Shades of Grey, by Jasper Fforde

Eddie Russett lives comfortably in a world where fortune, career and ultimate destiny are rigidly dictated by the colours you can see. Until he falls in love with Jane, and starts to question every aspect of the Rulebook.

‘No one could cheat the Colourman and the colour test. What you got was what you were, forever. Your life, career and social standing decided right there and then, and all worrisome life-uncertainties eradicated forever. You knew who you were, what you would do, where you would go, and what was expected of you. In return, you simply accepted your rung upon the Chromatic ladder, and assiduously followed the Rulebook. Your life was mapped. And all in the time it takes to bake a tray of scones . . .’

Watch a trailer for Shades of Grey and then enter the competition to win one of twelve copies that we are giving away.

The Bird Room, by Chris Killen

Alice is at work. Alice thinks I’m at work. I’m not at work. I’m trying to guess the password to her email account . . .

When Will meets Alice, he can’t believe his luck. She’s smart, sexy and, much to Will’s surprise, in love with him. Alice brings meaning to his urban existence. But true love never came easy and soon devotion leads Will to something darker.

The Bird Room is a candid, funny and joyous portrait of love and desire in the modern age.

The House of the Mosque, by Kader Abdolah

In the house of the mosque, the family of Aqa Jaan has lived for eight centuries. Now it is occupied by three cousins: Aqa Jaan, a merchant and head of the city’s bazaar; Alsaberi, the imam of the mosque; and Aqa Shoja, the mosque’s muezzin. The house itself teems with life, as each of their families grows up with their own triumphs and tragedies. Sadiq is waiting for a suitor to knock at the door to ask for her hand, while her two grandmothers sweep the floors each morning dreaming of travelling to Mecca. Meanwhile, Shahbal longs only to get hold of a television to watch the first moon landing. All these daily dramas are played out under the watchful eyes of the storks that nest on the minarets above. But this family will experience upheaval unknown to previous generations. For in Iran, political unrest is brewing. The shah is losing his hold on power; the ayatollah incites rebellion from his exile in France; and one day the ayatollah returns. The consequences will be felt in every corner of Aqa Jaan’s family.

The Museum of Innocence, by Orham Pamuk

‘It was the happiest moment of my life, though I didn’t know it.’

And so begins the new novel from the universally acclaimed author of Snow and My Name is Red, his first since winning the Nobel Prize.

It is a perfect Spring in 1975, Istanbul. Kemal, heir to one of the town’s wealthiest families, is about to become engaged to Sibel, from another aristocratic family, when he encounters Füsun, a beautiful shopgirl, and a distant relation.

As they break the taboo of virginity, a rift opens between Kemal and his lovingly described world of the westernized families of Istanbul with their opulent parties and clubs, society gossip, dining-room rituals, picnics, their mansions on the Bosphorus infused with the melancholy of decay.

For nine years Kemal will find excuses to visit the other Istanbul, a house in the impoverished backstreets that Füsun shares with her parents, enjoying the consolations of middle-class life at a dinner table in front of the television. His love for his distant relative will take him to the seedy film circles of Istanbul, cheap bars, sad hotels, a society of small men with big dreams and bitter failures.

It will make Kemal a compulsive collector of objects that chronicle his love story and his obsessive heart’s reactions: his anger and impatience, his remorse and humiliation, his miscalculated hopes of recovery, and his daydreams that transform his Istanbul into a city of signs and spectres of his beloved with whom he can only exchange meaning-laden glances, stolen kisses in cars, movie houses and park shadows.

All that will remain to him, certainly and eternally, is the museum he creates, a map of a society’s rituals and mores, and of one man’s broken heart.

A stirring exploration of the nature of romantic attachment, and of the mysterious allure of collecting, The Museum of Innocence plumbs the depths of an Istanbul half western and half traditional – its rituals, its morality, its vast cultural history. This is Orhan Pamuk’s greatest achievement.

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.

Chronic City, by Jonathan Lethem

Chase Insteadman, a handsome, inoffensive fixture on Manhattan’s social scene, lives off residuals earned as a child star on a much loved sitcom. Chase owes his current social cachet to an ongoing tragedy much covered in the tabloids: trapped on the International Space Station by a layer of low-orbit mines, Chase’s teenage sweetheart and fiancee Janice Trumbull sends him rapturous and heartbreaking love letters. Like Janice, Chase is adrift, she in earth’s stratosphere, he in a vague routine punctuated by Upper Eastside dinner parties.

Into Chase’s cloistered city enters Perkus Tooth, a wall-eyed free-range pop critic, whose countercultural savvy and voracious paranoia draw Chase into another Manhattan, where questions of what is real, what is fake and who is complicit take on a life-shattering urgency.

Like Manhattan itself, Jonathan Lethem’s novel is beautiful and tawdry, tragic and forgiving, devastating and antic, a stand-in for the whole world and a place utterly unique.

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.

Angel with Two Faces, by Nicola Upson

Summer, 1935. Inspector Archie Penrose has invited Josephine Tey to his family home in Cornwall, a struggling but beautiful country estate on a magnificent stretch of coastline. Still haunted by the dark events of the year before – depicted in An Expert in Murder – and disillusioned with the London stage, Josephine is ready to begin work on her second mystery novel and finds much to inspire her in the landscape and its legends – in particular, a lake on the estate which is said to claim a life every seven years, and the nearby Minack Theatre, an open-air auditorium which overlooks the sea.

But death clouds the holiday from the outset: Josephine’s arrival coincides with the funeral of a young estate worker, killed in a mysterious riding accident, and another local boy disappears shortly afterwards. When the Minack proves to be a stage for real-life tragedy and an audacious murder, Archie’s loyalties are divided between his friends and his job. He and Josephine must confront the violent reality which lies beneath a seemingly idyllic community – a community with one face turned towards the present, and another looking back to the crimes of the past.

The Salati Case, by Tobias Jones

Castagnetti is a private detective who lost his parents and his optimism long ago. He’s impatient with the world of appearances and deceit and prefers the company of his bees to that of humans. At least bees believe in order, hard work and self-sacrifice.

An old woman, Silvia Salati, has recently died. Fourteen years ago her second son went missing while waiting for a train to Rimini. In order for her Estate to be disposed of, Castagnetti is commissioned by a notary to change the son’s status from ‘missing’ to ‘presumed dead’. But Castagnetti isn’t the sort to content himself with presumption. He likes certainty, the kind of certainty that comes from seeing a skeleton.

Before long he’s reopening wounds from years ago and exposing family secrets to those who have tried to suppress them. The heirs want their inheritance, but Castagnetti wants to throw in justice too. And that means uncovering a plot as thick and chilling as the Padanian fog.

Occupied City, by David Peace

Tokyo, 26 January, 1948. As the third year of the US Occupation of Japan begins, a man enters a downtown bank. He speaks of an outbreak of dysentery and says he is a doctor, sent by the Occupation authorities, to treat anyone who might have been exposed.

Clear liquid is poured into sixteen teacups. Sixteen employees of the bank drink this liquid according to strict instructions. Within minutes twelve of them are dead, the other four unconscious. The man disappears along with some, but not all, of the bank’s money. And so begins the biggest manhunt in Japanese history.

In Occupied City, David Peace dramatizes and explores the rumours of complicity, conspiracy and cover-up that surround the chilling case of the Teikoku Bank Massacre: of the man who was convicted of the crime, of the legacy of biological warfare programmes, and of the victims and survivors themselves.

The second part of his acclaimed Tokyo Trilogy – and an extraordinary picture of a city in mourning – Occupied City is further evidence of this novelist’s singular and formidable talent.

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