From Lucian Heatherington-Jones, an adolscent from Croydon, his meeting with a mirth-seeking sect plunges him into a series of nightmarish metamorphoses from which he can only be saved by the wise and magnanumous Fotis.

A work in three parts, Things Written Randomly in Doubt starts with aphorisms in “How Not to Be a Ruminant”, shifts to essays in “Weights and Counterweights”, and concludes with poetry in “By the Metre”.

Standing one evening at the window of her house by the sea, Anne Quirk sees a rabbit disappearing in the snow. Nobody remembers her now, but this elderly woman was in her youth a pioneer of British documentary photography. Her beloved grandson, Luke, now a captain with the Royal Western Fusiliers, is on a tour of duty in Afghanistan, part of a convoy taking equipment to the electricity plant at Kajaki. Only when Luke returns home to Scotland does Anne’s secret story begin to emerge, along with his, and they set out for an old guest house in Blackpool where she once kept a room.

In her hugely acclaimed debut Anne Donovan tells an endearing, humorous yet unsentimental story of a working-class Glaswegian man who discovers Buddhism, rejects old habits and seeks a life more meaningful, only to alienate his immediate family in the process.

A young woman determines to find out what happened to her missing sister in this tense and twisting psychological thriller.

The Jewel is set largely during the dramatic years of their courtship in Mauchline, their married life at Ellisland and in Dumfries, and Robert’s early death, all against a background simmering with political intrigue and turmoil. Jean – a beautiful young woman with the voice of a nightingale – has been inexplicably neglected by biographers and historians.

LoveSexTravelMusik is a themed, contemporary story collection like no other. With wit, wisdom, insight and pathos, it examines men and women of all ages who, through the advent of discount air travel, play out their lives and loves across the globe, and captures the isolation, dislocation and occasional epiphanies of those who find themselves a thousand miles from home, and those who long to be.

In the early hours of Thursday, July 10, 1919 hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers rushed out onto the streets and rooftops and gaped up into the sky as a great silver ship, hundreds of feet long, rolled slowly across the city. Restaurants, hotels, theatres and bars emptied as people took to the street to gaze upwards. The ship seemed to hover over the New York Times building in 42nd street before turning its bow to the east and heading off towards the Atlantic.