Forthcoming Archive

JUNE

FICTION

PAPERBACK

The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ - Philip Pullman

This is the story of two brothers - one impassioned and one reserved. One is destined to go down in history and the other to be forgotten. In Philip Pullman's hands, the story of Jesus is reborn as one of the most enchanting, thrilling and thought-provoking stories of recent years, asking the reader questions that will continue to resonate long after they've finished reading it. (£7.99)

The Importance of Being Seven - Alexander McCall Smith

The extended family of 44 Scotland Street is trembling on the brink of reckless self-indulgence. Matthew and Elspeth receive startling - and expensive - news on a visit to the Infirmary, Angus and Domenica are contemplating an Italian menage a trois, and even Big Lou is overheard discussing cosmetic surgery. (£7.99)

Minding Frankie - Maeve Binchy

Baby Frankie is born into an unusual family. Her mother is desperate to find someone to take care of her child and she doesn't have much time. Noel doesn't seem to be the most promising of fathers ... (£7.99)

Sunset Park - Paul Auster

In the sprawling flatlands of Florida, Miles is photographing the last traces of families who have abandoned their houses due to debt or foreclosure. He is haunted by guilt for having inadvertently caused the death of his step-brother seven years ago. (£7.99)

It Had to be You - David Nobbs

One man, five very different women. James Hollingshurst is a man shaped by those who surround him. And in James's case, it's some very different women. (£7.99)

And the Land Lay Still - James Robertson

The story of a nation - a portrait of modern Scotland as seen through the eyes of natives and immigrants, journalists and politicians, drop-outs and spooks, all trying to make their way through a country in the throes of great and rapid change. It is a moving, sweeping story of family, friendship, struggle and hope - epic in every sense. (£9.99)

The Death of King Arthur: The Immortal Legend - Peter Ackroyd (£9.99)

Harvesting the Heart - Jodi Picoult

Paige has only a few vivid memories of her mother, who abandoned her when she was five. Now, having left home and her father for dreams of art school and marriage to an ambitious young doctor, Paige finds herself with a child of her own. (£7.99)

Island Beneath the Sea - Isabel Allende

From the sugar plantations of Saint-Domingue to the lavish parlors of New Orleans at the turn of the 19th century, Isabel Allende's latest novel tells the story of a mulatta woman, a slave and concubine, determined to take control of her own destiny in a society where that would seem impossible. (£8.99)

Touchy Subjects - Emma Donoghue

How do you make conversation with a sperm donor? How do you say someone's novel is drivel? Would you give a screaming baby brandy? In what words would you tell your girlfriend to pluck a hair on her chin? Touchy Subjects is about things that make people wince: taboos, controversies, secrets and lies. (£8.99)

Chosen - Lesley Glaister

The last time Dodie sees her mother alive, Stella is unusually busy, tattily splendid in an old red velvet dress. Soon after this, Dodie's brother Seth goes missing: the only trace of him is through postcards signed 'Yours in the Lord' addresses from the Soul Life Centre, New York state. When Stella hangs herself, Dodie must leave her baby Jake at home and cross the Atlantic to bring Seth beck from the mysterious Soul Life Centre. (£7.99)

Bed - David Whitehouse

Mal isn't like the other kids. He makes an impression on everyone he meets. So remarkable is his childhood that his family wait for the incredible things he seems born to do. Then one day he goes to bed, never to get out again. Recounted by Mal's younger brother, Bed is a coming-of-age story like no other. (£10.99)

Aphrodite's Hat - Salley Vickers

The stories in this long-awaited collection all deal with psychological aspects of love and take us into the complex geography of the human heart. (£7.99)

Fall of Giants - Ken Follett

A huge novel that follows five families through the world-shaking dramas of the First World War, the Russian Revolution, and the struggle for votes for women. (£8.99)

1222 - Anne Holt

1222 metres above sea level, train 601 from Oslo to Bergen careens off iced rails in a snowstorm. Marooned in the high mountains with night falling and the temperature plummeting, its 269 passengers are forced to decamp to a centuries-old mountain hotel. As dawn breaks one of them will be found dead, murdered. Retired police inspector Hanne Wilhelmsen is asked to investigate. (£7.99)

I Curse the River of Time - Per Petterson, trans. Charlotte Barslund

It is 1989 and all over Europe Communism is crumbling. Arvid Jansen is in the throes of a divorce. At the same time, his mother is diagnosed with cancer. Over a few intense autumn days, we follow Arvid as he struggles to find a new footing in his life, while everything around him is changing at staggering speed. A haunting literary masterpiece by the bestselling and prize-winning author of Out Stealing Horses (£7.99)

The Wings of the Sphinx - Andrea Camilleri

Things are not going well for Inspector Salvo Montalbano. His long-distance relationship with Livia is on the rocks, he feels himself getting even older and he's growing tired of the violence in his job. Then the dead body of a young woman is found in an illegal dump, with half her face missing. (£7.99)

Harbour - John Ajvide Lindqvist, trans. Marlaine DeLargy

It was a beautiful winter's day. Anders, his wife and their feisty six-year-old, Maja, set out across the ice of the Swedish archipelago to visit the lighthouse on Gavasten. There was no one around, so they let her go on ahead. And she disappeared, seemingly into thin air, and was never found. Two years later, Anders is a broken alcoholic, his life ruined. (£7.99)

REISSUES

Decameron: Selected Tales - Boccaccio (£3.00)

There's No Home - Alexander Baron

A rediscovered classic novel of World War II. It's 1943. During a lull in the allied invasion of Sicily, an exhausted British battalion marches into the searing summer heat of Catania, to be greeted by the women, children and old men emerging from the bomb shelters. Yearning for some semblance of domestic life, the men begin to fill the roles left by absent husbands and fathers. (£7.99)

The Wild Girls - Ursula K Le Guin

In the 40 years since Ursula le Guin’s first publication, her works have changed not only the face, but also the tone and agenda of science fiction. Her Nebula award-winning novelette "The Wild Girls", here newly revised, tells of two captive ''dirt children'' living in a society of sword and silk. Also included is Le Guin's scandalous and scorching Harper's essay, Staying Awake While We Read, and in interview with the author herself. (£8.99

A Wreath of Roses - Elizabeth Taylor

Spending the holiday with friends, as she has for many years, Camilla finds that their private absorptions - Frances with her painting and Liz with her baby - seem to exclude her from the gossipy intimacies of previous summers. Anxious that she will remain encased in her solitary life as a school secretary, Camilla steps into an unlikely liaison with Richard Elton, a handsome, assured - and dangerous - liar. (£8.99)

NON-FICTION

ART AND CRAFT

Crafty Ideas for Every Occasion: Craft Guerrilla - Lisa Margreet Payne; Deborah Daniel; Louise Batten

An accessible and fun approach to DIY craft-based events from designing your own bunting and making festival rain macs to mixing your own themed cocktails. (£19.95)

Adventures in Needlework: Stitching with Passion - Jessica Aldred; Emily Peacock (Guild of Master Craftsman Publications)

Bright and funky designs showing how stitching has become seriously stylish, to appeal to both beginning and experienced stitchers and bringing embroidery bang up to date using traditional techniques alongside bold colours, graphics and striking contemporary ideas. (£14.99)

BIOGRAPHY

Tony Benn: a Biography - Jad Adams

The first biography to have been written with full access to the Benn archives chronicles the behind-the-scenes story of Benn's bitter battles with every leader of the Labour Party since Gaitskell. (£14.99)

Wait For Me!: Memoirs of the Youngest Mitford Sister - Deborah Devonshire

Deborah Devonshire tells the story of her upbringing, lovingly and wittily describing her parents (so memorably fictionalised by her sister Nancy); talks candidly about her brother and sisters, and their politics and writes brilliantly about the country and her deep attachment to it and those who live and work in it. (£8.99)

Out of the Woods But Not Over the Hill - Gervase Phinn

A sparkling collection of his best humorous writing, looking back over more than sixty years of family life, teaching, inspecting schools, writing and public speaking.(£7.99)

FOOD

Vegetarian Nosh For Students - Joy May (£7.99)

Nosh for Students : A Fun Student Cookbook (3e) - Joy May (£7.99)

HISTORY

How the Girl Guides Won the War - Janie Hampton

When the Blitz broke out, the Guides knew what to do. They kept up morale in bomb shelters, demonstrating 'blitz cooking' with emergency ovens made from the bricks of bombed houses at the request of the Ministry of Food. They grew food on their company allotments and knitted for the entire country, dug shelters, provided crucial First Aid, and also assisted the millions of children who were forced to flee their city homes to safer places in the country. (£8.99)

Green Men & White Swans: The Folklore of British Pub Names - Jacqueline Simpson (£7.99)

HUMOUR

When I Were a Nipper... - Andrew Davies

Comes from a time when tots are dangled off buildings, put in the custody of dogs, given baths in the street and used for unsuitable photo opportunities by unthinking parents. Full of the same delightfully pre-health & safety shots from the 1930s, 40s and 50s that made the first two books a rip-roaring success. (£9.99)

Go the F**k to Sleep - Adam Mansbach

This is a gift book for parents that will have them laughing even as they cry. It looks like a nice bedtime book for children, but it really isn't! Profane, affectionate, and radically honest, California Book Award-winning author Adam Mansbach's verses perfectly capture the familiar and unspoken tribulations of putting your little angel down for the night. (£9.99)

Parting Shots - Matthew Parris

Up till 2006 a British Ambassador leaving his post was encouraged to write what was known as a valedictory despatch, to be circulated to a small number of influential people in government. Combining gems from the archives with more recent despatches obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, this is a treasure trove of wit, venom and serious analysis. (£8.99)

LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE

The Writers' & Artists' Yearbook 2012 (£14.99)

Science Fiction : a very short introduction - David Seed

Science Fiction has proved notoriously difficult to define. It combines romance, science and prophecy; it’s a genre based on an imagined alternative to the reader's environment; and it’s a form of fantastic fiction and historical literature. It has also been argued that science fiction narratives are the most engaged, socially relevant, and responsive to the modern technological environment. (£7.99)

Longman Anthology of Old English, Old Icelandic, and Anglo-Norman Literatures - Richard North; Joe Allard; Patricia Gillies

This new anthology sits at the forefront of the discipline of Anglo-Saxon Norse and Celtic literatures, brought to us by an author team highly respected in the field. It is the first to fully incorporate multi-cultural aspects of medieval British literature. This is the only anthology to present Old Icelandic and Anglo-Norman literatures alongside Old English as an integral part of the literary and cultural tradition in the British Isles before Chaucer. Uniquely, an expanded selection of material is also available for those teaching large courses who wish to create a bespoke anthology. (£25.99)

MBS

Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error - Kathryn Schulz

Being wrong is an inescapable part of being alive. And yet, we go through life tacitly assuming (or loudly insisting) that we are right about nearly everything. Being Wrong looks at why this conviction has such a powerful grip on us. (£9.99)

The Psychopath Test - Jon Ronson

This is a story about madness. It all starts when journalist Jon Ronson is contacted by a leading neurologist. She and several colleagues have recently received a cryptically puzzling book, and Jon is challenged to solve the mystery behind it. As he searches for the answer, Jon soon finds himself, unexpectedly, on an adventure into the world of madness. (£16.99)

NATURE

The Peregrine: The Hill of Summer & Diaries: The Complete Works of J. A. Baker, ed. John Fanshawe

