In her provocative debut, Carmen Maria Machado demolishes the borders between magical realism and science fiction, comedy and horror, fantasy and fabulism. A wife refuses her husband's entreaties to remove the mysterious green ribbon from around her neck. A woman recounts her sexual encounters as a plague spreads across the earth. A salesclerk in a mall makes a horrifying discovery about a store's dresses. One woman's surgery-induced weight loss results in an unwanted house guest.

They say 'live every day as if it's your last' - but you never actually think it's going to be. At least I didn't.
The thing is, you don't get to know when it happens. You don't remember to tell your family that you love them or - in my case - remember to say goodbye to them at all.

But what if, like me, you could live your last day over and over again? Could you make it perfect? If your whole life flashed before your eyes, would you have no regrets? Or are there some things you'd want to change...?

They say 'live every day as if it's your last' - but you never actually think it's going to be. At least I didn't.The thing is, you don't get to know when it happens. You don't remember to tell your family that you love them or - in my case - remember to say goodbye to them at all.But what if, like me, you could live yourlast day over and over again? Could you make it perfect? If your whole life flashed before your eyes, would you have no regrets? Or are there some things you'd want to change...?

My name's Griz. I've never been to school, I've never had friends, in my whole life I've not met enough people to play a game of football. My parents told me how crowded the world used to be, before all the people went away, but we were never lonely on our remote island. We had each other, and our dogs.

Then the thief came. He told stories of the deserted towns and cities beyond our horizons. I liked him - until I woke to find he had stolen my dog. So I chased him out into the ruins of the world. I just want to get my dog back, but I found more than I ever imagined was possible. More about how the world ended. More about what my family's real story is. More about what really
matters.

'A Hologram for the King' takes us around the world to show how one man fights to hold himself and his splintering family together in the face of the global economy’s gale-force winds. In a rising Saudi Arabian city, far from weary, recession-scarred America, a struggling businessman pursues a last-ditch attempt to stave off foreclosure, pay his daughter’s college tuition, and finally do something great. This taut, richly layered, and elegiac novel is a powerful evocation of our contemporary moment — and a moving story of how we got here.

When four graduates from a small Massachusetts college move to New York to make their way, they're broke, adrift, and buoyed only by their friendship and ambition. There is kind, handsome Willem, an aspiring actor; JB, a quick-witted, sometimes cruel Brooklyn-born painter seeking entry to the art world; Malcolm, a frustrated architect at a prominent firm; and withdrawn, brilliant, enigmatic Jude, who serves as their center of gravity. Over the decades, their relationships deepen and darken, tinged by addiction, success, and pride. Yet their greatest
challenge, each comes to realize, is Jude himself, by midlife a terrifyingly talented litigator yet an increasingly broken man, his mind and body scarred by an unspeakable childhood, and haunted by what he fears is a degree of trauma that he'll not only be unable to overcome - but that will define his life forever.

At fifty-seven, George is settling down to a comfortable retirement, building a shed in his garden, reading historical novels, listening to a bit of light jazz. Then Katie, his tempestuous daughter, announces that she is getting remarried, to Ray. The family is not pleased, as her brother Jamie observes, Ray has 'strangler's hands'. Katie can't decide if she loves Ray, or loves the way he cares for her son Jacob, and her mother Jean is a bit put out by the way the wedding planning gets in the way of her affair with one of her husband's former colleagues. And the tidy and pleasant life Jamie has created crumbles when he fails to invite his lover, Tony, to the dreaded nuptials. Unnoticed in the uproar, George discovers a sinister lesion on his hip, and quietly begins to lose his mind.

The phenomenal Number One bestseller about best friends James and Bob. Now a major motion picture starring Luke Treadaway.When James Bowen found an injured, ginger street cat curled up in the hallway of his sheltered accommodation, he had no idea just how much his life was about to change. James was living hand to mouth on the streets of London and
the last thing he needed was a pet.Yet James couldn't resist helping the strikingly intelligent tom cat, whom he quickly christened Bob. He slowly nursed Bob back to health and then sent the cat on his way, imagining he would never see him again. But Bob had other ideas.Soon the two were inseparable and their diverse, comic and occasionally dangerous adventures would transform both their lives, slowly healing the scars of each other's troubled pasts.A Street Cat Named Bob is a moving and uplifting story that will touch the heart of anyone who reads it.

