Evelyn Waugh was born in Hampstead in 1903 and educated at Hertford College, Oxford. In 1928 he published his first novel, Decline and Fall, which was soon followed by Vile Bodies (1930), Black Mischief (1932), A Handful of Dust (1934) and Scoop (1938). During these years he also travelled extensively and converted to Catholicism. In 1939 Waugh was commissioned in the Royal Marines and later transferred to the Royal Horse Guards, experiences which informed his Sword of Honour trilogy (1952-61). His most famous novel, Brideshead Revisited (1945), was written while on leave from the army. Waugh died in 1966.

Evelyn Waugh

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Namwali Serpell

**Winner of the Arthur C. Clarke Award 2020** 
 
 'The great African novel of the twenty-first century' Tade Thompson, author of Rosewater 
 
 On the banks of the Zambezi River, a few miles from the majestic Victoria Falls, there was once a colonial settlement called The Old Drift. 
 
 In 1904, in a smoky room at the hotel across the river, an Old Drifter named Percy M. Clark, foggy with fever, makes a mistake that entangles his fate with those of an Italian hotelier and an African busboy. 
 
 So begins a cycle of unwitting retribution between three Zambian families as they collide and converge over the course of the century, into the present and beyond. 
 
 'Extraordinary, ambitious, evocative, dazzling' Salman Rushdie 
 
 'Brilliant . . . heartbreaking' Sunday Times 
 
 'Charming, heartbreaking and breathtaking' Carmen Maria Machado, author of In the Dream House

The Old Drift

Kurt Vonnegut

Look at the Birdie evokes a world in which squabbling couples, high school geniuses, misfit office workers, and small-town Lotharios struggle to adapt to changing technology, moral ambiguity, and unprecedented affluence. In "Confido," a family learns the downside of confiding their deepest secrets into a magical invention. In "Ed Luby's Key Club," a man finds himself in a Kafkaesque world of trouble after he runs afoul of the shady underworld boss who calls the shots in an upstate New York town. In "Look at the Birdie," a quack psychiatrist turned "murder counsellor" concocts a novel new outlet for his paranoid patients. The stories are cautionary they also brim with his trademark humour. 
 
Wry, ironic, satirical and poignant Look at the Birdie reflects the anxieties of the postwar era in which they were written and provides an insight into the development of Vonnegut's early style

Look at the Birdie

Helen Sedgwick

**AS HEARD ON BBC RADIO 4 WOMAN'S HOUR** 
 
What if anyone could have a baby? A boldly original and unforgettable novel from a rising star. 
 
Now we have equality. Now we've outgrown our biology. With FullLife's baby pouch, women are liberated and men can share the joy of childbearing. Holly's whole family knows the benefits, but Eva doesn't believe society has changed for the better and Piotr has uncovered a secret behind FullLife's glossy facade. What separates them may just bring them together, as they search for the truth about FullLife and each face a truth of their own. 
 
'A compelling what-if about the female body, technology and power' Guardian

The Growing Season

Helen Macdonald

Sin Blaché

A mysterious event 
An all-American diner appears overnight in a remote British field. More and more objects materialise: toys, fairground rides, pets and other treasured mementos of the past. 
 
A weapon like no other 
The deaths quickly follow. A devastating weapon &ndash; Prophet &ndash; is bringing these memories to life, then stifling innocent people with their own joy. But nobody knows who created it, or why. 
 
A fight for the future 
Sunil Rao and Adam Rubenstein are tasked with investigating this strange new reality. After a troubled past together, they are drawn closer than ever to defend what they both hold most dear&hellip;

Prophet

Kevin Brockmeier

Something strange is going on. 
 
All over the world, pain is manifesting itself as light. Cuts and bruises blaze and flash. Arthritic joints glow. Injured troops emit radiant white shards into the desert night. On the news, they're calling it 'The Illumination'. 
 
As this breathtaking phenomenon takes holds, a private journal of love notes passes into the keeping of Carol Ann Page, a lonely hospital patient, and from there through the hands of five other people. Each of them will find their lives changed forever over a story which spans decades and continents, a story that shines a spectacular light on the wounds we all bear...

The Illumination

Juli Zeh

Mia Holl lives in a state governed by The Method, where good health is the highest duty of the citizen. Everyone must submit medical data and sleep records to the authorities on a monthly basis, and regular exercise is mandatory. 
 
