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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Adriaan Van Dis

In Repatriated the world is a dangerous place and the bomb is ticking - at home and abroad. 
 
In a seaside town in the Netherlands, Mr Java - a war damaged ex-colonial - drills his son for the future, drawing him deeper and deeper into his delusionary world. As the radio broadcasts news of H bomb tests, Mr Java writes letters of complaint to the authorities, dreams of horses, and stands at the front window, on the look out for special security spies and nuclear holocaust. His wife and her three daughters from a previous marriage in Indonesia form a sort of Greek chorus, providing a sceptical commentary as his obsessions build towards a dark, absurdist climax. 
 
Repatriated is an inventive, blackly funny novel that shows an adolescent boy trying to break free from his parents and finding he cannot escape their past.

Repatriated

Haley Tanner

Vaclav and Lena seem destined for each other. They first meet as children in an English-as-a-second- language class in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn. Vaclav, who dreams of becoming a famous magician, is precocious and verbal. Lena, struggling with English, takes comfort in the safety of his adoration, his noisy, loving home, and the care of Rasia, his big-hearted mother. Vaclav imagines their story unfolding like a fairy tale, but among the many truths to be discovered in Haley Tanner's wondrous debut is that happily ever after is never a foregone conclusion. 
 
When Lena is not around Vaclav and his parents, her world is unsafe. Her poor language skills isolate her. She lives with a mostly absent, neglectful aunt, and has no connection to her parents, who she believes are still in Russia. Then, one day, Lena does not show up for school. She has disappeared from Vaclav and his family's lives as if by a cruel trick. For the next seven years Vaclav always says goodnight to her, wondering if she is doing the same somewhere. On the eve of Lena's seventeenth birthday he finds out. 
 
Haley Tanner has the originality and verve of a born storyteller, and the boldness to imagine a world in which love can overcome the most difficult circumstances. In Vaclav &amp; Lena she has created two unforgettable young protagonists who evoke the joy, the confusion, and the passion of having a profound, everlasting connection with someone else.

Vaclav and Lena

Susan Orlean

Susan Orlean's collection of profiles ranges from the well-known (Marky Mark) to the unknown (Colin Duffy, a typical American man, aged ten) to the formerly known (the cult sixties girl group the Shaggs). Orlean meets with Cristina Sanchez, Spain's first fully-qualified female matador, Silly Billy, New York's most successful children's clown, an African king who is a New York taxi-driver, and a champion show dog called Biff, who from a certain angle looks like President Clinton. As in her remarkable bestseller The Orchid Thief, soon to be the basis of Spike Being John Malkovich Jonze's new film, starring Meryl Streep and Nicholas Cage, Orlean's eye for the fascinatingly bizarre and her wonderfully witty way with language make her take on the world utterly original and unique.

The Bullfighter Checks Her Make-Up

Douglas Adams

Two quirky detective stories from Britain's best sci-fi writer and author of The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Douglas Adams. 
 
Dirk Gently is a detective - well, a sort of detective. There is a long and honourable tradition of great detectives and Dirk Gently does not belong to it. Dirk Gently calls himself a 'holistic detective' and above all, he believes in 'the interconnectedness of all things'. Sherlock Holmes observed that once you have eliminated the impossible, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth. Dirk Gently, however, does not like to eliminate the impossible. 
 
In Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency a simple search for a missing cat reveals two ghosts, a dodo, an Electric Monk, the devastating secret that lies behind the whole of human history and threatens to bring it to a premature close, and, finally, the utterly terrifying reason why Richard MacDuff has had a sofa stuck on his stairs for three weeks. 
 
As The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul opens, a passenger check-in desk at Heathrow Airport shoots up through the roof engulfed in a ball of orange flames. The usual people try to claim responsibility. However, no rational cause can be found for the explosion - it was simply designated an act of God. But, thinks Dirk Gently, which God? And why? What God would be hanging around Terminal Two of Heathrow Airport trying to catch the 15.37 to Oslo? 
 
