Picador Beneath the Bonfire Butler Nickolas

One September morning in 2008, an investment banker approaching forty, his career in collapse and his marriage unravelling, receives a surprise visitor at his West London home. He struggles to place the dishevelled figure carrying a backpack, until he recognizes a friend from his student days, a brilliant man who disappeared years earlier under mysterious circumstances. The friend has resurfaced to make a confession of unsettling power • Theirs is the age-old story of the bond between two men and the betrayal of one by the other. As the friends begin to talk, and as their room becomes a world, a journey begins that is by turns exhilarating, shocking, intimate and strange. Set against the breaking of nations and beneath the clouds of economic crisis, and moving between Kabul, New York, Oxford, London and Islamabad, In the Light of What We Know tells the story of people wrestling with unshakeable legacies of class and culture, and pushes at the great questions of love, origins, science, faith and war

The number one Sunday Times bestseller in a new festive package, Twas the Nightshift Before Christmas is the perfect stocking filler from the author of multi-million-copy bestseller This is Going to Hurt – now a major BBC TV series • Christmas is coming, the goose is getting fat . . . but 1.4 million NHS staff are heading off to work. In this perfect present for anyone who has ever set foot in a hospital, Adam Kay delves back into his diaries for a hilarious, horrifying and sometimes heartbreaking peek behind the blue curtain at Christmastime • This is a love letter to all those who spend their festive season on the front line, removing babies and baubles from the various places they get stuck, at the most wonderful time of the year

Henry, Lee, Kip and Ronny grew up together in rural Wisconsin. Friends since childhood, their lives all began the same way, but have since taken different paths. Henry stayed on the family farm and married his first love, whilst the others left in search of something more. Ronnie became a rodeo star, Kip made his fortune in the city, and musician Lee found fame - but heartbreak, too • Now all four are back in town for a wedding, each of them hoping to recapture their old closeness but unable to escape how much has changed. Amid the happiness of reunion and celebration, old rivalries resurface and a wife's secret threatens to tear both a marriage and a friendship apart • This is a novel about the things that matter - love and loyalty, the power of music and the beauty of nature - told in a uniquely beautiful, warm-hearted and profound way and exploring the age-old question of whether we can ever truly come home

Camp Chippewa, 1962 • This is the summer that everything changes for lonely thirteen-year-old Nelson, marking the beginning of his uncertain friendship with a popular boy named Jonathan, and the discovery of his father's betrayal • As the years pass on, both Nelson and Jonathan find their notions of loyalty and bravery tested to the limit, and each will be forced to ask himself what it really means to be a good man…

Before the real city could be seen it had to be imagined, the way rumours and tall tales were a kind of charting • It is the 1920s, and Patrick Lewis has arrived in the bustling city of Toronto, leaving behind his Canadian wilderness home. Immersed in the lives of the people who surround him - the immigrants building the city, as well as those who dreamed it into being - Patrick begins to learn, from their stories, the history of the city itself. And he has his own adventures: searching for a missing millionaire, tunnelling beneath Lake Ontario, falling in love • In the Skin of a Lion is Michael Ondaatje's sparkling predecessor to his Booker Prize-winning The English Patient. Here we encounter Hana the orphaned girl and Caravaggio the thief for the first time, as well as a large cast of other characters, all lovingly and intimately portrayed

John Grady Cole is the last bewildered survivor of long generations of Texas ranchers. Finding himself cut off from the only life he has ever wanted, he sets out for Mexico with his friend Lacey Rawlins. Befriending a third boy on the way, they find a country beyond their imagining: barren and beautiful, rugged yet cruelly civilized; a place where dreams are paid for in blood • The first volume in McCarthy's legendary Border Trilogy, All The Pretty Horses is an acknowledged masterpiece and a grand love story: a novel about the passing of childhood, of innocence and a vanished American age. Steeped in the wisdom that comes only from loss, it is a magnificent parable of responsibility, revenge and survival • Part of the Picador Collection, a series showcasing the best of modern literature