Reissue of J. A. Baker's extraordinary classic of British nature writing set on the flat marshes of the Essex coast, where J A Baker spent a long winter looking and writing about the visitors from the uplands. Includes original diaries from which The Peregrine was written and its companion volume The Hill of Summer. (£12.99)

The Lie of the Land: An Under-the-field Guide to Great Britain - Ian Vince

Takes us on a journey through a fantastically exotic Britain of red desert sands, shattering continental collisions and tides of volcanic lava. Ian Vince shows us how Britain came to look the way it does; and with warmth and wit transports us back through billions of years to a land that time forgot. (£8.99)

The Wavewatcher's Companion - Gavin Pretor-Pinney

Waves are everywhere around us, and our lives depend on them. But what, the author wondered, could they all have in common with ones we splash around in on holiday? (£9.99)

Waves: The Sounds of Britain's Shores (British Library)

From the gentle lapping of water on a shingle beach to the powerful crashing of waves on a rocky shore, this collection of recordings explores the idea that each beach has its own signature sound and demonstrates the contrasting nature of Britain's shoreline. (£9.95)

OUTDOOR ACTIVITIES

The Natural Navigator Pocket Book - Tristan Gooley

Blends natural science, myth, folklore and the history of travel to introduce you to the rare and ancient art of finding your way using nature's own sign-posts, from the feel of a rock to the look of the moon. (£9.99)

40 Short Walks in West Yorkshire (AA) (£9.99)

Know Your Diggers - Paul Argent (£4.99)

Pocket Guide to Sheds - Gordon Thorburn

Over 100 photos of eccentric sheds and their owners. (£9.99)

POETRY

A Shropshire Lad: Unabridged - A. E. Housman, read by Samuel West (Naxos CD)

Published at the author's own expense in 1896, after rejection from publishers, the collection contains a cycle of 63 poems set in a half-imagined pastoral Shropshire (£8.99).

SOCIETY

Them and Us: Changing Britain - Why We Need a Fair Society - Will Hutton

The suddenness and depth of the recession has raised questions about the workability of capitalism not seen since the 1930s. One of the constraints on recovery is the growing belief that if the old model did not work there is no new one on offer. This book sets out to provide one. (£10.99)

Priceless: The Hidden Psychology of Value - William Poundstone

Why do text messages cost money while e-mails are free? Why do cereal packets keep getting smaller? Why do so many prices end in 9? Reveals how we perceive value and how businesses set the prices we pay. (£8.99)

TRAVEL

The Masque of Africa: Glimpses of African Belief - V. S. Naipaul

Moving beyond travelogue, "The Masque of Africa" considers the effects of belief (in indigenous animisms, the foreign religions of Christianity and Islam, the cults of leaders and mythical history) upon the progress of African civilization. (£9.99)

CHILDREN'S BOOKS

Ages 0-5yrs

Cave Baby - Julia Donaldson, Emily Gravett

Now in paperback.A hairy mammoth takes a cheeky little baby on a thrilling ride through a moonlit landscape populated by a sabre-toothed tiger, a leaping hare, a laughing hyena and even, just maybe, by a big brown bear ...But where are they going? And what has it to do with the baby's scribblings on the cave wall? Age: 2 - 5yrs. (£6.99)

Ages 9-11yrs

Earwig and the Witch - Diana Wynne Jones

Everyone knows that orphanages are horrible places. But Earwig loves it there, mostly because she has the run of the place and seems to be able to persuade people to do as she wants. Then one day Earwig is chosen to live with a very strange couple: Bella Yaga, her new 'mother', is actually a horrible witch. Earwig will need all her ingenuity (and some help from a talking cat) to survive! A witty, magical story from this muched loved writer who died earlier this year. Age: 6 - 12yrs. (£6.99)

Teenage

Trouble Twisters - Garth Nix and Sean Williams

Twin siblings Jack and Jaide discover they are pivotal to a secret supernatural organisation that protects the earth from marauding Evil! Portland might seem like a quiet coastal town, and their grandmother is perhaps no dottier than anyone else's, but it soon becomes apparent that the strange things going on around them are anything BUT ordinary. Ages: 10+ (£6.99)

MAY 2011

FICTION

HARDBACK

A Conspiracy of Friends: A Corduroy Mansions Novel - Alexander McCall Smith

Corduroy Mansions, a crumbling four-storey mansion in Pimlico, is inhabited by a glorious assortment of characters: among them, Oedipus Snark, the first ever nasty Lib Dem MP, who is so detestable his own mother, Berthea, is writing an unauthorised biography about him; and one small vegetarian dog, Freddie de la Hay, who has the ability to fasten his own seatbelt. (£14.99 at The Book Case)

Smut: Two Unseemly Stories - Alan Bennett

Unexpected tales from the master of short fiction. Graham Forbes is a disappointment to his mother who thinks that if he must have a wife, he should have done better. And her own husband would be better if she were mourning him than living with him. And Mrs Donaldson is a conventional middle-class woman beached on the shores of widowhood. But she decides to take in two lodgers. (£12.00)

PAPERBACK

The Finkler Question - Howard Jacobson

The 2010 Booker winner. A funny and serious novel about love, loss and male friendship. (£7.99)

Our Kind of Traitor - John le Carre

Britain is in the depths of recession. A left-leaning young Oxford academic and his barrister girlfriend take an off-peak holiday on the Caribbean island of Antigua. A chance meting with a Russian millionaire propels the young lovers on a tortuous journey through Paris to a safe house in the Swiss Alps, to the murkiest cloisters of the City of London and its unholy alliance with Britain's Intelligence Establishment. (£7.99)

Sex and Stravinsky - Barbara Trapido

The time is 1995, but everybody has a past. Brilliant Australian Caroline can command everyone except her own ghoulish mother, which means that things aren't easy for Josh and Zoe, her husband with Stravinsky-glasses and twelve-year-old daughter. (£7.99)

The Last Weekend - Blake Morrison

Set over a long weekend in East Anglia, a chilling story of a rivalrous friendship. It opens with a surprise phone call from an old university friend, inviting Ian and his wife, Em, for a few days by the sea. Their hosts, Ollie and Daisy, are a golden couple, and the scene is set for sunlit relaxation. But dangerous tensions quickly emerge. (£7.99)

Hand Me Down World - Lloyd Jones

She is crossing continents, searching for her missing child. Everyone she comes into contact with has a tale to tell: the truck driver who mistook her for a prostitute, the hunters who almost shot her, the Frenchman who loved her, the blind man and the lodger. This is her story. (£7.99)

The Distant Hours - Kate Morton

Edie Burchill and her mother have never been close, but when a long lost letter arrives with the return address of Milderhurst Castle, Kent, printed on its envelope, Edie begins to suspect that her mother's emotional distance masks an old secret. (£7.99)

All Men are Liars - Alberto Manguel

Where can you find truth in a world that is so thoroughly ruled by lies? That is the question tackled by the investigation of a French journalist who endeavours to shed light on the enigma of an unexplained death. The reader discovers the fascinating homage Alberto Manguel pays to literature and its shape-shifting creations, which give infinite expressions to the objects of our desires. (£7.99)

The Accident - Ismail Kadare

Why did the taxi crash on the autobahn in Vienna? Who were the mysterious couple who died after being flung from the backseat? This is the story of the last forty weeks of their lives - a fever dream where love and obsession collide. (£8.99)

Purge - Sofi Oksanen

Deep in an Estonian forest, two women, one young, one old, are hiding. Zara is a prostitute and a murderer, on the run from brutal captors. Aliide offers refuge but not safety: she has her own criminal secrets from the country's brutal Soviet years. (£7.99)

Surface Detail - Iain M. Banks

The latest Culture novel. Lededje Y'breq is one of the Intagliated, her marked body bearing witness to a family shame, her life belonging to a man whose lust for power is without limit. Prepared to risk everything for her freedom, her release, when it comes, is at a price, and to put things right she will need the help of the Culture. (£8.99)

City of Veils - Zoe Ferraris
One scalding afternoon in Saudi Arabia, the mutilated body of a young woman, half naked beneath her burqa, is discovered on a Saudi beach; soon afterwards a Western woman's husband vanishes without trace. (£7.99)

REISSUES

Ruth - Elizabeth Gaskell
Elizabeth Gaskell's second novel challenged contemporary social attitudes by taking as its heroine a fallen woman. Ruth Hilton is an orphan and an overworked seamstress, an innocent preyed upon by a weak, wealthy seducer. devotion are tested to the limit by a twist of fate that brings her past back to haunt her. Gaskell's depiction of Ruth lays bare Victorian hypocrisy and sexual double-standards.(£9.99)

NON-FICTION

ART AND DESIGN

Ex-Libris: The Art of Bookplates - Martin Hopkinson

Showcases bookplates drawn from the rich collections of the British Museum, including works created by some of the most talented artists of their day, such as Albrecht Durer, Edward Burne-Jones, Aubrey Beardsley and Eric Gill. The content of bookplates has evolved over the years to feature a vast range of allegory and symbolism often incorporating a pun on the owners name uniquely relevant to that individual. (£9.99)

BIOGRAPHY

The Notebook - Jose Saramago

A record of a year in the life of the author. He dissects the financial crisis, deplores Israel's bombardment of Gaza, traces the ongoing inquiry into the execution of the Brazilian Jean Charles de Menezes on the London Underground, and charts the transition from the era of George W. Bush to that of Barack Obama. A unique journey into the personal and political world of one of the greatest writers of our time. (£8.99)

Life: Keith Richards

With the Rolling Stones, Keith Richards created the riffs, the lyrics and the songs that roused the world, and over four decades he lived the original rock and roll life: taking the chances he wanted, speaking his mind, and making it all work in a way that no one before him had ever done. Now, at last, the man himself tells us the story of life in the crossfire hurricane. (£7.99)

CURRENT AFFAIRS

The Forgotten Palestinians : A History of the Palestinians in Israel - Ilan Pappe

Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians have lived as Israeli citizens within the borders of the nation formed at the end of the 1948 conflict, occupying a precarious middle ground between the Jewish citizens of Israel and the dispossessed Palestinians of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. In the innumerable discussions of the Israel-Palestine problem, their experiences are often overlooked and forgotten. (£18.99)

Living Dolls: The Return of Sexism - Natasha Walter

Empowerment, liberation, choice. Once the watchwords of feminism, these terms have now been co-opted by a society that sells women an airbrushed, highly sexualised and increasingly narrow vision of femininity. (£8.99)

GARDENING

The Bad Tempered Gardener - Anne Wareham, photog. Charles Hawes

Anne Wareham sees gardening as a serious and even outrageous art form. This is the story of her development as a thinking gardener and the creation with her husband of their acclaimed garden in the Welsh borders, the Veddw. (£16.99)

Radical Gardening: Politics, Idealism and Rebellion in the Garden - George McKay

In the common public perception, contemporary gardening is understood as suburban, as leisure activity, as television makeover opportunity. Radical Gardening travels an alternative route, through history and across landscape, linking propagation with propaganda. (£12.99)

HISTORY

The Ecclesiastical History of the English People - the Venerable Saint Bede (Dover) (£8.99)

At Home: A Short History of Private Life - Bill Bryson
Bill Bryson realised that we devote a lot more time to studying battles and wars than to considering what history really consists of: centuries of people quietly going about their daily business - sleeping, eating, having sex, endeavouring to get comfortable. This inspired him to start a journey around his own house, wandering from room to room considering how the ordinary things in life came to be. (£8.99)

