Caroline Bird at first appears to be a traditional story-teller. But the stories she tells are suspended, charged with metaphor, and built upon foundations strangely familiar: fairy tale, fantasy and the sweet-bitter world of romance. The further one reads in her haunted tales, the more remarkable becomes the variety of forms, metres and rhythms she uses, and the clearer their appropriateness...

Allan Quartermain had been a trader and hunter all his life and knew Africa as well as any white man. He was returning to Natal, South Africa, when Sir Henry Curtis tracked him down and made him a proposition. Curtis''s brother had heard of the famous, fabled diamond mines of King Solomon.

He has taken an expedition into the unchartered interior to find it. He has not returned. Quartermain possesses an old map purporting to show the way to the fabled mines so, in return for a share of the treasure or a handsome stipend for his son if he dies in the attempt, Quartermain agrees to mount a rescue expedition...

God - or Sora, as she's called - has come to earth to experience its conflicts first hand, but adopting a human form also means assuming human frailty and mortality, and when Sora's death - and her true identity - is discovered, the world is immediately and irrevocably changed. Waves of panic, civil unrest and mass suicide sweep the globe; young men take the future into their own hands, armies go to war over fate versus free will, and parents - in the absence of an alternative, and with nothing else to do on a Sunday - turn their children into objects of worship.

God is Dead is truly - and terrifyingly - original; blasphemous and heretical, it's an exceptional debut and a remarkable read.

Irreverent, exhilarating, heartbreaking, and enchanting us from the very first line - 'Listen. Let me take you on a journey beyond imagining. Let me tell you a story' - this extraordinary book is an Arabian Nights for our time.

Osama al-Kharrat left Lebanon at sixteen to escape the civil war. He returns after some years, much changed, to find his father bedridden and his family, friends and enemies in attendance, reminiscing, gossiping, making peace, and above all telling stories. "Hakawati" means 'storyteller', and Osama's grandfather was one of the best.From Uncle Jihad to the family doctor 'Tin Can', each member of Osama's circle is joined in a vigil that crosses continents, spans centuries, celebrates love, recounts war, and creates an epic picture of the region: one that is at once mythic, mischievous, and painfully real...

This book, one of the most haunting things that Roth ever composed, was published in 1939, the year the author died. Like Andreas, the hero of the story, Roth drank himself to death in Paris, but this is not an autobiographical confession. It is a secular miracle-tale, in which the vagrant Andreas, after living under bridges, has a series of lucky breaks that lift him briefly onto a different plane of existence. The novella is extraordinarily compressed, dry-eyed and witty, despite its melancholic subject-matter.

Welcome to LA. City of contradictions. It is home to movie stars and down-and-outs.  Palm-lined beaches and gridlock. Shopping sprees and gun sprees. Bright Shiny Morning takes a wild ride through the ultimate metropolis, where glittering excess rubs shoulders with seedy depravity...

Cortázar’s stories are like small time pieces, where each polished part moves relentlessly on its own particular path, exercising a crucial and perpetual influence on the mechanism as a whole. Moments jerk forward and retract, reflect and refract: an island at noon from an aeroplane – an aeroplane at noon from an island; the living deceiving the dying and also themselves, about death; fatality by fire in an ancient Roman arena and in a modern city apartment. It is a world that is constantly shifting, upsetting our balance and our peace of mind, a world outside of time that provokes a fascination bordering on terror. Cortázar is the master of the form and this celebrated collection houses some of his finest work.