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Ed Moloney's Voices from the Grave follows his highly acclaimed A Secret History of the IRA, the best-informed account yet written of the IRA's evolution from ruthless guerilla army into governmental party. But reconciliation between political figures who until very recently wished each other dead or in jail has not been accompanied by very much truth-telling about the past. Men who have been to the White House and fraternized with Tony Blair deny that they ever fired a shot in anger, or caused a bomb to be planted.Now, in Voices from the Grave, a truly ground-breaking piece of historical evidence is unearthed. Two former paramilitary leaders - one republican, one loyalist - speak with unprecedented frankness about their role in some of the most appalling violence of the Troubles. The openness of Brendan Hughes of the IRA and David Ervine of the UVF results in a book of shocking and irresistible testimony, their voices set in the context of a narrative by Ed Moloney of their lives and of the society they grew up in.

Fresh out of college and uncertain how to proceed with life, the narrator of Ben Markovits' Playing Days finds himself drifting towards a career that once obsessed his father - professional basketball. Gaining a place on a minor league German team, he leaves Texas and lands in the small rather desolate town of Landshut, playing basketball with an eclectic group of teammates, training for most of the day and then trying to find ways to fill the rest of it. It's an odd, isolated existence, punctuated by the intense excitement - and often intense disappointment - of the game. But then he meets Anke, a young single mother who happens to be the former wife of one of his teammates; and their tentative, burgeoning relationship becomes as significant and as life changing as the game itself. Beautifully written, Playing Days is entirely recognisable in its depiction of the first long summer after university. Tinged with the melancholy and nostalgia of early steps into adulthood, it's the story of a young man's first experience of adult love, and of the discovery of his own limitations.

'We all know what this could be: we know it could be dysentery, we know it could be typhoid. In the Occupied City, we all know what this could mean -'Tokyo, January 26th, 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 dramatises 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 a singular and formidable novelist.

A novel of secrets and revenge within a 17th century English family. Longlisted for the Orange Prize1672. A generation after the Civil War, Jonathan Dymond, a cider maker, has so far enjoyed a quiet life. But when he discovers a letter from his dying uncle, hinting an inheritance and revenge, he is determined to unravel the mystery in his family. Under the pretence of his cider business, Jonathan visits his newly widowed aunt and there meets her unruly servant girl, Tamar, who soon reveals that she has secrets of her own...

'Everyone's touched! Don't be taken in by appearances here. Believe me, the old world has gone, but its shell remains in place. One day soon, there will come a breath of wind, a new messiah, the shell will crumple, and the kids will run, screaming, barefoot in the head, through lush new imaginary meadows. What a time to be young!'Barefoot in the Head is a tale of a future world recovering from a holocaust of hallucinogenic chemical weapons. For the victims, reality is a fluid mixture of the real, the imaginary and the nightmarish, the past, present and future. Colin Charteris, the hero and anti-hero on this continually disintegrating stage, has not himself survived the cataclysm unscathed, and his gradual descent into fantastic and paranoid visions will have drastic consequences for civilization.Brian Aldiss, in a psychedelic tour de force of inventive, playful narrative, owing as much to the methods of James Joyce and the experimentalism of William S. Burroughs as to H. G. Wells, goes light-years beyond the conventions of the genre to tell his story.

'The human consciousness had now widened so alarmingly, was so busy transforming everything on Earth into its own peculiar tones, that no art could exist that did not take proper cognisance of the fact. Something entirely new had to be forged.'The time traveller Bush's adventure takes him through 1930, 1851, the Jurassic and 2093, on the way exploring a modern crisis that remains our own.In Brian Aldiss's tale of time travel, the fiction is once again as psychologically imaginative as it is scientific, an idiosyncrasy of Aldiss's future visions that, over time, have proven remarkably prescient.

'No way of solving these problems exists any more. The conventions collapsed like old bridges. On the one side of the gulf is the mind, eternal and untouched - on the other, the body, running, jumping, bleeding ... The mind can take care of itself, as it has had to from the very beginning; it's not as smart as the body, but it can survive.'The future Earth of Brian Aldiss's Earthworks is a moribund ecological disaster, ruined by poisons, greed, unsustainable development and overpopulation. Mankind is broken, starving, wracked with disease and divided by bitter social injustice. Our window into this terrible world is the dangerous, crazed Knowle Noland, whose destructive impulses threaten to upturn the wreckage of civilization, either to redemption or final catastrophe.Rarely do Science Fiction works stand well the test of time as their suppositions are out-dated and superseded; Brian Aldiss's vision is remarkable for having come closer to reality decades after he conceived of this terrible future.