The VW Camper Van: A Biography - Mike Harding

Mike Harding's first ride in a Volkswagen Camper Van was back in 1961, when it was the carrying around the gear and bandmembers of his rock band the Manchester Rainmakers. Finally, in 2009, he could wait no longer, and bought his own. A wonderful social history of the postwar years through the prism of a single transport icon. (£16.99)

LIFESTYLE

Brave Old World: A Practical Guide to Husbandry, or the Fine Art of Looking After Yourself - Tom Hodgkinson

Drawing on the wisdom of an eclectic range of thinkers and writers, on medieval calendars and manorial records, and his own attempts to travel the road to self-sufficiency, this book charts the progress of a year in pursuit of the pleasures of the past" and asks "Why shouldn't we return to the ideals of a pre-capitalist, pre-Puritan, pre-consumerist world of feasting, dancing, horse-riding, wood-chopping, fire-laying, poultry-rearing, bartering, bread-baking and bee-keeping?" (£16.99)

LITERATURE

This is Not the End of the Book: A Conversation Curated by Jean-Phillippe De Tonnac - Umberto Eco; Jean-Claude Carriere, ed. Polly McLean

"The book is like the spoon: once invented, it cannot be bettered". (Umberto Eco). Two of the world's great men have a delightfully rambling conversation about the future of the book in the digital era, and decide it is here to stay. (£12.99)

MUSIC

Reelin' in the Years: The Soundtrack of a Northern Life - Mark Radcliffe

Mark Radcliffe takes a record from each year of his life, using the song as a starting point from which to reach out and pull together a wonderfully entertaining catalogue of memories and asides about British culture. From The Kinks' 'See My Friends', through Slade's 'Coz I Luv You' to Kraftwerk's 'Europe Endless' and Joy Division's 'Atmosphere', Mark's selections bring forth a diverse collision of styles from eras uniquely defined by their musical genres and fashions. (£12.99)

NATURE

Wild Vision In Celebration of the Natural World - John Beatty

Gorgeous big colour photography book from the man who brings you the John Muir calendars and diaries. (£25.00)

The Butterfly Isles: A Summer In Search Of Our Emperors And Admirals - Patrick Barkham

Butterflies animate our summers but the 59 species found in the British Isles can be surprisingly elusive. This bewitching book charts Patrick Barkham's quest to find each of them - from the Adonis Blue to the Dingy Skipper - in one unforgettable summer. Shortlisted for Galaxy National Book Awards: National Book Tokens New Writer of the Year 2010. (£8.99)

Know Your Ducks - Jack Byard(£4.99)
The latest in this popular series: colour photos of a range of ducks with info about them.

OUTDOOR ACTIVITIES

The Good Mountain Biking Guide: England & Wales

Big book with 640 pages of tightly packed information covering every area that has access to great mountain bike trails - the most comprehensive guide on the subject yet published with info, maps and photos. (£19.95)

The Cyclist's Friend - Chris Naylor

'Other forms of transport grow daily more nightmarish. Only the bicycle remains pure in heart' - Iris Murdoch. Roadies, tourers, mountain bikers and casual cyclists will savour this insightful collection of quotations and prose from cycle lovers past and present, interspersed with practical tips on everything from fixing a puncture to choosing the right bicycle. (£9.99)

PHILOSOPHY

On Evil - Terry Eagleton

In this witty, accessible study, the prominent Marxist thinker Terry Eagleton launches a surprising defence of the reality of evil, drawing on literary, theological, and psychoanalytic sources to suggest that evil, no mere medieval artefact, is a real phenomenon with palpable force in our contemporary world. (£10.99)

POLITICS

Verso’s Revolutions series:

Toussaint L'Ouverture: The Haitian Revolution - Jean-Bertrand Aristide (£7.99)
Jesus Christ: The Gospels - Terry Eagleton (£7.99)
The Levellers: The Putney Debates - Geoffrey Robertson, QC (£7.99)
Virtue and Terror: Maximilien Robespierre - Maximilien Robespierre; Slavoj Zizek (£7.99)

Verso’s Radical Thinkers series

Machiavelli and Us - Louis Althusser (£8.99)
Brecht and Method - Fredric Jameson (£8.99)

RELIGION

Paganism - Owen Davies (AVery Short Introduction) (£7.99)

SCIENCE

Quantify!: A Crash Course in Smart Thinking - Goran Grimvall

Goran Grimvall is determined to help mere mortals understand how scientists get to the kernel of perplexing problems. Entertaining and enlightening, his latest book uses examples from sports, literature, and nature - as well as from the varied worlds of science - to illustrate how scientists make sense of and explain the world around us.

STATIONERY

Hebridean Calendar 2012 - Mairi Hedderwick

Distinctive full-colour paintings by one of Scotland's best-loved authors and artists.(£7.99)

The Hebridean Desk Diary - Mairi Hedderwick (£12.99)

The Hebridean Pocket Diary 2012 - Mairi Hedderwick (£7.99)

The Hebridean Pocket Address Book - Mairi Hedderwick (£7.99)

TRAVEL

OxTravels - Michael Palin; Paul Theroux; et al.

OxTravels" is a collection of travel writing for the 2011 Oxfam Bookfest. Original stories from twenty-five top travel writers, including Michael Palin, Paul Theroux, Sara Wheeler, William Dalrymple, Patrick Leigh Fermor, Lloyd Jones, Rory Stewart, Jan Morris, Dervla Murphy, Rory MacLean, and others. Each of the stories takes as its theme a meeting - life-changing, affecting, amusing by turn - and together they transport readers into a brilliant, vivid atlas of encounters. (£9.99)

The Invention of Paris: A History in Footsteps - Eric Hazan (£9.99)

An Inland Voyage - Robert Louis Stevenson

Tells of a canoeing trip through Belgium and northern France that Stevenson took in 1876, when the author was 26 years old with Sir Walter Grindlay Simpson, each in a kayak-style wooden canoe, with a deck and rigged with a sail. (£6.99)

Return to the Olive Farm - Carol Drinkwater

After sixteen months of travelling round the Mediterranean in search of the ancient secrets of the olive tree, Carol returns to her beloved olive farm in the south of France. However, the homecoming celebrations are overshadowed by disturbing discoveries. (£7.99)

The Rough Guide to Scottish Highlands & Islands - Rob Humphreys; Donald Reid (6 r.e.)(£12.99)

Too Narrow to Swing a Cat: Going Nowhere in Particular on the English Waterways - Steve Haywood

She was particularly taken with the small narrow ledges that ran along either side of the boat. Steve has a new member of crew aboard his narrowboat, Justice - but maybe not the kind he'd have wanted if he'd known the trouble she'd cause. (£8.99)

Two Wheels Over Catalonia: Cycling the Back Roads of North-Eastern Spain - Richard Guise (£8.99)

APRIL 2011

FICTION

PAPERBACK

The Red Queen - Philippa Gregory

The second book in the Cousins War trilogy brings to life the story of Margaret Beaufort, who now takes centre stage in the bitter struggle of The War of the Roses. The book tells the story of the child-bride of Edmund Tudor, who, although widowed in her early teens, uses her determination of character and wily plotting to infiltrate the house of York. (£7.99)

The Dog Who Came in from the Cold - Alexander McCall Smith

In the genteel environs of Corduroy Mansions, Pimlico, strange doings are afoot, mostly in the name of love. (£7.99)

The Water Theatre - Lindsay Clarke

As war-reporter Martin Crowther arrives in Umbria, still raw from a recent assignment in Africa, and from a failing love affair back home, a storm hits and the sky opens. Things are powerfully on the move inside him too as he comes to the small village of Fontanalba, on a mission to track down two friends from a lifetime ago. (£7.99)

In a Strange Room - Damon Galgut

A young man takes three journeys, through Greece, India and Africa. He travels with little purpose, letting the chance encounters of the road dictate his path. But although he knows that he is drifting, he is unable to settle. (£7.99)

The Dead Republic - Roddy Doyle

We last saw Henry Smart, his leg severed in an accident with a railway boxcar, crawl into the Utah desert to die - only to be discovered by John Ford, who's there shooting his latest Western. "The Dead Republic" opens in 1951. Henry is returning to Ireland for the first time since his escape in 1922. (£7.99)

Wild Child - T. Coraghessan Boyle

In this beguiling new collection of stories, T. C. Boyle, one of the world's greatest storytellers, explores the improbable, the tragic, the allegorical and the altogether ordinary. (£7.99)

Skippy Dies - Paul Murray

'Skippy and Ruprecht are having a doughnut-eating race one evening when Skippy turns purple and falls off his chair'. And so begins this epic, tragic, comic, brilliant novel set in and around Dublin's Seabrook College for Boys. (£8.99)

The Guardian Angel's Journal: She Thought Her Life Was Over, But it Hadn't Even Started... - Carolyn Jess-Cooke

When Margot Delacroix dies at forty-two years old, she is sent back to earth as a guardian angel - to herself. Renamed Ruth, she is forced by divine mandate to re-experience and record her biggest mistakes and fiercest regrets from the beginning of her life to her untimely death. (£6.99)

The Green Rider - Kristen Britain

Karigan G'ladheon always seemed to be getting into a fight, and today was no exception. But as she trudged through the forest, using her long walk home to contemplate her depressing future - and the expulsion it was bound to hold - a horse burst through the woodland and charged straight for her. The rider was slumped over his mount's neck with two arrows embedded in his back. (£8.99)

The Death Instinct - Jed Rubenfeld

Under a clear blue September sky, a quarter ton of explosives is detonated in a deadly attack on Wall Street. Fear comes to the streets of New York. Witnessing the blast are war veteran Stratham Younger, his friend James Littlemore of the NY Police Department, and beautiful French radiochemist Colette Rousseau. From the author of "The Interpretation of Murder". (£7.99)

Ashes to Dust - Yrsa Sigurdardottir, trans. Philip Roughton

Thora peered at the floor, but couldn't see anything that could have frightened Markus that much, only three mounds of dust. She moved the light of her torch over them. It took her some time to realize what she was seeing-- and then it was all she could do not to let the torch slip from her hand. (£7.99)

Railway to the Grave - Edward Marston

Yorkshire 1855. Colonel Aubrey Tarleton is a man respected by his neighbours in the small Yorkshire village of South Otterington - as much for his heroic feats in the army as for his social position. So the community is left stunned when Tarleton, deliberately, walks into the path of a speeding train. (£7.99)

The Inspector and Silence - Hakan Nesser

A north European country swelters in a fug of heat. In the beautiful forested lake-town of Sorbinowo, Sergeant Merwin Kluuge's tranquil existence is shattered when he receives a phone-call from an anonymous woman. She tells him that a girl has gone missing from the summer camp of the mysterious The Pure Life, a religious sect buried deep in the woods. (£7.99)

The Mammoth Book of Best British Crime 8 - Maxim Jakubowski

The year's top new British short stories selected by leading crime critic Maxim Jakubowski. (£7.99)

REISSUES

Hadji Murat - Leo Tolstoy Hadji
Murat, one of the most feared and venerated mountain chiefs in the Chechen struggle against the Russians, defects from the Muslim rebels after feuding with his ruling Imam, Shamil. Hoping to protect his family, he joins the Russians, who accept him but never put their trust in him - and so Murat must find another way to end the struggle. (£7.99)

A Bend in the River - V. S. Naipaul

Set in an unnamed African country, the book is narrated by Salim, a young man from an Indian family of traders long resident on the coast. One of the author's most potent works - a truly moving story of historical upheaval and social breakdown. (£8.99)

A House for Mr Biswas - V. S. Naipaul

Heartrending and darkly comic, this triumph of resilience, persistence and dignity masterfully evokes a man's quest for autonomy against the backdrop of post-colonial Trinidad. (£9.99)

The Enigma of Arrival: A Novel in Five Sections - V. S. Naipaul
The story of a journey, from one place to another, from the British colony of Trinidad to the ancient countryside of England, and from one state of mind to another, and is perhaps Naipaul's most autobiographical work. (£9.99

NON-FICTION

ART AND ARCHITECTURE

Your Sketchbook Your Self - Felicity Allen

Written by a leading gallery educator, who is herself an artist, the book is illustrated both with pages from the author's sketchbook and examples from the sketchbooks of many well-known artists, both historic and contemporary, including Turner, Picasso, David Hockney and Cornelia Parker. Subjects covered include choosing or making your own sketchbook; getting the habit; living with your mistakes; making a mess; doodling; drawing from observation; looking at works of art; trying things out; writing down ideas; collage; and, selecting materials.

