See larger image Mrs Robinson's Disgrace: The Private Diary of a Victorian Lady (Hardcover) By (author) Kate Summerscale List Price: 16.99 GBP New From: 9.20 In Stock Used from: 9.00 In Stock Release date April 30, 2012.

On a mild winter’s evening in 1850, Isabella Robinson set out for a party. Her carriage bumped across the wide cobbled streets of Edinburgh’s Georgian New Town and drew up at 8 Royal Circus, a grand sandstone house lit by gas lamps. This was the home of the rich widow Lady Drysdale, a vivacious hostess whose soirees were the centre of an energetic intellectual scene.

Lady Drysdale’s guests were gathered in the high, airy drawing rooms on the first floor, the ladies in dresses of glinting silk and satin, bodices pulled tight over boned corsets; the gentlemen in tailcoats, waistcoats, neckties and pleated shirt fronts, dark narrow trousers and shining shoes. When Mrs Robinson joined the throng she was introduced to Lady Drysdale’s daughter and son-in-law, Mary and Edward Lane. She was at once enchanted by the handsome Mr Lane, a medical student ten years her junior. He was ‘fascinating’, she told her diary, before chastising herself for being so susceptible to a man’s charms. But a wish had taken hold of her, which she was to find hard to shake…

See larger image The Wrong Man (Hardcover) By (author) Jason Dean List Price: 19.99 GBP New From: 9.32 In Stock Used from: 15.32 In Stock

Nine hundred and seventy three days.

Thinking. Planning. Waiting for the perfect moment.

Former Marine James Bishop will only have one opportunity to make his prison break. And one chance to prove that he isn’t responsible for the murders that put him inside.

Three years ago Bishop was the leader of an elite close protection team hired to protect a millionaire and his daughter. After being attacked, Bishop regained consciousness to find seven bodies strewn throughout the millionaire’s Long Island mansion – including those of his two charges – and a mountain of evidence guaranteed to send him down for murder.

But to find out who set him up and why, Bishop needs to be free. And now the time has come to make his move.

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See larger image The Book of Summers (Paperback) By (author) Emylia Hall List Price: 7.99 GBP New From: 3.99 In Stock This title will be released on May 24, 2012.

Beth Lowe has been sent a parcel.

Inside is a letter informing her that her long-estranged mother has died, and a scrapbook Beth has never seen before. Entitled The Book of Summers, it’s stuffed with photographs and mementos complied by her mother to record the seven glorious childhood summers Beth spent in rural Hungary.

It was a time when she trod the tightrope between separated parents and two very different countries; her bewitching but imperfect Hungarian mother and her gentle, reticent English father; the dazzling house of a Hungarian artist and an empty-feeling cottage in deepest Devon. And it was a time that came to the most brutal of ends the year Beth turned sixteen.

Since then, Beth hasn’t allowed herself to think about those years of her childhood. But the arrival of The Book of Summers brings the past tumbling back into the present; as vivid, painful and vital as ever.

See larger image How Soon is Now?: The Madmen and Mavericks who made Independent Music 1975-2005 (Paperback) By (author) Richard King List Price: 17.99 GBP New From: 9.00 In Stock Used from: 8.67 In Stock

One of the most tangible aftershocks of punk was its urgency to prompt individuals into action. Document your reality: do it yourself. From this, a generation was inspired and, with often zero financial planning or business sense, in bedrooms, garages and sheds, labels such as Factory, Rough Trade, Mute, 4AD, Beggars Banquet, Warp, Creation and Domino began, shifting the musical landscape and trading on an ethos and identity no brand consultant would now dare dream of.

Musicians were encouraged to do whatever the hell they wanted and damn the consequences. From humble beginnings, some of our most influential artists were allowed to thrive: Orange Juice, New Order, Cocteau Twins, Depeche Mode, Happy Mondays, The Smiths, Sonic Youth, Primal Scream, My Bloody Valentine, Aphex Twin, Autechre, Teenage Fanclub, Broadcast, The White Stripes, Franz Ferdinand, and Arctic Monkeys, to name but a handful.

This is the story, set to an incredible soundtrack, of the enormous scale of the passions, the size of the egos, and the true extent of the madness of the mavericks who had the vision and bloody-mindedness to turn the music world on its head.

See larger image The Street Sweeper (Paperback) By (author) Elliot Perlman List Price: 14.99 GBP New From: 6.96 In Stock Used from: 7.28 In Stock

On the crowded streets of New York City there are even more stories than there are people passing each other every day… only some of these stories survive to become history. Lamont Williams, recently released from prison and working as a hospital janitor, strikes up an unlikely friendship with a patient, an elderly Jewish Holocaust survivor who starts to tell him of his extraordinary past.

Meanwhile Adam Zignelik, the son of a prominent Jewish civil rights lawyer, is facing a personal crisis: almost 40-years-old, his long-term relationship is faltering and his academic career has stalled. It’s only when one of his late father’s closest friends, the civil rights activist William McCray, suggests a promising research topic that the possibility of some kind of redemption arises.

Dealing with memory, racism and the human capacity for guilt, resilience, heroism, and unexpected kindness, The Street Sweeper spans over fifty years, and ranges from New York to Melbourne, Chicago, Warsaw and Auschwitz, as these two very different paths – Adam’s and Lamont’s – lead to one greater story.

See larger image Double Cross (Hardcover) By (author) Ben Macintyre List Price: 16.99 GBP New From: 7.49 In Stock Used from: 9.97 In Stock Release date March 27, 2012.

D-Day, 6 June 1944, the turning point of the Second World War, was a victory of arms. But it was also a triumph for a different kind of operation: one of deceit, aimed at convincing the Nazis that Calais and Norway, not Normandy, were the targets of the 150,000-strong invasion force.

