The 19th century independent United States of America has its own strengths. But have the relationships with England really settled down. While Benjamin Ploughman's loyalty to the English Crown takes him from Maryland to the East Indies, the Royal Navy suffers its gravest mutiny and his family continues to forges its heritage within a new world beset with major changes. Fifth generation immigrant Ada looks on as President Madison declares war on England and she is fortunate to survive the consequences. An invitation from England to become the chatelaine of the ancient Hall at Snodland, Kent where the Ploughman heritage began, may not be all it seems - This is the fourth novel in the Warranted Land saga.

In 1920s Lancashire, Adam and Mary Roberts grow up in the village of Gately beside the Leeds and Liverpool Canal, the son and daughter of a miner. But their fortunes lie far outside their small mining community in the industrial North. An astute businessman, Adam's future is on the canals and waterways; Mary, inquisitive and intellectual, will follow a path leading away from England all together. Sagamore Gold is the story of four generations of the extended Roberts family, set against the backdrop of the Second World War - and all its resulting social changes - and the increased freedoms and opportunities of the sixties.

Australian millionaire gold mine owner and playboy Chuck First is reforming his shallow lifestyle and shady business ethics following a deathbed plea from his Grandmother Hester. Chuck hopes to reunite with his estranged wife Carol; he just 'needs' to conclude the London flotation of MinRes, a Philippine gold mining company. And then, of course, there is his latest conquest hot Georgina to deal with. Chuck's efforts lead him into a fast moving mix of international politics, high finance, corruption, missiles, drugs and sex. Behind the scenes is the shady hand of the USA looking for a regime change in Burma. The plots interweave and finally collide with devastating results for Chuck and all concerned...

A story of East meets West when young Jason Lazarus travels to Japan for what he believes is to be a simple run of the mill sports competition which was to be the tournament of a lifetime.

Grace Corin Hodgson Flandrau's (1889-1971) Being Respectable was made into a film in 1924. Flandrau left money to the University of Arizona to create the Grace H. Flandrau Planetarium, now called the Flandrau Science Center and Planetarium.

Lascelles Abercrombie (1881-1938) was also known as the "Georgian Laureate." His original verse, largely metaphysical poems in dramatic form, and a number of verse plays were collected in this 1930 volume.

One of the most acclaimed novels of the 21st Century, from the Nobel Prize-winning author Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize Kazuo Ishiguro imagines the lives of a group of students growing up in a darkly skewed version of contemporary England. Narrated by Kathy, now thirty-one, Never Let Me Go dramatises her attempts to come to terms with her childhood at the seemingly idyllic Hailsham School and with the fate that has always awaited her and her closest friends in the wider world. A story of love, friendship and memory, Never Let Me Go is charged throughout with a sense of the fragility of life. 'Exquisite.' Guardian 'A feat of imaginative sympathy.' New York Times What readers are saying: 'A book I will return to again and again, and one that keeps me thinking even after finishing it. 5/5 stars' 'I loved it, every single word of it.' 'It took me wholly by surprise.' 'Utterly beautiful.' 'Essentially perfect.'

The human inhabitants of the western counties unknowingly share their world with witches. By day these hide, or take the form of animals or people, but at night their world comes alive. One human girl knows of their existence; her best friend is a witch. When a body is found on a Devon beach, it is investigated by human police, who suspect a gruesome murder, and by witches who know it poses a threat to the world. The girls become heavily involved in both investigations, leaving them fighting to preserve their friendship and their lives. They are saved by their own determination and ingenuity, the bravery of a young male relative of the witch, bungling detectives, and the wisdom and sacrifice of some peculiar old witches. Join them and share the suspense, horror, laughter, tears and sheer magic of their adventure!