Tilly hates her stepfather, Dave. He abuses her mother, but she refuses to leave him. Frightened for her own safety, Tilly asks to go into foster care and is placed with Cathy. Tilly arrives with a graze on her cheek and Cathy becomes increasingly concerned by Dave's behaviour, especially when she learns he has been showering Tilly with gifts. While she's busy looking after Tilly and trying to keep her safe, Cathy is also worried about her own daughter, Lucy. She has a very difficult decision to make that will affect the rest of her life, and Cathy hopes she makes the right choice.

Beck hates his life. He hates his violent mother. He hates his home. Most of all, he hates the piano that his mother forces him to play hour after hour, day after day. He will never play as she did before illness ended her career and left her bitter and broken. But Beck is too scared to stand up to his mother, and tell her his true passion, which is composing his own music - because the least suggestion of rebellion on his part ends in violence. When Beck meets August, a girl full of life, energy and laughter, love begins to awaken within him and he glimpses a way to escape his painful existence. But dare he reach for it?

In a small Cotswold country town, Beth, Lindy and Rachel are looking for new beginnings.So they set up a business of their own: organising stylish and perfectly affordable vintage weddings. Soon they are busy arranging other people's Big Days. What none of them know is that their own romances are waiting just around the corner...

Three generations of Palestinian-American women living in Brooklyn are torn between individual desire and the strict mores of Arab culture in this heart-wrenching story of love, intrigue and courage.

Palestine, 1990. Seventeen-year-old Isra prefers reading books to entertaining the suitors her father has chosen for her. Over the course of a week, the naïve and dreamy girl finds herself quickly betrothed and married, and is soon living in Brooklyn. There Isra struggles to adapt to the expectations of her oppressive mother-in-law Fareeda and strange new husband Adam, a pressure that intensifies as she begins to have children - four daughters instead of the sons Fareeda tells Isra she must bear.

Brooklyn, 2008. Eighteen-year-old Deya, Isra's oldest daughter, must meet with potential husbands at her grandmother Fareeda's insistence, though her only desire is to go to college. But her grandmother is firm on the matter: the only way to secure a worthy future for Deya is through marriage to the right man.

But fate has a will of its own, and soon Deya will find herself on an unexpected path that leads her to shocking truths about her family…

For Marie-Laure, blind since the age of six, the world is full of mazes. The miniature of a Paris neighbourhood, made by her father to teach her the way home. The microscopic layers within the invaluable diamond that her father guards in the Museum of Natural History. The walled city by the sea, where father and daughter take refuge when the Nazis invade Paris. And a future which draws her ever closer to Werner, a German orphan, destined to labour in the mines until a broken radio fills his life with possibility and brings him to the notice of the Hitler Youth.

Sometimes you have to go a long way to find what you’re looking for. And sometimes a little beginner’s luck is all you need…
• Welcome to the First Class India USA Destination Vacation Tour Company
• One fixed itinerary, one fixed price
• All levels catered for
• No refunds

Beginner
Recently widowed Pival Sengupta has never travelled alone before and her first trip to this strange country masks a secret agenda: to find out the truth about her long-estranged son.

Intermediate
Satya, her guileless and resourceful tour guide, has been in America for less than a year – and has never actually left the five boroughs of New York.

Advanced
An aspiring/failing actress, Rebecca signed up for the role of Pival’s modesty companion; it might not be her big break but surely it’ll break her out of the rut she’s stuck in. As their preconceptions about each other and about America are challenged, with a little beginner’s luck, these unlikely companions might learn how to live again.
A big-hearted, hilarious tale of forgiveness, hope, and acceptance, reminding us that there is no roadmap to life.

