It was in July 1983 that Townshend took up an editorial role at Faber, invited by the then chief publisher Matthew Evans. Townshend had always been interested in poetry and prose, and was increasingly worn down by the treadmill of his rock existence, especially so after Keith Moon’s sorry death. More recently he reminisced to the writer Simon Garfield (whose early work he edited at Faber) that he accepted the Evans offer because he ‘needed some dignity’, which is a shard of Townshend wit but also a considerable tribute to Faber.

Townshend’s brief was fairly free, and he oversaw a fair bit of new fiction and non-fiction, but one of his special enthusiasms was for books about rock and pop. Townshend has always been one of the most eloquent advocates of these musical forms as art, even if it be fleeting and possibly ephemeral ‘Pop Art’. As he told the Independent only a few years back, ‘Even Pete Waterman has had a moment or two. He is a bit of factory lad, but there must be people out there who remember a Kylie song as their perfect moment. That’s what makes pop so great…’

As I’ve heard it from folk who were at Faber round this era, Townshend believed that significant musical trends were worthy of more-or-less instant chronicle. Lee Brackstone, Townshend’s successor in publishing about contemporary music at Faber, has written:

‘Notable Townshend projects included Charles Shaar Murray’s award-winning Crosstown Traffic, Jon Savage’s landmark England’s Dreaming, The Rolling Stones’ Rock ‘n’ Roll Circus (a photographic record of the Stones’ ‘lost’ psychedelic performance movie when they were upstaged by Townshend’s The Who) and Dave Rimmer’s Like Punk Never Happened…’

That last title seems a strange anomaly: a study by a Smash Hits writer of Culture Club and the ‘New Romantics’, musically about as candy-floss-like as you could get, and ostensibly part of the reason why Townshend felt so estranged from pop in the early 1980s, at least as he told Simon Garfield:

‘We’d worn out the form. Punk had shaken everything, but what followed was computers and Linn drums and Heaven 17 and Scritti Politti. Interesting music, but quite manufactured and complex, and much less of the blood…’

But Heaven 17, too, is Pop Art. And it’s to Townshend’s credit that he was ready to give a hearing to and find a readership for writing about the sort of music that was drowning out some of the sounds he had loved.

Lee Brackstone’s music list at Faber remains a brilliant mix-tape on paper, open to any sounds that penetrate the head or the pop culture and stick there. Just consider the recently-founded journal Loops, in partnership with Domino Records, which shifts easily between passions for Prince and Nick Drake, Joy Division and Ol’ Dirty Bastard, Michael Jackson and Jelly Roll Morton. The magnum opus of the list in recent years has been Simon Reynolds’ much admired Rip It Up and Start Again, a study of the ‘postpunk’ of 1978-1984, in which key players are the aforementioned Scritti Politti: purveyors of politicised indie-label dub-skank who morphed into a byword for springy, breathy 80s electronic pop that nonetheless keenly name-checked Immanuel Kant.

I should confess my feeling for music writing waxes and wanes. A lot of it is personal (writers roughly your own age telling you how they feel when they listen to certain songs, a feeling we the readers tend to ‘get’ already.) A lot more of it is pseudo-sociological: rather straining for gravity by telling us what else was going on in the world when Dylan or Marvin Gaye or Frankie Goes To Hollywood (or whoever) released their celebrated recordings. I prefer music writing that tells you, ideally in the artist’s own words, how the record got made, what were the big decisions and happy accidents, such revelations being one of the many virtues of Bob Dylan’s celebrated Chronicles. There’s also a place for old-fashioned put-the-work-in-order scholarship, which is why the best book about The Who is Maximum R&B, a goldmine of trainspotter-information in chronological form, infinitely preferable to the ponderous liner notes that accompany most re-mastered Who long-players on CD.
It’s hard to write well about any art-form unless you know by experience how that form functions on a mechanical level. Music is the hardest challenge of all in that respect. The great George Steiner, in his 1989 study Real Presences, took up the contention of Claude Levi-Strauss that ‘the invention of melody is the supreme mystery of man.’ Steiner lamented:

‘When it speaks of music language is lame. Customarily it takes refuge in the pathos of simile… The messianic intimation in music is often manifest. But attempts to verbalise it produce impotent metaphors…. In music, at a more radical level than in either literature or the arts, the best of intelligence, interpretative and critical, is musical. Asked to explain a difficult étude, Schumann sat down and played it again…’

Steiner’s chief concern is for what we call ‘classical music’, what he tends to call ‘supreme music.’ But rock has its own answer to his critical contention, namely the cover version. How well we understand Bob Dylan’s ‘All Along the Watchtower’ when it is translated by Jimi Hendrix! How brightly does Tricky elucidate Chuck D’s ‘Black Steel In the Hour of Chaos’! What depths did Richard Thompson discover in the ‘Oops I Did It Again’ of Britney Spears!

And, by turn, we should not overlook or diminish the power of a seasoned critic, a close listener, a succinct observer, to show us the way music works. To read Greil Marcus’s massively influential Mystery Train, to hear him extolling the greatness in The Band’s reading of Holland-Dozier-Holland’s ‘Baby Don’t You Do It’, is to enjoy a beautiful mind at work.

Lest I forget, even George Steiner in Real Presences grants popular music its power: ‘[F]or many human beings,’ he writes, ‘music has been the religion which they believe in. In the ecstasies of Pop and of Rock, the overlap is strident.’ This takes us back to Pete Townshend, whose faith in something bigger is encapsulated by several major lyrics, most memorably ‘Pure and Easy’ from 1971’s Who’s Next, also a key song in the much-delayed Lifehouse cycle. Pure and Easy speaks of a sort of musical ur-note in a shared human consciousness (‘The note is eternal, I hear it, it sees me’). It speaks of ‘the simple secret of the note in us all.’ Roger Daltrey sings these lines, as usual, but Townshend’s own voice surges forward at the end over his trademark windmill power chords: ‘There once was a note, listen…’

Interviewed by Melvyn Bragg for a South Bank Show in 1985, Townshend reaffirmed his faith in rock as possessing a quasi-religious force through its particular poetry and extraordinary commonality. Yet almost in the next sentence he was dismissing himself and fellow ‘ageing rock performers’ as the equivalent of Morris Dancers, preserving a possibly moribund tradition by mere creaking repetition. (You’ll find it here).

I suspect Townshend retains the ability to be in two minds on the issue; and I also suspect he might take pride and joy in Faber’s latest music title, Rob Young’s Electric Eden: Unearthing Britain’s Visionary Music. Pride because of his instigation of the pop/rock list at Faber, and joy because Young’s book is both an exemplary piece of musical-cultural history/exegesis, and a special declaration of love for music’s deep-lying and deep-moving powers. To say Electric Eden is a study of folk music in the British Isles over the last 200 years is really to cramp the book’s style, for it has an even more generous embrace of our island dreams, our unsung and inspirational landscapes, our warring urges as peoples, to return to a sunlit garden sanctuary even while we hook up the power-lines that will propel us into the future.

From Vaughan Williams to Kate Bush, Young shows us how ‘phantoms of the agrarian past’ have been invoked and then ‘channelled via an electrified present.’ Folk often seems to evoke either some conservative Little England preservation project, or else some misguidedly utopian project for enlightening the masses as to the historical basis of their exploitation. In fact, as Young shows, it is all this and more: above all else, an anvil on which to strike sparks, a cultural well that never dries. Pete Townshend is right, as are many of us, to find Morris dancing a little ridiculous to the eye. But look at this pursuit through the lens of The Wicker Man or its embrace by Ashley Hutchings of Fairport Convention, and you see what else it means. Such are the truths of tradition, and their yet more truthful revisiting and reinterpretation.