Sunday Business Post Book of the Year Blindboy Boatclub is one half of the Rubberbandits, Ireland's foremost satirist and now the talented author of a collection of brilliant short stories and visual art. Published to critical acclaim, his first collection is powered by big themes and even bigger ideas. There are stories about a van fuelled by Cork people's accents, Tipperary's first ISIS recruit, a sexually aggressive banshee and a fridge dragged heroically through the streets of Limerick. The Gospel According to Blindboy questions and challenges the complacencies and contradictions at the heart of modern Ireland. Whip-smart, provocative and animated by his unmistakable dark wit, it is one of the most original collections of short stories to emerge in recent years. 'Mad, wild, hysterical, and all completely under the writer's control - this is a brilliant debut.' Kevin Barry 'There is genius in this book, warped genius. Like you'd expect from a man who for his day job wears a plastic bag on his head but something beyond that too. Oddly in keeping with the tradition of great Irish writers.' Russell Brand 'If you've ever witnessed (there's no other word for it) a Rubberbandits video you'll be anxious (there's no other word for it) to read this collection of short stories from one of the originators. I hesitate to use the word author as the experience is as close to reading a traditional short story as being burnt by a blow torch. Essential, funny and disturbing.' Danny Boyle 'One of Ireland's finest and most intelligent comic minds delivers stories so blisteringly funny and sharp your fingers might bleed. In language so delicious you can taste it, we're shown holy and unholy Ireland: a land of lock-ins, nettle stings, stone-mad Cork birds, gas cunts and Guiney's jeans. No one is safe - we all have the unmerciful piss ripped out of us and there's no escape from the emotional gut punches, expertly dealt.' Tara Flynn 'Demented, dishevelled and deeply surreal - Blindboy Boatclub's book will shock and delight.' Irish Independent 'It's not for the faint-hearted.' Joe.ie 'You won't be disappointed. It will take you to places unexpected.' Ryan Tubridy

The author was not intending to write a novel merely to catalogue a series of memories of events from the shadows of her childhood. Her re-visit to the Grade one listed building that was her first memory Rose Hill now an apartment complex brought her full circle as it raised her shadows.

A new novel from Simon Green, a well known trainer of teachers, Only Correct is a story of the joys and frustrations of teaching modern languages in the north of England. Chapters include: Singular or puerile, Vorsprung durch Cricket, Irritable vowel syndrome, Banda Brothers, New Variant CPD, including The Teachers' Creed.

Jack Sinclair, an officer in the Secret Intelligence Service, is invited to join an elite special operations team, the International Mutual Defence and Support Agency. Evidence of a powerful shadowy international criminal organisation that has caused considerable harm at an international level comes to light. Such is the urgency for intervention that in a race against time, the team endeavour to untangle its complex web before the damage becomes irreparable.

"You see why I never bothered with the question, 'What is he'. It's a matter of who is he and what does he want." Professor Robert Schumann is not the only one to have seen the significance of a mysterious phenomenon. Scientists in other countries have alerted their governments that it is something they should watch. There is ruthless rivalry to get Fred. The CIA assumes that Schumann will head the US team. However, he is an academic, out of touch with the unscrupulous realities of politics in the Cold War era. He finds himself working against them when he realises that their policy is to get Fred dead or alive, just so long as no one else gets their hands on him. Outwitting the CIA is dangerous. Will they let him get away with it?

Enter a vanished and unjust world: Jackson, Mississippi, 1962. Where black maids raise white children, but aren't trusted not to steal the silver... There's Aibileen, raising her seventeenth white child and nursing the hurt caused by her own son's tragic death; Minny, whose cooking is nearly as sassy as her tongue; and white Miss Skeeter, home from College, who wants to know why her beloved maid has disappeared. Skeeter, Aibileen and Minny. No one would believe they'd be friends; fewer still would tolerate it. But as each woman finds the courage to cross boundaries, they come to depend and rely upon one another. Each is in a search of a truth. And together they have an extraordinary story to tell...

Emile Francois Zola (1840-1902) was an influential French writer and liberal champion. "Une page d'amour" ("An Episode of Love") is the eighth novel in the Rougon-Macquart series set among the petite bourgeoisie in Second Empire suburban Paris. It first appeared in serial form in Le Bien public, before being published as a novel in April 1878.