Why Architecture Matters - Paul Goldberger
Deals with how things feel to us when we stand before them, with how architecture affects us emotionally as well as intellectually, and with its impact on our lives. This book raises our awareness of fundamental things like proportion, scale, space, texture, materials, shapes, light, and memory. (£11.99)

BIOGRAPHY

Charles Dickens - Michael Slater
This long-awaited biography, twenty years after the last major account, uncovers Dickens the man through the profession in which he excelled. (£12.99)

Not on My Patch, Lad - Mike Pannett

Mike Pannett used to work the beat in Central London - tackling drugs and knife crime - so when he moved back to Yorkshire he was hoping for a quieter life. But it seems the moors and villages of his native county aren't as sleepy as he once thought... (£7.99)

Ten Pound Pom - Niall Griffiths

In 1976, Niall's family emigrated to Australia, as part of the GBP10 Pom scheme. He lived there for 3 years, moving from Brisbane to Perth in a souped-up station wagon. 30 years later, he returned to retrace his steps. This is his memoir. (£9.99)

We are a Muslim, Please - Zaiba Malik

For Zaiba Malik, growing up in Bradford in the '70s and '80s certainly has its moments but her story is also one of anxiety and seemingly irreconcilable opposites, constantly torn between two identities: 'British' and 'Muslim'. (£8.99)

HERITAGE

The Making of the British Landscape: How We Have Transformed the Land, from Prehistory to Today - Francis Pryor

From our suburban streets which still trace the boundaries of long vanished farms to the Norfolk Broads, formed when medieval peat pits flooded - evidence of man's effect on Britain is everywhere. Packed with over 250 maps and photographs, compellingly written and argued, this highly acclaimed book will permanently change the way you see your surroundings. (£14.99)

The Book of English Place Names: How Our Towns and Villages Got Their Names - Caroline Taggart (£9.99)

Robin Hood - J. C. Holt
The legend of Robin Hood began more than 600 years ago. The man, if he existed at all, lived even earlier. In this definitive work one of Britains premier historians and author of the standard work on the Magna Carta, unravels pure invention from real possibility and offers the results of some thirty years of research. He reconstructs the historical basis of the stories but never loses sight of the human imagination that sustained them. This edition includes new illustrations and The Gest of Robyn Hood, one of the oldest surviving tales. (£12.95)

England's Lost Houses: From the Archives of Country Life - Giles Worsley

More than just an elegy for lost glories: by studying the circumstances behind one hundred houses that have gone, the author is able to explain why such a large number were destroyed in the last century. (£18.99)

HISTORY

Blood Rites - Barbara Ehrenreich

"The Origins and History of the Passions of War" traces the history of warfare back to our prehistoric ancestors’ experiences of being hunted by other carnivores. (£9.99)

Europe Between the Oceans : 9000 BC-AD 1000 - Barry Cunliffe

Europe is, in world terms, a relatively minor peninsula attached to the Eurasian land mass, yet it became one of the most innovative regions on the planet, bearing restless adventurers who traversed the globe to trade and often to settle. By the fifteenth century Europe was a driving world force. (£19.99)

The English Castle : 1066-1650 - John Goodall
A riveting architectural study which includes over 350 illustrations, bringing to life the history of the English castle over six centuries. In it he explores the varied architecture of these buildings and describes their changing roles in warfare, politics, domestic living, and governance. (£45)

LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE

A Little Book of Language - David Crystal

Focuses on the development of unique linguistic styles, the origins of obscure accents, and the search for the first written word; and discusses the plight of endangered languages, as well as successful cases of linguistic revitalization. (£8.99)

Science Fiction Writers - British Library (CD)

What is science fiction? Are science fiction writers under-appreciated compared to literary novelists? Is their prime mission to predict the future or to comment on the present? These and other questions are discussed by major writers including Isaac Asimov, Douglas Adams, Brian Aldiss, J G Ballard, Doris Lessing and Kurt Vonnegut Jr. (£9.95)

LIVESTOCK

The Omlet Guide to Keeping Chickens (£7.99)

Know Your Ducks - Jack Byard (£4.99)

Beautiful Chickens Postcard Book (£5.99)

Beautiful Ducks Postcard Book (£5.99)

Beautiful Rabbits Postcard Book (£5.99)

MATHS

Alex's Adventures in Numberland - Alex Bellos

This groundbreaking book reclaims maths from the geeks. Mathematical ideas underpin just about everything in our lives: from the surprising geometry of the 50p piece to how probability can help you win in any casino. Shortlisted for Galaxy National Book Awards and Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction 2010. (£8.99)

MBS

Boyhoods: Rethinking Masculinities - Ken Corbett

How is a boy made between the body, the family, and the culture? Does a boy grow by identifying with his father, or by separating from his mother? Writing in a wonderfully robust and engaging voice, Ken Corbett argues for a new psychology of masculinity, one that is not strictly dependent on normative expectation. (£11.99)

Boredom - a lively history - Peter Toohey
Dispels the myth that boredom is simply a childish emotion or an existential malaise and shows that it is, in fact, one of our most common and constructive emotions and is an essential part of the human experience. (£18.99)

The Rough Guide to Psychology - Christian Jarrett

Why are we the way we are? It starts with you, your mind and brain, broadening out to look at your friends and other relationships, then finally on to crowds, mobs and religion and what happens when the mind goes wrong, including depression, anxiety, schizophrenia, and more unusual conditions. (£11.99)

How Not to F*** Them Up - Oliver James

Babies have very simple needs, yet many parents are overwhelmed with elaborate advice on how to meet them. Leading child psychologist Oliver James argues that your under-threes do not need training; it's getting your head straight as a parent that's important. (£8.99)

The Art of Mindful Gardening: Sowing the Seeds of Meditation - Ark Redwood

Ark Redwood, head gardener at Chalice Wells, one of Britain's most sacred gardens, guides the reader through the changing seasons. Drawing on years of both practical gardening experience and Zen Buddhist practice, he acts as an expert guide to the secret places of the garden that can be discovered through mindful practice and spiritual contemplation. (£7.99)

The Art of Mindful Walking: Meditations on the Path - Adam Ford

Applies the notion of mindfulness to walks ranging from a simple journey to work to a personal odyssey in the Australian outback. (£7.99)

Broken: A Love Story: A Woman's Journey Toward Redemption on the Wind River Indian Reservation - Lisa Jones

An account of the writer’s meeting with Northern Arapaho Stanford Addison, a wheelchair-bound quadriplegic who gentles horses rather than breaking them and who after an accident developed at first unwelcome powers of healing. (£8.99)

NATURE

The Perfumier and the Stinkhorn: Six Personal Essays on Natural Science and Romanticism - Richard Mabey

From birdsong to poetry, from Petri-dish to microscope, this is a joyful union of meandering thoughts and intimate memories. (£9.99)

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek - Annie Dillard

A passionate and poetic reflection on the mystery of creation with its beauty on the one hand and cruelty on the other, it has become a modern American literary classic in the tradition of Thoreau. Living in solitude in the Blue Ridge Mountains near Roanoke, Virginia, and observing the changing seasons, the flora and fauna, she reflects on the nature of creation and of the God who set it in motion. (£9.99)

Lady of the Loch: The Incredible Story of Britain's Oldest Osprey - Helen Armitage

For the past twenty years, Lady, Britain's oldest breeding osprey at 25, has made the 3000-mile journey from Africa back to Scotland, her nest and her mate. In March 2010, she produced an egg for a record-breaking 20th year; despite her weakened state throughout that summer, and with the stalwart assistance of her youthful mate, the chicks fledged successfully. (£7.99)

Midges in Scotland - George Hendry

The first edition of this book rapidly topped the list of bestsellers and has continued to sell well, turning up in places as far away as German schlosses, Brisbane bedsides and Canadian log cabins! This latest edition brings the story of biting midges up to date with new material on the Highland midge, its biology and why it bites. (£4.99)

OUTDOOR ACTIVITIES

Run Wild!: Outdoor Games and Adventures - Fiona Danks; Jo Schofield

Following the success of Nature's Playground, Go Wild and Make it Wild, Jo Schofield and Fiona Danks focus on inspiring children of all ages - as well as parents, teachers, youth leaders and anyone working or playing with children - to have fun outdoors, anywhere, any time, whatever the weather. (£16.99)

PHILOSOPHY

Who Am I and If So How Many? - Richard David Precht

Drawing on neuroscience, psychology, history, and even pop culture, Richard David Precht deftly elucidates the questions at the heart of human existence: What is truth? Does life have meaning? Why should I be good? And presents them in concise, witty, and engaging prose. The result is an exhilarating journey through the history of philosophy and a lucid introduction to current research on the brain. (£8.99)

POETRY

Family Values - Wendy Cope

From a motorway service area to her ambivalent relationship with religion, Wendy Cope covers a wide range of experience in her new collection. Her mordant humour and formal ingenuity are in evidence, even as she remembers the wounds of a damaging childhood; and in poems about love and the inevitable problems of aging she achieves an intriguing blend of sadness and joy. (£12.99)

Sparrow Tree - Gwyneth Lewis

Explores a huge variety of birds as mouthpieces for inhuman song and the wild inside the mind. (£8.95)

POLITICS

Making the Future: The Unipolar Imperial Moment - Noam Chomsky

A wide range of issues including the ongoing financial crisis, Obama's presidency, the limits of the two-party system, nuclear Iran, Afghanistan, Israel-Palestine, corporate power, and the future of American politics. Fierce, accessible, timely, gloves-off political writing by one of the world's foremost intellectual and political dissidents. (£14.99)

Power and Terror: Conflict, Hegemony, and the Rule of Force - Noam Chomsky

The ten years of US foreign policy since 9/11 have been characterised by war, torture and rendition. Noam Chomsky places these developments in the context of America's long history of aggression and imperialism. (£12.99)

SOCIETY

Ill Fares the Land: A Treatise on Our Present Discontents - Tony Judt

A startling diagnosis of how Western societies have failed and how they can be reformed. (£9.99)

TRAVEL

Extreme Rambling: Walking Israel's Separation Barrier. For Fun - Mark Thomas

'Good fences make good neighbours, but what about bad ones?’ The Israeli barrier is probably the most iconic divider of land since the Berlin Wall. Mark Thomas decided the only way to really get to grips with this huge divide was to use the barrier as a route map, to ‘walk the wall’, covering the entire distance with little more in his armoury than Kendal Mint Cake and a box of blister plasters. (£10.99)

The Wild Rover: A Blistering Journey Along Britain's Footpaths - Mike Parker

From the author of "Map Addict" a brilliant, intelligent and witty exploration of a glorious and passionate British subject - footpaths and our rights of way. Mike discovers how these paths have become part of our cultural landscape and why, at the tender age of 44, he suddenly finds himself at a crossroads. (£12.99)