Young quotes Richard Thompson as saying that ‘Nothing resonates like an old song’… Thompson’s reading of Britney Spears may one day be heard as a raiding of tradition no different or any less archival than Fairport Convention’s celebrated revivals of the folksongs ‘Tam Lin’ or ‘She Moved Through the Fair.’ Faber’s music list acknowledges this delicious heretical canon, just as Pete Townshend surely intended. There once was a note. Listen…

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Serena

The year is 1929, and newlyweds George and Serena Pemberton arrive from Boston in the North Carolina mountains to create a timber empire. Serena is new to the mountains – but she soon shows herself the equal of any worker, overseeing crews, hunting rattlesnakes, even saving her husband’s life in the wilderness. Yet she also learns that she will never bear a child. Serena’s discovery will set in motion a course of events that will change the lives of everyone in this remote community. As the Pembertons’ intense, passionate marriage starts to unravel, this riveting story of love, passion and revenge moves toward its shocking reckoning.

From Those Wonderful Folks Who gave You Pearl Harbor, by Jerry Della Femina

In 1970 Jerry Della Femina wrote this gossip-filled, insider’s account of working on Madison Avenue during the golden age of advertising. It caused a sensation, became a bestseller and established itself as a cult classic.

Years later, it inspired the multi-award-winning drama Mad Men.

American Rust, by Philipp Meyer

It is the story of two young men bound to the town by family, responsibility, inertia and the beauty around them who dream of a future beyond the factories, abandoned homes, and the polluted river.

Isaac is the smartest kid in town, left behind to care for his sick father after his mother commits suicide and his sister Lee moves away. Now Isaac wants out too. Not even his best friend, Billy Poe, can stand in his way: broad-shouldered Billy, always ready for a fight, still living in his mother’s trailer. Then, on the very day of Isaac’s leaving, something happens that changes the friends’ fates and tests the loyalties of their friendship and those of their lovers, families, and the town itself.

Evoking John Steinbeck’s novels of restless lives during the Great Depression, Philipp Myer’s American Rust is an extraordinarily moving novel about the bleak realities that battle our desire for transcendance, and the power of love and friendship to redeem us.

• Download a chapter from American Rust

The Perks of Being a Wallflower, by Steven Chbosky

Charlie is a freshman. And while he’s not the biggest geek in the school, he is by no means popular. Shy, introspective, intelligent beyond his years yet socially awkward, he is a wallflower, caught between trying to live his life and trying to run from it. Charlie is attempting to navigate his way through uncharted territory: the world of first dates and mixed tapes, family dramas and new friends; the world of sex, drugs, and The Rocky Horror Picture Show, when all one requires is that perfect song on that perfect drive to feel infinite. But Charlie can’t stay on the sideline forever. Standing on the fringes of life offers a unique perspective. But there comes a time to see what it looks like from the dance floor. The Perks of Being a Wallflower is a deeply affecting coming-of-age story that will spirit you back to those wild and poignant roller-coaster days known as growing up.

Stardust, by Joseph Kanon

Hollywood, 1945. Ben Collier returns from war to the news that his filmmaker brother Daniel has died in mysterious circumstances — the papers say it was an accident, but others suspect suicide. Daniel was a heroic figure who helped many prominent German intellectuals escape Europe before the war and then settled in Los Angeles with his beautiful wife, Liesl. Why would a man with such a bright future take his own life? Could he have been murdered?

Ben is determined to uncover the truth and uses his friendship with Continental Studios boss Sol Lasner to penetrate the maze of studio politics and Hollywood secrets. Beneath the surface shine of the movie business lies a darker world where even the biggest stars and star-makers are vulnerable to old secrets being exposed and old loyalties tested…

• Take a tour of Hollywood past with Jospeh Kanon
• Stardust reading group guide
  

Founding Brothers, by Joseph J. Ellis

Founding Brothers is an illuminating, Pulitzer Prize-winning study of the intertwined lives of the founders of the American republic: Adams, Burr, Franklin, Hamilton, Jefferson, Madison, and Washington. During the 1790s these great statesmen came together to define the new republic and direct its course for the future. Ellis focuses on six key ‘moments’ in this era: Burr and Hamilton’s deadly duel; the ‘secret dinner’ of Hamilton, Jefferson, and Madison, during which the seat of the nation’s capital was determined; Franklin’s petition to end slavery, and Madison’s efforts to quash it; Washington’s farewell address that offered his country some parting advice about US involvement in other nations’ affairs; Adams’s difficult term as Washington’s successor; and Adams and Jefferson’s correspondence at the end of their lives, in which they compared their views of the Revolution and its legacy.

In a lively and engaging narrative, Ellis shows us the private characters behind the public personas, and argues that the checks and balances that permitted the republic to endure were intensely personal, rooted in the dynamic interaction of these men. Founding Brothers informs our understanding of American politics – then, and now.

Wall Street, by Steve Fraser

This epic book is a passionate, critical history of the most powerful financial district in the world. Steve Fraser’s story of America’s love-hate relationship with its own economic power is brought to life with colourful tales of robber barons and aristocrats, Napoleonic financiers and reckless adventurers, men to the manor born and men from nowhere. Meticulously researched and masterfully written, Wall Street is history on a grand scale, fully deserving of its subject.

Mystery Train, by Greil Marcus

Greil Marcus’s study of American rock and roll is universally acclaimed as the benchmark work of modern rock criticism. Using a handful of artists – a brace of bluesmen, The Nad, Sly Stone, Randy Newman and Elvis Presley – Marcus illuminates and interprets the American Dream in rigorous prose touching on the myth, landscape and oral tradition of the continent.

Housekeeping, by Marilynne Robinson

Acclaimed on publication as a contemporary classic, Housekeeping is the story of Ruth and Lucille, orphans growing up in the small desolate town of Fingerbone in the vast northwest of America. Abandoned by a succession of relatives, the sisters find themselves in the care of Sylvie, the remote and enigmatic sister of their dead mother. Steeped in imagery of the bleak wintry landscape around them, the sisters’ struggle towards adulthood is powerfully portrayed in a novel about loss, loneliness and transience.

Private Life, by Jane Smiley

Margaret Mayfield is nearly an old maid at twenty-seven when she marries Captain Andrew Jackson Jefferson Early. He’s the most famous man their Missouri town has ever produced: a naval officer and an astronomer – a genius who, according to the local paper, has changed the universe. Margaret’s mother calls the match ‘a piece of luck’.

Yet Andrew confounds Margaret’s expectations from the moment their train leaves for his naval base in San Francisco, and soon she realizes that his devotion to science leaves little room for anything, or anyone, else. She stands by him through tragedies both personal and those they share with the nation. But as World War II approaches, Andrew’s obsessions take a darker turn, forcing Margaret to reconsider the life she’d so carefully constructed.

Private Life is a portrait of marriage and the mysteries that endure even in lives lived side by side, a riveting historical panorama, and an unforgettable novel from one of our finest storytellers.

The Motel Life, by Willy Vlautin

‘The night it happened I was drunk, almost passed out, and I swear to God a bird came flying through my motel room window . . .’