Lydia Quixano Pérez lives in the Mexican city of Acapulco. She runs a bookstore. She has a son, Luca, the love of her life, and a wonderful husband who is a journalist. And while there are cracks beginning to show in Acapulco because of the drug cartels, her life is, by and large,
fairly comfortable. Even though she knows they'll never sell, Lydia stocks some of her all-time favorite books in her store. And then one
day a man enters the shop to browse and comes up to the register with a few books he would like to buy-two of them her favorites. Javier is
erudite. He is charming. And, unbeknownst to Lydia, he is the jefe of the newest drug cartel that has gruesomely taken over the city. When
Lydia's husband's tell-all profile of Javier is published, none of their lives will ever be the same. Forced to flee, Lydia and eight-year-old Luca soon find themselves miles and worlds away from their comfortable middle-class existence. Instantly transformed into migrants, Lydia and
Luca ride la bestia-trains that make their way north toward the United States, which is the only place Javier's reach doesn't extend. As they
join the countless people trying to reach el norte, Lydia soon sees that everyone is running from something. But what exactly are they running to?

Antwerp was Roberto Bolano's first novel, though he chose not to publish it until 2002, more than twenty years after he'd written it. Set amidst the seedy hotels and deserted campsites on the Costa Brava, and filled with hapless girls, failed poets, and shifty policemen, Antwerp is a short and cinematic experimental crime novel spliced together with voices from a dream, from a nightmare, from passers-by, from an omniscient narrator, from `Roberto Bolano'. Intense and irrepressible, the novel is a personal declaration of the power of literature; reading it is to be present at the birth of Bolano's enterprise in prose, to see the beginning, to witness the moment when his talent explodes.

Anything is Possible tells the story of the inhabitants of rural, dusty Amgash, Illinois, the hometown of Lucy Barton, a successful New York writer who finally returns, after seventeen years of absence, to visit the siblings she left behind. Reverberating with the deep bonds of family, and the hope that comes with reconciliation, Anything Is Possibleagain underscores Elizabeth Strout's place as one of America's most respected and cherished authors.

Arturo Bandini arrives in Los Angeles with big dreams. But the reality he finds is a city gripped by poverty.

When he makes a small fortune from the publication of a short story, he reinvents himself, indulging in expensive clothes, fine food and downtown strip clubs. But Bandini's delusions take a worrying turn when he is drawn into a relationship with Camilla Lopez, a beautiful but troubled young woman who will be responsible for his greatest downfall.

In a small back alley in Tokyo, there is a café which has been serving carefully brewed coffee for more than one hundred years. But this coffee shop offers its customers a unique experience: the chance to travel back in time.

In Before the Coffee Gets Cold, we meet four visitors, each of whom is hoping to make use of the café’s time-travelling offer, in order to: confront the man who left them, receive a letter from their husband whose memory has been taken by early onset Alzheimer's, to see their sister one last time, and to meet the daughter they never got the chance to know.

But the journey into the past does not come without risks: customers must sit in a particular seat, they cannot leave the café, and finally, they must return to the present before the coffee gets cold . . .

Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy is an epic novel of the violence and depravity that attended America's westward expansion, brilliantly subverting the conventions of the Western novel and the mythology of the Wild West. Based on historical events that took place on the Texas-Mexico border in the 1850s, it traces the fortunes of the Kid, a fourteen-year-old Tennessean who stumbles into a nightmarish world where Indians are being murdered and the market for their scalps is thriving

After 50 years together Stan still adores his wife... so why is he dating again? Bonnie and Stan are soulmates. They met during the Swinging Sixties, to the soundtrack of The Beatles and the Merseybeat scene. Now they've grown up and grown old together, had children and grandchildren. They are finally building their dream home, when disaster strikes. Stan is running out of time, and can't bear the thought of leaving Bonnie alone. Alongside his teenage granddaughter Greya, he forms a plan to find Bonnie a new love of her life. And she must never find out...