Parisians: An Adventure History of Paris - Graham Robb (£9.99)

Cool Camping: England: A Hand-picked Selection of Exceptional Campsites and Camping Experiences - Jonathan Knight; et al. (£16.95)

Cool Camping: France: A Hand-picked Selection of Exceptional Campsites and Camping Experiences - Keith Didcock; et al. (£16.95)

The Rough Guide to France (12 r.e.) (£16.99)

The Rough Guide to Yorkshire (£12.99)

The Rough Guide to Scotland - Rob Humphreys (9 r.e.)(£13.99)

A House Somewhere: Tales of Life Abroad - ed. Don George; Anthony Sattin (£7.99)

By the Seat of My Pants: Humorous Tales of Travel and Misadventure - ed. Don George

A hilarious anthology of humorous travel stories, penned by a mix of well-known comedians, travel writers and previously unpublished authors. These stories from the road focus on universal themes familiar to all travellers. (£7.99)

To Prussia with Love: Misadventures in Rural East Germany - Roger Boyes

In a desperate attempt to save his relationship with girlfriend Lena and take a break from the world of journalism, Germany correspondent Roger Boyes agrees to make a great escape from the easy urban lifestyle of Berlin and decamp to the countryside. Roger has hopes for southern Italy, but Lena has inherited a run-down old schloss in deepest, darkest Brandenburg. (£8.99)

CHILDREN'S BOOKS

Ages 0-5yrs

Meg and Mog, Three Favourite Tales- Helen Nicoll

Three stories featuring Meg, Mog and Owl. A great way to introduce young children to these classic stories.Age: 2 - 5yrs. (£7.99)

Ages 5-9 yrs

Polly and the Wolf Again - Catherine Storr

Back in print, Pollys adventures with the not so clever wolf. He’s desperate to eat up Polly, but his schemes always go wrong, and clever Polly usually ends up rescuing him! Ages 6-9yrs (£6.99)

Ages 9-11yrs

Scorpia Rising- Anthony Horowitz

This gripping final mission brings together Alex Rider's old enemies to frame the teenage superspy in an unstoppable plot of revenge, from which he can never return. Pursued from Europe to North Africa and Cairo's city of the dead - this is the twistiest and most deadly plot of any Alex Rider mission yet. Ages: 10 + (£6.99)

MARCH 2011

FICTION

HARDBACK

The Troubled Man: A Kurt Wallander Mystery - Henning Mankell

Every morning Hakan von Enke takes a walk in the forest near his apartment in Stockholm. However, one winter's day he fails to come home. It seems that the retired naval officer has vanished without trace. Detective Kurt Wallander is not officially involved in the investigation but he has personal reasons for his interest in the case as Hakan's son is engaged to his daughter Linda. (£15.99 at The Book Case)

Daughters-in-Law - Joanna Trollope

Rachel has fiercely devoted herself to her three sons all their lives,and continues to do so even now they are all grown up. But when Luke, her youngest, gets married, Rachel finds that control is slipping away. (£16.99 at The Book Case)

The Somme Stations - Andrew Martin

On the first day of the Somme enlisted railwayman Jim Stringer lies trapped in a shell hole, smoking cigarette after cigarette under the bullets and the blazing sun. He calculates his chances of survival - even before they departed for France, a member of Jim's unit had been found dead. (£10.99 at The Book Case)

Land of Painted Caves - Jean Auel

Continues the "Clan of the Cave Bear" series about Stone Age life, after a gap of many years. We’re waiting to see if anyone remembers the series!

PAPERBACK

Solar - Ian McEwan

Michael Beard is a Nobel prize-winning physicist whose best work is behind him. He speaks for enormous fees, lends his name to the letterheads of renowned scientific institutions and half-heartedly heads a government-backed initiative tackling global warming. A compulsive womaniser, Beard finds his fifth marriage floundering. But this time it is different: she is having the affair, and he is still in love with her. (£7.99)

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet - David Mitchell

In the dying days of the 18th-century, a young Dutch clerk arrives on a tiny, man-made island in the bay of Nagasaki, for two hundred years the sole gateway between Japan and the West, to make his fortune. Instead he loses his heart. Galaxy shortlisted. (£7.99)

So Much for That - Lionel Shriver

What do you pack for the rest of your life? Shepherd Knacker has been saving all his working life for a one way ticket away from the daily grind. When he sells his handyman business for $1million, 'The Afterlife' seems tantalisingly within reach. Yet his wife has concocted one reason after another why now isn't the time to go. (£7.99)

Blueeyedboy - Joanne Harris

A dark and intricately plotted tale of a poisonously dysfunctional family, a blind child prodigy, and a serial murderer who is not who he seems. (£7.99)

Point Omega - Don DeLillo

Richard Elster, a retired secret war adviser, has retreated to a forlorn house in a desert, 'somewhere south of nowhere'. But his planned isolation is interrupted when he is joined by a young filmmaker intent on documenting his experience in a one-take film. A book about lateness: late life, late empire, hindsight, dread, disappearance. (£7.99)

The Pregnant Widow - Martin Amis

An Italian poolside, Summer, 1970. Sex is very much on everyone's mind. The girls are acting like boys and the boys are going on acting like boys. Keith Nearing - a bookish twenty year old, in that much disputed territory between five foot six and five foot seven - is struggling to twist feminism towards his own ends. (£7.99)

The Slap - Christos Tsiolkas

At an Australian suburban barbecue one afternoon, a man slaps an unruly boy. The boy is not his son. It is a single act of violence, but this one slap reverberates through the lives of everyone who witnesses it happen. Galaxy shortlisted, Man Booker longlisted. (£7.99)

Collected Stories - Hanif Kureishi

Provocative, erotic, tender, funny and charming sories dealing with the complexities of relationships and the joys of children. Contains his controversial story "Weddings and Beheadings", as well as his prophetic "My Son the Fanatic", which exposes the religious tensions within the Muslim family unit . (£9.99)

Corrag - Susan Fletcher

From the author of Eve Green and Oystercatchers. The story of an epic historic event, the Massacre of Glencoe, of the difference a single heart can make, and how deep and lasting relationships can come from the most unlikely places. (£7.99)

Super Sad True Love Story - Gary Shteyngart

In a very near future a functionally illiterate America is about to collapse. But don't tell that to poor Lenny Abramov, proud author of what may well be the world's last diary. (£7.99)

The Calligrapher's Secret - Rafik Schami

Hamid Farsi is acclaimed as a master of the art of calligraphy; but sees that weaknesses in the Arabic language and its script limit its uses in the modern world. In a secret society, he works out schemes for radical reform and neglects his beautiful wife, Noura. (£8.99)

Somewhere Home - Nada Awar Jarrar

This remarkable novel, winner of the Commonwealth Writers' Prize, tells the story of three women, each of them far from where they came, all of whom are still searching for somewhere that can be called home. (£7.99)

Private Life - Jane Smiley

Margaret Mayfield is nearly an old maid at twenty-seven when she marries Captain Andrew Jackson Jefferson Early. But she soon realizes that his devotion to science leaves little room for anything, or anyone, else. (£7.99)

Terrible Privacy Of Maxwell Sim - Jonathan Coe
Maxwell Sim seems to have hit rock bottom: separated from his wife and daughter, estranged from his father, and with no one to confide in even though he has 74 friends on Facebook. He's not even sure whether he's got a job until suddenly a strange business proposition comes his way which involves a long journey to the Shetland Isles. (£7.99)

Florence and Giles - John Harding 7.99
Gripping Gothic tale based on Henry James's Turn of the Screw - in the tradition of The Woman in Black. (£7.99)
Whole Wide Beauty - Emily Woof
Katherine Freeman has drifted far from her life as a dancer. Married with a small child and working as a part-time teacher, she has become distant from her life, navigating the world in a dream, drawn one way and another by those who depend on her. (£7.99)

Pigeon English - Stephen Kelman

Newly arrived from Ghana, eleven-year-old Harrison Opoku lives on a London housing estate, absorbing the many strange elements of his new life in England: watching, listening, and learning the tricks of inner-city survival. But when a boy is knifed to death on the high street, Harri decides to start a murder investigation of his own. (£12.99)

A Palace in the Old Village - Tahar ben Jelloun

A novel about the powerful pull of home and the yearning for tradition and family, from a highly acclaimed Moroccan author. Captures the stark contrast between old and new world values in the life of an immigrant from Morocco to France. (£8.99)

The Cloud Messenger - Aamer Hussein

In his early teens, Mehran moves from Karachi to London, the rainy city his father has always loved. At the age of twenty-three, he leaves his job in a bank to return to university, where he meets the charismatic Riccarda - nearly ten years older than him, vivacious and enigmatic. (£7.99)

Question Of Belief - Donna Leon
As Venice experiences a debilitating heatwave, Commissario Brunetti prepares to escape the city and spend time with his family in the mountains. For Ispettore Vianello, however, the weather is the last thing on his mind; it appears his aunt has become obsessed with horoscopes and has been withdrawing large amounts of money from family business. (£7.99)

The Mammoth Book of Dracula - Stephen Jones

This tribute to the world's greatest vampire collects "Dracula" fiction by masters of dark fantasy. (£7.99)

Strangers on the 16:02 - Priya Basil

A Quick Read: a violent incident on a train causes two strangers to come together... (£1.99)

Clouded Vision - Linwood Barclay

A Quick Read. Keisha Ceylon is a psychic. At least, that's what she passes herself off as. (£1.99)

REISSUES

How the Two Ivans Quarrelled and Other Russian Comic Stories - Nikolai Gogol et al

The first story portrays two exceptionally close friends and the mortal insult that drives them apart; the second story, Ivan Krylov's "Panegyric in Memory of My Grandfather", has an ingenuous narrator praise the nobility and modesty of a landowner; and the final two stories, by the Russian satirist Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin, are satirical attacks on the inability of civil servants to cope with real life, and on Russia's autocracy. (£7.99)

The Suitcase - Sergei Dovlatov

Several years after emigrating from the USSR, the author discovers the battered suitcase he had brought with him gathering dust at the back of a wardrobe. As he opens the suitcase, the seemingly undistinguished items he finds inside take on a riotously funny life of their own as Dovlatov inventories the circumstances under which he acquired them. (£7.99)

The Fountain Overflows - Rebecca West

Rose Aubrey is one of a family of four children. Their father, Piers, is the disgraced son of an Irish landowning family, a violent, noble and quite unscrupulous leader of popular causes. His Scottish wife, Clare, is an artist, a tower of strength, fanatically devoted to a musical future for her daughters. (£10.99)

Mist Over Pendle - Robert Neill

The classic tale of witchcraft set in a wild corner of Lancashire in a time when the ancient fear of demons and witches was still a part of life ... and death. (£6.99)

When I Was Otherwise - Stephen Benatar; Gillian Carey

The only available edition of this moving and skilful evocation of life in old age. With believable, fallible and highly engaging individuals, plus the social and cultural backgrounds of the protagonist's lives described vividly and with precision, this is often compared to Ayckbourn and Austen. (£8.99)

ART & CRAFT

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll, ill. Tove Jansson

Over forty years after she presented Lewis Carroll's masterpiece to a Scandinavian audience, Tove Jansson's beautifully illustrated edition of the original text of this classic work is finally made available to an English-speaking audience. (£12.99)