Narrated by Frank Flannigan, The Motel Life tells the story of how he and his brother Jerry Lee take to the road in a bid to escape the hit-and-run accident which kick-starts the narrative. Written with huge compassion, and an eye for the small details of life, it has become one of the most talked about debuts of recent years.

Lake Wobegon Days, by Garrison Keillor

Lake Wobegon Days is the marvellous chronicle of an imaginary place located somewhere in the middle of the state (but not on the map) and named after an Indian word meaning ‘Here we are!’ or ‘We sat all day in the rain waiting for you.’ From the narrator – a skinny Protestant kid fascinated by the Catholic church – we learn of the town’s beginnings and of the settlers who made their lives there. A contemporary classic filled with warmth and humour, sadness and tenderness, songs and poems, it is also an unforgettable portrait of small-town America.

Diner, by Barry Levinson

Baltimore 1959, and a gang of male friends in their early twenties reconvene for the wedding of their pal Eddie. Boogie is the hustler of the group, a trainee hairdresser mired in gambling debts. Shreevie is the elder statesman, already married (albeit tetchily) to Beth. Fenwick is the reckless trust-fund prankster; Modell the straight-faced jester; Billy the thoughtful intellectual.

The sole obstacle barring Eddie’s marriage is that he has decreed that his fiancée Elyse must first pass a taxing quiz on pro-football trivia; and there’s the rub. On the threshold of adulthood, the guys remain happiest hanging out together in the neighbourhood diner, feasting on sodas and French fries in gravy, shooting the breeze about pop records, first dates and schoolboy pranks. Maturity, responsibility and real red-blooded women are the challenges they truly fear.

Like the other two entries in Barry Levinson’s ‘Baltimore trilogy’ (Tin Men and Avalon), Diner is a satisfyingly literary creation, free of plot points or grandstanding resolutions. People just talk; true-life characters and situations are lovingly and wittily evoked. Diner is the original ‘guys together’ picture, a template for future hits such as Swingers.

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Stranger to History

As a child, all Aatish Taseer ever had of his father was his photograph in a browning silver frame. Raised by his Sikh mother in Delhi, his father, a Pakistani Muslim, remained a distant figure. It was a fractured upbringing which left Aatish with many questions about his own identity. Stranger to History is the story of the journey Aatish made to try to understand what it means to be Muslim in the twenty-first century. Starting from Istanbul, Islam’s once greatest city, he travels to Mecca, its most holy, and then home through Iran and Pakistan. Ending in Lahore, at his estranged father’s home, on the night Benazir Bhutto was killed, it is also the story of Aatish’s own divided family over the past fifty years.

Learning to Live, by Luc Ferry

From the ordered universe of the ancient Greeks to the shadows of Nietzsche’s nineteenth century, Learning to Live shakes the dust from the history of philosophy and takes us on a fascinating journey through more than two millennia of humanity’s search for understanding — of the world around us and of each other. Both a sparkling and accessible history of Western thought, and a courageous dissection of how religion and philosophy have converged and clashed through the ages, Luc Ferry’s blueprint for a new humanism challenges every one of us to learn to think for ourselves, and asks us the most important question of all: how can we live better?

• Read an extract

Ship of Fools, by Fintan O’Toole

Between 1995 and 2007, the Republic of Ireland was the worldwide model of successful adaptation to economic globalisation. The success story was phenomenal: a doubling of the workforce; a massive growth in exports; a GDP that was substantially above the EU average. Ireland became the world’s largest exporter of software and manufactured the world’s supply of Viagra.

The factors that made it possible for Ireland to become prosperous – progressive social change, solidarity, major State investment in education, and the critical role of the EU – were largely ignored as too sharply at odds with the dominant free market ideology. The Irish boom was shaped instead into a simplistic moral tale of the little country that discovered low taxes and small government and prospered as a result. There were two big problems. Ireland acquired a hyper-capitalist economy on the back of a corrupt, dysfunctional political system. And the business class saw the influx of wealth as an opportunity to make money out of property. Aided by corrupt planning and funded by poorly regulated banks, an unsustainable property-led boom gradually consumed the Celtic Tiger.

This is, as Fintan O’Toole writes, ‘a good old-fashioned jeremiad about the bastards who got us into this mess’. It is an entertaining, passionate story of one of the most ignominious economic reversals in recent history.

Franklin, by Andrew Lambert

From ‘the outstanding naval historian of his generation’ (David Cannadine), a gripping story of the Arctic, propelled by the need to recover the truth about one man’s fatal mission.

In 1845, Captain Sir John Franklin led a large, well equipped expedition to complete the conquest of the Canadian Arctic: to find the fabled North West Passage connecting the North Atlantic to the North Pacific. Yet Franklin, his ships and men were fated never to return. The cause of their loss remains a mystery.

Shocked by the loss of all 129 officers and men, and sickened by reports of cannibalism, the Victorians re-created Franklin as a brave Christian hero who laid down his life, and those of his men. Later generations have been more sceptical about Franklin and his supposed selfless devotion to duty. But does either view really explain why this outstanding scientific navigator found his ships trapped in pack ice seventy miles from the magnetic north?

Andrew Lambert re-examines the life and the evidence with his customary brilliance and authority. He discovers a new Franklin: a character far more complex, and more truly heroic, than previous histories have allowed.

• Read an interview with the author, Andrew Lambert here on Bookhugger

The Blue Moment, by Richard Williams

There have been many books about Miles Davis, one of the twentieth century’s most protean musical figures, but The Blue Moment is unlike any other work on the subject.

Richard Williams takes as his starting point the making of Kind of Blue, Davis’s most celebrated album, and shows how movements in art, philosophy and music fed into this meditative, melancholy masterpiece, first released in 1959. The haunting palettes of Picasso, Matisse and Yves Klein influenced the mood of a culture that valued the colour blue so highly; and the blues, mediated by jazz and other kinds of music, had become the sound that signified ‘coolness’.

Williams tells the story of album’s creation in miraculously few hours in a converted Manhattan church and elegantly sketches the roles of the other five musicians who played on the recording. This is then the foundation for an ambitious exploration of Kind of Blue’s influence on the whole course of late-twentieth-century music, which moves in surprising directions through the labyrinth of sound.

Davis’s album was profoundly influential on his bandmate John Coltrane, and they both haunted the avant-garde composers Terry Riley, Steve Reich and Lamonte Young, who in turn were responsible for transmitting that influence into rock music, touching artists as diverse as John Cale and the Velvet Underground, The Who, Soft Machine, Brian Eno and early Roxy Music, and Talking Heads and U2. The Allman Brothers reworked passages from Kind of Blue in their long improvised jams; and the Grateful Dead’s extended concert performances owed much to that strain of jazz. James Brown’s most copied riff, from ‘Cold Sweat’, was a reworking of ‘So What’.

Richard Williams traces the echoes of Davis’s creation in the enduring success of the German ECM label, whose reverberant, brooding sound has defined the work of Keith Jarrett, Chick Corea and Jan Garbarek, and in the static, minimalist music of bands such as Supersilent and The Necks.

This is a beautifully crafted journey through some of the most important music of our time.

