921, a story of a dystopian future that influenced "1984". Inside its glass dome the One State is a place of mathematical precision, a community where everything is everyone's and integrity, clarity and unerrring loyalty reign over all. (£8.99)

The Mammoth Book of Extreme Fantasy - Mike Ashley (£7.99)

The Mammoth Book of Best Crime Comics - Paul Gravett (£12.99)

The Road to Samarcand - Patrick O'Brian

From the stormy South China Seas to the steppes of Central Asia, this is the gripping story of a young man's adventurous spirit leading him on a journey full of fearsome tribes, great danger, friendship and treasure. (£7.99)

On the Road: The Original Scroll - Jack Kerouac (£10.99)

More new editions from Oxford World’s Classics:

Memoirs from the House of the Dead - Fyodor Dostoevsky

In this almost documentary account of his own experiences of penal servitude in Serbia, Dostoevsky describes the physical and mental suffering of the convicts, the squalor and the degradation, in relentless detail. (£8.99)

Notes from the Underground: WITH The Gambler - Fyodor Dostoevsky (£7.99)

The Idiot - Fyodor Dostoevsky (£7.99)

The Karamazov Brothers - Fyodor Dostoevsky

Both a brilliantly told crime story and a passionate philosophical debate. (£6.99)

The Man Who Would be King: and Other Stories - Rudyard Kipling (£5.99)

Kim - Rudyard Kipling (£6.99)

The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket and Related Tales - Edgar Allan Poe

An archetypal American story of escape from home and family which traces a young man's rite of passage through a series of terrible brushes with death during a fateful sea voyage. But it also goes much deeper, as Pym encounters various interpretative dilemmas, at last leaving the reader with a broken-off ending that defies solution. Plus eight short tales which are linked to Pym. (£7.99)

The Secret Agent: A Simple Tale - Joseph Conrad (£6.99)

Winesburg, Ohio - Sherwood Anderson

An influential cycle of short stories concerning life in a small Ohio town at the end of the nineteenth century. At the centre is George Willard, a young reporter who becomes the confidant of the town's 'grotesques' - solitary figures unable to communicate with others. . (£7.99)

A Room of One's Own, and Three Guineas - Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf considers with energy and wit the implications of the historical exclusion of women from education and from economic independence. New edition from Oxford World’s Classics. (£5.99)

Orlando: a Biography - Virginia Woolf

The story of the cross-dressing, sex-changing Orlando who begins life as a young noble in the sixteenth century and moves through numerous historical and geographical worlds to finish as a modern woman writer in the 1920s. The book is in part a happy tribute to Vita Sackville-West. (£6.99)

The Waves - Virginia Woolf

Traces the lives and interactions of seven friends in an exploratory and sensuous narrative. (£5.99)

To the Lighthouse - Virginia Woolf

This masterpiece concerns the Ramsay family and their summer guests on the Isle of Skye before and after the First World War. (£6.99)

NON-FICTION

ART, CRAFT AND PHOTOGRAPHY

Time - Andy Goldsworthy; Terry Friedman

A sequence of works made around his home in Scotland often shown in series recording their gradual disappearance or transformation is followed by Goldsworthy's diaries of visits to five locations in North America and Europe. (£24.95)

David Bellamy's Watercolour Landscape Course (£12.99)

Watercolour Landscapes - David Bellamy, OBE (£8.99)

Quick Sketching - Carl Cheek (£5.95)

Composition: The Anatomy of Picture Making - Harry Sternberg (£5.95)

Famous Aircraft in Origami: 18 Realistic Models - Jose Maria Chaquet Ulldemolins (£10.95)

The Joy of Kites - Hans Silvester

From China to Bolivia, from Italy to Sri Lanka, each of Hans Silvester’s photographs catches the beauty and grace of these objects, which belong both to the world of children and adults alike. (£16.95)

Very Vintage: The Guide to Vintage Patterns and Clothing - ed. Raven Smith (£24.95)

Paisley Designs Coloring Book - Marty Noble (£3.95)

BIOGRAPHY

The Platform of Time: Memoirs of Family and Friends - Virginia Woolf

Taking family, friends and servants as her subjects, Virginia Woolf here presents a series of impressions of the people around her. (£8.99)