Brisbane, 1983: A lost father, a mute brother, a mum in jail, a heroin dealer for a stepfather and a notorious criminal for a babysitter. It's not as if Eli's life isn't complicated enough already. He's just trying to follow his heart, learning what it takes to be a good man, but life just keeps throwing obstacles in the way – not least of which is Tytus Broz, legendary drug dealer.

But Eli's life is about to get a whole lot more serious. He's about to fall in love. And he has to break into prison on Christmas Day, to save his mum.

A story of brotherhood, true love and the most unlikely of friendships, Boy Swallows Universe will be the most heartbreaking, joyous and exhilarating novel you will read all year.

Sometimes you have to tear everything down to build something new...Sayer Cole is frozen inside. At least, that's what it's felt like for as long as she can remember. She's yet to let anyone past her icy exterior - and the one guy she thinks might melt her heart couldn't possibly be interested in someone so uptight. Rough, hard and hot-as-hell, Zeb Fuller has rebuilt his life and his construction business since protecting his family sent him to jail all those years ago.

Rob had it all – friends, a near-guaranteed lacrosse scholarship to college and an amazing family – but all that changed when his dad was caught embezzling funds from half the town. Now he's a social pariah.

Maegan always does the right thing. But when her sister comes home from college pregnant, she's caught between telling their parents the truth about the father and keeping her sister's trust.

When Rob and Maegan are paired together for a project, they form an unexpectedly deep connection. But Rob's plan to fix his father's damage could ruin more than their new friendship …

Writer Ivan Connor is desperate. His publisher has turned down his new novel, his agent is out of ideas, and the only person to turn up at his latest reading is his mum. He's deeply jealous of Francesca Brady, a hugely successful author of fat romantic books for fat romantic people, whose expansive hair and bright red lipstick mock him from posters everywhere he goes. He's also living at home since his marriage broke up, and he's just collected the wrong child from school. But one night Connor stumbles on a route back to the top, via a beautiful model, two deranged psychopaths, a multi-million pound publishing fraud, true love and utter heartbreak...

Kip Singh watches India pass by his window on the slow train to Kashmir. Timorous and barely twenty, Kip arrives for the first time at General Kumar's camp and is placed under the supervision of Chef Kishen, a fiery, anarchic mentor who guides him towards the heady spheres of food and women. Though he is Sikh, Kip feels secure in his rightful allegiance to India, the right side of this interminable conflict. But when he comes across a Pakistani 'terrorist' with long, flowing hair, swept up on the banks of the river, everything changes... Mesmeric and lyrical, Chef is a story of hope, love and memory.

Eight-year-old TC skips school to explore the city's overgrown, forgotten corners. Sophia, seventy-eight, watches with concern as he slips past her window, through the little park she loves. She's writing to her granddaughter, Daisy, whose privileged upbringing means she exists in a different world from TC - though the two children live less than a mile apart.

Jozef spends his days doing house clearances, his nights working in a takeaway. He can't forget the farm he left behind inPoland, its woods and fields still a part of him, although he is a thousand miles away. When he meets TC he finds a kindred spirit: both lonely, both looking for something, both lost.

When it comes to drumming, Leah Burke is usually on beat - but real life isn't always so rhythmic. An anomaly in her friend group, she's the only child of a young, single mum, and her life is decidedly less privileged. And even though her mom knows she's bisexual, she hasn't mustered the courage to tell her friends - not even her openly gay BFF, Simon.

So Leah really doesn't know what to do when her rock-solid friend group starts to fracture in unexpected ways. With prom and college on the horizon, tensions are running high. It's hard for Leah to strike the right note while the people she loves are fighting-especially when she realizes she might love one of them more than she ever intended.

Plum Kettle does her best not to be noticed, because when you're fat, to be noticed is to be judged. Or mocked. Or worse.

But when a mysterious woman starts following her, Plum finds herself involved with an underground community of women who live life on their own terms. At the same time, a dangerous guerrilla group called "Jennifer" begins to terrorize a world that mistreats women. As Plum grapples with her personal struggles, she becomes entangled in a sinister plot, the consequences of which are explosive.