• Read a Q&A with author Richard Williams

Why Mahler?, by Norman Lebrecht

A century after his death, Gustav Mahler is the most important composer of modern times. Displacing Beethoven as a box-office draw, his music offers more than the usual listening satisfactions. Many believe it has the power to heal emotional wounds and ease the pain of death. Others struggle with the intellectual fascination of its contradictory meanings. Long, loud and seldom easy, his symphonies are used to accompany acts of mourning and Hollywood melodramas. Sometimes dismissed as death-obsessed, Mahler is more alive in the twenty-first century than ever before.

Why Mahler? Why does a Jewish musician from a land without a name capture the yearnings and anxieties of post-industrial society? Is it the music, is it the man, or is it the affinity we feel with his productive peak – a decade when Freud, Einstein, Picasso, Joyce and Mahler reconfigured the ways we understand life on earth?

In this highly original account of Mahler’s life and work, Norman Lebrecht – renowned writer, critic and cultural commentator – explores the Mahler Effect, a phenomenon that reaches deep into unsuspecting lives, altering the self-perceptions of world leaders, finance chiefs and working musicians. Part biography, part travelogue, part hitchhiker’s guide, Why Mahler? is a multilayered exploration of the role that his music plays as the soundtrack to our lives.

• More information on Mahler can be found on Faber’s blog, The Thought Fox

When a Billion Chinese Jump, by Jonathan Watts

When a Billion Chinese Jump tells the story of China’s – and the world’s – greatest crisis. With filthy water, choking emissions and an unsustainable appetite for resources, China’s development has taken our planet to the environmental edge. Now it faces a stark choice that will affect us all: accept catastrophe or make radical change.

To explore the response, award-winning correspondent Jonathan Watts travels from mountain paradise to blasted desert, through eco-cities, coal mines and industrial wastelands, examining the challenges facing those at the top of society and the problems and hopes of those below.

His travelogue will interest anyone concerned with economic development, energy security, globalisation or climate activism. At heart, it is not a call for panic, but an expression of hope that – despite political constraints – individual choices can make a difference.

Consistently attentive to human detail, Watts vividly portrays the diversity of a country too often viewed as a faceless machine. No reader of his book – no consumer in the world – can be unaffected by what he presents.

Thank You For the Days, by Mark Radcliffe

Approaching 50, Mark Radcliffe decided to write about his life, most importantly, his time in music. But crucially, he only wanted to write about the most interesting days and not the dull ones in between. With predictable good taste, Mark takes his title from the Kinks’ song and has written an entertaining, funny book worthy of such a pedigree.

Mark’s family life is covered by ‘The Day My Mother Hit Me With a Golf Club’ , his school life by ‘The Day I Ruined a Perfectly Good Suit’ and ‘The Day I Got My First Guitar’; through his epiphany of the power of music in ‘The Day I Met the Band Who Changed My Life’ and his star struck meeting with childhood hero, David Bowie. Many other stars are covered too, for example in ‘The Day I Went to Kate Bush’s House for Cheese Flan’, and ‘The Day Mick Jagger Was Taller Than Me’. He’s very funny when recounting his days working at the BBC in ’80s and ’90s (how, when bored, he and colleagues invented a fictional department), winning Stars in Their Eyes as Shane MacGowan and so on. Yet, among the laughter are more sober days, such as the one when he learned John Peel had died.

A cracking read and a potted history of both one man’s life and his love affair with music, Thank You For The Days is a uniquely entertaining memoir that will appeal not just to music fans but to connoisseurs of British popular culture.

The Lost City of Z, by David Grann

David Grann ventures into the hazardous wild world of the Amazon to retrace the footsteps of the great Colonel Fawcett and his followers, in a bracing attempt to solve one of the greatest mysteries. It is an irresistibly readable adventure story, a subtle examination of the strange and often violent encounters between Europeans and Amazonian tribes and a tale of lethal obsession.

Daughter of Dust, by Wendy Wallace

Leila understands from early on that she is not part of normal Sudanese society. Her parents are unable to care for her, so she is banished to a strict orphanage, along with children born outside marriage. At school, Leila and her best friend Amal are called ‘daughters of sin’. Her pretty sister, Zulima, is married off to a much older man, while the nannies say an abandoned girl is lucky to get an offer of marriage at all. At the age of ten, both Leila and Amal endure female circumcision. Suffering appalling prejudice, and thought to bring the ‘evil eye’, Leila remains outgoing and brave and manages to get an education. She goes on to marry, have four children, and divorce, yet even grown up she continues to know the stigma of being abandoned.

Undaunted, Leila founds her own charity to help those shunned as outcasts and she continues to work tirelessly to dispel prejudice. This beautifully written, graceful memoir perfectly evokes the heat and colour of the North African desert and tells of the true friendships that are born out of adversity.

The Way We’re Working Isn’t Working, by Tony Schwartz

Through his years of intensive work consulting to companies including Procter & Gamble, Sony, Toyota, Microsoft, Ford and Ernst & Young, with his firm The Energy Project, Schwartz has developed a powerful program for changing the way we are working that greatly boosts our engagement and our satisfication with our work and increases our performance. In this book he marshalls a wide range of powerful evidence from business research and psychology that shows that the current model of work — in which people are treated essentially as machines that should be able to perform at top speed for extraordinarily long hours, be able to multi-task, be always accessible and online, withstand often harsh and emotionally punishing treatment, and be primarily driven by the need to make profits – is not only not optimal, it is specfically counter-productive because it saps us of our physical, emotional, mental and spiritual energy.

In order for us to perform at our best, we must make a set of key changes in our work lives — and in order to develop the full potential of their work force, our managers and companies must institute changes that will provide us with the regular physical renewal, emotional reward, mental focus and stimulation; and sense of purpose and significance that we need.

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• Peter Carey Parrot and Olivier in America (Faber and Faber)
• Emma Donoghue Room (Pan MacMillan – Picador)
• Helen Dunmore The Betrayal (Penguin – Fig Tree)
• Damon Galgut In a Strange Room (Grove Atlantic – Atlantic Books)
• Howard Jacobson The Finkler Question (Bloomsbury)
• Andrea Levy The Long Song (Headline Publishing Group – Headline Review)
• Tom McCarthy C (Random House – Jonathan Cape)
• David Mitchell The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet (Hodder & Stoughton – Sceptre)
• Lisa Moore February (Random House – Chatto & Windus)
• Paul Murray Skippy Dies (Penguin – Hamish Hamilton)
• Rose Tremain Trespass (Random House – Chatto & Windus)
• Christos Tsiolkas The Slap (Grove Atlantic – Tuskar Rock)
• Alan Warner The Stars in the Bright Sky (Random House – Jonathan Cape)

The 2010 shortlist will be announced on Tuesday 7 September. The winner of the Man Booker Prize for Fiction will receive £50,000 and can look forward to greatly increased sales and worldwide recognition. Each of the six shortlisted authors, including the winner, will receive £2,500 and a designer bound edition of their shortlisted book.

Chaired by Andrew Motion, former Poet Laureate, the 2010 judges are Rosie Blau, Literary Editor of the Financial Times; Deborah Bull, formerly a dancer, now Creative Director of the Royal Opera House as well as a writer and broadcaster; Tom Sutcliffe, journalist, broadcaster and author and Frances Wilson, biographer and critic.