The deception involved every branch of Allied wartime intelligence – the Bletchley Park code-breakers, MI5, MI6, SOE, Scientific Intelligence, the FBI and the French Resistance. But at its heart was the ‘Double Cross System’, a team of double agents controlled by the secret Twenty Committee, so named because twenty in Roman numerals forms a double cross.

The key D-Day spies were just five in number, and one of the oddest military units ever assembled: a bisexual Peruvian playgirl, a tiny Polish fighter pilot, a Serbian seducer, a wildly imaginative Spaniard with a diploma in chicken farming, and a hysterical Frenchwoman whose obsessive love for her pet dog very nearly wrecked the entire deception. Their enterprise was saved from catastrophe by a shadowy sixth spy whose heroic sacrifice is here revealed for the first time. Under the direction of an eccentric but brilliant intelligence officer in tartan trousers, working from a smoky lair in St James’s, these spies would weave a web of deception so intricate that it ensnared Hitler’s army and helped to carry thousands of troops across the Channel in safety.

These double agents were, variously, brave, treacherous, fickle, greedy and inspired. They were not conventional warriors, but their masterpiece of deceit saved countless lives. Their codenames were Bronx, Brutus, Treasure, Tricycle and Garbo. This is their story.

See larger image The Coward's Tale (Paperback) By (author) Vanessa Gebbie List Price: 7.99 GBP New From: 2.05 In Stock Used from: 2.05 In Stock

The boy Laddy Merridew, sent to live with his grandmother, stumbles off the bus into a small Welsh mining community, where he begins an unlikely friendship with Ianto Passchendaele Jenkins, the town beggar-storyteller.

Ianto is watchman over the legacy of the collapse many years ago of Kindly Light Pit, a disaster whose echoes reverberate down the generations and blight the lives of many in the town. Through Ianto’s stories Laddy Merridew is drawn into both the town’s history and the conundrums of the present.

Why has woodwork teacher Icarus Evans striven most of his life to carve wooden feathers that will float on an updraft? Why is the undertaker Tutt Bevan trying to find a straight path through the town? Why does James Little, the old gas-meter emptier, dig his allotment by moonlight? And why does window cleaner Judah Jones take autumn leaves into a disused chapel?

These and other men of the town, both past and present, and the women who mothered them, married them and mourned them, are bound together by the echoes of the Kindly Light tragedy and by the mysterious figure of Ianto Passchendaele Jenkins, whose stories of loyalty and betrayal, loss and love, form an unforgettable, spellbinding tapestry.

See larger image Phoenix from the Ashes: The boat that rebuilt our lives (Paperback) By (author) Justin Ruthven-Tyers List Price: 8.99 GBP New From: 3.38 In Stock Used from: 6.20 In Stock

‘Good will come of this.’ I don’t know why I said that…the fire crew walked back down the hill – there was nothing they could do. As we stood there watching the house collapse in flames, I put my arms around Linda, who was sobbing uncontrollably. All we owned now were the old clothes in which we stood, and an old car for which we no longer had a key. After a fire destroyed their house, Justin and his wife Linda irrationally decided to build a 15-ton classic yacht, as complete amateurs – starting with the trees. Working under the watchful eye of local sheep farmers who gave freely of their advice, how could they possibly fail? Once built, they set off for seven years aboard the prettiest boat you’ve ever seen to search out the hidden paradises and wildernesses in Scotland, France, Cornwall and Ireland, meeting the quirky, sometimes odd, but always entertaining characters who inhabit the shoreline. Told through his beautiful narrative and exquisite illustrations, Justin Ruthven-Tyers’ story is unexpected and extraordinary.

See larger image Other People's Money (Paperback) By (author) Justin Cartwright List Price: 7.99 GBP New From: 2.72 In Stock Used from: 2.64 In Stock

The venerable bank of Tubal & Co is in trouble. It’s not the first time in its three-hundred-year history – it was bailed out by Rothschilds’ in 1847 – but this time will be the last. A sale is under way, and a number of rather important facts need to be kept hidden, especially from any potential buyer. Hundreds of millions of pounds are being diverted – temporarily – to shore it up, masterminded by the bank’s chairman, Julian Trevelyan-Tubal. His aging father Sir Henry would be horrified, but fortunately he is in the early stages of dementia, writing admonitory letters that all say the same thing to Julian from the sunny climes of Antibes. His letters instruct his son to stick to the time-honoured traditions of the bank, and, indeed, had his son taken his advice the bank might still be solvent. Great families have all sorts of secrets, though, and this one is no exception. And whether they are lovers, old partners, or retainers who resent not being part of the family, they have a nasty habit of turning awkward. When an alimony payment from the bank to an abandoned husband, the penniless, quixotic director (currently putting on Thomas the Tank Engine, hoping to woo Daniel Day-Lewis for his new playscript), a trickle of consequences turns into a tsunami of potential catastrophe for the family, the bank and all who sail in her. Other People’s Money is both a subtle thriller and an acutely delineated portrait of a world and a class. Justin Cartwright manipulates our sympathies with masterly ease, unwinding the story with gentle satire, and, as ever, acute and beautifully phrased insights into the eccentricities and weaknesses of the human condition.

See larger image This is Life (Paperback) By (author) Dan Rhodes List Price: 12.99 GBP New From: 4.80 In Stock Used from: 6.43 In Stock

A missing baby mystery and an enchanted Parisian adventure. Hand in hand with lovable heroine Aurelie Renard, you will see life as you’ve never seen it before, discover the key to great art, witness the true cost of love, and learn how all these things may be controlled by the in-breath of a cormorant.