Berlin. 11 July 1986. They meet by chance on a bus. She is a young student, he is older and married. Theirs is an intense and sudden attraction, fuelled by a shared passion for music and art, and heightened by the secrecy they must maintain. But when she strays for a single night he cannot forgive her and a dangerous crack forms between them, opening up a space for cruelty, punishment and the exertion of power. And the world around them is changing...

WINNER OF THE DESMOND ELLIOTT PRIZE England, 1643. Parliament is battling the King; the war between the Roundheads and the Cavaliers rages. Puritanical fervour has gripped the nation, and the hot terror of damnation burns black in every shadow. In Manningtree, depleted of men since the wars began, the women are left to their own devices. At the margins of this diminished community are those who are barely tolerated by the affluent villagers - the...

So Gelon says to me, 'Let's go down and feed the Athenians. The weather's perfect for feeding Athenians.' It's 412 BC, and Athens' invasion of Sicily has failed catastrophically. Thousands of Athenian soldiers are held captive in the quarries of Syracuse, starving, dejected and hanging on by the slimmest of threads. Lampo and Gelon are local potters, young men with no work and barely two obols to rub together. With not much to fill their time, they...

Deep in uncharted Peru, the holy town of Bedlam stands at the edge of a forest. The shrine statues move, and anyone who crosses the border dies. But somewhere inside are cinchona trees, whose bark yields quinine: the only known treatment for malaria. On the other side of the Pacific, it is 1859 and India is ravaged by the disease. The hunt for a reliable source of quinine is critical and in its desperation, the India Office searches out its last qualified...

'I am the queen of two crowns, banished fifteen years, the famed and gilded woman, bad-luck baleful girl, mother of three small animals, now gone. I am fifty-five years old. I am Lear's wife. I am here.' Word has come. Care-bent King Lear is dead, driven mad and betrayed. His three daughters too, broken in battle. But someone has survived: Lear's queen. Exiled to a nunnery years ago, written out of history, her name forgotten. Now she can tell her...

Nuneaton, 1875. Lily Moon, the local miner's daughter, spends her days as a parlour maid for Lord and Lady Bellingham at Oakley Manor, on the outskirts of Nuneaton. She's always been happy with her lot in life, and never expected more. But one day, everything changes when she temporarily becomes lady's maid to the Bellingham's daughter, Arabella, who is pregnant with the illegitimate child of her lover, and about to be unhappily married off to a man...

'Bodies of Light' is a deeply poignant tale of a psychologically tumultuous 19th century upbringing set in the atmospheric world of pre-Raphaelitism and the early suffrage movement. Ally (older sister of May in 'Night Waking'), is intelligent, studious and engaged in an eternal - and losing - battle to gain her mother's approval and affection. Her mother, Elizabeth, is a religious zealot, keener on feeding the poor and saving prostitutes than on embracing...

'Mariana Enriquez is a mesmerizing writer who demands to be read. Like Bola,o, she is interested in matters of life and death, and her fiction hits with the full force of a train' Dave EggersWelcome to Buenos Aires, a city thrumming with murderous intentions and morbid desires, where missing children come back from the dead and unearthed bones carry terrible curses. These brilliant, unsettling tales of revenge, witchcraft, fetishes, disappearances...

'A vivid, perfectly paced tale of slavery and freedom, innocence and experience, love and despair, Sugar Money is told in an unforgettably beautiful language. What a stunning writer Jane Harris is, mastering an extremely harrowing and complex subject and making it into art.' AMANDA CRAIG Martinique, 1765, and brothers Emile and Lucien are charged by their French master, Father Cleophas, with a mission. They must return to Grenada, the island they...

This is the story of one lost poem, two great rivers, and three remarkable lives - all connected by a single drop of water. In the ruins of Nineveh, that ancient city of Mesopotamia, there lies hidden in the sand fragments of a long-forgotten poem, the Epic of Gilgamesh. In Victorian London, an extraordinary child is born at the edge of the dirt-black Thames. When his brilliant memory earns him a spot as an apprentice at a printing press, the world...