• Visit the Man Booker Prize website

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Summoned to the trailer of a Hollywood star who’s receiving death threats, former stuntman-turned-private investigator, David Spandau, assumes this will be another routine case. It turns out to be anything but. A-list actor Bobby Dye has become entangled with B-list gangster Richie Stella, who just wants to make a movie – and you can’t make a movie without a star. But as Richie and his cohorts are about to find out, the movie business makes the cocaine and heroin racket look like child’s play. Meanwhile, Spandau finds himself drawn ever deeper into the crazy world of Bobby Dye, one of the handsomest, most idolized men on the planet – and also one of the loneliest. All Bobby wants is someone to talk honestly to him – but can he really cope with the blunt and bitter truth?

• Read an extract at Bookdagger

The Executioner, by Chris Carter

Inside a Los Angeles church, on the altar steps, lies the blood-soaked, decapitated body of a priest. Carefully positioned, legs stretched out, arms crossed over the chest, the most horrifying thing of all is that the priest’s head has been replaced by that of a dog. Later, the forensic team discover that, on the victim’s chest, the figure 3 has been scrawled in blood.

At first, Detective Robert Hunter believes that this is a ritualistic killing. But as more bodies surface, he is forced to reassess. All the victims died in the way they feared the most. Their worst nightmares have literally come true. But how could the killer have known? And what links these apparently random victims.

Hunter finds himself on the trail of an elusive and sadistic killer, somone who apparently has the power to read his victims’ minds. Someone who can sense what scares his victims the most. Someone who will stop at nothing to achieve his twisted aim.

• Read more about author Chris Carter’s writing at Bookdagger

The Sacred Stone, by The Medieval Murderers

1067. In the desolate wastes of Greenland, a group of hunters discover a strangely-shaped meteor which has fallen from the sky. At first, the mysterious ‘sky-stone’ seems to bring them good luck, healing a lame boy and guaranteeing a good catch of furs. But violence and murder soon follow in fortune’s wake, as the villagers fight and struggle amongst themselves to get control of the precious stone.

Over the next six hundred years, the Sky-Stone falls into the hands of crusading knights, the wicked Sheriff of Devon, a group of radical young kabalists, the dying King Henry III and a band of travelling players. Each time, the stone brings treachery, discord and violent death to those who seek to possess it.

The Oath, by  Michael Jecks

1326. In an England riven with conflict, knight and peasant alike find their lives turned upside down by the warring factions of Edward II, with his hated favourite, Hugh le Despenser, and Edward’s estranged queen Isabella and her lover, Sir Roger Mortimer. Yet even in such times the brutal slaughter of an entire family, right down to a babe in arms, still has the power to shock. Three further murders follow, and bailiff Simon Puttock is drawn into a web of intrigue, vengeance, power and greed as Roger Mortimer charges him to investigate the killings.

Michael Jecks brilliantly evokes the turmoil of fourteenth-century England, as his well-loved characters Simon Puttock and Sir Baldwin de Furnshill strive to maintain the principles of loyalty and truth.

Two for Sorrow, by Nicola Upson

London, 1903. Two women are hanged in Holloway Prison for killing babies. More than thirty years later, their crimes resurface with shocking consequences… When Josephine Tey sets out to write a novel about Amelia Sach and Annie Walters, the notorious Finchley baby farmers, she can have little idea that the research for her book will be needed to help solve a modern-day killing – the sadistic murder of a young seamstress, found dead in the Motley sisters’ studio, amid preparations for a star-studded charity gala. The girl’s death seems to be the result of a long-standing domestic feud, but Josephine’s friend, Inspector Archie Penrose, is unconvinced; and when a second young woman is involved in an horrific accident soon afterwards, the search begins for a vicious killer who will stop at nothing to keep the past where it belongs. Moving between the decadence and glamour of a private women’s club, the bleak surroundings of Holloway prison, and the deprivation of London’s slums, Two for Sorrow is a dark and unsettling exploration of the way in which the crimes of the past destroy those left behind – long after justice is done.

Beautiful Malice, by Rebecca James

So. Were you glad, deep down? Were you glad to be rid of her? Your perfect sister? Were you secretly glad when she was killed?

Following a horrific tragedy that leaves her once-perfect family devastated, Katherine Patterson moves to a new city, starts at a new school, and begins a new life of quiet anonymity.

But when Katherine meets the gregarious and beautiful Alice Parrie her plan to live a solitary life becomes difficult. Katherine is unable to resist the flattering attention that Alice pays her and is so charmed by her contagious enthusiasm that the two girls soon become firm friends.

But being friends with Alice is complicated – and as Katherine gets to know her better she discovers that although Alice can be charming, she can also be selfish. Sometimes, even, Alice is cruel.

Eye of the Red Tsar, by Sam Eastland

It is the time of the Great Terror.

Inspector Pekkala – known as the Emerald Eye – was once the most famous detective in all Russia, the favourite of the Tsar. Now he is the prisoner of the men he once hunted.

Like millions of others, he has been sent to the gulags in Siberia and, as far as the rest of the world is concerned, he is as good as dead. But a reprieve comes when he is summoned by Stalin himself to investigate a crime. His mission – to uncover the men who really killed the Tsar and his family, and to locate the Tsar’s treasure. The reward for success will be his freedom and the chance to re-unite with the woman he would have married if the Revolution had not torn them apart. The price of failure – death.

Set against the backdrop of the paranoid and brutal country that Russia became under the rule of Stalin, Eye of the Red Tsar introduces a compelling new figure to readers of crime fiction.

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The Lacuna is the story of a man’s search for safety in the grinding jaws of two nations, at a moment when the entire world seemed bent on reinventing itself at any cost.

Born in the US, reared in a series of provisional households in Mexico, Harrison Shepherd is mostly a liability to his social-climbing flapper mother, Salomé. From a coastal island jungle to the unpaved neighbourhoods of 1930s Mexico City, through a disastrous stint at a military school in Virginia and back again, his fortunes never steady as Salomé finds her rich men-friends always on the losing side of the Mexican Revolution. Sometimes she gives her son cigarettes instead of supper.

He aims for invisibility, observing his world and recording everything with a peculiar selfless irony in his notebooks. Life is whatever he learns from servants putting him to work in the kitchen, errands he runs in the streets, and one fateful day, by mixing plaster for famed Mexican muralist Diego Rivera. Making himself useful in the household of the muralist, his wife Frida Kahlo, and exiled Bolshevik leader Lev Trotsky, young Shepherd inadvertently casts his lot with art and revolution, and the howling gossip and reportage that dictate public opinion.

A violent upheaval sends him north to a nation newly caught up in the internationalist goodwill of World War II. In the mountain city of Asheville, North Carolina, he remakes himself in America’s hopeful image. Under the watch of his peerless stenographer, Violet Brown, he finds an extraordinary use for his talents of observation. But political winds continue to push him between north and south, in a plot that turns many times on the unspeakable breach – the lacuna – between truth and public presumption.

This is a gripping story of identity, connection with our past, and the power of words to create or devastate. Like no other novel yet written, it illuminates an era when bold internationalism gave way to a post-war landscape of narrowly defined ‘Americanism’. Crossing two decades, from the vibrant revolutionary murals of Mexico City to the halls of a Congress bent on eradicating the colour red, The Lacuna is as deep and rich as the New World itself.

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Beautiful Malice, by Rebecca James

So. Were you glad, deep down? Were you glad to be rid of her? Your perfect sister? Were you secretly glad when she was killed?

Following a horrific tragedy that leaves her once-perfect family devastated, Katherine Patterson moves to a new city, starts at a new school, and begins a new life of quiet anonymity.

