Nearing her one-hundredth birthday, Roseanne McNulty faces an uncertain future, as the Roscommon Regional Mental hospital where she's spent the best part of her adult life prepares for closure. Over the weeks leading up to this upheaval, she talks often with her psychiatrist Dr Grene, and their relationship intensifies and complicates. Told through their respective journals, the story that emerges is at once shocking and deeply beautiful. Refracted through the haze of memory and retelling, Roseanne's story becomes an alternative, secret history of Ireland's changing character and the story of a life blighted by terrible mistreatment and ignorance, and yet marked still by love and passion and hope.

Two men are massacred in an expensive Moscow bar. But the bullets miss their target: Alexei Volkovoy — Volk for short. He's a deadly, battle-hardened veteran of Russia's brutal war in Chechnya, and he serves two masters: Maxim, a psychotic mafia kingpin; and a military man known only as the General. By his side is Valya, an exotic beauty and the most dangerous weapon in Volk's arsenal. Together they are commissioned to steal a long-lost masterpiece from St Petersburg's Hermitage Museum. Volk must choose which powerful man he will betray in order to escape with the painting and with his life. Volk's Game announces Alexei Volkovoy as the boldest, most unforgettable hero of a new generation.

Anthony is a British journalist whose American wife, Lucy, has suddenly died. Grieving and haunted, he becomes obsessed with her youth and the years he missed before he met her. To find out more, he travels to a remote part of the Nevada desert to meet Lucy's first husband. Their encounter is the beginning of a journey that takes him across the world, to the edge of madness, and into the corners of the human heart. It is a journey in which he is never at peace and never far from the woman he still loves.

Ricardo Somocurcio is in love with a bad girl. He loves her as a teenager known as 'Lily' in Lima in 1950, where she claims to be from Chile but vanishes the moment her claim is exposed as fiction. He loves her next in Paris as 'Comrade Arlette', an activist en route to Cuba, an icy, remote lover who denies knowing anything about the Lily of years gone by. Whoever the bad girl turns up as and however poorly she treats him, Ricardo is doomed to worship her. Gifted liar and irresistible, maddening muse — does Ricardo ever know who she really is?

«Set in London in 1989, the year of the fatwah and the fall of the Berlin Wall, this is a thriller with a background of raves, ecstasy, religious ferment and sexual passion. By the author of «The Buddha of Suburbia» and «Sammy and Rosie Get Laid»..»

Juxtaposes two tales about mothers, trans-sexuality, kitchens, love, tragedy, and the terms they all come to in the minds of a pair of free-spirited young women in contemporary Japan.

Things have never been easy for Oscar. A ghetto nerd living with his Dominican family in New Jersey, he's sweet but disastrously overweight. He dreams of becoming the next J.R.R. Tolkien and he keeps falling hopelessly in love. With dazzling energy and insight, Diaz immerses us in the tumultuous lives of Oscar and his family and their attempts to find love and belonging. Rendered with uncommon warmth and humour, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is an exciting and completely original first novel from Junot Diaz.

Venetia Aldridge QC is a distinguished barrister. When she agrees to defend Garry Ashe, accused of the brutal murder of his aunt, it is one more opportunity to triumph in her career as a criminal lawyer. But just four weeks later, Miss Aldridge is found dead. Commander Adam Dalgliesh, called in to investigate, finds motives for murder among the clients Venetia has defended, her professional colleagues, her family — even her lover. As Dalgliesh narrows the field of suspects, a second brutal murder draws them into greater complexities of intrigue and evil.

In July 2004, Barack Obama electrified the Democratic National Convention with an address that spoke to Americans across the political spectrum. One phrase in particular anchored itself in listeners' minds, a reminder that for all the discord and struggle to be found in our history as a nation, we have always been guided by a dogged optimism in the future, or what Obama called the audacity of hope. The Audacity of Hope is Barack Obama's call for a different brand of politics — a politics for those weary of bitter partisanship and alienated by the endless clash of armies we see in congress and on the campaign trail; a politics rooted in the faith, inclusiveness, and nobility of spirit at the heart of our improbable experiment in democracy. He explores those forces — from the fear of losing to the perpetual need to raise money to the power of the media — that can stifle even the best-intentioned politician. He also writes, with surprising intimacy and self-deprecating humor, about settling in as a senator, seeking to balance the demands of public service and family life, and his own deepening religious commitment. At the heart of this book is Barack Obama's vision of how we can move beyond our divisions to tackle concrete problems. He examines the growing economic insecurity of American families, the racial and religious tensions within the body politic, and the transnational threat — from terrorism to pandemic — that gather beyond our shores. And he grapples with the role that faith plays in a democracy — where it is vital and where it must never intrude. Underlying his stories about family, friends, and members of the Senate is a vigorous search for connection: the foundation for a radically hopeful political consensus. A public servant and a lawyer, a professor and a father, a Christian and a skeptic, and above all a student of history and human nature, Barack Obama has written a book of transforming power. Only by returning to the principles that gave birth to our Constitution, he says, can Americans repair a political process that is broken, and restore to working order a government that has fallen dangerously out of touch with millions of ordinary Americans. Those Americans are out there, he writes — waiting for Republicans and Democrats to catch up with them.