Peeling the Onion - Gunter Grass

A searingly honest memoir that evokes Grass' modest upbringing in Danzig, his time as a boy soldier fighting the Russians and concludes with the writing of his masterpiece, "The Tin Drum", in Paris. (£8.99)

Che: A Graphic Biography - Spain Rodriguez

This dramatic and extensively researched book portraying Che’s struggle through the medium of the underground political comic - one of the most prominent countercultural art forms since the 1960s. (£9.99)

Spotted Pigs and Green Tomatoes: A Year in the Life of Our Farm - Rosie Boycott

A terrible car accident forced Rosie Boycott, previously editor of the "Daily Express", to rethink her life, and she and her husband work a small farm in Somerset. (£7.99)

CURRENT AFFAIRS & SOCIETY

Wikinomics - Don Tapscott; Anthony Williams

Shows how businesses can collaborate creatively with their customers to succeed in the age of Wikipedia, YouTube and Linux: "Economist" Book of the Year, "Financial Times" Book of the Year, shortlisted for the "Financial Times" Business Book of the Year. (£8.99)

Hold Everything Dear: Dispatches on Survival and Resistance - John Berger

A vital response to today's global economic and military tyranny. From Hurricane Katrina, 9/11 and 7/7, to resistance in Ramallah and traumatic dislocation in the Middle East, it is a profound meditation on what political resistance means today. (£7.99)

Complaint - Julian Baggini

Whereas we once complained about the things that really matter, now we are most likely to be stirred by late trains and bad television programmes. Examines what we complain about, why we do so, the different kinds of complaints we make, why men and women complain about different things, why we complain less than Americans, and whether we should complain differently! (£10.99)

Queuing for Beginners: The Story of Daily Life from Breakfast to Bedtime - Joe Moran

Exploring the history of everyday activities during a typical day, starting with eating breakfast and ending with sleeping, Joe Moran tells a story about hidden social and cultural changes in Britain since the Second World War. (£8.99)

DRAMA

Bacchae and Other Plays - Euripides

"Iphigenia among the Taurians"- a story of escape and contrasting Greek and barbarian civilization; "Bacchae"- a profound exploration of the human psyche, dealing with the appalling consequences of resistance to Dionysus, "Iphigenia at Aulis"- the ultimate dysfunctional family as natural emotion is tested in the tragic crucible of the Greek expedition against Troy, "Rhesus" - a thrilling, action-packed Iliad in miniature, dealing with a grisly event in the Trojan War. New OWC edition. (£7.99)

Stories from Shakespeare: No. 3 - ed. David Timson (Naxos CD)

Read by Juliet Stevenson & Simon Russell Beale: including Much Ado About Nothing, Antony and Cleopatra, The Winter's Tale, Measure for Measure and All's Well That Ends Well. (£13.99

Under Milk Wood (CD) - Dylan Thomas

Richard Burton and Sian Phillips as the first and second voices. Dylan Thomas' lyrical masterpiece traces the lives of a group of villagers in a tiny Welsh seaport. (£12.99)

FOOD

The Abel and Cole Cookbook: Easy, Seasonal, Organic - Keith Abel (£12.99)

How it All Vegan!: Irresistible Recipes for an Animal Free Diet - Tanya Barnard; Sarah Kramer (£9.99)

HISTORY

The Annals: The Reigns of Tiberius, Claudius, and Nero - Cornelius Tacitus

A gripping account of the Roman emperors who followed Augustus, and of the murders, sycophancy, plotting, and oppression that marked this period in Rome; plus the earliest and most detailed account of Boudicca's rebellion in Britain, the great fire of Rome in the reign of Nero, and the persecution of the Christians that followed. (£10.99)

England: 1000 Things You Need to Know - Nicholas Hobbes

Despite a thousand years of glorious history, the people of England know surprisingly little about the facts and fables, people and places and events and emblems that have shaped their country and its heritage.(£8.99)

Spitfire Pilot - David Crook; Richard Overy

Written in 1940, this is a personal account of the Battle of Britain - seen through the eyes of a pilot of the famous 609 Squadron, which shot down over 100 planes in that epic contest. (£8.99)

Service Slang - ed. J. L. Hunt (Flying Officer); A. G. Pringle (Lieutenant) Illustrated by: C. Morgan (Flying Officer)