But when Katherine meets the gregarious and beautiful Alice Parrie her plan to live a solitary life becomes difficult. Katherine is unable to resist the flattering attention that Alice pays her and is so charmed by her contagious enthusiasm that the two girls soon become firm friends.

But being friends with Alice is complicated – and as Katherine gets to know her better she discovers that although Alice can be charming, she can also be selfish. Sometimes, even, Alice is cruel.

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The Crimson Petal was, and is, an 835-page tale set in 1870s London. It follows the progress of a young woman called Sugar, a prostitute who longs to escape the influence of her abusive mother. By the end of the book, she is working as a nanny and has formed a close bond with a little girl called Sophie. There is every reason to hope that Sugar, damaged though she undoubtedly is by her past, will not perpetuate the cycle of abuse. But hope is not the same thing as knowing for sure. At the very end, Sugar and Sophie are forced onto the streets. What happens next is undisclosed.

A few days ago, I lugged out the cardboard box where I keep letters from my readers. I re-read the ones about The Crimson Petal. Most of them were wonderfully generous and enthusiastic; several of them were from people who’d been readers for decades and had never written to an author before.

Here are some of the things I found:

Ever since I was a child in Cape Bruton, Nova Scotia, I have loved to read. There are some books which illuminate why that is, and remind a person how thankful we should be for those who write. The Crimson Petal and the White moved me so deeply, and taught me so much, in the process of a wonderful escape into another time . . . I wish I could articulate more lucidly all that your work made me think about and feel. Thank you for your gift.

This lady was unusual in not demanding to be told what happened after the ending of the novel. Most people who wrote to me were not so serene. Quite a few described themselves as ‘in shock’ or ‘desperate’. A lady in New York began her letter:

How dare you, sir? What an ending!

A man in Arnhem, The Netherlands, anticipated my position as he made his pitch:

It is very clear why the story ends where it ends. You have made your point . . . Still I would like to request a sequel, for the following reasons:

I have grown attached to Sugar, your and my heroine. In my own real life there have been a number of sudden and irrevocable goodbyes, which have left lasting feelings of pain and guilt. Why do you make me suffer more?

Another man assured me that:

I could have easily read another 800 pages. So I implore you to please, please, please, PLEASE continue the story in a sequel.

Another man — the author of a tough, gritty contemporary Scottish novel — showed a touching concern for little Sophie:

About the ending; you are writing a sequel, aren’t you? Sophie grows up to be a woman-before-her-time, maybe an author herself?

Another young man, from Texas – also, by remarkable coincidence, a published novelist – showed considerable ambivalence towards my book:

The Crimson Petal and the White is singularly the most frustrating, maddening masterwork that I have ever trudged through in my entire life . . . How dare your book end with us not knowing what happened to Agnes! And where did Sugar take Sophie off to anyhow? Novels aren’t supposed to just stop! Novels aren’t like real life. Novels are supposed to have satisfying tight endings.

More conciliatory was the lady from Bournemouth, Dorset, speaking on behalf of a group of ‘avid readers of mature years’. Her postcard, decorated with pussycats, read:

Thank you so much. However, where did Sugar and Sophie go? Australia? New Zealand? Back north? Please – if you know — give us an idea. We worry about Sophie!

A 65-year-old woman from Quebec was given the book as a Christmas present and initially had her doubts:

I had never heard of you and, at 835 pages, I wondered if I would ever have the courage, and the physical strength to hold the book on my lap. I took it home and read the first line. That’s all it took . . . Just before I end this letter, please tell me: where did Sugar go????? Did she indeed bring the child back to her mother???? What happens to them? You must write a sequel.

A woman from Aurora, Colorado confessed that she had not slept for two days and called in sick for work in order the read the novel in one marathon session:

I simply won’t be able to sleep until I’ve sent this off. About five minutes ago I finished your work The Crimson Petal and the White. I would have been writing five minutes earlier but I was too stunned by your ending…

A lady in Michigan tackled the book in a slightly more leisurely mode:

I’ve spent two weeks entranced by The Crimson Petal and the White with only a few breaks for meals and an occasional tennis or bridge game. And I didn’t think I liked historical novels. After finishing at 1 a.m., I spent the rest of the night wondering what happened to Sugar, Agnes and William, the cad. You can’t leave me hanging; please issue a news bulletin regarding their fates.

A corporate lawyer wrote:

I wonder if you can resolve a dispute as to the interpretation of the ending of your book, I am a member of an all-male book group . . . Everybody but me thought the ending meant that Sugar took Sophie away to meet Agnes and they all lived happily ever after.

I was touched by the goodwill of a man from New York City:

I just now — this second — said goodbye, knowing that it must be so. All week I had to pinch myself as a reminder that my new friends were not forever — but until the end of the week or maybe a little longer. Now they are gone – I hope to greater heights.

Particularly haunting was this hand-written note from a gentleman in Lancashire:

A few days before Christmas I was half awake and the first thought that came to me was what I could obtain as Christmas presents for Miss Sophie, Sugar and Mrs Fox. Then suddenly I realised who they really were.

There were many other people people who communicated with me. Academics, women on welfare, historians, campaigners for social justice. I even corresponded with several prostitutes who announced that they were Sugar and had been spooked by my ability to spy on their thoughts as they were dealing with customers. All in all, my novel had made a powerful impression on an extraordinary range of people. I didn’t send replies to as many as I would have liked, because I grew tired of explaining that there was not going to be a sequel. Sugar had been denied privacy all her life, I would say, and by the end of the novel she has earned the right to make her own way in the world, unscrutinised by us. And isn’t it fun, at the end of the book, to be challenged to do what the Victorians were obliged to do between instalments of serialised novels: construct what happens next in our imaginations? In any case, the ending of The Crimson Petal is not as sudden as it might first appear. Re-read the final chapters, and you will find that there is a gradual process of leave-taking, a drawing of curtains, a succession of narrative farewells to each of the key characters. Yes, their future is uncertain. But so are all our futures. Only death concludes the story, and Sugar and Sophie are still alive. A sequel would crush that life out of them.

So, here I am in 2006, presenting a collection of Crimson Petal stories. Have I changed my mind about the sequels?

No. This is a book of stories about characters who also appeared in The Crimson Petal and the White. You needn’t have read that book in order to appreciate this one. The stories are, as stories should be, little worlds of their own.

They are also a much more wide-ranging time-travel experience than The Crimson Petal was. Some of the characters in these new stories are very much younger than when they were in the novel, some are very much older. One tale is a memoir of the Edwardian era, narrated in the 1990s by the son of on of Petal’s characters — a reminder of how few human lifespans it takes to link us to distant centuries. Yet the essential mysteries at the end of The Crimson Petal (What happened to Sugar? Where did she and Sophie go?) are left intact.

Inevitably, though, the three stories that are set after the end of Petal — ‘Clara and the Rat Man’, ‘Medicine’ and ‘A Mighty Horde Of Women In Very Big Hats, Advancing’ — offer glimpses of futures that may be different from the scenarios some readers imagined. Fro example, those folk who were convinced that Sugar must have been captured immediately after the end of the novel will have to concede that, as far as can be judged from these new tales, no such capture occurred. But we are still a very long way from knowing “what happened”. These stories offer openings, not closure. Or, if they offer closure, it is of an instinctive, emotional kind.