The Hunting of the Snark - Lewis Carroll, ill. Tove Jansson

In 1959 Tove Jansson was commissioned to illustrate a Swedish edition of Lewis Carroll's miniature masterpiece. It proved an inspired choice, as the enigmatic charms of Jansson's illustrative style bring to life the beauty and strangeness of Carroll's tale. Now, for the first time, these beautiful illustrations are matched with Lewis Carroll's original English text. (£12.99)

Cartooning : Philosophy and Practice - Ivan Brunetti 9.99

The best cartooning is efficient visual storytelling - fifteen lessons on the art of cartooning, moving the reader from spontaneous drawings to single-panel strips and complicated multipage stories, with simple, creative exercises and assignments.(£9.99)

The Mammoth Book of Tattoo Art - Lal Hardy (£10.99)

Knit Your Own Royal Wedding - Fiona Goble

With a backdrop of Westminster Abbey included, so that you can display your creations in authentic surroundings. (£9.99)

BIOGRAPHY

Red Dust Road - Jackie Kay

From the moment when, as a little girl, she realizes that her skin is a different colour from that of her beloved mum and dad, to the tracing and finding of her birth parents, her Highland mother and Nigerian father, Jackie Kay's journey in "Red Dust Road" is one of unexpected twists, turns and deep emotions. (£8.99)

Notes to My Mother-in-Law - Phyllida Law

'My mother-in-law Annie lived with us for 17 years and was picture-book perfect.' It took a while before the family realised that Annie was increasingly (as she would put it) 'Mutt and Jeff'. So Phyllida began to write out the day's gossip at the kitchen table, putting her notes by Annie's bed before going to hers. (£7.99)

Road to the Dales: The Story of a Yorkshire Lad - Gervase Phinn

A snapshot of growing up in Yorkshire in the 1950s, told with his wicked ear for the comical and sharp eye for detail, full of poignant memories. (£7.99)

FOOD

River Cottage: Cakes - Pam Corbin (£14.99)

Traditional baking at its very best, with over 75 adaptable recipes including Macaroons, Meringues, Fairy Cakes (and their counterpart - Gnome Cakes), the classic Victoria Sandwich, Yorkshire Rhubarb Gingerbread, Walnut Cake, Blueberry Yoghurt Cake, Orange Cake with Earl Grey Icing, and the glorious Battenberg Cake.

River Cottage Baby and Toddler Cookbook - Nikki Duffy (£14.99)

Olive Oil, Garlic & Parsley: Dairy- & Egg-free Cooking for Pleasure - Sue Lermon (£14.99)

GARDENING

RHS Good Fruit and Veg Guide (£9.99)

GIFTS

Where's Wally?: The Phenomenal Postcard Book - Martin Handford (£6.99)

HISTORY

The English Castle : 1066-1650 - John Goodall
As homes or ruins, the historic castles which still stud our landscape are today largely objects of curiosity. For centuries, however, they were at the heart of the kingdom's social and political life. This is a riveting architectural study that sets this legion of buildings in historical context, tracing their development from the Norman Conquest in 1066 through the civil wars of the 1640s, exploring their varied architecture their changing roles in warfare, politics, domestic living, and governance.Over 350 illustrations. (£45)

Marking the Hours: English People and Their Prayers, 1240-1570 - Eamon Duffy

A richly illustrated look at the most intimate and most widely used book of the later Middle Ages. (£16.99)

Winnie in Space - Valerie Thomas and Korky Paul
This galactic picture book takes Winnie and Wilbur on an amazing journey into outer space. With flying saucers, shooting stars and even space rabbits, Winnie’s off on another adventure! Age: 2 - 5yrs. (£5.99)

Scorpia Rising- Anthony Horowitz
This gripping final mission brings together Alex Rider's old enemies to frame the teenage superspy in an unstoppable plot of revenge, from which he can never return. Pursued from Europe to North Africa and Cairo's city of the dead - this is the twistiest and most deadly plot of any Alex Rider mission yet. Ages: 10 + (£6.99)

Wreckers - Julie Hearn
The box had been sealed and hidden for hundreds of years, but what lay within it was only dormant. A stunning new novel from Carnegie Medal shortlisted author, drawing on the myth of Pandora’s box. Ages: 11+ ( £6.99)

Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and longlisted for the Orange Prize, a hauntingly beautiful tale set in Jamaica during the last turbulent years of slavery and the early years of freedom that followed. (£7.99)

Olivier is a French aristocrat, the traumatized child of survivors of the Revolution. Parrot the son of an itinerant printer who always wanted to be an artist but has ended up a servant. Born on different sides of history, their lives will be brought together by their travels in America. Shortlisted for Man Booker Prize for Fiction 2010. (£7.99)

A startling encounter on a New York subway platform leads two strangers to a run-down tenement where a life or death decision must be made via a dialectic redolent of the best of Beckett. Beautifully crafted and consistently thought-provoking. (£7.99)

On a cold, quiet day between Christmas and the New Year, a man's body is found in an abandoned apartment. His friends look on, but they're dead, too. Their bodies found in squats and sheds and alleyways across the city. Victims of a bad batch of heroin, they're in the shadows. (£7.99)

This is the first commercial literary work to emerge from inside Palestine: a multi-generational story about a Palestinian family. Forcibly removed from the olive-farming village of Ein Hod by the newly formed state of Israel in 1948, the Abulhejos are displaced to live in canvas tents in the Jenin refugee camp. We follow the Abulhejo family as they live through a half century of violent history. (£7.99)

Jacob Smith's a tactical firearms officer - a handsome, popular, financially secure specialist, no less. He's also married, with two children; and a connoisseur of fine cinema. A darkly humorous tale of an out-of-control policeman experiencing a spectacular breakdown. (£7.99)

Major Ernest Pettigrew (Ret'd), born in Lahore, is drawn into an unexpected friendship with Mrs. Ali, the widowed village shopkeeper of Pakistani descent born in Cambridge, drawn together by a shared love of Literature and the loss of their respective spouses. (£7.99)

Mma Ramotswe and Mma Makutsi are called to a safari lodge in Botswana's Okavango Delta to carry out a delicate mission on behalf of a former guest. The Okavango is a paradise of teeming wildlife, majestic grasslands and sparkling water, but it is also home to rival safari operators, fearsome crocodiles and disgruntled hippopotamuses. (£7.99)

A young woman, her two very different grandmothers, Isa and May, and the secrets that families keep. (£7.99)

Girl in a Blue Dress - Gaynor Arnold
Booker and Orange listed novel based on a retelling of Dickens's life with his estranged wife taking centre stage (£7.99)

Leningrad, 1952. Andrei, a young hospital doctor, and Anna, a nursery school teacher, are forging a life together in the postwar, postsiege wreckage. But their happiness is precarious, like that of millions of Russians who must avoid the claws of Stalin's merciless Ministry of State Security. (£7.99)

Started Early, Took My Dog - Kate Atkinson
A day like any other for security chief Tracy Waterhouse, until she makes a purchase she hadn't bargained for. The fourth novel featuring Jackson Brodie. (£7.99)

One cold January day the police are called to a sleepy little hamlet in the north of Sweden where they discover a savagely murdered man lying in the snow. As they begin their investigation they notice that the village seems eerily quiet and deserted. Going from house to house, looking for witnesses, they uncover a crime unprecedented in Swedish history. (£7.99)

From the author of "Duende", gripping Spanish detective fiction. Either you kill the bull, or the bull kills you - traditional proverb. Chief Inspector Max Camara hates bullfighting, but one hot afternoon in Valencia he has to replace his boss, judging a festival corrida, starring Spain's most famous young matador. (£12.99)

Banks isn't back, and that's the problem. If DCI Alan Banks had been in his office when his old neighbour came calling, perhaps it would have turned out differently. Perhaps an innocent man would still be alive. (£7.99)

Completes the John Russell series series set in World War II - Russell must reach Berlin ahead of the advancing Red Army to save his son and girlfriend (£7.99)

To celebrate the 50th anniversary of Penguin Modern Classics, a selection of novellas and story collections from some of the best - good value at £3.00 for around 100 pages and a chance to sample authors you’ve wondered about or unfamiliar pieces from well-known authors.

In a tour-de-force of writing by the businessman, political satirist, and spy Daniel Defoe, Moll tells her own story, a vivid and racy tale of a woman's experience in the seamy side of life in late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century England and America. (£6.99)

The Penguin Book of Victorian Women in Crime: The Great Female Detectives, Crooks, and Villainesses

During the late Victorian era the New Woman was breaking all the rules - in crime fiction as everywhere else, shadowing suspects through London fog, crawling through secret passages, fingerprinting corpses - and sometimes committing a lesser cime in order to solve a murder. (£12.99)

Outside a London theatre a throng of people wait expectantly for the last performance of a popular musical. But as the doors open at last, something spoils all thought of entertainment: a man in the queue is found murdered by the deadly thrust of a stiletto... (£7.99)

Beneath the sea cliffs of the south coast, suicides are a sad but common fact. Yet even the hardened coastguard knows something is wrong when a beautiful young film actress is found lying dead on the beach one morning. (£7.99)

On his train back to Scotland for a well-earned rest, Inspector Grant learns that a fellow passenger, one Charles Martin, has been found dead - and he follows a trail to the remote Outer Hebrides. (£7.99)

No Place Like Home: A New Beginning with the Dogs of Afghanistan - Pen Farthing

When Pen Farthing brought two dogs home from his tour of Afghanistan, little did he know what he had begun. Twelve months later, he has left the Marines, after 20 years service, to run his charity full time, giving more rescued dogs the chance of a new life in the West. (£6.99)

Eric Gill (1882-1940) is one of the twentieth century's most controversial artists. This illustrated introduction focuses on the clarity of Gill's drawn and cut line and explores his genius as a letter cutter, wood engraver, sculptor and typographer in the light of his refined finished drawings and preparatory sketches. Like all modernists of the early twentieth-century, he used stylised form, explicit sexuality and the influence of other cultures to position himself at the forefront of the avant-garde. (£9.99)

Annie Proulx, one of America's finest writers, invites us to share her experience in the building of her new home on a rich plot of untouched, unspoilt prairie and her pleasure in uncovering of the layers of American history locked beneath the topsoil. (£16.99)

The Girl in the Painted Caravan: Memories of a Romany Childhood - Eva Petulengro

Born into a Romany gypsy family in 1939, Eva Petulengro's childhood seemed to her to be idyllic in every way. She would travel the country with her family in their painted caravan and spend evenings by the fire as they sang and told stories of their past. Vividly captures a way of life that has now all but disappeared. (£6.99)

Growing up in rural Yorkshire in the 1940s and 50s, Terry Wilson spent his school days hunting down Just William books, cutting up apples to help with fractions and staring out the window dreaming up new schemes. But it was on the Dales themselves that Terry came into his own. (£6.99)

I Shall Not Hate: A Gaza Doctor's Journey on the Road to Peace and Human Dignity - Izzeldin Abuelaish

A Palestinian doctor's inspiring account of his extraordinary life, growing up in poverty but determined to treat his patients in Gaza and Israel regardless of their ethnic origin. He is the father whose three daughters were killed by Israeli shells on 16 January 2009, during Israel's incursion into the Gaza Strip. (£16.99)

In August, 2005, as Hurricane Katrina blew in, the city of New Orleans had been abandoned by most citizens. But resident Abdulrahman Zeitoun, though his wife and family had gone, refused to leave. For days he traversed an apocalyptic landscape of flooded streets by canoe. He protected neighbours' properties, fed trapped dogs and rescued survivors. But eventually he came to the attention of those 'guarding' this drowned city. Only then did Zeitoun's nightmare really begin. "Zeitoun" is the powerful, ultimately uplifting true story of one man's courage when confronted with an awesome force of nature followed by more troubling human oppression. (£8.99)

