Parrot and Olivier in America, by Peter Carey

From the two-time Booker Prize-winning author, an improvisation on the life of Alexis de Tocqueville, and an irrepressibly funny portrait of the impossible friendship between a master and a servant.

Olivier is a French aristocrat, the traumatised child of survivors of the Revolution; Parrot the son of an itinerant English printer who always wanted to be an artist but has ended up a servant. Born on different sides of history, their lives will be joined by their travels in America.

When Olivier sets sail for the New World – ostensibly to study its prisons but in reality to save his neck from one more revolution – Parrot is sent with him, as spy, protector, foe and foil. As the narrative shifts between the perspectives of Parrot and Olivier, and their picaresque travels together and apart – in love and politics, prisons and the world of art – Peter Carey explores the adventure of American democracy, in theory and in practice, with dazzling wit and inventiveness.

Lean on Pete, by Willy Vlautin

Fifteen-year-old Charley Thompson wants a home. Food on the table and in the cupboard; a high school he can attend for more than part of a year; and some structure to his life. But as the son of single father working at warehouses across the Pacific Northwest, Charley’s been pretty much on his own for sometime.

Lean on Pete opens as Charley and his father arrive in Portland, Oregon and Charley takes a stables job, illegally, at the local race track. Once part of a vibrant racing network, Portland Meadows is now seemingly the last haven for washed up jockeys and knackered horses, but it’s there that Charley meets Pete, an old horse who becomes his companion as he’s forced to try and make his own way in the world.

A portrait of a journey – populated by a vivid cast of characters against a harsh landscape – Lean on Pete is also the unforgettable story of a friendship and of hope in dark times.

The Wilding, by Maria McCann

In her second novel Maria McCann returns to 17th-century England, where life is struggling to return to normal after the horrific tumult of the Civil War.

In the village of Spadboro Jonathan Dymond, a 26-year-old cider-maker who lives with his parents, has until now enjoyed a quiet, harmonious existence. As the novel opens, a letter arrives from his uncle with a desperate request to speak with his father. When his father returns from the visit the next day, all he can say is that Jonathan’s uncle has died.

Then Jonathan finds a fragment of the letter in the family orchard, with talk of inheritance and vengeance. He resolves to unravel the mystery at the heart of his family – a mystery which will eventually threaten the lives and happiness of Jonathan and all those he holds dear.

Little Hands Clapping, by Dan Rhodes

A tale of mortifying heartbreak, momentous love, horrifying deaths and delicious apfel kuchen, in which a spider-eating old man and the local doctor form an unlikely alliance, fate unites a heartbroken baker and a euphonium, the most beautiful girl and boy in the village find love, and the town’s least effective policeman, with a little help from a dog called Hans, exposes a crime so grotesque that it will shock the nation.

Timoleon Vieta Come Home, by Dan Rhodes

Meet the mongrel. Timoleon Vieta. A deeply loyal, undemanding and loving companion . . . with the most beautiful eyes. He’s living an idyllic existence in the Italian countryside with Cockroft, a composer in exile.

Until, that is, the mysterious and malevolent Bosnian comes to stay. How will the stranger affect the bond between dog and master?

Timoleon Vieta Come Home is a free-wheelin take on the Lassie legend, deeply moving and hysterically funny.

Anthropology, by Dan Rhodes

I loved an anthropologist. She went to Mongolia to study the gays. At first she kept their culture at arm’s length, but eventually she decided that her fieldwork would benefit from assimilation. She worked hard to become as much like them as possible, and gradually she was accepted. After a while she ended our romance by letter.

It breaks my heart to think of her herding those yaks in the freezing hills, the peak of her leather cap shielding her eyes from the driving wind, her wrist dangling away, and nothing but a handlebar moustache to keep her top lip warm.

The Lieutenant, by Kate Grenville

In 1788 Daniel Rooke sets out on a journey that will change the course of his life. As a lieutenant in the First Fleet, he lands on the wild and unknown shores of New South Wales. There he sets up an observatory to chart the stars. But this country will prove far more revelatory than the stars above. Based on real events, The Lieutenant tells the unforgettable story of Rooke’s connection with an Aboriginal child – a remarkable friendship that resonates across the oceans and the centuries.

The Last Station, by Jay Parini

1910. Anna Karenina and War and Peace have made Leo Tolstoy the world’s most famous author. But fame comes at a price. In the tumultuous final year of his life, Tolstoy is desperate to find respite, so leaves his large family and the hounding press behind and heads into the wilderness. Too ill to venture beyond the tiny station of Astapovo, he believes his last days will pass in peaceful isolation. But the battle for Tolstoy’s soul will not be so simple.