The book that started it all, Bateman's first novel published in 1995. It introduced the world to the hapless, endlessly wily and witty Belfast journalist Dan Starkey. Dan shares with his wife an appetite for drinking and dancing. But when he meets Margaret, things get seriously out of hand. Terrifyingly, unbelievably, she is murdered. Before long Dan is a target himself, racing against time to crack the mystery.

Vivian is an oddball. An unemployed orphan living in the house of her recently deceased great aunt in North Dublin, Vivian boldly goes through life doing things in her own peculiar way, whether that be eating blue food, cultivating `her smell', wishing people happy Christmas in April, or putting an ad up for a friend called Penelope to check why it doesn't rhyme with antelope. But behind her heroic charm and undeniable logic, something isn't right. With each attempt to connect with a stranger or her estranged sister doomed to misunderstanding, someone should ask: is Vivian OK?

A poignant and delightful story of belonging that plays with the myth of the Changeling and takes us by the hand through Dublin. A poetic call for us all to accept each other and find the Vivian within.

It’s been sixteen years since Gretel last saw her mother, half a lifetime to forget her childhood on the canals. But a phone call will soon reunite them, and bring those wild years flooding back: the secret language that Gretel and her mother invented; the strange boy, Marcus, living on the boat that final winter; the creature said to be underwater, swimming ever closer. In the end there will be nothing for Gretel to do but to wade deeper into their past, where family secrets and aged prophesies will all come tragically alive again.

The classic novel about a daring experiment in human intelligence Charlie Gordon, IQ 68, is a floor sweeper and the gentle butt of everyone's jokes - until an experiment in the enhancement of human intelligence turns him into a genius. But then Algernon, the mouse whose triumphal experimental transformation preceded his, fades and dies, and Charlie has to face the possibility that his salvation was only temporary.

Laugh, cry, stand up and cheer: Forrest Gump is everyman's story, everyman's dream. A wonderfully warm, savagely barbed, and hilariously funny 'tale told by an idiot', from the razor-sharp pen of a contemporary wizard.

The day Idgie Threadgoode and Ruth Jamison opened the Whistle Stop Cafe, the town took a turn for the better. It was the Depression and that cafe was a home from home for many of us. You could get eggs, grits, bacon, ham, coffee and a smile for 25 cents. Ruth was just the sweetest girl you ever met. And Idgie? She was a character, all right. You never saw anyone so headstrong. But how anybody could have thought she murdered that man is beyond me. Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe is a mouth-watering tale of love, laughter and mystery. It will lift your spirits and above all it'll remind you of the secret to life: friends.

Perhaps you missed the talk on the Cabbage Root Fly last week?
Galina Petrovna hasn't missed a meeting, even if that means leaving her three-legged dog Boroda behind. Boroda isn't `hers' exactly, they belong to each other, and that's why she doesn't wear a collar. And that's how Mitya the Exterminator got her. So everyone had to go to Moscow. Filled to the brim with pickle, misadventure and tears, Galina Petrovna's Three-Legged Dog Story will leave you smiling at every page

The second novel from exciting, young novelist Nick Laird - an artful meditation on love and life in contemporary London. When David Pinner introduces his former teacher, the American artist Ruth Marks, to his friend and flatmate James Glover, he unwittingly sets in place a love triangle loaded with tension, guilt and heartbreak. As David plays reluctant witness (and more) to James and Ruth's escalating love affair, he must come to terms with his own blighted emotional life.

Tyrone Slothrop, a GI in London in 1944, has a big problem. Whenever he gets an erection, a Blitz bomb hits. Slothrop gets excited, and then, as Thomas Pynchon puts it in his sibilant opening sentence, 'a screaming comes across the sky', heralding an angel of death, a V-2 rocket. Soon Tyrone is on the run from legions of bizarre enemies through the phantasmagoric horrors of Germany. Gravity's Rainbow is never a single story, but a proliferation of characters - Pirate Prentice, Teddy Bloat, Tantivy Mucker-Maffick, Saure Bummer, and more - and events that tantalize the reader with suggestions of vast patterns only just past our comprehension. It is a blizzard of references to science, history, high culture, and the lowest of jokes and among the most important novels of our time.