Written in the 1950s, the eight stories collected here are brilliantly of their time: the decade of rubber plants, espresso bars and skiffle, of Suez, Teddy Boys and Angry Young Men.With compassion and deadly accuracy, Angus Wilson charts the scandals and secrets of the respectable middle classes - Kennie, the Borstal Boy mascot of an intellectual clique; June Raven, an SW3 hostess who gets over-involved with one of her publisher-husband's authors; Lord Peacehaven, retired megalomaniac; Maurice Liebig, teenage pawn in a family feud; and the mad old man who finds the justice of God in a hen roost.

Angus Wilson's first volume of short stories, The Wrong Set was first published in 1949 to immense critical acclaim. The collection is a brilliantly funny exposure of the protective devices with which people seek to mask deep-laid egotism. There is the wallowing in self-adulation on the part of the 'crazy Cockshott family', as they delight to dub themselves. There is the search for really nice standards on the part of Vi, singer at the 'Passion Fruit' nightclub - as hopelessly bemused a spirit as ever lived in sin at Earl's Court and attempted to lecture a young Communist nephew with untidy hair and spectacles. There is the humbug of the bullying new curator at the provincial Art Gallery. And the staff dance at the South Kensington hotel, where lives the lady who spends her life trying to achieve 'a Knightsbridge appearance on a Kensington purse', and where, as the evening progresses and the drinks begin to tell, the lady-like fa,ades and gentlemanly courtesy of the clientele crack up with a vengeance.

Revenge was all Leadford could think of as he set out to find the unfaithful Nettie and her adulterous lover. But this was all to change when a new comet entered the earth's orbit and totally reversed the natural order of things. The Great Change had occurred and any previous emotions, thoughts, ambitions, hopes and fears had all been removed. Free love, pacifism and equality were now the name of the game. But how will Leadford fare in this most utopian of societies ...?H. G. Wells was responsible for an entirely new genre of writing. It was his bold, daring and hugely innovative books that first introduced readers to the concept of time travel, invisibility, genetic experimentation and interstellar invasion - ideas that have gone on to inspire future generations and given rise to the entire science fiction industry.

Mr Bensington and Professor Redwood were amongst that new breed of men - or 'scientists' as they had become known. They discover Herakleophorbia IV, a chemical foodstuff that accelerates growth, and, after a series of experiments, the countryside is overrun with giant chickens, rats, wasps and worms. Havoc ensues, but Benson and Redwood are undeterred and begin to use 'the food of the gods' on humans. Soon, children are growing up to 40 feet high. But where will the experiments end?H. G. Wells was responsible for an entirely new genre of writing. It was his bold, daring and hugely innovative books that first introduced readers to the concept of time travel, invisibility, genetic experimentation and interstellar invasion - ideas that have gone on to inspire future generations and given rise to the entire science fiction industry.

Mr Hoopdriver is an expert in his field - a perfect gentleman with more than a little flair behind the drapers' counter. Yet Mr Hoopdriver is growing tired of measuring out yards of gingham and selling endless reels of threads. He yearns for new discoveries, new adventures and above all, a change of scenery. Determined to leave the humdrum behind him, he mounts his bicycle and embarks on a journey across England. Liberation, excitement and friendship with a pretty young girl await him - but what will happen when the real world catches up with him? First published in 1896, during the bicycle's golden age, The Wheels of Chance is a delightful comic novel, capturing a period of momentous social change.

After My Fashion has an unusual publishing history. Although it was John Cowper Powys' third novel and written in 1920, it wasn't published until 1980. It seems that when his US publisher turned it down Powys made no effort to place it elsewhere. Indeed, when Powys had finished a book he tended to be oddly indifferent to its fate. The novel has two other unusual features: its locations (Sussex and Greenwich Village); and Isadora Duncan being the inspiration for Elise, the dancer and mistress of the protagonist, Richard Storm (based quite largely on Powys himself).As one would expect from Powys the writing is vivid, not least in the descriptions of the Sussex landscape and the bohemian milieu of Greenwich Village.

