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The moving, powerful and urgent English-language debut from one of the brightest young stars in world literatureSuppose you and Pa were gone, and we were lost. What would happen then?A family in New York packs the car and sets out on a road trip. A mother, a father, a boy and a girl, they head south west, to the Apacheria, the regions of the US which used to be Mexico. They drive for hours through desert and mountains. They stop at diners when they’re hungry and sleep in motels when it gets dark. The little girl tells surreal knock knock jokes and makes them all laugh. The little boy educates them all and corrects them when they’re wrong. The mother and the father are barely speaking to each other.Meanwhile, thousands of children are journeying north, travelling to the US border from Central America and Mexico. A grandmother or aunt has packed a backpack for them, putting in a bible, one toy, some clean underwear. They have been met by a coyote: a man who speaks to them roughly and frightens them. They cross a river on rubber tubing and walk for days, saving whatever food and water they can. Then they climb to the top of a train and travel precariously in the open container on top. Not all of them will make it to the border.In a breath-taking feat of literary virtuosity, Lost Children Archive intertwines these two journeys to create a masterful novel full of echoes and reflections – a moving, powerful, urgent story about what it is to be human in an inhuman world.

Across eighteen short stories, Lessing dissects London and its inhabitants with the power for truth and compassion to be expected of the Nobel Prize for Literature 2007.'During that first year in England, I had a vision of London I cannot recall now … it was a nightmare city that I lived in for a year. Then, one evening, walking across the park, the light welded buildings, trees and scarlet buses into something familiar and beautiful, and I knew myself to be at home.'Lessing’s vision of London – a place of nightmares and wonder – underpins this brilliantly multifaceted collection of stories about the city, seen from a cafe table, a hospital bed, the back seat of a taxi, a hospital casualty department; seen, as always, unflinchingly, and compellingly depicted.

A great rollercoaster rags-to-riches-to-rags tale about the first black Hollywood sex goddess.• Like Elvis, like Marilyn, the first black film superstar didn’t die tragically, but lives among us still, changed out of all recognition…• Propelled out of Depression-era poverty by the ambition of her mother and her own talents, young Irene O’Brien finds she attracts attention easily – both welcome (she is talent-spotted from Mississippi to Harlem to Hollywood) and unwelcome (at six, a fat, over-friendly storekeeper gets altogether too excited when she sits on his lap…)• She blazes a trail no other black performer has taken before and becomes an international sex symbol in the 1950s – ‘the black Monroe’• Fame and fortune come running: she is the first black woman to be nominated for an Oscar for Best Actress. But happiness eludes her: her celebrity marriage never works; her daughter is autistic; and the studios soon tire of her as she ages• Her descent into drunkenness and derangement ends with her very mysterious ‘death’ in the mid-1960s at the age of forty-three. But, beaten but not bowed, Venus Johnson rises from the ashes of Irene O’Brien to tell her tale and live out her days in tranquillity…

After the success of The Northern Clemency, shortlisted for the 2008 Man Booker Prize, Philip Hensher brings us another slice of contemporary life, this time the peaceful civility and spiralling paranoia of a small English town.After the success of The Mulberry Empire and The Northern Clemency, which was short-listed for the 2008 Man Booker Prize, Philip Hensher brings us the peaceful civility and spiralling paranoia of the small English town of Handsmouth.Usually a quiet and undisturbed place situated on an estuary, Handsmouth becomes the centre of national attention when an eight-year-old girl vanishes. The town fills with journalists and television crews, who latch onto the public's fearful suspicions that the missing girl, the daughter of one of the town's working-class families, was abducted.This tragic event serves to expose the range of segregated existences in the town, as spectrums of class, wealth and lifestyle are blurred in the investigation. Behind Handsmouth's closed doors and pastoral façade the extraordinary individual lives of the community are exposed. The undisclosed passions of a quiet international aid worker are set against his wife, a woman whose astonishing aptitude for intellectual pursuits, such as piano-playing and elaborate cooking, makes her seem a paragon of virtue to the outside world. A recently-widowed old woman tells a story that details her late discovery of sexual gratification. And the Bears – middle-aged, fat, hairy gay men, given to promiscuity and some drug abuse – have a party.As the search for the missing girl elevates, the case enables a self-appointed authority figure to present the case for increased surveillance, and, as old notions of privacy begin to crack, private lives seep into the public well of knowledge.Handsmouth is a powerful study of the vital importance of individuality, the increasingly intrusive hand of political powers and the unyielding strength of Nature against the worst excesses of human behaviour.

The new novel from Yiyun Li, author of The Vagrants and the Guardian First Book Award-winning A Thousand Years of Good Prayers.When Moran, Ruyu, and Boyang were young, they were involved in a mysterious ‘accident’ in which a young woman was poisoned. Now grown up, the three friends are separated by this incident, and by time and distance. Boyang stayed in China, while Moran and Ruyu emigrated to the United States. All three remain haunted by what really happened.A breathtaking page-turner, Kinder Than Solitude resonates with provocative observations about human nature and the virtues of loyalty. In mesmerizing prose, and with profound philosophical insight, Yiyun Li unfolds this remarkable story, even as she explores the impact of personality and the past on the shape of a person’s present and future.