 
Mia is young and beautiful, a successful scientist who is outwardly obedient but with an intellect that marks her as subversive. Convinced that her brother has been wrongfully convicted of a terrible crime, Mia comes up against the full force of a regime determined to control every aspect of its citizens' lives.

The Method

Marie-Helene Bertino

‘One of the best books I have read this year’ KALIANE BRADLEY, Guardian 
‘A remarkable funny-sad novel’ New York Times 
 
Meet Adina: a woman who has never felt at home on Earth 
 
Born at the moment when Voyager 1 is launched into space, Adina is a baby of unusual perception. Tiny and jaundiced, she reaches for warmth and light. As a child, she recognises she is different, not least because of her strange knowledge of a faraway planet. Then a fax machine arrives at home. Her mission is clear: she must report on the oddities of humankind. 
 
As Adina grows up, she dispatches transmissions on the terrors and delights of human existence. But then she starts to wonder. Is there a chance there are others like her out there? 
 
Adina sees our world differently. And her gentle, perceptive – and funny – observations offer a quietly joyful new view of life on Earth, the challenge of knowing ourselves and the miracle of finding our people in this vast universe. 
 
‘Beautyland is a miracle. I’ll be rereading it forever’ KAVEH AKBAR 
‘Beautiful and hilarious and transcendent . . . Bertino is an other-worldly talent’ TOMMY ORANGE 
‘A book that I will recommend to people for the rest of my life’ DAKOTA JOHNSON

Beautyland

Julie Myerson

A blasted world. 
A broken heart. 
A shattering betrayal. 
 
Heartlessness has become the law. In the wasted ruins of London, a woman pieces together fragments of her memory. As her past emerges, her own apocalypse begins. 
 
Then is a novel of singular invention and bravery. With it, Julie Myerson has created an echo chamber of the heartbreaking and the terrifying, and an enduring dystopian vision.

Then

Andrey Kurkov

Igor is confident his old Soviet policeman’s uniform will be the best costume at the party. But he hasn’t gone far before he realises something is wrong. The streets are unusually dark and empty, and the only person to emerge from the shadows runs away from him in terror. 
 
After a perplexing conversation with the terrified man, who turns out to be a wine smuggler, and on recovering from the resulting hangover, Igor comes to an unbelievable conclusion: he has found his way back to 1957 Kiev. And it isn’t the innocent era his mother and her friends have so sentimentally described. 
 
As he travels between centuries, his life becomes more and more complicated. The unusual gardener who lives in his mother’s shed keeps disappearing, his best friend has blackmailed the wrong people, and Igor has fallen in love with a married woman in a time before he was born. With his mother’s disapproval at his absences growing, and his adventures in each time frame starting to catch up with him, Igor has to survive the past if he wants any kind of future.

The Gardener from Ochakov

Steven Amsterdam

Opening on the eve of the millennium, when the world as we know it is still recognisable, we meet the nine-year-old narrator as he flees the city with his parents, just ahead of a Y2K breakdown. 
 
Next he is a teenager with a growing criminal record, taking his grandparents for a Sunday drive. In a world transformed by battles over resources, he teaches them how to steal. 
 
In time we see him struggle through strange, horrific and unexpectedly funny terrain as he goes about the no longer simple act of survival. Despite the chaos of his world, he keeps his eyes on the exit door, his heart open and his mind on what he thinks is going to happen next. 
 
Longlisted for the Guardian first book award.

Things We Didn't See Coming

Isaac Marion

R is recovering from death. He's learning how to read, how to speak, maybe even how to love. He can almost imagine a future with Julie, this girl who restarted his heart - building a new world from the ashes of the old one. 
 
And then helicopters appear on the horizon. A mysterious army is coming to restore order, to bring back the good old days of stability and control and the strong eating the weak. These grinning strangers are more than they seem. The plague has many hosts, and some are far more terrifying than the Dead. 
 
With their home in the grip of madmen, R and Julie plunge into the wastelands of America in search of answers. But there are some answers R doesn't want to find. A past life, an old shadow, crawling up from the basement. 
 
In this long-anticipated new chapter of the Warm Bodies series, Isaac Marion expands the scope of a powerfully simple story: a dead man's search for life in all its bloody rawness. 
 
 
Talk to Isaac on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Tumblr, Snapchat, and isaacmarion.com

The Burning World (The Warm Bodies Series)

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