'There is an old saying, 'Murder will out.' I am really unable to see why this should be so...' Israel Rank: The Autobiography of a Criminal (1907) inspired the classic Ealing film Kind Hearts and Coronets. But though both works are comedies about a serial murderer, they are different creatures. The eponymous narrator of Roy Horniman's novel, son of a Jewish commercial traveller, offers his memoirs from the condemned cell, having murdered six people who stood between him and an earldom he hoped to inherit. Through Israel's story Horniman explores and parodies the anti-Semitic attitudes of Edwardian England. "e;A superb thriller, but also a disturbing study in human nature. The narrative pace never slackens, thanks to the spareness and elegance of Horniman's prose ...it is a book of its time, quite faithful to it, and (despite its 400 pages) over all too quickly"e;. (Simon Heffer, in his Preface).

Still Life: Sketches from a Tunbridge Wells Childhood (the sub-title is important) was first published in 1984. It won the J.R. Ackerley Prize for Literary Biography in that year. It is a classic among middle-class memoirs. In twenty-one short chapters the town is vividly anatomized. So too are its residents: meet Dr Ranking and, best of all, meet the Limbury-Buses living a life of contented ossification.'Cobb remembers, and that, as well as his redeeming freedom from all conventional standards of dignity and relevance, is what makes this offbeat, capricious book a rare treasure'. John Carey, Sunday Times 'A remarkable feat of making purest autobiography part of a general, social history... Cobb has broken one of the strangest silences in English social commentary; on the missing history of the English bourgeoisie'. Michael Neve, Times Literary Supplement

This is a classic war book by one of the finest poets of the Second World War. Keith Douglas was posted to Palestine in 1941 with a cavalry regiment. When fighting broke out at El Alamein in 1942, he was instructed to stay behind as a staff officer. But he wanted to fight, and so, completely disobeying orders, he drove a truck to the sight of the battle and participated as a tank commander. "e;Alamein to Zem Zem"e; is a vivid and unforgettable description of his experiences on the desert battlefield, seen through the eyes of a poet-soldier. 'Highly charged, violent descriptive prose ...conveys the humour, the pathos and the literal beauty of that dead world of tanks, sand, scrub and human corpses ...Comparable in descriptive power and intelligence to the books of Remarque, Sassoon and Blunden which spoke in similar terms of 1914-1918' - "e;Spectator"e;.

The Cherry Tree was first published in 1932 and is the final volume in Adrian Bell's classic rural trilogy. The first two volumes are Corduroy and Silver Ley. In The Cherry Tree the author describes further farming experiences, his marriage, and becoming habituated to country life.Taken together these three volumes have been described 'as the classic account of a twentieth-century Englishman's conversion to rural life'.

Silver Ley, first published in 1931, is the second volume in Adrian Bell's classic rural trilogy (the other volumes being Corduroy and The Cherry Tree). In Silver Ley the author moves from being a farm apprentice to a farm owner.

Corduroy was first published in 1930. It was followed by Silver Ley in 1931 and The Cherry Tree in 1932. Together they form a trilogy that has been described as 'the classic account of a twentieth-century Englishman's conversion to rural life'. In Corduroy the author's experiences as a farm apprentice in Suffolk are described. The tone is affectionate, humourous and not in the least patronizing. At times there is an elegiac strain not dissimilar to Edward Thomas. The three books constitute a threnody for, what was then, a vanishing, pre-mechanized way, of farming and rural life.

Small Town, Fife. Andy and Vicky were meant to be getting married tomorrow.The trouble is, Andy's stag weekend was so epic, so legendary, that he didn't survive it. The finest pleasures that Amsterdam and Hamburg have to offer, together with a mile-high fling with a budget-airline stewardess, brought him down to earth with a bump. Now it's time for the post-mortem. A black comedy about waking up to find the party's over, Gregory Burke's Hoors premiered at the Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh, in May 2009.