The new blockbuster from one of the world’s greatest storytellers concludes the extraordinary tale of Emma Harte, the original Woman of Substance, and the powerful Harte clan…Linnet O’Neill, great-granddaughter of Emma Harte, finds herself following in the footsteps of the original woman of substance as she battles to save the family business. She and Emma’s other great-granddaughters are tested to the limit as the final chapter in the extraordinary story of the Harte family draws to a dramatic close…Returning from from her honeymoon full of fresh ideas for bringing the Harte empire into the new century Linnet and her mother, Paula, lock horns in a battle about the future. When Paula falls ill, Linnet finds herself alone at the helm, just as her great-grandmother once was. Will she become the new Emma Harte?Evan Hughes, the American great-granddaughter of Emma, is pregnant and planning her small family wedding. Life seems good until a harsh confrontation with her adopted sister puts Evan in hospital.Tessa Fairley, Paula’s daughter, is ready to start a new life after an acrimonious divorce. But having always believed herself to be her mother’s rightful heir, Tessa is reluctant to forego her chances of the top spot.India Standish, in the midst of planning her own glamorous summer wedding in Ireland, is thrown off balance when her fiancé Dusty’s daughter, Atlanta comes to live with them – closely followed by Dusty’s unstable ex-girlfriend, intent on trouble….However, it is Evan’s sister Angharad who makes the most ripples within the family, trying to infiltrate the quartet of young women and latching on to Jonathan Ainsley, deadly enemy of the Hartes, in the process, putting them all in danger.Then two beloved members of the Harte family unexpectedly die, causing grief and heartbreak. And Jonathan Ainsley seems ever closer to wreaking his revenge…

The funniest debut novel since Tom Sharpe’s Riotous Assembly, only it’s set in Tasmania!Julian Corkle's got small-screenability. His mother tells him he'll be a star one day. 'Twinkle, twinkle,' she says, giving his hair a ruffle.Not everyone shares Julian's dreams of stardom. Television is too much like hairdressing for his father's tastes. A Tasmanian man wants a son for sporting purposes. 'Boys don't like dolls,' he tells Julian, 'They like Dinky Toys.' Not this boy, thinks Julian, who knows better than to tell the truth.Besides, the family already has a sporting hero, Julian's sister Carmel aka 'The Locomotive'. Julian likes his sister, but knows better than to tangle with her bowling arm. It's the same one she uses for punching.Julian Corkle is a Filthy Liar is the ultimate feel-good novel, a book that will have the reader laughing out loud on the back of a bus as it follows Julian's bumpy journey through adolescence, fibbing his way through school and a series of dead-end jobs, to find his ultimate calling as creator of 'The Hog'. It's as if Crocodile Dundee has crashed Muriel's wedding and run off into the desert with Priscilla.

For readers of Melissa Bank or Jhumpa Lahiri: witty, seductive stories of expatriate women, their loves and losses.“Interesting women – are we ever going to be free of them? I meet them everywhere these days, now that there is no longer such a thing as an interesting man…” So drawls the narrator of one of Andrea Lee’s jewel-like stories, herself, undeniably, an Interesting Woman. These gleaming, sensual stories bend a wit worthy of Colette’s on a demimonde of expatriates, teenage ‘pocket divas’, girlfriends, wives, mistresses and daughters. Each focuses on a moment of seduction, of self-discovery, where the mocking detachment of the outsider is briefly pulled aside. An American, chained by her Italian husband’s belief in her conventional wholesomeness, surprises him with two costly call girls for his birthday; but her pleasure in her own daring remains wistfully private. A New England beauty has a brief love affair, alternately lyrical and perverse, with a European prince more than twice her age. A woman, having earlier left her husband ‘in a moment of epic distraction’, has his new ex to stay, changing forever their understanding of the man they both married.‘Interesting Women’ teases the reader with ironic glimpses of the charged games of sexual power between men and women, and women with each other. It is that delicious rarity: a summer read of sophisticated intelligence, whose gorgeous images will linger long.

A riveting and deeply moving portrait of love and marriage.“His hand is growing cold, still she holds it.”The story unfolds over a single night, as Nina sits at the bedside of her husband Philip, whose sudden and unexpected death is the reason for her lonely vigil. Too shocked yet to grieve, she recalls the defining moments of their long marriage, beginning with their first meeting in Paris. As the reader is drawn through select memories – real and imagined – of events that occurred in places as distant and disparate as France, Wisconsin, Hong Kong, Mexico, and California, Tuck reveals the intimacies, dark secrets and overwhelming joys that shaped the lives of Nina and Philip.Moving, powerful, and utterly engaging, ‘I Married You for Happiness’ is a riveting portrait of a forty-three-year-old marriage, an elegant elegy to a husband and a meditation on how chance can affect both a life and love.

An unforgettable, unnerving short story about a writer’s life from one of today’s greatest writers – extracted from her upcoming collection, THE ASSASSINATION OF MARGARET THATCHER.“One summer at the fag-end of the nineties, I had to go out of London to talk to a literary society, of the sort that must have been old-fashioned when the previous century closed. When the day came, I wondered why I’d agreed to it; but yes is easier than no, and of course when you make a promise you think the time will never arrive …”‘How Shall I Know You’ is as unsettling and hauntingly written as we have come to expect from Hilary Mantel, one of Britain’s most accomplished, acclaimed and garlanded writers. It invites us into the usually hidden recesses of a writer’s life, into her hotel rooms, handbags, frustrations, desires, and darkest imaginings.This story is also available in the collection ‘The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher’.