New edition: more than just a collection of Hugh's recipes, this book is a witty, practical guide to the River Cottage lifestyle. (£25.00)

Grow Your Food: A Guide for Brand-new Gardeners - Jon Clift; Amanda Cuthbert (£6.95)

Chickens, Ducks and Bees: A Beginner's Guide to Keeping Livestock in the Garden - Paul Peacock (£9.99)

Kids in the Wild Garden: Fun Activities for the Great Outdoors - Elizabeth McCorquodale (£9.95)

Carthage Must be Destroyed: The Rise and Fall of an Ancient Civilization - Richard Miles (£10.99)

Corrugated Iron Buildings - Nick Thomson (Shire)
The author draws on a wide range of research to highlight the significance of these often overlooked buildings in Britain and across the world. (£6.99)

Gathers together some of the UK's leading contemporary authors - including Hilary Mantel and P D James - to share their experiences of the highs and lows of the writing life. (£15.95)

Raphael's Astrological Ephemeris 2012: of the Planets' Places for 2012 (£5,99)

Why do we lie? Because we are frightened of being humiliated, being treated like an object, being rejected, losing control of things, and, most of all, we are frightened of uncertainty. We are capable of changing, but will we choose to do this? (£9.99)

A brand new collection of astonishing true stories about the many different ways our guardian angels speak to us and reveal their divine messages of comfort, guidance and inspiration. (£6.99)

A generous portrait of folk music, embracing a Russian wedding near the Arctic Circle, a group song in a small rainforest village in Brazil, and an Uzbek dance tune in Afghanistan. He looks in detail at three poignant songs from three widely separated regions--northern Afghanistan, Jewish Eastern Europe, and the Anglo-American world--with musical notation and lyrics included. He goes on to sketch out the turbulent times of folk music today and tomorrow, confronting new possibilities, frameworks, and challenges. (£7.99)

A meditation on the act of listening and the nature of performance, Cage's controversial piece became the iconic statement of the meaning of silence in art and is a landmark work of American music. Gann provides an expert's analysis, finding resemblances and resonances of 4'33" in wide-ranging artworks and providing a much-needed cultural context for this fundamentally challenging and often misunderstood piece. (£10.99)

This new edition of Shakespeare's much-loved Sonnets was developed by and for the Royal Shakespeare Company. (£4.99)

When Love Speaks: Poetry and Prose for Weddings, Relationships and Married Life - Adam O'Riordan (£7.99)

British bird poetry is as old as British poetry. Simon Armitage and amateur ornithologist Tim Dee gather the best of the past and the most promising of the present, as well as some overlooked gems. (£9.99)

Eric Hobsbawm provides a fascinating and insightful overview of Marxism. He investigates its influences and analyses the spectacular reversal of Marxism's fortunes over the past thirty years. As the free market reaches its extreme limits in the economic and environmental fallout, a reassessment of capitalism's most vigorous and eloquent enemy has never been more timely. (£20)

The 4-Percent Universe: Dark Matter, Dark Energy, and the Race to Discover the Rest of Reality - Richard Panek

Only 4% of the universe consists of the matter that makes up you, me, this form, and every star and planet. Over the last few decades scientists have been battling to understand the rest: the strange dark matterA" and even stranger dark energyA". In exhilarating and behind-the-scenes detail, Panek takes us on a tour of the bitter rivalries and fruitful collaborations, the eureka moments and blind alleys, that have fuelled the search, redefined science, and reinvented the universe. (£12.99)

Her name was Henrietta Lacks, but scientists know her as HeLa. She was a poor Southern tobacco farmer whose cancer cells - taken without her knowledge - became one of the most important tools in medicine. Shortlisted for Wellcome Trust Book Prize 2010. (£7.99)

Explores how the modern number system matured over centuries, explains the various number types and shows how they behave, introduces key concepts such as integers, fractions, real numbers, and imaginary numbers; and also demonstrates the practical interactions and modern applications, such as encryption of confidential data on the internet. (£7.99)

Delusions of Gender: The Real Science Behind Sex Differences - Cordelia Fine

A vehement attack on the latest pseudo-scientific claims about the differences between the sexes. This startling, original and witty book shows the surprising extent to which boys and girls, men and women are made - and not born, empowering us to break free of the supposed predestination of our sex chromosomes. Shortlisted for John Llewelyn Rhys Memorial Prize 2010. (£8.99)

If you want to go in one direction, the best route may involve going in another. The richest men and women are not the most materialistic; the happiest people are not necessarily those who focus on happiness and the most profitable companies are not always the most profit-oriented.(£8.99)

The Selfish Society: How We All Forgot to Love One Another and Made Money Instead - Sue Gerhardt

We have come to inhabit a culture of selfish individualism which has confused material well-being with happiness. As society became bigger and more competitive, working life was cut off from child-rearing and the new economics ignored people's emotional needs. (£8.99)

Brian Moore, or 'Pitbull' as he came to be known during nearly a decade at the heart of the England rugby team's pack, established himself as one of the game's original hard men at a time when rugby was still an amateur sport. Since his retirement, he has earned a reputation as an equally uncompromising commentator. William Hill Sports Book of the Year 2010. (£7.99)

A Day to Die for: 1996: Everest's Worst Disaster - The Untold True Story - Graham Ratcliffe

Jon Krakauer's international bestseller "Into Thin Air", claimed by many as the best in its genre, left the world reeling in astonishment at the worst disaster to beset climbers on the world's highest mountain: Everest. But was the whole truth told? This book from a first-hand witness, reveals for the first time the full, startling facts that led to the 1996 tragedy. (£11.99)

Call Out Mountain Rescue?: A Pocket Guide to Safety on the Hill - Judy Whiteside (£9.99)

Backbone of England: Life and Landscape on the Pennine Watershed - Andrew Bibby

From the locally-based author and journalist, a paperback edition of his exploration of the Pennines along the route of the watershed that separates the water flowing westwards to the Irish Sea and the Atlantic from the water heading towards the North Sea. (£8.99)

Highly praised and entertaining guide to Germany: a country much like our own - Protestant, aggressive and committed to eating some very strange food. (£9.99)

A new Lonely Planet Guide to Paris, and new French, German and Italian phrasebooks; new Rough Guide to Japan.

Independent Hostel Guide, 2011 : Holiday Accommodation for Groups, Families and Individuals - Sam Dalley (£5.95)

Tommy Carr was a kind man; Eve had been able to tell that after half an hour of knowing him. There had never been a day when he had not shown her some kindness. And so it was now, she found the sprays of plum blossom he had left ready for her in the jug, just as he always did on this April day. A transfixing parable of greed and goodness and an extraordinary miracle. (£10.00)

As a train pulls into Yaroslav Station, Moscow, a teenage girl - Maya - wakes to an unimaginable horror. Her baby has been taken ... Increasingly disillusioned with the workings of Moscow's Prosecution Service, Arkady Renko is teetering on the brink of resignation when he becomes drawn into a strange new case. (£15.99 at The Book Case)

In a silent valley in southern France in an isolated stone farmhouse lives an alcoholic so haunted by his violent past that he's become incapable of all meaningful action, letting his hunting dogs starve and his land go to ruin. His sister lives alone nearby, dreaming of retribution. A visitor from London sets a frightening and unstoppable series of consequences in motion. (£7.99)

Jack is five. He lives with his Ma. They live in a single, locked room. They don't have the key. Jack and Ma are prisoners. Shortlisted for Man Booker Prize for Fiction 2010. (£7.99)

Successful lawyer Filth marries Elisabeth in Hong Kong soon after the War. Reserved, immaculate and courteous, Filth finds it hard to demonstrate his emotions. But Elisabeth is different - a free spirit. A page-turning plot, in a perfect novel which is full of surprises and revelations, as well as the humour and eccentricites for which Jane Gardam's writing is famous. (£7.99)

What is the secret formula for love? Hector, our intrepid psychiatrist, sets off on a new globe-trotting mission and this time he’s looking for LOVE. Sequel to "Hector and the Search for Happiness". (£7.99)

The final episode in the "Man and Boy" trilogy. Harry Silver is settled and happy. But can it last? (£7.99)

Imtiaz Raina, born in Sheffield, young father, young husband, son of loving parents, has decided to die. He has convinced himself that he believes in his cause. And before he leaves home for a final time, he wants to be sure his family understand why. (£12.99)

A boy growing up in suburban Calcutta in the 1960s experiences the world through the eyes of others. When a seemingly random act of violence threatens his vision of the world, he begins piecing together events for himself. I was disappointed in his last one which seemed a contrived cut-and-paste; let’s hope this is a return to form. (£7.99)

Jeannie is twenty years old and she's Lancashire's worst perfume girl. She works in her small town's department store, where all the other girls have perfect make-up (if a little too orange, and a mite too thick) and hair in buoyant ponytails. Jeannie, with wet hair and pale skin, doesn't fit the bill. From the Guardian feature writer, born in Wigan. (£7.99)

There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbour's Baby: Scary Fairy Tales - Ludmilla Petrushevskaya

In these blackly comic tales of revenge, disturbing deaths and haunting melancholy, Ludmilla Petrushevskaya blends miracles and madness in the darkest of modern fairy tales. (£9.99)

A scrap of glass and metal has lain lost and forgotten for fifteen hundred years in the ancient heartland of England, the lost core of a flawless Sphere made by the greatest of the Anglo-Saxon CraeftLords in memory of the one he loved. The Hydden - little people existing on the borders of our world - break the silence of centuries. First of a quartet. (£7.99)

Hundreds of years in the future, the world is an alarmingly different place. Life is lived according to The Rulebook and social hierarchy is determined by your perception of colour. Eddie Russett is an above average Red who dreams of moving up the ladder by marriage to Constance Oxblood. Until he is sent to the Outer Fringes where he meets Jane -- a lowly Grey with an uncontrollable temper and a desire to see him killed. (£7.99)

A story about conditional love, cowardice and the possibility of redemption that sweeps from the trenches of Passchendaele to the terrorist-besieged streets of London today. (£7.99)

Iran, 1950. Spring has arrived, and as the women prepare the festivities, Sadiq waits for a suitor to knock on the door. This novel brings to life the Iranian Revolution from an author who experienced it. (£7.99)

Master painter Hans Memling is without peer in the artistic world of fifteenth-century Bruges, but when he falls in love with the daughter of his powerful patron, the Duke of Burgundy, his life begins to unravel ass he accepts an invitation to visit old allies in London. (£7.99)

1326. In an England riven with conflict, knight and peasant alike find their lives turned upside down by the warring factions of Edward II, with his hated favourite, Hugh le Despenser, and Edward's estranged queen Isabella and her lover, Sir Roger Mortimer. Yet even in such times the brutal slaughter of an entire family, right down to a babe in arms, still has the power to shock. (£7.99)

The discovery of a corpse washed up on a beach in an Icelandic backwater sparks a series of events that propels the village of Hvalvik's police sergeant Gunnhildur into deep waters. (£7.99)

It is a cold wintry morning in the picturesque port town of Visby when art dealer Egon Wallin's battered and naked body is found hanging from a gate in the town's old city walls. His was a very public death, but who killed him and why? As Inspector Knutas begins his investigation, Egon's secrets quickly begin to come to the surface. (£7.99)

