Hear from users of Islamic Tinder, a disenchanted Maulana working as a TV chat show host and a plastic surgeon blackmailed by MI6. Follow the career of an actress with Middle-Eastern heritage whose dreams of playing a ghostbuster spiral into repeat castings as a jihadi bride. Among stories of honour killings and ill-fated love in besieged locations, we also find heart-warming connections and powerful challenges to the status quo. From Algiers to Brighton,...

A freak tidal surge hitting a Welsh seaside town leaves devastation and three locals drowned. Yet when a fourth body is found in the debris it takes time for it to be identified as the respected Oxford writer Sara Meredith. A celebrity, an icon to an entire generation - what was she doing in such an unlikely place? And how had it ended in her death?These mysteries overwhelm the lives of people Sara has left behind: estranged husband Josh, their volatile...

Gabrielle Bates's electric debut collection Judas Goat plumbs the depths of intimate relationships. The book's eponymous animal is used to lead sheep to slaughter, while its own life is spared, and its harrowing existence echoes through this spellbinding collection of forty poems, which wrestle with betrayal and forced obedience, violence and young womanhood, and the "forbidden felt language" of sexual and sacred love. These poems conjure encounters...

Paul Stewart has returned to Scotland to continue his successful career. His agent and girlfriend, Gloria, has arranged for him to write The Philosophy of Food in Six Easy Chapters, a project he relishes but that will have to be delivered in six months. It is not going well, as Paul finds his domestic circumstances unsuited to concentrated hard work: Gloria has now moved in with him (not specifically invited) and has brought with her two extremely...

When I was younger I wanted to be an interesting, sophisticated, semi-heroic, multi-layered person. BUT that kind of perfect is impossible. Being an actual tw*t is much more the real me. Sorry to boast, but I am a champion tw*t. In The Tw*t Files I will tell you about all the times I?ve been a total and utter tw*t. The moments where I?ve misunderstood stuff and messed up. In my life these have been key because: Mistakes tell us about ourselves. Mistakes...

In the summer of 1956, Jack Kerouac hitchhiked from Mill Valley, California, to the North Cascades to spend two months serving as a fire lookout for the US Forest Service. Taking only the Diamond Sutra for reading material, he intended to spend his time in deep contemplation and to achieve enlightenment. Kerouac's experience on Desolation Peak forms the climax of his novel The Dharma Bums and has also been depicted in part 1 of Desolation Angels and...

Once a year, on All Souls' Day, it is said in Ireland that the dead may return. 'Solar Bones' is the story of one such visit. Marcus Conway, a middle-aged engineer, turns up one afternoon at his kitchen table and considers the events that took him away and then brought him home again.

They could not say how many robbers there were?it appears to be one of the biggest robberies in U.S. history.?- New York Times In 1993 $7.4 million was stolen from the Brink?s Armored Car Depot in Rochester, New York, the fifth largest robbery in US history. Sam Millar was a member of the gang who carried out the robbery. He was caught, found guilty and incarcerated, before being set free by Bill Clinton's government as an essential part of the Northern...

From the bestselling author of Jews Don?t Count David Baddiel would love there to be a God. He has spent a lot of time fantasising about how much better life would be if there actually was such a thing as a Superhero Dad who chased off Death. Unfortunately for him, there isn?t. Or at least, that is Baddiel?s view in this book, which argues that it is indeed the very intensity of his, and everyone else?s, desire for God to exist that proves His non-existence....

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 spinsterhood is renewed . . . 'A classic . . . a book which...