None of which need concern readers who are unfamiliar with these characters’ history. The tales collected here are complete narratives, and if The Crimson Petal had never existed, I would wish to have written them regardless. ‘A Mighty Horde . . .’ gives me as much satisfaction as my best novels. In fact, to my mind, it is a novel, with a novel’s scope and richness of theme. It’s done with fewer words, that’s all.

But why these characters, and not others? Why this slim volume, and not more? Because these were the tales that demanded to exist. There were other characters I was curious about, characters I wished I could spend more time with. They had moved away, disappeared into history. I had to let them go. My one serious regret is that I didn’t manage to write a story about Henry Racham, a decent man who deserved so much more than he got in The Crimson Petal. I offered him an opportunity to live again, as a younger person, even as a child; I urged him to seize the chance to say the things he’d been too shy to say the first time round. He remained too shy.

Such things must be respected.

This, then, is all there is. I can understand why some readers might still wish to know more about what became of Sugar. Revisiting my accumulated correspondence, I wish I knew what became of some of the readers who took the trouble to write to me. The man who had cancer and read The Crimson Petal in hospital: is he still alive? The prostitute who said she was leaving the game and returning to education: did she? And so on. But I will probably never know. But then, I’d thought I would never know the things in these stories. And now I know.

Michel Faber.

From the foreword in the hardback edition of The Apple, published in 2006.

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The Nobodies Album

Octavia Frost is no stranger to life’s twists of fate.

She has mourned a husband and a daughter. She has watched her son become a rock star, following his progress through gossip magazines: they have not spoken in four years.

And in her own, less spectacular way, she has built a name for herself as a writer.

But the news she receives today will make her rethink everything. And though the situation seems bleak, it could give her a chance to redeem the mistakes she’s made in the past. She may still have time to bring her own story to a different ending.

True Things About Me, by Deborah Kay Davies

This is the story of a woman brave enough to risk it all. She understands better than most the things that we keep hidden. She comes to learn how the heart is usually stronger than the head. And she cannot help, despite her better instincts, being drawn into a sexually charged and highly volatile relationship. True Things About Me is a brilliantly written novel of survival that reveals simultaneously the strength and vulnerability of one ordinary woman.

With great honesty and unexpected humour, Deborah Kay Davies takes us deep into the mind of her unforgettable protagonist, and in doing so asks us to consider seriously what we might sacrifice for our desires.

The Radleys, by Matt Haig

Meet the Radleys. Peter, Helen and their teenage children, Clara and Rowan, live in an English town. They are an everyday family, averagely dysfunctional, averagely content. But as their children have yet to find out, the Radleys have a devastating secret. From one of Britain’s finest young novelists comes a razor-sharp unpicking of adulthood and family life. In this moving, thrilling and extraordinary portrait of one unusual family, The Radleys asks what we grow into when we grow up, and explores what we gain – and lose – when we deny our appetites.

The Crimson Petal and the White, by Michel Faber

Step into Victorian London and meet our heroine, Sugar – a young woman trying to drag herself up from the gutter any way she can – and the host of unforgettable characters that make up her world.

Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi, by Geoff Dyer

Jeff Atman, a journalist, is in Venice to cover the opening of the Biennale. He’s expecting to see a load of art, go to a lot of parties and drink too many bellinis. He’s not expecting to meet the spellbinding Laura, who will completely transform his few days in the city. So begins a story of erotic love and spiritual learning that will reach its conclusion amidst the ghats of Varanasi.

Winner of the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize; a New York Times Notable Book of the Year.

Serena, by Ron Rash

George and Serena Pemberton arrive in the wilds of the North Carolina mountains to build a life together. Unlike any woman the timber empire has ever seen, Serena oversees crews, hunts rattlesnakes and even saves her husband’s life in the wilderness. But when Serena learns she will never bear a child, it sets in motion a course of events that will change the lives of everyone in the community.

Beautiful Malice, by Rebecca James

So. Were you glad, deep down? Were you glad to be rid of her? Your perfect sister? Were you secretly glad when she was killed?

Following a horrific tragedy that leaves her once-perfect family devastated, Katherine Patterson moves to a new city, starts at a new school, and begins a new life of quiet anonymity.

But when Katherine meets the gregarious and beautiful Alice Parrie her plan to live a solitary life becomes difficult. Katherine is unable to resist the flattering attention that Alice pays her and is so charmed by her contagious enthusiasm that the two girls soon become firm friends.

But being friends with Alice is complicated – and as Katherine gets to know her better she discovers that although Alice can be charming, she can also be selfish. Sometimes, even, Alice is cruel.

Invisible, by Paul Auster

New York City, Spring 1967: Twenty-year-old Adam Walker, an aspiring poet and student at Columbia University, meets the enigmatic Frenchman Rudolf Born, and his silent and seductive girlfriend Margot. Falling into a passionate affair with Margot, Walker soon finds himself caught in a perverse triangle that leads to a sudden, shocking act of violence that will alter the course of his life.

Sinuously constructed in four interlocking parts, Invisible is told by three different narrators as it travels in time from 1967 to 2007 and moves from New York to Paris and to a remote Caribbean island, in a story of unbridled sexual hunger and a relentless quest for justice.

With uncompromising insight, Auster takes us to the shadowy borderland between truth and memory, authorship and identity, to produce a work of unforgettable power that confirms his reputation as one of America’s most spectacularly inventive writers.

Pilgrims, by Garrison Keillor

The good folk of Wobegon head to Italy – love, laughter and chaos ensue.

Margie Krebsbach dreams up the idea of a trip to Rome, hoping to get her husband Carl to make love to her – he’s been sleeping across the hall and she has no idea why. She finds a patriotic purpose for the journey. A Lake Wobegon boy, Gussy Norlander, died in the liberation of Rome, 1944, and his grave, according to his elderly brother, Norbert, is in a neglected weed patch near the Coliseum. So it’s decided they will go to clean Gussy’s final resting place.

But Margie is unprepared for the enthusiastic response – fifty people want to go with her, including her nemesis, the mayor of Lake Wobegon, Carl’s bossy sister, Eloise, Mr Berge the town drunk, and her treacherous mother-in-law. Margie fends off some of the would-be travellers, but ten applicants remain, though Carl is not sure he wants to go after all. At this, a heartbroken Margie gets the motley crew to the airport and aboard the plane, and then discovers one of the secret pleasures of travel – as they enter alien territory, safely away from Lake Wobegon, they tell each other stories of astonishing frankness and self-revelation.

Bad Day in Blackrock, by Kevin Power

On a late August night a young man is kicked to death outside a Dublin nightclub and celebration turns to devastation. The reverberations of that event, its genesis and aftermath, are the subject of this extraordinary story, stripping away the veneer of a generation of Celtic cubs, whose social and sexual mores are chronicled and dissected in this tract for our times. The victim, Conor Harris, his killers – three of them are charged with manslaughter – and the trial judge share common childhoods and schooling in the privileged echelons of south Dublin suburbia. The intertwining of these lives leaves their afflicted families in moral free fall as public exposure merges with private anguish and imploded futures.

Secrets of Eden, by Chris Bohjalian

‘There’ says Alice Hayward to Reverend Stephen Drew, when she come up out of the water after her baptism. Just a few short hours later, Alice is dead, shot by her abusive husband who turned the gun on himself soon after.