Come on troops. Let's take check: Finn Bar, slightly ruffled but still in fighting form. Maggie, could do with a full night's sleep but otherwise all in order... Stay here. Don't answer the door. I'll go out and get some proper food.In a new flat, three children play hide and seek. Eliot wears a crown, little Finn, King of the Wild Thing's, draws on the walls. Maggie climbs them. Hiding from the world, needing to be found, their one shared focus a mobile phone. Will it ring? Who will call? And what are they waiting for?Tusk Tusk is a tale of family loyalty as an uncertain future circles. Polly Stenham's second play premiered at the Royal Court Theatre, London, in March 2009.

The greatest of the late medieval Scottish makars, Robert Henryson wrote in Lowland Scots, a distinctive northern version of English. He was profoundly influenced by Chaucer's vision of the frailty and pathos of human life. His greatest poem, and one of the rhetorical masterpieces of the literature of these islands, is the narrative Testament of Cresseid, set in the aftermath of the Trojan War, which completes the story of Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde, offering a grim and tragic account of its faithless heroine's rejection by her lover Diomede, and her decline into prostitution and leprosy. A work of unreconciled Shakespearean intensity, the Testament has been translated by Seamus Heaney into a confident and yet faithful modern English idiom which honours the poem's unique blend of detachment and compassion.A master of narrative, Henryson was also a comic master of the verse fable; his burlesques of human weakness in the guise of animal wisdom are traced with delicate comedy and irony. Seven of the Fables are here sparklingly translated; their burlesque freshness rendered to the last claw and feather. Seven Fables and The Testament of Cresseid is an extraordinarily rich and wide-ranging encounter between two poets across six centuries.

From the Nobel Prize-winning author of The Remains of the Day and Never Let Me GoIn Nocturnes, Kazuo Ishiguro explores the ideas of love, music and the passing of time. From the piazzas of Italy to the 'hush-hush floor' of an exclusive Hollywood hotel, the characters we encounter range from young dreamers to cafe musicians to faded stars, all of them at some moment of reckoning. Gentle, intimate and witty, this quintet is marked by a haunting theme: the struggle to keep alive a sense of life's romance, even as one gets older, relationships founder and youthful hope recedes.

Dublin. Midsummer. While absent in New York, the celebrated actor Molly Fox has loaned her house to a playwright friend, who is struggling to write a new work. Over the course of this, the longest day of the year, the playwright reflects upon her own life, Molly's, and that of their mutual friend Andrew, whom she has known since university. Why does Molly never celebrate her own birthday, which falls upon this day? What does it mean to be a playwright or an actor? How have their relationships evolved over the course of many years? Molly Fox's Birthday calls into question the ideas that we hold about who we are; and shows how the past informs the present in ways we might never have imagined.

Jamaica used to be the source of much of Britain's wealth, an island where slaves grew sugar and the money flowed in vast quantities. It was a tropical paradise for the planters, a Babylonian exile for the Africans shipped to the Caribbean. It became independent in 1962.Jamaica is now a country in despair. It has become a cockpit of gang warfare, drug crime and poverty. Haunted by the legacy of imperialism, its social and racial divisions seem entrenched. Its extraordinary musical tradition and physical beauty are shadowed by casual murder, police brutality and political corruption.Ian Thomson shows a side of Jamaica that tourists rarely see in their gated enclaves. He travelled country roads in buses and met ordinary Jamaicans in their homes and workplaces; and his encounters with the white elite, who still own most of Jamaica's businesses and newspapers, are unforgettable. Thomson brings alive the country's unique racial and ethnic mix; the all-pervading influence of the USA; and the increasing disillusionment felt by its people, who can't rely on the state for their most basic security. At the heart of the book is Jamaica's tense, uneasy relationship with Britain, to whom it remains politically and culturally bound.

They're ex-special forces, CIA spooks or Foreign Legionnaires.They're fighting insurgents in Baghdad and patrolling government buildings in Afghanistan. And now they're spying on environmental protestors and policing the 2012 Olympics.They are above the law and independent from government. They are the privatised armies of mercenaries. Meet the private security contractors - a stock-market-listed corporate version of the mercenary. These private soldiers operate their million-dollar contracts from executive boardrooms in London, Washington, Paris and Oslo. With democracies unwilling to see their children die for strategic reasons in foreign lands, these corporate soldiers are part of the last great outsourcing - the privatisation of war. 'With an estimated 48,000 private security contractors at work in Iraq alone, corporate warfare is one of the fastest growing industries in the world. Journalist Armstrong's excellent book looks into how these companies operate.' GQ'Frightening . . . He has collected some chilling anecdotes about the corners cut by companies who are only interested in profit.' Metro