A light-hearted survey of expressions prevalent in the Army, Navy and R.A.F. during the Second World War. Originally published in 1943. (£7.99)

HUMOUR

The Heart of the Dales - Gervase Phinn

Gervase Phinn is back with his tales of life as a schools inspector in Yorkshire. (£7.99)

Sod Abroad: Why You'd be Mad to Leave the Comfort of Your Own Home - Michael Moran

Ok, it’s not absolutely certain that you’ll catch a fatal bout of food-poisoning or be banged up in jail as a drugs mule. But you might. Why would a sane person risk it? Holidays aren’t economical, they aren’t ecological, and they’re not much bloody fun. (£7.99)

LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE

Writers' and Artists' Yearbook 2009 (£14.99)

The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature - Steven Pinker

Steven Pinker analyses what our use of words can tell us about ourselves, the use of space and motion as metaphors for more abstract ideas, and the deeper structures of human thought shaped by evolutionary history, as well as the emotional impact of language. (£9.99)

Collins Easy Learning Polish Dictionary (£8.99)

MBS

The Analects - Confucius

Compulsory reading in the late Imperial period for all who wished to enter the Civil Service or Government, Confucius’s sayings and those of his disciples form the foundation of a distinct social, ethical, and intellectual system. New OWC edition. (£7.99)

A Book of Uncommon Prayer - Theo Dorgan

A collection of spiritual and devotional texts, drawn from both inside and outside the limits of the world's religious traditions and intended for believers and non-believers alike. (£8.99)

The Art of Dying - Peter Fenwick; Elizabeth Fenwick

Neuropsychiatrist Dr Peter Fenwick believes that consciousness may be independent of the brain and so able to survive the death of the brain. He hopes to help change attitudes so that we in the West can face up to death and embrace it as a significant and sacred part of life. (£9.99)

Still - In the Storm: How to Manage Your Stress and Achieve Balance in Life - Ann Williamson

An accessible programme of exercises that offer long-term stress solutions. (£6.99)

Change Your Life: 10 Steps to Get What You Want - John Bird

An honest, upfront guide to getting what you want from The Big Issue founder John Bird (£10.99)

Complete Baby and Childcare: Everything You Need to Know for the First Five Years - Miriam Stoppard (£16.99)

Old Moore's Almanack 2009 (£2.99)

NATURE

Wildwood: A Journey Through Trees - Roger Deakin

A celebration of the transforming magic of trees, exploring the 'fifth element' of wood as it exists in nature, in our souls, in our culture and our lives. From the walnut tree at his Suffolk home, Roger Deakin embarks upon a quest that takes him through Britain, across Europe, to Central Asia and Australia, in search of what lies behind man's profound and enduring connection with wood and with trees. (£8.99)

PHILOSOPHY

The Birth of Tragedy - Friedrich Nietzsche

In its wide-ranging discussion of the nature of art, science and religion, Nietzsche's argument raises important questions about the problematic nature of cultural origins which are still of concern today. New OWC edition. (£7.99)

POETRY

Homer's the "Iliad" and the "Odyssey": A Biography (A Book That Shook the World) - Alberto Manguel

Shows how these two poems, written nearly three thousand years ago, have come to resonate throughout the world. (£8.99)

The Satires - Juvenal

New OWC edition. (£8.99)

Betjeman's Britain: Poems from the BBC Archive

A collection of poems read by the poet John Betjeman on radio and live from theatres and halls. (£12.99)

Two Cures for Love - Wendy Cope

A new selection of her poems, with notes. (£12.99)

SPORT

Blazing Saddles: The Cruel and Unusual History of the Tour De France - Matt Rendell (£9.99)

TRAVEL

The Yorkshire Dales - South and West: Howgills, Dentdale, Ribblesdale, Airedale, Wharfdale - Dennis R. Kelsall; Jan Kelsall (£12.00)

Essentials: Trail Riding and Techniques, £6.99

Pocket Mountains: The Yorkshire Dales - Dominic North (£6.99)

New Rough Guides to Britain, the Scottish Highlands and Islands and Sicily

Lanzarote: Hotspots (£4.99)

Gran Canaria: Hotspots (£4.99)