If twelve-year-old Annie hadn't been angry with her mother, she would never have taken her younger brother William on a secret fishing trip deep into the North Idaho woods and they would never have witnessed the execution nor looked straight into the eyes of the four executioners. Now they're running for their lives. (£7.99)

Seventeen-year-old Haley never gave her parents a moment's worry until one morning her mother wakes to find that she didn't come home the night before. Wendy Tynes is a reporter on a mission: to identify and bring down sexual predators via televised sting operations. (£7.99)

Monsieur Goriot is one of a disparate group of lodgers at Mademe Vauquer's dingy Parisian boarding house. At first his wealth inspires respect, but as his circumstances are mysteriously reduced he becomes shunned by those around him, and soon his only remaining visitors are his two beautifully dressed daughters. (£8.99)

Lewis Carroll’s epic nonsense poem is a much darker work than the earlier Alice books: ten characters whose names begin with B, disappear, go mad and generally find themselves struggling to navigate an impossible path through a nonsensical world. This new edition is a facsimile of the 1876 original, with reproductions of the original illustrations by Henry Holiday and is bound in red cloth with luxury gold embossing. (£12.95)

When a mysterious seafarer puts up at the Admiral Benbow, young Jim Hawkins is haunted by his frightening tales. The discovery of a treasure map sets Jim and his companions in search of buried gold. (£5.99)

Set in 1820s Sweden, the story of a defrocked minister named Gosta Berling, involving snow, wolves, supernatural elements and eccentric upper-class characters. It was made into a silent film starring Greta Garbo in 1924. (£9.99)

Kikuji has been invited to a tea ceremony by a mistress of his dead father. He is shocked to find there the mistress's rival and successor, Mrs. Ota, and that the ceremony has been awkwardly arranged for him to meet his potential future bride. (£9.99)

The Sound of the Mountain - Yasunari Kawabata, trans. Edward G. Seidensticker

Ogata Shingo is growing old, and his memory is failing him. At night he hears only the sound of death in the distant rumble from the mountain. The relationships which have previously defined his life - with his son, his wife, and his attractive daughter-in-law - are dissolving, and Shingo is caught between love and destruction. (£9.99)

Brave New Worlds: Dystopian Stories - Ursula K. Le Guin; Cory Doctorow; Paolo Bacigalupi; Orson Scott Card, ll. Nick Gaetano

Brings together the best dystopian fiction of the last 30 years, demonstrating the diversity that flourishes in this compelling subgenre. (£11.99)

A lone man adrift in the American West with his own memories and an octopus in a bathysphere. First published 1968. "Nog is to literature what Dylan is to lyrics" said Village Voice. Good cover. (£8.99)

The Michael Dibdin Aurelio Zen books are due to become a major TV drama series from the Wallander team, with Rufus Sewell:

When, one dark night in November, Prince Ludovico Ruspanti fell a hundred and fifty feet to his death in the chapel at St. Peter's, Rome, there were a number of questions to be answered. Inspector Aurelio Zen finds that getting the answers isn't easy, as witness after witness is mysteriously silenced - by violent death. (£6.99)

Police Commissioner Aurelio Zen had crossed swords with the establishment before - and lost. But from the depths of a mundane desk job in Rome he is unexpectedly transferred to Perugia to take over an explosive kidnapping case involving one of Italy's most powerful families. (£6.99)

Inspector Zen has a problem: an impossible murder, recorded on the closed-circuit video of Oscar Burolo's top-security Sardinian fortress. As Zen gets to work, he is once again plunged into a menacing and violent world where his own life is soon at risk. (£6.99)

Furoshiki is the ancient Japanese custom of wrapping objects in a piece of cloth. Rather than using plastic bags for shopping or wrapping gifts in throw-away paper, furoshiki allows us to wrap and carry clothes, gifts, food and much more in a variety of beautiful cloths that can be reused time after time. The book starts with the four basic knots and then explains the various folding methods that can be used according to the shape and size of the object. (£7.99)

These novelty knitting projects range from quick and easy to more challenging, and cover apples, pears, mangoes, grapes, cherries and more - there's even a banana to unzip. (£4.99)

You do not need an allotment to produce this abundant crop of vegetables - just needles, yarn and a little knitting know-how. Ranges from everyday carrots and peas to more exotic chili peppers and artichokes. (£4.99)

Italo Calvino once said that he preferred to give false details about his biography since he felt that even the genuine data of a writer's life shed no light on the creative work. But this volume of posthumously collected personal writings is the closest we will ever come to the autobiography of this most private of writers. (£10.99)

A vivid, ironic and delicately nuanced portrait of growing up in colonial Nigeria and inhabiting its 'middle ground', interrogating both his happy memories of reading English adventure stories in secondary school and also the harsher truths of colonial rule. (£9.99)

At the end of "Eat, Pray, Love", Elizabeth Gilbert fell in love with Felipe. Resettling in America, the couple swore eternal fidelity to each other, but also swore to never, ever, under any circumstances get legally married. A witty and intelligent contemplation of marriage that debunks myths, unthreads fears and suggests that sometimes even the most romantic of souls must trade in her amorous fantasies for the humbling responsibility of adulthood. (£7.99)

Soon after Rhoda Janzen turned forty, her husband of fifteen years left her for Bob and a car accident left her injured. Needing a place to rest and pick up the pieces of her life, Rhoda packed her bags, crossed the country, and returned to her Mennonite family's home, where she was welcomed back with open arms and weird advice. (£8.99)

Joanne Limburg thinks things she doesn't want to think, and does things she doesn't want to do. A vividly honest, beautifully told and darkly witty memoir about the quest to understand and manage a life with Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder. (£8.99)

Noam Chomsky surveys the threats and prospects of our early twenty-first century. Exploring challenges such as the growing gap between North and South, American exceptionalism (even under Obama), the fiascos of Iraq and Afghanistan, the Israeli assault on Gaza and the recent financial bailouts, he also sees hope for the future and a way to move forward. (£9.99)

Celebrates the movement's achievement and takes up the challenge of improving more lives through fair dealing with producers. The authors of this collection emphasise the importance of ensuring that farmers and other producers remain the main beneficiaries and explain the tensions between large and small operators. (£12.99)

'I simply wanted to know - for myself and my family - what meat is. Where does it come from? How is it produced? What are the economic, social and environmental effects? Are there animals that it is straightforwardly right to eat? Are there situations in which not eating animals is wrong?’ (£9.99)

Book of Fire: William Tyndale, Thomas More and the Bloody Birth of the English Bible - Brian Moynahan

The great echoing phrases of the King James Bible are largely the work of a man whose genius for words matches Shakespeare. But William Tyndale, the young Gloucestershire tutor who wrote them, paid for them with his life. He was persecuted, exiled and eventually burned at the stake. (£14.99)

For two hundred years after Shakespeare's death, no one thought to argue that somebody else had written his plays. Since then dozens of rival candidates have been proposed as their true author. Shakespeare scholar James Shapiro's fascinating search for the source of this controversy retraces a path strewn with fabricated documents, calls for trials, false claimants, concealed identity and bald-faced deception. (£8.99)

Almost a quarter of a million lives were lost as King and Parliament battled for their religious and political ideals in the English Civil War. This timeless narrative is based on the first-hand accounts of those who witnessed these traumatic events. (£10.99)

The Case for Working with Your Hands: Or Why Office Work is Bad for Us and Fixing Things Feels Good - Matthew B. Crawford (£8.99)

Self-Sufficiency: A Complete Guide to Baking, Carpentry, Crafts, Organic Gardening, Preserving Your Harvest, Raising Animals and More! - Abigail R. Gehring (£16.99)

UEA Creative Writing: Prose - John Boyne; Andrew Cowan, ed. Nathan Hamilton; Rachel Hore (£9.99)

All faiths insist that the Golden Rule is the test of true spirituality - 'Always treat others as you wish to be treated yourself'. Taking as her starting point the teachings of the great world religions, Karen Armstrong demonstrates in twelve practical steps how we can bring compassion to the forefront of our lives. (£12.99)

An enchanting and enriching journey through the upside and the downside of what it means to be human. Firstly there is upside A-Z, which is full of the happy and hopeful aspects of our lives, such as A is for Adventure to Zen is the Place to Be. The other downside half examines the negative parts of our character lives and how we can overcome them to lead more positive and fulfilling lives from A is for Anger, through H is for Hate ... (£9.99)

The 15 Minute Rule: How to Stop Procrastinating and Take Charge of Your Life - Caroline Buchanan (£7.99)

Change Your Life with NLP: The Powerful Way to Make Your Whole Life Better - Lindsey Agness (2 r.e.)

There is a brighter future ahead of you - all you need is to change your thinking. This book uses powerful tools and techniques from the tried and tested field of neuro linguistic programming to reveal how you've got to where you are and what might be holding you back or stopping good things happening. (£10.99)

This rich treasury of prayers for the night aims to soothe, reassure, calm, strengthen, delight and restore. (£7.99)

Discover which of the twelve animal signs you are and how 'the animal that hides in your heart' influences your outlook on life and your relationships with others. (£12.99)

In this new book, Barbel captures the essence of all of her previous titles on Cosmic Ordering to provide you with 21 Golden Rules that allow you to master the concept that seems too good to be true - but nonetheless works. (£7.99)

Granite and Grit: A Walker's Guide to the Geology of British Mountains - Ronald Turnbull

Britain has the most varied geology of any country in the world. This book is a celebration in words and pictures of what its mountains are made of, and how they got there. This in turn determines what they're like to climb, scramble on, or walk over. (£16.99)

On the summit of K2, 1 August 2008, an exhausted band of climbers celebrate - while far below them an ice shelf collapses and sweeps away their ropes. They don't know it yet, but they will be forced to descend into the blackness with no lines. Of the thirty who set out, eleven will never make it back. (£9.99)

What Should I Do?: Philosophers on the Good, the Bad, and the Puzzling ed. Alexander George; Elisa Mai

Is it ever OK to be dishonest? Is it wrong to enjoy violent video games, or to cheat on one's tax returns? Should we be vegetarians? When is war justified? Are there any moral facts, or is morality relative? This is a collection of some of the most interesting questions about ethics to have appeared on the AskPhilosophers.org website during its first five years. (£9.99)

Simon Armitage's new collection is by turns a voice and a chorus: a hyper-vivid array of dramatic monologues, allegories, parables and tall tales. Armitage creates world after world, peculiar yet always particular, where the only certainty is the unexpected. (£6.99)

Jackie Kay's new collection is a lyric counterpart to her memoir, "Red Dust Road". "Fiere" - Scots for 'companion, friend, equal' - is a vivid description of the many paths our lives take, and of how those journeys are made meaningful by our companions on the road: lovers, friends, parents, children, mentors - as well as all the remarkable and chance acquaintances we would not otherwise have made. (£8.99)

Poet John Stammers has created a unique collection, by pairing some of the finest love poems from centuries past with modern counterparts. (£12.99)

Ten Poets: UEA Poetry 2010 - Lavinia Greenlaw; George Szirtes, ed. Nathan Hamilton; Rachel Hore (£8.99)

The periodic table is one of our crowning scientific achievements, but it's also a treasure trove of passion, adventure, betrayal and obsession. The fascinating tales in "The Disappearing Spoon" follow carbon, neon, silicon, god and every single element on the table as the play out their parts in human history, finance, mythology, conflict, the arts, medicine and the lives of the (frequently) mad scientists who discovered them. (£20)

New Pocket Rough Guides to Barcelona, London and Paris, and Rough Guides to England, India and New York.

Previous Months' New Titles