In these two delightfully odd detective stories, Adams explores once again the realm of the unknown, in the style of science fiction that brought him fame with The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

The Dirk Gently Omnibus

Sophie Pinkham

Each time Ukraine has rebuilt itself over the last century, it has been plagued by the same conflicts: corruption, poverty, and most of all Russian aggression. Sophie Pinkham saw all this and more over ten years in Ukraine and Russia, a period that included the Maidan revolution of 2013-14, Russia's annexation of Crimea, and the ensuing war in Donbass. 
 
With a keen eye for the dark absurdities of post-Soviet society, Pinkham presents a dynamic account of contemporary Ukrainian life. She meet a charismatic doctor helping to smooth the transition to democracy even as he struggles with drug dependence; a band of Ukrainian, Russian, and Belarusian hippies in a Crimean idyll; and a Jewish clarinetist agitating for Ukrainian liberation. These fascinating personalities deliver an indelible impression of a country on the brink. 
 
Black Square is necessary reading for anyone who wishes to learn the roots of the current Russo-Ukrainian war and the personal stories of the people who live it every day.

Black Square

Adventures in Post-Soviet Ukraine

__________________________________ 
THE COMPLETE HITCH HIKER'S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY SERIES 
 
Don't panic. 
 
First a legendary radio series, then a sequence of bestselling books, a television series, a computer game, a little-known Belgian progressive rock opera, a blockbuster movie, and finally this handsome hardback edition – primarily intended as a blunt object with which to bludgeon one's enemies – The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy is one of the greatest fictional enterprises of the twentieth century. 
 
Telling the long, circuitous and often inexplicable story of Arthur Dent, left homeless and rather annoyed after the Earth is destroyed in order to build a hyperspace expressway, this edition collects all five parts of the trilogy: 
 
· The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy 
· The Restaurant at the End of the Universe 
· Life, the Universe and Everything 
· So Long and Thanks For All the Fish 
· Mostly Harmless 
 
along with a wealth of extra material prefaced and contextualised by Jem Roberts, the official biographer of Douglas Adams, to complete the canon. 
 
Introduced by Richard Dawkins and Nick Harkaway

The Hitch Hiker's Guide To The Galaxy

A Trilogy in Five Parts

Charles Handy

Who are the new philanthropists? And how is their philanthropy 'new'? 
 
In this remarkable and inspiring book, the eminent management writer Charles Handy and his wife Elizabeth, a portrait photographer, have collaborated to portray a new generation of practical philanthropists, men and women who have made their own fortunes and decided to move on from financial success to try to help those in need. They are doing so not simply by giving their money away to charities and agencies but by helping actively, working on the spot with the very people who need their aid, ensuring that the initiatives are sustainable in the longer term. 
 
As in their acclaimed The New Alchemists, the Handys have both interviewed and photographed their subjects in order to tell their inspiring stories; from the Sydney restaurateur Jeff Gambin, who personally helps to cook hot and cold menus for homeless people; to Niall Mellon, a young Irish property developer who is replacing the shacks with breeze-block homes in a South African township; and Sara Davenport, who sold her art gallery and set up the breast-cancer care centre the Haven Trust to offer integrated and holistic treatment and support. 
 
This striking book of words and photographs reveals the energy and inspiration of these new ways of using wealth, revealing the motivations and satisfactions of such direct action.

The New Philanthropists

Harper Lee

'Shoot all the bluejays you want, if you can hit 'em, but remember it's a sin to kill a mockingbird.' 
 
Atticus Finch gives this advice to his children as he defends the real mockingbird of this classic novel - a black man charged with attacking a white girl. Through the eyes of Scout and Jem Finch, Lee explores the issues of race and class in the Deep South of the 1930s with compassion and humour. She also creates one of the great heroes of literature in their father, whose lone struggle for justice pricks the conscience of a town steeped in prejudice and hypocrisy.

To Kill A Mockingbird

60th Anniversary Edition

Enhanced Edition

50th Anniversary Edition

Nicola Barker

*WINNER OF THE GOLDSMITHS PRIZE 2017* 
*SHORTLISTED FOR THE GORDON BURN PRIZE 2018* 
*LONGLISTED FOR THE WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION 2018* 
 
A GUARDIAN BOOK OF THE YEAR 
A TELEGRAPH BOOK OF THE YEAR 
AN INDEPENDENT BOOK OF THE YEAR 
 
From the internationally acclaimed, Man Booker-shortlisted Nicola Barker comes a new novel, a post-post apocalyptic story that overflows with pure creative talent. 
 
