Ajay Chowdhury, the inaugural winner of the Harvill Secker-Bloody Scotland prize, is a tech entrepreneur and theatre director. His children’s book – Ayesha and the Firefish, was published in 2016 and adapted into a musical which premiered in San Francisco. 
 
 
The Waiter (Sunday Times Crime Book of the Month), was published in 2021, and is the first in his critically-acclaimed crime series about Detective Kamil Rahman, an ex-policeman from Kolkata who has moved to Brick Lane in London. It is being adapted for television by Moonage Pictures.The Cook (Guardian Top Crime Books of the Year) was published in May 2022 to excellent reviews and deals with the issue of homelessness. The third book in the series – The Detective (Sunday Times Top Crime Books of the Year) – is about government surveillance and AI. The Spy (Longlisted Wilbur Smith Adventure Writing), the fourth book, sees Kamil infiltrate a terrorist cell. The Shadow (A Sunday Times Crime Book of the Month) is the latest book in the series.

Ajay Chowdhury

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George S. Schuyler

It's New Years Day in 1933 in New York City and Max Disher, a young black man, has just heard the news: a mysterious doctor has discovered a strange process that can turn black skin white - a new way to 'solve the American race problem'. Max, who is tired of being rejected and abused because of his dark skin, leaps at the opportunity. After receiving the 'Black-No-More' procedure, he becomes Matthew Fisher, a white man who is able to attain everything he has ever wanted: money, power and a beautiful wife. But it soon becomes apparent that America, whiter than ever, is becoming more and more dangerous . . . 
 
An extraordinary, cutting satire, Black No More is an utterly unique work of science fiction, and one of the first works of Black speculative fiction.

Black No More

Robert Sheckley

Announced in a thunderclap out of another day's tedium, Tom Carmody - a hapless New Yorker - learns that he is the winner of the Intergalactic Sweepstake. Accepting with a shrug, he is whipped across the universe to collect his prize. The catch? There's no way home. Enlisting the help of galactic bureaucrats, planetary engineers and a couple of gods, Carmody embarks on a desperate search for Earth, all the while being pursued by a perplexing predatory creature . . . 
 
Often compared to The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Dimension of Miracles is a masterwork of electric humour that offers an oblique examination of human nature amid the vastness of the cosmos.

Dimension of Miracles

Stanislaw Lem

Stanislaw Lem is perhaps the most original and influential European science-fiction writer of the twentieth century. 
The Cyberiad, one of Lem's most beloved works, follows the exploits of the Trurl and Klapaucius, two ingenious 'constructors'. In their adventures through a strange medieval universe they encounter a machine capable of creating anything that starts with the letter 'N'; kings who oppress their people with parlour games; and PhD pirates who demand ransom in knowledge rather than gold. It is a world where UFOs land silently on lawns at dawn, and where even the stars can be re-arranged for advertising purposes.

The Cyberiad

Fables for the Cybernetic Age

Yevgeny Zamyatin

In a glass city composed of absolute straight lines, ruled over by the all-powerful 'Benefactor', the citizens of OneState live their lives without passion or agency. That is until D-503, a man tasked with bringing the Revolution to the stars, meets a remarkable woman . . . 
 
Supressed in Russia for decades, Zamyatin's dystopian masterpiece prophesized the worst excesses of the Soviet Union, while creating an enduring and vivid vision of what future societies might look like - a vision that would inspire George Orwell's 1984 and many subsequent dystopias.

Andreas Eschbach

In the dusty wastes of a far-flung planet, strange artisans toil. Like their fathers before them, they tie intricate knots out of the hair of their wives and daughters, slowly forming carpets. Delicate and unique, each carpet requires an entire lifetime of work - and all will be sold to pave the Emperor's palace. 
Then, one day, the empire falls. Soon, strange men begin to arrive from the stars, in search of the carpets' true destination. What they discover will astonish them . . . 
 
Combining brilliant world-building with an irresistible sense of mystery, Andreas Eschbach's acclaimed space opera is a compelling meditation on faith, fundamentalism and the meaning of life itself.

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