Michael Moore returns to give you the low-down on the ins and outs of voting, answering all those pressing questions you've always wondered about, such as, Why should I vote? It only encourages them. Can my vote be bought (and what's the starting price)? The candidates seem to think I'm stupid. Should I just go along to keep them happy? It seems like just anyone can run for office. Is that a good idea? For anyone who thought voting was just a load of ballots, this is the book you need to read before marking your X. Enfranchisement has never been so exciting!

The naked body of a young woman is found hanging from a tree on a London roadside. Scrawled across her back, the words Dirty Girl. Detective Sergeant Stella Mooney and the AMIP 5 squad are faced with a murder as baffling as it is chilling. With no means to identify the victim and no apparent motive, the case is blocked, until... A man is found on a bench by the river, his throat cut back to the vertebrae. And, as before, the killer has left a trademark comment: Filthy Coward. Stella and her team can see there's a connection: but what? One victim is a young girl — maybe one of the hookers who work the Strip; the other a researcher for a prominent and controversial MP. More evidence is needed. And soon enough, it comes: another death; another message...

Francis Saxover and Diana Brackley, two scientists investigating a rare lichen, discover it has a remarkable property: it retards the aging process. Francis, realising the implications for the world of an ever-youthful, wealthy elite, wants to keep it secret, but Diana sees an opportunity to overturn the male status quo by using the lichen to inspire a feminist revolution. As each scientist wrestles with the implications and practicalities of exploiting the discovery, the world comes ever closer to learning the truth. Trouble With Lichen is a scintillating story of the power wielded by science in our lives and asks how much trust should we place in those we appoint to be its guardians?

In the sleepy English village of Midwich, a mysterious silver object appears and all the inhabitants fall unconscious. A day later the object is gone and everyone awakens unharmed — except that all the women in the village are discovered to be pregnant. The resultant children of Midwich do not belong to their parents: all are blonde, all are golden eyed. They grow up too fast and their minds exhibit frightening abilities that give them control over others and brings them into conflict with the villagers just as a chilling realisation dawns on the world outside. The Midwich Cuckoos is the classic tale of aliens in our midst, exploring how we respond when confronted by those who are innately superior to us in every conceivable way.

You can run from a guilty conscience, but you can't hide... James wasn't much more than a child when he had an affair with Lily. And now, twenty-four years later, Lily confesses to James that their affair led to a daughter, Kate. And Kate desperately needs her father's help: she's wanted for murder. But there is no room for murder in James' life. He has a wife, a good job, a nice house in the country... As Kate comes crashing into his world, so she lights the fuse under his ordered life. Because James has also been keeping a secret — a very dark and deadly one...

For a second she thinks she is dead. Then she opens her eyes and wishes she was. The press call him the Black River Killer and his stats are shocking: 16 murders; not captured in 20 years; the FBI's best profiler — Jack King — burned out and beaten, his career shattered. Jack and his wife now run a hotel in Tuscany. And though he still gets nightmares, rural Italy is a whole world away from BRK's brutal crime scenes in Southern Carolina. Or so Jack thought... As Italian cops discover the body of a young woman — her remains mutilated like BRK's victims — a gruesome package arrives at the FBI, twin events that conspire to lure the profiler back into the hunt. But this time, who is the spider and who is the fly?

Gervase Phinn is back with his tales of life as a schools inspector in Yorkshire. His colourful cast of characters have now become firm favourites — the mostly mad staff at County Hall as well as the children themselves who find ways of embarrassing the school inspectors with innocent ease. We reconvene with Christine Bentley, head teacher of Winnery Nook School and now Gervase's wife and mother of their son, the well-named Mrs. Savage and not forgetting the Queen of Clean — Connie. Gervase Phinn has an extraordinary talent to entertain, and the latest instalment to the Dale Series is heart-warming, wry and will make you laugh out loud.

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On the Road swings to the rhythms of 1950s underground America, jazz, sex, generosity, chill dawns and drugs, with Sal Paradise and his hero Dean Moriarty, traveller and mystic, the living epitome of Beat. Now recognized as a modern classic, its American Dream is nearer that of Walt Whitman than Scott Fitzgerald, and it goes racing towards the sunset with unforgettable exuberance, poignancy and autobiographical passion.

Famously associated with the term ‘magical realism’, Marquez is probably South America’s most famous literary export. Equally tragic, joyful and comical, One Hundred Years of Solitude inhabits a strange dream-like space where very little makes real sense, but everything is mysteriously and vividly alive nonetheless. Blending fantasy and reality seamlessly, the characters struggle hopelessly against a merciless backdrop of madness, corruption and death…all measured out equally with farce and fatality; as profound a statement on the human condition as possible. In every sense, this is literature on the grandest of scales. An acknowledged masterpiece, this is the story of seven generations of the Buendía family and of Macondo, the town they have built. Though little more than a settlement surrounded by mountains, Macondo has its wars and disasters, even its wonders and miracles. A microcosm of Columbian life, its secrets lie hidden, encoded in a book and only Aureliano Buendía can fathom its mysteries and reveal its shrouded destiny. Blending political reality with magic realism, fantasy with comic invention, One Hundred Years of Solitude is one of the most daringly original works of the twentieth century.

Jeremy Paxman is to many the embodiment of Englishness yet even he is sometimes forced to ask: who or what exactly are the English? And in setting about addressing this most vexing of questions, Paxman discovers answers to a few others. Like: • Why do the English actually enjoy feeling persecuted? • What is behind the English obsession with games? • How did they acquire their odd attitudes to sex and to food? • Where did they get their extraordinary capacity for hypocrisy? Covering history, attitudes to foreigners, sport, stereotypes, language and much, much more, The English brims over with stories and anecdotes that provide a fascinating portrait of a nation and its people.

In this fascinating survey of everything from how sounds become speech to how names work, David Crystal answers every question you might ever have had about the nuts and bolts of language in his usual highly illuminating way. Along the way, we find out about eyebrow flashes, whistling languages, how parents teach their children to speak, how politeness travels across languages and how the way we talk show not just how old we are but where we're from and even who we want to be.

From the famous episodes of the whitewashed fence and the ordeal in the cave to the trial of Injun Joe, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer is redolent of life in the Mississippi River towns in which Twain spent his own youth. A somber undercurrent flows through the high humor and unabashed nostalgia of the novel, however, for beneath the innocence of childhood lie the inequities of adult reality-base emotions and superstitions, murder and revenge, starvation and slavery.

Eugenia`s wit, guile and sophistication, and Felix`s debonair vivacity form an uneasy alliance with the Puritan morality and the frugal, domestic virtues of the Americans. A rich and delicately balanced comedy of manners, The Europeans weighs the values of the established order against those of New England society, but makes no simple judgements, only subtle contrasts and beautifully observed comparisons.