All the Pretty Horses, the first novel of the Border Trilogy, published in 1992, was an international bestseller, winning both the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. It tells the tale of John Grady Cole, who at sixteen finds himself the last bewildered survivor of generations of Texas ranchers, cut off from the only life he ever imagined. With two companions, he sets off for Mexico on a sometimes idyllic, sometimes comic journey to a place where dreams are paid for in blood.

Four men once close to Jack Dodds, a London butcher, meet to carry out his peculiar last wish: to have his ashes scattered into the sea. For reasons best known to herself, Jack's widow, Amy, declines to join them.On the surface the tale of a simple if increasingly bizarre day's outing, Last Orders is Graham Swift's most poignant exploration of the complexity and courage of ordinary lives.

It is the summer of 1983, and young Nick Guest, an innocent in the matters of politics and money, has moved into an attic room in the Notting Hill home of the Feddens: Gerald, an ambitious new Tory MP, his wealthy wife Rachel, and their children Toby and Catherine. As the boom years of the mid-80s unfold, Nick becomes caught up in the Feddens' world, while pursuing his own private obsession, with beauty - a prize as compelling to him as power and riches are to his friends.

For Picador's 40th anniversary we asked 40 writers to respond to the idea of 40 in whatever way they liked. The results are spectacular: thoughtful, funny, poignant, as brilliantly diverse as the Picador list.Pieces include the temporal (what I was doing 40 years ago; the mid-life crisis of a 40-year-old whose lifespan coincides with Picador's), the quirky (gifts I'd like to receive for my 40th birthday; 40 things to do before I die; what it's like never to have been on any of those Best Under 40 lists), and the downright clever (40-word synopses of great works of literature), along with some astonishingly good short stories and poems touching on mortality and ageing. The authors range from great established writers on the list, like Alice Sebold, John Banville and Graham Swift, to new stars, such as Emma Straub, Belinda McKeon and Megan Abbott, and 33 more!

When Max Morden returns to the seaside village where he once spent a childhood holiday, he is both escaping from a recent loss and confronting a distant trauma. Mr and Mrs Grace and their twin children Myles and Chloe appeared that long-ago summer as if from another world. He grew to know them intricately, even intimately, and what ensued would haunt him for the rest of his years and shape everything that was to follow.

Jack Gladney is a pioneering professor in the field of Hitler Studies atthe bucolic Midwestern College-on-the-Hill. Married five times, he has abrood of children and stepchildren with his current wife, Babette. Overthe course of an absurd, tragic year, Jack and Babette will each be forced to confront the question that keeps them awake at night: who will die first?