The High Places: Leaves from a Lakeland Notebook - Harry Griffin

Better known as Harry Griffin, and for fifty years the Guardian's country diarist, A.H. Griffin also wrote a weekly feature called 'Leaves from a Lakeland Notebook' for the Lancashire Evening Post for almost thirty years until his death in 2004. This is a selection of those articles with illustrations by Alfred Wainwright. (£12.99)

Mountain: Exploring Britain's High Places - Griff Rhys Jones

Climbing the big mountains like Snowdon, Ben Nevis and Scafell Pike and many others besides gave Griff an insight into the passion and devotion our high places inspire - and turned a mountain virgin into a mountaineer. Well almost... (£8.99)

Long Way Down - Ewan McGregor; Charley Boorman

A 15,000-mile journey with two new BMWs from John O'Groats to Cape Agulhas on the southernmost tip of South Africa. Riding through spectacular scenery, often in extreme temperatures, Ewan and Charley faced their hardest challenges yet. (£7.99)

The Cook, the Rat and the Heretic: In the Shadow of Rennes-le-Chateau - Hugo Soskin

Hugo Soskin, son of best-selling author on Rennes-le-Chateau Henry Lincoln, has no time for the French Pyrenean village and its mysteries. He is fed up with the whole subject of how a nineteenth-century priest came to be a millionaire overnight and why he built so many bizarre clues into his church and his home. But when he and his wife decide to drive an old camper van to Spain to start a new life, they can't resist a tiny peek en route at the village. (£7.99)

CHILDREN’S BOOKS

New editions of Ladybird’s edited classics at £1.99 each: Alice in Wonderland, Black Beauty, Gulliver’s Travels, Oliver Twist, Jungle Book, Three Musketeers, Treasure Island, Wind in Willows: Ladybird seem to be one of the better editions for sticking to the style of the original!

Finn Family Moomintroll - Tove Jansson (CD)

Read by Hugh Laurie. (£9.99)

Look Out, Secret Seven - Enid Blyton (CD)

Read by Sarah Greene (£9.99)

MAY 2008

FICTION

HARDBACK

Alfred and Emily - Doris Lessing

The first book after Doris Lessing’s Nobel Prize takes her back to her childhood in Southern Africa and the lives, both fictional and factual, that her parents lead. 'I think my father's rage at the trenches took me over, when I was very young, and has never left me. Do children feel their parents' emotions? Yes, we do, and it is a legacy I could have done without.’ (£14.99 at The Book Case)

The Siege - Ismail Kadare

The Ottoman Army - the most powerful the world had known by that time - lays siege to a Christian fortress in the mountains of Albania. Above the colourful host looms the great dark wall of the citadel that has to be overcome. (£14.99 at The Book Case)

PAPERBACK

The World According to Bertie - Alexander McCall Smith

Poor put-upon Bertie is still struggling to escape his overbearing mother's influence, his yoga lessons and his pink bedroom while wondering why new baby brother Ulysses looks uncomfortably like his psychotherapist. (£6.99)

When We Were Romans - Matthew Kneale

Nine-year-old Lawrence is the man in his family, watching protectively over his mother and his wilful little sister Jemima. When the three of them suddenly move to Rome it seems at first to be a great adventure: a long drive through the night to the city of popes and emperors. But his mother's behaviour becomes increasingly erratic, and the threat that had forced them to Italy seems to have followed them there. (£7.99)

Cheating at Canasta - William Trevor

From a chance encounter between two childhood friends to the memories of a newly widowed man to a family grappling with the sale of their ancestral land, Trevor examines with grace and skill the tenuous bonds of our relationships, the strengths that hold us together, and the truths that threaten to separate us. (£7.99)

The Dig - John Preston

In the long hot summer of 1939, Mrs Petty, the widowed farmer, has had her hunch proved correct that the strange mounds on her land hold buried treasure. (£7.99)

The Camel Bookmobile - Masha Hamilton

Once a fortnight, a nomadic settlement in the dusty Kenyan desert awaits the arrival of three camels laden down with panniers of books. This is a scheme set up to bring books to scattered tribes whose daily life is dominated by drought, famine and disease. But one day a book is stolen. (£6.99)

The Glassblower of Murano - Marina Fiorato

Nora Manin decides to leave her fractured life in London to start again in Ven