Orphans of Eldorado, by Milton Hatoum

The setting for this magical fable is Eldorado, the Enchanted city that inhabited the fevered dreams of European navigators and conquistadors, but eluded all attempts to find it on the map. Some have linked it to Manaus in the Amazon Basin, and it is here that Arminto Cordovil lives with his father Amando in a white mansion. Theirs is a relationship full of passion and limitless ambition. Separating father and son is a remarkable cast of characters, from Angelina, the dead mother, to Denisio, the infernal boatman, and at the centre, Dinaura, a girl who betwitches Arminto and dreams of Eldorado…

Orphans of Eldorado is a rich and magical fable that beautifully captures the atmosphere of the steamy, lush Amazonian world.

A Matter of Loyalty, by Sandra Howard

When a bomb goes off in London’s West End, Home Secretary Victoria Osborne has a desperate sense of having failed in her duty to protect the public. A young Muslim reporter, Ahmed Khan, also has deep-seated feelings of anger and responsibility. He persuades his editor to let him go back amongst childhood friends in Leeds to try to find any lead that might help prevent further bombs.

When Ahmed meets Victoria’s daughter, Nattie, at a party, he cannot get her out of his mind. They begin seeing each other. But, as he investigates his hometown and finds out uncomfortable facts, his involvement with Nattie has everyone alarmed. Knowing something catastrophic is being planned and fearing for Nattie’s safety, Ahmed becomes obsessively determined to thwart it, whatever the cost to himself.

Twisted Wing, by Ruth Newman

Cambridge is home to 18,000 students, 1,500 academics – and one serial killer. The discovery of the headless, mutilated body of a female undergraduate in her bloodsoaked college room heralds the start of a series of bizarre and extremely violent murders. For the students of Ariel College, a siege mentality has developed following weeks of media interest in the ‘Cambridge Butcher’. University life has become not about surviving their exams, but surviving full stop.

Forensic psychiatrist Matthew Denison is sure that his traumatised patient, student Olivia Coscadden, has the killer’s identity locked up in her memory. That within the little clique she belonged to lurks someone with a grudge. Someone who has yet to finish settling their score. In order to get to the truth, Denison must delve into the secrets hidden within Olivia’s subconscious. Secrets that are about to lead him into a nightmare beyond imagining.

The Devlin Diary, by Christie Phillips

London, 1672: A vicious killer stalks the court of Charles II, inscribing his victims’ bodies with mysterious markings. Are these the random murders of a madman? The deadly consequence of a personal vendetta? Or the grisly result of a hidden conspiracy?

Cambridge, 2008: A Trinity College history professor is found dead, the torn page of a seventeenth-century diary in his hand. His death appears to be an accident, but the college’s newest Fellow Claire Donovan and historian Andrew Kent suspect otherwise. The professor’s last research subject was Hannah Devlin, a physician to the king’s mistress and the keeper of a diary that holds the key to a series of unsolved murders in 1670s London. Through the arcane collections of Trinity’s Wren Library, the British Library, and the Royal Society, Claire and Andrew follow the clues Hannah left behind, unearthing secrets of the past and present as both stories unfold to their shocking conclusions.

Songs for the Butcher’s Daughter, by Peter Manseau

Itsik Malpesh was born the son of a goose-plucking factory manager during the Russian pogroms – his life saved on the night it began by the young daughter of a kosher slaughterer. Or so he believes…

Exiled during the war, Itsik eventually finds himself in New York, working as a typesetter and writing poetry to his muse, the butcher’s daughter, whom he is sure he will never see again. But it is here in New York that Itsik is unexpectedly reunited with his greatest love – and, later, his greatest enemy – with results both serendipitous and tragic. His story is recounted in his memoirs thanks to the most unlikely of translators – a twenty-one-year-old Boston Catholic college student who, in meeting Itsik, has embarked upon a great lie that will define his future and the most
extraordinary friendship he’ll ever know.

The Island at the End of the World, by Sam Taylor

Through the eyes of eight-year-old Finn we find ourselves on a small island, surrounded by nothing but sea. Finn lives here with his Pa, his elder sister Alice and his younger sister Daisy, and has no memory of any world but this one. All he knows of the past comes from the songs and stories of his father, which tell of the great flood that drowned all the other inhabitants of the earth, a deluge their family survived thanks to the ark in which they now live …

Set in the near future, told from three different viewpoints and written in extraordinary prose, The Island at the End of the World is an original, moving exploration of family love, truth and lies, and how strange and frightening it can feel for a child to discover the adult world.

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