Imagine a perfect world where everything is known, where everything is open, where there can be no doubt, no hatred, no poverty, no greed. Imagine a System which both nurtures and protects. A Community which nourishes and sustains. An infinite world. A world without sickness, without death. A world without God. A world without fear. 
 
Could you...might you be happy there? 
 
H(A)PPY is a post-post apocalyptic Alice in Wonderland, a story which tells itself and then consumes itself. It's a place where language glows, where words buzz and sparkle and finally implode. It's a novel which twists and writhes with all the terrifying precision of a tiny fish in an Escher lithograph – a book where the mere telling of a story is the end of certainty.

H(A)PPY

Anthony Burgess

The fully restored fiftieth anniversary edition 
 
Foreword by Martin Amis 
 
First published by William Heinemann in 1962, A Clockwork Orange is widely acknowledged as one of the most influential books of the twentieth century. This special edition, compiled and edited by Andrew Biswell, Burgess's biographer, restores the text of the novel as Burgess originally wrote it, and includes a selection of interviews, articles, reviews and other previously unpublished material.

A Clockwork Orange

Fred Fordham

A beautifully crafted graphic novel adaptation of Harper Lee’s beloved American classic, voted the #1 Great American Read 2018. 
 
‘Shoot all the bluejays you want, if you can hit ‘em, but remember it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird.’ 
 
A haunting portrait of race and class, innocence and injustice, hypocrisy and heroism, tradition and transformation in the Deep South of the 1930s, Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird remains as important today as it was upon its initial publication in 1960, during the turbulent years of the Civil Rights movement. 
 
Now, this most beloved and acclaimed novel is reborn for a new age as a gorgeous graphic novel. Scout, Jem, Boo Radley, Atticus Finch and the small town of Maycomb, Alabama, are all captured in vivid and moving illustrations by artist Fred Fordham. 
 
Enduring in vision, Harper Lee’s timeless novel illuminates the complexities of human nature and the depths of the human heart with humour, unwavering honesty and a tender, nostalgic beauty. Lifetime admirers and new readers alike will be touched by this special visual edition.

To Kill a Mockingbird

The stunning graphic novel adaptation

Chris Heath

No other pop group in recent history has faced fame with such intelligence, humour and shrewdness as the Pet Shop Boys. In 1991, the band toured North America for the first time shadowed by journalist Chris Heath and legendary rock photographer Pennie Smith. They visited fourteen cities in one month, confronting the American music industry and colliding with the likes of Liza Minnelli, Steven Spielberg and Axl Rose. This is more than a documentary of a tour; it is an unusually intimate portrait of two maverick British musicians always reluctant to compromise. 
 
‘There was a time when the Pet Shop Boys seemed to exist entirely on radio, television and in magazines. This is the other world of the Pet Shop Boys in concert, travel and backstage, as they bring their art and glamour to America. It’s funny too.’ 
Johnny Marr 
 
‘A brilliant book, to be read over and over again. How could anyone not love these men?’ 
NME

Pet Shop Boys versus America

The Pet Shop Boys are one of the most successful and unusual bands of the last five decades. They are the pop duo that proves pop music can be modern, ecstatic and playful as well as serious and intelligent, winning them legions of devoted fans throughout the world. 
 
In 1989, Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe invited journalist Chris Heath and photographer Lawrence Watson to shadow them around Hong Kong, Japan and the UK as they embarked on their first-ever tour. This book is the result: an immersive portrait giving access into the duo’s inner sanctum, showing them in brilliantly observed detail as they work, relax, gossip, argue and occasionally try to make sense of what they do. 
 
‘As clear a picture as could be wished for of the seething mass of elegant contradictions that is the 
Pet Shop Boys’ on-the-road experience.’ Independent on Sunday 
 
‘This superbly reported book transcends tired rock journalism cliché. It’s about what it means to be a pop star, what it means to be a Pet Shop Boy… how to love pop, hold it to a higher standard and subvert its expectations.’ 
Laura Snapes

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