When the Prince of Wales takes it into his head to appoint a Household Bard he hasn't reckoned on the delectable but subversive Cerys Gifford Huws, fine poet in the strict metres and staunch Nationalist, who tries to teach him Welsh and encourages him to make his Principate more truly reflective of the country from which he takes his title. Not only does he introduce Highgrove and Floomerwormwood, his little place down in Wales, to all things Welsh but insists on innovations like bilingual road-signs in England, Welsh on the syllabus of schools, a Welsh page in all the Sunday papers, and much more. For a while he is admired for his bold patriotism but eventually the English Establishment reacts and the monarchy falls into disrepute. By 2020, the Yookay having broken up after Scotland's secession, Cymru is an Autonomous Republic within the Celtic Confederation and ruled by a permanent green-red coalition. Charles has renounced his title and his claim to the throne, and gone to live quietly at Gregynog, where he has found contentment at last. With the death of his mother, and William's succession, the Windsors troop out on to the balcony of Buckingham Palace, and the sound of gunfire is heard echoing down the Mall. And all this happens because of a Welsh poet...This 'likely story', at once provocative and percipient, but never bland, is partly a critique of the institution of monarchy and partly a satire on the culture and politics of contemporary Wales. Laying no claim to 'literary merit' (the bane of so much of what is published in Wales nowadays), but elegantly written, it will make some readers grin and get up the noses of others, in about equal measure.

With unreliable memories and scraps of photographs as his only clues, Conor Lyons follows in the tracks of his father, a rootless photographer, as he moved from war-torn Spain, to the barren plains of Mexico, where he met and married Conor's mother, to the American West, and finally back to Ireland, where the marriage and the story reach their heartrending climax. As the narratives of Conor's quest and his parents' lives twine and untwine, Collum McCann creates a mesmerizing evocation of the gulf between memory and imagination, love and loss, past and present.

Inanna was the most important deity of ancient Sumeria, the land now called Iraq. She was revered as the goddess of fertility, of rhythm and the seasons. She represents many opposites, light and dark, life and death, body and spirit, passivity and action. Without the dark resting period of winter there can be no growth in the summer. Without the peacefulness of thought there can be no just and wise decisions. A bunch of reeds is her symbol, for reeds which grow at the edges of the dark watery depths represent the transition between one stage and another. She was a vital life-giving figure who gave a sense of balance and equilibrium. Her tale was written in cuneiform script on clay tablets around 2,500BC and is one of the very first recorded stories. It is only comparatively recently that it has been translated. The journey she decides to undertake to the underworld requires enormous courage and perseverance. Bit by bit her identity is dismantled as she descends into ever-increasing darkness. She undergoes the loss of everything she holds dear. However, nothing is wasted, rather it is re-formed. In the darkness of the chaotic matrix where everything is possible she is dissolved into a state of complete unknowing. This is the stage at which transformation can take place. Just as the caterpillar dissolves in the chrysalis and emerges totally transformed as a butterfly, so the old Inanna returns from the underworld with a new consciousness.

John Gascoigne is devastated by the disfigurement, through cancer, in his teenage sweetheart after 50 years of separation and seeks to restore the balance of good and evil by fulfilling the justice that should have ruled in the sentencing of the most heinous crimes of sinful women. A reparation, he believed, that would restore his long lost love to her former glory. Detective Sergeant Amanda Sherwood is faced with victims who have no connection to the killer. No murder scene. No known motive. No way of stopping the carnage. She is then shocked by the discovery of her family background's hidden secrets that bind her to the case in a way that she cannot divulge. Only after the final solution of retribution can John Gascoigne's dreams be vindicated in one violent apparition of the 'Green Flash' on the shores of Florida.

Despite Mother Superior whispering, ‘We’re so close to heaven,’ in a calm and collected convent high up in the misty Rwandan hills, a student, Gloriosa, a Hutu with an influential father, finds the nose of the Virgin Mary statue offensive. It is the nose of a Tutsi, she announces. Ethnic enmities begin to make themselves known…

A haunting book with shafts of light, comedy and a deft touch, Our Lady of the Nile is set in a convent school in Rwanda just before the genocide. Taut and written with simplicity and beauty, Scholastique Mukasonga’s writing has an eye for satire that will leave the reader wondering long after she has closed the book.