Tortured by the cryptic finality of that short utterance, Reverend Drew feels his faith in God slipping away as he tries to unearth the truth behind Alice’s death. Only new arrival Heather Laurent — the enigmatic author of wildly successful books about angels — seems able to save him from slipping into the depths of despair.

Heather has her own story. She survived a childhood that culminated in her own parents’ murder-suicide, so she identifies deeply with Alice’s daughter, Katie, offering herself as a mentor to the girl and a shoulder for Stephen. But then the state’s attorney begins to suspect that Alice’s husband may not have killed himself . . . and finds out that Alice had secrets only her minister knew.

Related through the eyes of four different narrators, Secrets of Eden is both a haunting literary thriller and a deeply evocative testament to the inner complexities that mark all of our lives. Once again, Chris Bohjalian has given us a riveting page-turner in which nothing is precisely what it seems.

The Company of Shadows, by Ruth Newman

Flicking through her friends’ holiday snaps, Kate Benson receives a sudden shock. For there in the background is her husband, Charlie. Dark hair, blue eyes, familiar smile: there’s no mistaking him. But that’s impossible. Because Charlie died exactly a year ago.

Determined to track down the man in the photograph, Kate follows the trail from Miami to Sicily, where her husband drowned in mysterious circumstances. But when she discovers serious discrepancies in the original investigation, Kate starts to question whether she ever really knew the man she loved so much.

Was Charlie murdered? Was their marriage as perfect as Kate remembers? Who are the people following her? Who can she trust? And is Kate herself to be trusted? Because there are secrets in her past too . . .

The Leopard’s Wife, by Paul Pickering

The Leopard’s Wife is a novel of love in an impossible land. Smiles, a famous concert pianist and English public school boy, wants to make amends with his African-American schoolmaster, Lyman Andrew, who has buried himself in the war-torn jungle of the Congo. Smiles owes his success to the man he helped ruin and harbors a dark secret from the past and his brutal public school. But a bomb has exploded at a hotel in Kinshasa where Smiles was due to play at a peace and reconciliation concert and he is accidentally invited to his own funeral. Coffins are broken open by the Presidential Guard and when he is not in his, Smiles is suspected of being one of the rebels. He escapes on a ramshackle boat with the grand piano meant for his recital, which is now destined for his old schoolmaster, who lives near Kisangani, more than a thousand miles upriver, where the rebel forces are gathering and exiles are fleeing the war in the east. On the way he falls in love with Lola, the beautiful wife of Xavier, the head of the Presidential Guard and the Leopard of the title – even the leopard has a wife, says a Swahili proverb – and Smiles begins to appreciate anew the majesty of creation and the Congo as he brings Beethoven into the atrocity haunted forest. But all the time the Leopard is following . . .

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Both a sparkling and accessible history of Western thought, and a courageous dissection of how religion and philosophy have converged and clashed through the ages, Luc Ferry’s blueprint for a new humanism challenges every one of us to learn to think for ourselves, and asks us the most important question of all: how can we live better?

• Read the prologue and first chapter of Learning to Live
  

Luc Ferry is a philosopher, teacher and politician. His writing has been published in twenty-five countries and he has won the Prix Medicis for his essays, as well as the Prix Jean-Jacques Rousseau. He was formerly the Minister for Youth and Education in France.

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• True Things About Me, by Deborah Kay Davies (Canongate)
• The Lost City of Z, by David Grann (Simon & Schuster)
• When a Billion Chinese Jump, by Jonathan Watts (Faber)
• The Predator of Batignolles, by Claude Izner (Gallic Books)
• One Day, by David Nicholls (Hodder Paperbacks)

True Things About Me, by Deborah Kay Davies

This is the story of a woman brave enough to risk it all. She understands better than most the things that we keep hidden. She comes to learn how the heart is usually stronger than the head. And she cannot help, despite her better instincts, being drawn into a sexually charged and highly volatile relationship. True Things About Me is a brilliantly written novel of survival that reveals simultaneously the strength and vulnerability of one ordinary woman.

With great honesty and unexpected humour, Deborah Kay Davies takes us deep into the mind of her unforgettable protagonist, and in doing so asks us to consider seriously what we might sacrifice for our desires.

The Lost City of Z, by David Grann

Colonel Percy Harrison Fawcett was the last of a breed of great British explorers who ventured into ‘blank spots’ on the map with little more than a machete, a compass and unwavering sense of purpose. In 1925, one of the few remaining blank spots in the world was in the Amazon. Fawcett believed the impenetrable jungle held a secret to a large, complex civilization like El Dorado, which he christened the ‘City of Z’. When he and his son set out to find it, hoping to make one of the most important archeological discoveries in history, they warned that none should follow them in the event that they did not return. They vanished without a trace. For the next eighty years, hordes of explorers — shocked that a man many deemed invincible could disappear in a land he knew better than anyone, and drawn by the centuries-old myth of El Dorado — searched for the expedition and the city. Many died from starvation, disease, attacks by wild animals, and poisonous arrows. Others simply vanished.

• David Grann discusses The Lost City of Z

When a Billion Chinese Jump, by Jonathan Watts

When a Billion Chinese Jump tells the story of China’s – and the world’s – greatest crisis. With filthy water, choking emissions and an unsustainable appetite for resources, China’s development has taken our planet to the environmental edge. Now it faces a stark choice that will affect us all: accept catastrophe or make radical change.

To explore the response, award-winning correspondent Jonathan Watts travels from mountain paradise to blasted desert, through eco-cities, coal mines and industrial wastelands, examining the challenges facing those at the top of society and the problems and hopes of those below. His travelogue will interest anyone concerned with economic development, energy security, globalisation or climate activism. At heart, it is not a call for panic, but an expression of hope that – despite political constraints – individual choices can make a difference.

Consistently attentive to human detail, Watts vividly portrays the diversity of a country too often viewed as a faceless machine. No reader of his book – no consumer in the world – can be unaffected by what he presents.

The Predator of Batignolles, by Claude Izner

In the turbulent Parisian summer of 1893,Victor Legris has vowed to give up the dangerous hobby of amateur sleuthing to concentrate on selling books.

But a murderer is at large in Paris, intent on revenge for events that took place many years before during the Commune.

And when a bookbinder friend of Victor’s becomes the latest victim of the mysterious Leopard, the young bookseller feels impelled to resume his detective work and uncover the identity of the Batignolles predator.

One Day, by David Nicholls

`I can imagine you at forty,` she said, a hint of malice in her voice. `I can picture it right now.`

He smiled without opening his eyes. `Go on then.`

15th July 1988. Emma and Dexter meet for the first time on the night of their graduation. Tomorrow they must go their separate ways.

So where will they be on this one day next year?

And the year after that? And every year that follows?

Twenty years, two people, One Day. From the author of the massive bestseller Starter For Ten.

The Question

To win, answer one simple question, the answer to which can be found somewhere on Bookhugger…

• Question 1: In whose foootsteps does David Grann follow deep into the heart of the Amazon jungle in The Lost City of Z?

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Terms and conditions

1. Closing date for entries: 5th August 2010.
2. Open to residents of the United Kingdom only.
3. Entry to the competition is by completion of the above form only. Anyone submitting multiple entries will be disqualified.
4. The winners will be selected at random from those correct entries received before the closing date.
5. Only the winning entrants will be contacted by Bookhugger. Our decision is final and no correspondence will be entered into.
6. The winner’s name(s) may be published on the Bookhugger website after the closing date of the competition.
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