From the author of the bestselling postpunk history Rip It Up and Start Again comes Totally Wired, a companion book of conversations with the brilliant minds who made the late seventies and early eighties such a creative era for radical music and alternative culture. Totally Wired features thirty-two interviews with postpunk's most innovative musicians and colourful personalities - Ari Up, Jah Wobble, David Byrne, Green Gartside, Lydia Lunch, Edwyn Collins - as well as other movers and shakers of the period: label bosses and managers like Anthony H. Wilson and Bill Drummond, record producers such as Trevor Horn and Martin Rushent, and influential DJs and journalists like John Peel and Paul Morley. Crackling with argument and anecdote, the conversations in Totally Wired bring a rich human dimension to the postpunk story chronicled in the critically acclaimed Rip It Up. We get to follow these exceptional (and often eccentric) characters from their earliest days through the glory and sometimes disaster of their musical adventures to what they went on to do after postpunk. We gain a vivid sense of individuals struggling against the odds to make their world as interesting as possible, in the process leaving a legacy of artistic ambition and provocation that reverberates to this day. Along with the interviews, Totally Wired also includes a bonus 'overviews' section: further reflections by Simon Reynolds on postpunk's key icons and crucial scenes, including John Lydon and Public Image Ltd, Ian Curtis and Joy Division, art school conceptualists and proto-postpunkers Brian Eno and Malcolm McLaren, and the lineage of glam grotesquerie running from Siouxsie & The Banshees to the New Romantics to Leigh Bowery. Buzzing with ideas and insights, Totally Wired is an absolute mind rush.

An anthology of writings spanning Simon Reynolds's extraordinary career as a music writer, Bring the Noise weaves together interviews, reviews, essays, and features to create a critical history of the last twenty years of pop culture. Bring the Noise juxtaposes the voices of many of rock and rap's most provocative artists - Morrissey, Public Enemy, Beastie Boys, The Stone Roses, PJ Harvey, Radiohead, The Streets - with Reynolds's own passionate analysis. With all the energy and insight you would expect from the author of Rip It Up And Start Again, Bring the Noise tracks the alternately fraught and fertile relationship between white bohemia and black street music. The selections transmit the immediacy of their moment while offering a running commentary on the broader enduring questions of race and resistance, multiculturalism and division. From grunge to grime, from Madchester to the Dirty South, Bring the Noise chronicles hip hop and alternative rock's competing claims to be the cutting edge of innovation and the voice of opposition in an era of conservative backlash. Alert to both the vivid detail and the big picture, Simon Reynolds has shaped a compelling narrative that cuts across a thrillingly turbulent two-decade period of pop music.

The seventies are probably the most important and fascinating period in modern British political history. They encompass strikes that brought down governments, shock general election results, the rise of Margaret Thatcher and the fall of Edward Heath, the IMF crisis, the Winter of Discontent and the three-day week.But the seventies have also been frequently misunderstood, oversimplified and misrepresented. When the Lights Went Out goes in search of what really happened, what it felt like at the time, and where it was all leading. It includes vivid interviews with many of the leading participants, many of them now dead, from Heath to Jack Jones to Arthur Scargill, and it travels from the once-famous factories where the great industrial confrontations took place to the suburbs where Thatcherism was created and to remote North Sea oil rigs.The book also unearths the stories of the forgotten political actors away from Westminster who gave the decade so much of its volatility and excitement, from the Gay Liberation Front to the hippie anarchists of the free festival movement. Over five years in the making, this book is not an academic history but something for the general reader, written with the vividness of a novel or the best works of American New Journalism, bringing the decade back to life in all its drama and complexity.

At the age of eighteen Lucy Wadham ran away from English boys and into the arms of a Frenchman. Twenty-five years later, having married in a French Catholic Church, put her children through the French educational system and divorced in a French court of law, Wadham is perfectly placed to explore the differences between Britain and France.Using both her personal experiences and the lessons of French history and culture, she examines every aspect of French life - from sex and adultery to money, happiness, race and politics - in this funny and engrossing account of our most intriguing neighbour.