It is the Monaco Grand Prix in May 1968. Jack Preston, a mechanic for Team Sutton, is making the final checks on his car as the beau monde mingles with the drivers under the eyes of the world's press and the galleries of spectators. DeeDee, a starlet of great beauty, seems to be walking towards him, or perhaps towards the royal box. Without warning a fireball rips across the starting grid. Preston will always bear the scars as a consequence of his unthinking heroism, his saving th...

A 3,162 km race. A 48-year-old man. A 100-year-old bike. Made mostly of wood. That he built himself.Tim Moore sets off to recreate the most appalling bike race of all time. The notorious 1914 Giro d'Italia was an ordeal of 400-kilometre stages, cataclysmic night storms and relentless sabotage - all on a diet of raw eggs and red wine. Of the 81 who rolled out of Milan, only eight made it back.Committed to total authenticity, Tim acquires the ruined husk of a...

John Banville's Ancient Light is a story of obsessive young love and the power of grief'Billy Gray was my best friend and I fell in love with his mother.'In a small town in 1950s Ireland a fifteen-year-old boy has illicit meetings with a thirty-five-year-old woman - in the back of her car on sunny mornings, and in a rundown cottage in the country on rain-soaked afternoons. Unsure why she has chosen him, he becomes obsessed...

SHORTLISTED FOR THE SUNDAY TIMES YOUNG WRITER OF THE YEAR AWARD'Crushing...intensely vital' Observer'It's impossible to tear yourself away' The Times'Such brilliant writing about female desire...honest and visceral' Marian KeyesShe's twenty-three and in love with love. He's older, and the most beautiful man she's ever seen. The affair is quickly consuming.But this r...

A riveting, cathartic literary debut about love, addiction, and what it does to us.Wouldn’t I do anything to reverse my loss, the absence of him?In the first scene of this provocative gut-punch of a novel, our unnamed narrator meets a magnetic writer named Ciaran and falls, against her better judgment, completely in his power. After a brief, all-consuming romance he abruptly rejects her, sending her into a tailspin of jealous obsession and longing....

The Man Booker Prize-winning author of The Sea gives us a brilliant novel about an actor in the twilight of his life and his career: “a devastating account of a boy’s sexual awakening and the loss of his childhood…. Seamless [and] profound ... An unsettling and beautiful work.” —Wall Street JournalIs there a difference between memory and invention? That is the question that haunts Alexander Cleave as he reflects on his first, and perhaps only, lov...

A charming, honest, funny, sad, tender and beautiful literary memoir, from Tim Rogers of You Am I. Think Patti Smith meet Dylan Thomas, by way of Banjo Paterson.'Rogers is a beautiful writer, both literate and lyrical ... Detours makes most rock memoirs look like How to Hypnotise Chooks. A heartbreaking work of staggering honesty.' West Australian'Of all the utterances delivered to me by strangers, my least favourite after "We can no l...

New York Times BestsellerNamed one of the Best Books of the Year by NPR, the Washington Post, Kirkus Reviews, and Library JournalWinner of the Audie AwardThe New York Times bestseller from the author of Watchmen and V for Vendetta finally appears in a one-volume paperback.Begging comparisons to Tolstoy and Joyce, this “magnificent, sprawling cosmic epic” (Guard...

The inside story of The Cure'Beautifully realised' Irish TimesComing of age in Thatcher's Britain in the late 70s and early 80s was really tough, especially if you lived in Crawley. But against the grinding austerity, social unrest and suburban boredom, the spark of rebellion that was punk set alight three young men who would become one of the most revered and successful bands of their generation. The Cure.Cured is...

Evening Standard Book of the Year. Observer Book of the Year. Guardian Book of the Year. Sunday Times Book of the Year. Telegraph Book of the Year. New Statesman Book of the Year. Herald Book of the Year. Mojo Book of the Year.Brett Anderson came from a world impossibly distant from rock star success, and in Coal Black Mornings he trac...

It is December; Christmas is approaching and the magic of one of Europe's most beautiful cities beckons. A father looks for himself in the past, struggling to deal with a recent divorce, his teenage son in tow. A single, selfless mother accompanies her only daughter and friends for a weekend-long bachelorette party. And a husband treats his wife to a birthday weekend away, somehow heightening her anxieties and insecurities about age, desire, and motherhood. As these people brush against on...

SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2012 WELLCOME TRUST BOOK PRIZEHow do you lose music? Then having lost it, what do you do next? Nick Coleman found out the morning he woke up to a world changed forever by Sudden Neursosensory Hearing Loss.The Train in the Night is an account of one man's struggle to recover from the loss of his greatest passion - and go one further than that: to restore his ability not only to hear but to think about and feel music, by going back to the series o...