On an island off the windswept Irish coast, guests gather for the wedding of the year - the marriage of Jules Keegan and Will Slater. Old friends. Past grudges. Happy families. Hidden jealousies. Thirteen guests. One body. The wedding cake has barely been cut when one of the
guests is found dead. And as a storm unleashes its fury on the island, everyone is trapped. All have a secret. All have a motive.
One guest won't leave this wedding alive . . .

Jesika is four and a half. She lives in a flat with her mother and baby brother and she knows a lot. She knows their flat is high up and the stairs are smelly. She knows she should not draw on the wall where the wallpaper is peeling or touch the broken window. And she knows she loves her mummy and Toby. She does not know that their landlord is threatening to evict them and that Toby’s cough is going to get much worse. Or that Lauren, her new best friend, has a secret that will explode their world.

Isma is free. After years spent raising her twin siblings in the wake of their mother's death, she is finally studying in America, resuming a dream long deferred. But she can't stop worrying about Aneeka, her beautiful, headstrong sister back in London – or their brother, Parvaiz, who's disappeared in pursuit of his own dream: to prove himself to the dark legacy of the jihadist father he never knew.Then Eamonn enters the sisters' lives. Handsome and privileged, he inhabits a London worlds away from theirs. As the son of a powerful British Muslim politician, Eamonn has his own birthright to live up to – or defy. Is he to be a chance at love? The means of Parvaiz's salvation? Two families' fates are inextricably, devastatingly entwined in this searing novel that asks: what sacrifices will we make in the name of love?A contemporary reimagining of Sophocles' Antigone, Home Fire is an urgent, fiercely compelling story of loyalties torn apart when love and politics collide – confirming Kamila Shamsie as a master storyteller of our times.

Solomon Kugel has had enough of the past and its burdens. So, in the hope of starting afresh, he moved his family to a small rural town where nothing of import has ever happened. Sadly, Kugel’s life isn’t that simple. His family soon find themselves threatened by a local arsonist and his ailing mother won't stop reminiscing about the Nazi concentration camps she didn’t actually suffer through. And when, one night, Kugel discovers a living, breathing, thought-to-be-dead specimen of history hiding in his attic, bad very quickly becomes worse.

Into the rarefied atmosphere of the Hotel du Lac timidly walks Edith Hope, romantic novelist and holder of modest dreams. Edith has been exiled from home after embarrassing herself and her friends. She has refused to sacrifice her ideals and remains stubbornly single. But among the pampered women and minor nobility Edith finds Mr Neville, and her chance to escape from a life of humiliating loneliness is renewed . . .

I'm Johanna Morrigan. It's 1995. I'm nineteen and I live in the epicentre of Britpop. My unrequited love, John Kite, is busy with a Number One album, world-tour, drugs, and a nervous breakdown. So, I've started hanging out with hot young comedian Jerry Sharp. Big mistake. "He's a vampire," my friend Suzanne warns. "One of those men who destroys bright young girls. Also, he's a total dick." Unfortunately, I've already had sex with him. Bad sex. And now, I'm one of the girls he is trying to destroy. I know I have to stop him. But how does one girl fight a famous, powerful man? A novel about friendship, feminism and finding your place in the world.

One relentlessly hot summer, six children explore the scorched wheat-fields that enclose their tiny Italian village. When the gang find a dilapidated farmhouse, nine-year-old Michele Amitrano makes a discovery so momentous he dare not tell a soul. It is a secret that will force Michele to question everything and everyone around him.

An unputdownable thriller, I'm Not Scared is also a devastatingly authentic portrayal of childhood and the tension when it must join the adult world.