«The latest volume in the glorious bestiary «Flanimals» features the prolific class of flying, crawling invertebrates collectively known as Blugs. There are an endless variety of Movs, Bants and Zubs. The metamorphosis from Monk Worm to Frag Drier. And the evil incarnate that is the Bletchling. It is compulsive bedtime reading for children and disturbed adults alike. Night, night. And mind the Blugs don't bite.»

Is Santa Claus really a magic mushroom in disguise? Was Alice in Wonderland a thinly veiled psychedelic mushroom odyssey? Did mushroom tea kick-start ancient Greek philosophy? This book tells the story of how hallucinogenic mushrooms, once shunned in the West as the most pernicious of poisons, came to be the illicit drug of choice.

«An atmospheric mystery set in St Petersburg in the winter of 1867 sees detective Porfiry Petrovich taking his first murder case since Dostoevsky's «Crime and Punishment». When two frozen bodies are found in a park, he begins to suspect that the truth may be more complex than others wish him to believe, as his investigations lead him to a shocking discovery which reveals the city's darkest secrets. «A Gentle Axe» is utterly absorbing and tense from its dramatic opening through to its shocking climax.»

An old man sits in a room, with a single door and window, a bed, a desk and a chair. Each day he awakes with no memory, unsure of whether or not he is locked into the room. Attached to the few objects around him are one-word, hand-written labels, and on the desk is a series of vaguely familiar black-and-white photographs and four piles of paper. Then a middle-aged woman called Anna enters and talks of pills and treatment, but also of love and promises. Who is this Mr Blank, and what is his fate? What does Anna represent from his past — and will he have enough time to ever make sense of the clues that arise? After the huge success of The Brooklyn Follies, his new novel sees Auster return to the metaphysical territory familiar from his enormously influential The New York Trilogy. A dark puzzle, and a game that implicates both reader and writer alike, Travels in the Scriptorium is a mind-altering exploration of language, responsibility and the passage of time. 'Travels in the Scriptorium returns to . . . the nihilistic gaiety of Beckett (in particular Krapp) or the sub-dermal violence of Pinter.' New Statesman

It's the year 1793, and Hanno Stiffeniis is a magistrate in Prussia. He has been called to investigate a spate of murders which has reduced the city to a state of terror, under the watchful gaze of his mentor, Kant. Four people have died, and there is no sign of an end to the killing spree. When the killer tries to murder him, the magistrate finds himself confronted by the demons of his own past. Therein lies the sinister source of those murders, and the true reason he has been enticed back to Konigsberg... Hugely atmospheric, entertaining and intelligent, Critique of Criminal Reason is the first in a series of compelling crime novels set in Prussia featuring Hanno Steffeniis.

When an English priest takes over a small Scottish parish, not everyone is ready to accept him. He makes friends with two local youths, Mark and Lisa, and clashes with a world he can barely understand. The town seems to grow darker each night. Fate comes calling and before the summer is out his quiet life is the focus of public hysteria. Meanwhile a religious war is unfolding on his doorstep... Be Near Me is a brilliantly moving story of art and politics, love and change and the way we live now.

Opens in 1944, as the women of a small Welsh farming community wake one morning to find that their husbands have gone. Soon after that a German patrol arrives in their valley.

«Narrated by the twin voices of the artist Butcher Bones, and his 'damaged two-hundred-and-twenty-pound brother' Hugh, «Theft: A Love Story» once again displays Peter Carey's extraordinary flair for language. Ranging from the rural wilds of Australia to Manhattan via Tokyo, it is a brilliant and moving exploration of art, fraud, responsibility and redemption.»

«Why is a left foot either trusty or educated, but a right foot is neither? Why is a bad back pass almost invariably suicidal? Why can you score from a corner with a free header, but never with a free shot? Why are hooligans always a tiny minority even when there seem to be hundreds of them throwing seats across Kenilworth Road? Discover how stock phrases — «schoolboy howler», «sweeper system» — are only part of the story in the artfully twisted language of football. Let Leigh and Woodhouse take you on a journey, from the «top-flight» vocabulary of commentators to the more «speculative efforts» of footballers, from the «Champions League circus» to a «Wednesday night in Rochdale». And prepare to be very entertained.»

Nathan and Tom are an uncle and nephew double-act — one in remission from lung cancer, divorced, and estranged from his only daughter, the other hiding away from his once-promising academic career. Matters change when Lucy, a little girl who refuses to speak, comes into their lives...

Guides us through the monuments and lost paradises, dilapidated Ottoman villas, back streets and waterways of Istanbul — the city of the author's birth and the home of his imagination. This is an account of one man's love affair with the city that has been his home since his birth.