Set in a mythical, feudal, Japanese land, a world both beautiful and cruel, the intense love story of two young people takes place against a background of warring clans, secret alliances, high honour and lightning swordplay • Lian Hearn's stunningly powerful bestseller, Across the Nightingale Floor, is an epic story for readers young and old • In his palace at Inuyama, Lord Iida Sadamu, warlord of the Tohan clan, surveys his famous nightingale floor. Its surface sings at the tread of every human foot, and no assassin can cross it. But sixteen-year-old Otori Takeo, his family murdered by Iida's warriors, has the magical skills of the Tribe - preternatural hearing, invisibility, a second self - that enable him to enter the lair of the Tohan. He has love in his heart and death at his fingertips… • The first novel in the epic Tales of the Otori series, Across the Nightingale Floor is followed by Grass For His Pillow and Brilliance of the Moon

Sara hasn't seen or heard from her childhood best friend, Lejla, in years. She's comfortable with her life in Dublin, with her partner, their avocado plant, and their naturist neighbour. But when Lejla calls her and demands she come home to Bosnia, Sara finds that she can't say no • What begins as a road trip becomes a journey through the past, as the two women set off to find Armin, Lejla's brother who disappeared towards the end of the Bosnian War. Presumed dead by everyone else, only Lejla and Sara believed Armin was still alive • Confronted with the limits of memory, Sara is forced to reconsider the things she thought she understood as a girl: the best friend she loved, the first experiences they shared, but also the social and religious lines that separated them, that brought them such different lives

Sara hasn't seen or heard from her childhood best-friend, Lejla, in years. She's comfortable with her life in Dublin, with her partner, their avocado plant, and their naturist neighbour. But when Lejla calls and demands she come home to Bosnia, Sara finds that she can't say no • What begins as a road trip becomes a journey through the past, as the two women set off to find Armin, Lejla's brother who disappeared towards the end of the Bosnian War. Presumed dead by everyone else, only Lejla and Sara believed Armin was still alive • Confronted with the limits of memory, Sara is forced to reconsider the things she thought she understood as a girl: the best friend she loved, the first experiences they shared, but also the social and religious lines that separated them, that brought them such different lives

When, in 1859, George Hills is pulled from the wreck of the steamship Admella, he carries with him the uneasy memory of a fellow survivor. Someone else - or something else - kept him warm as he lay dying, half-submerged in the freezing Southern Ocean, kept him bound to life • As George adapts to his life back on land, he can't quite escape the feeling that he wasn't alone when he emerged from the ocean that day, that a familiar presence has been watching him ever since. What the creature might want from him - his life? His first-born? Simply to return to its home? - will pursue him, and call him back to the water, where it all began

Rounding the Mark is the seventh darkly humorous novel in Andrea Camilleri's Inspector Montalbano series • Increasingly disillusioned with his government and the world in general, Inspector Montalbano is considering retirement. He is starting to feel his age, and even his favourite restaurant has closed. But when he bumps into a dead body during a bracing swim, his detective instincts are aroused once more. Particularly when the most likely identity of the victim is a man already long buried

Наше увлечение Древним Египтом восходит к древним грекам. Но расцвет египтологии, несомненно, пришелся на девятнадцатый и начало двадцатого веков. Этот золотой век науки и приключений завершился двумя эпохальными событиями: расшифровкой иероглифов Шампольоном в 1822 году и открытием гробницы Тутанхамона Говардом Картером и лордом Карнарвоном сто лет спустя • В "Мире под песками" известный египтолог Тоби Уилкинсон рассказывает захватывающие истории мужчин и женщин, чья одержимость древней цивилизацией Египта побудила их раскрыть ее секреты. Здесь присутствуют Шампольон, Картер и Карнарвон, но также и их менее известные современники, такие как прусский ученый Карл Рихард Лепсиус, француз Огюст Мариетт и британская аристократка Люси Дафф-Гордон