Jonathan Cape Dreaming the Karoo. A People Called the /Xam Blackburn Julia

In his daily cartoon for the Guardian and his long-running strip, IF, in the same paper, Steve Bell has proved that he is without equal in Britain as political cartoonist. Savage, funny, rude, constantly transgressing the rules of good taste, and of course beautifully drawn his cartoons are hated by those they lampoon and loved by everyone who likes to see authority subverted. In his new collection he covers the years of the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government, 2010-2015, fertile ground for Bell’s genius. From George Osborne in his bondage gear, the ‘Quiet Man’ zombie Ian Duncan Smith, Cable the elephant, Cameron the talking condom and Clegg the butler to Kipling and the IF penguins, every awful moment of the coalition years is re-run before your eyes … but Steve Bell style: ‘outrageous, anarchic, brilliant, sometimes inexplicable and a bit mad (not really)’ to quote John Pilger

The noodle soup called pho is the national dish of Vietnam. When Little Blue-- having been dropped by a mysterious man with a red car and being told to count to 500 -- finds himself in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam's baffling, daunting capital, his salvation is his own mobile pho stand. Little Blue's relationship with the city and its food brings an understanding to what it means to never want to return home and the fact that everyone goes away in the end • Beautifully drawn and coloured, and featuring many delicious recipes for pho, this is a startlingly original and immensely appealing graphic novel by a brilliant new talent

The Quentin Blake Treasury contains • All Join In * Quentin Blake’s Nursery Rhyme Book * Patrick * Angelica Sprocket’s Pockets * Mister Magnolia * Quentin Blake’s ABC * Cockatoos * Angel Pavement * Mrs Armitage Queen of the Road • Meet Mister Magnolia, with only one boot! Peer into Angelica Sprocket’s Pockets! Set off with Mrs Armitage Queen of the Road, be whisked away by the music of the extraordinary Patrick and soar into the air on the wings of Angel Pavement. Discover the crazy counting of the mischievous Cockatoos and the most enjoyable alphabet ever in Quentin Blake’s ABC. And finally, join in at the top of your voice with the verse and songs of Quentin Blake’s Nursery Rhyme Book and All Join In! • From Quentin’s very first picture book to his most recent adventures, this collection spans and celebrates his astonishing career

‘The blessing of an inherently interpretive medium like comics is that it hasn't allowed me to . . . make a virtue of dispassion. For good or for ill, the comics medium is adamant, and it has forced me to make choices. In my view, that is part of its message’ – from the preface by Joe Sacco • Over the past decade, Joe Sacco has increasingly turned to short-form comics journalism to report from conflict zones around the world. Collected here for the first time, Sacco's darkly funny, revealing reportage confirms his standing as one of the foremost international correspondents working today • Journalism takes readers from the smuggling tunnels of Gaza to war crimes trials in The Hague, from the lives of India's 'untouchables' to the ordeal of sub-Saharan refugees washed up on the shores of Malta

The Drunken Sailor traces the life of Arthur Rimbaud: poet, surrealist, libertine and gun runner. In dazzling artwork, Nick Hayes follows Rimbaud from his youth in Ardennes to the poetry salons of Paris, from the absinthe-glazed passion of his relationship with Verlaine to his flight into the jungles of Indonesia and the deserts of Yemen and Egypt. Told entirely in Rimbaud’s own words, from a new translation of Le bateau ivre, The Drunken Sailor confirms Nick Hayes’ place as one of the most talented graphic novelists at work today

The second book from the "exact and poetic" (New York Times) author of critical smash Young Skins, winner of the Guardian First Book Award and the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature and a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35, Homesickness is an emotionally resonant and wonderfully wry collection that follows the lives of outcasts, misfits, and malcontents from County Mayo to Canada • When Colin Barrett's debut Young Skins published, it swept up several major literary awards, and, in both its linguistic originality and sharply drawn portraits of working-class Ireland, earned Barrett comparisons to Faulkner, Hardy, and Musil. Now, in a blistering follow-up collection, Barrett brings together eight character-driven stories, each showcasing his inimitably observant eye and darkly funny style • A quiet night in a local pub is shattered by the arrival of a sword-wielding fugitive; a funeral party teeters on the edge of this world and the next, as ghosts simply won't lay in wake; a shooting sees a veteran policewoman confront the banality of her own existence; and an aspiring writer grapples with his father's cancer diagnosis and in his despair wreaks havoc on his mentor's life

The extraordinary new story collection from one of Ireland's greatest writers and bestselling author of Mindwinter Break • Bernard MacLaverty is a consummately gifted short-story writer and novelist whose work - like that of John McGahern, William Trevor, Edna O'Brien or Colm Toibin - is deceptively simple on the surface, but carries a turbulent undertow. Everywhere, the dark currents of violence, persecution and regret pull at his subject matter: family love, the making of art, Catholicism, the Troubles and, latterly, ageing • Blank Pages is a collection of twelve extraordinary new stories that show the emotional range of a master. 'Blackthorns', for instance, tells of a poor out-of-work Catholic man who falls gravely ill in the sectarian Northern Ireland of 1942 but is brought back from the brink by an unlikely saviour

The job of the skin is to keep things in… • On the buttoned-down island of Here, all is well. By which we mean: orderly, neat, contained and, moreover, beardless • Or at least it is until one famous day, when Dave, bald but for a single hair, finds himself assailed by a terrifying, unstoppable…monster*! • Where did it come from? How should the islanders deal with it? And what, most importantly, are they going to do with Dave? • The first book from a new leading light of UK comics, The Gigantic Beard That Was Evil is an off-beat fable worthy of Roald Dahl. It is about life, death and the meaning of beards • (*We mean a gigantic beard, basically.)

The Bind charts the rise and fall of Egret Bindings, once the most prestigious firm of bookbinders in London • In 1910 brothers Guy and Victor Egret take on an ambitious commission: a deluxe, jewelled binding of a collection of poems, A Moonless Land. It proves to be a moment of hubris. The work triggers their ruin, watched by the disapproving spirit of their father, Garrison Egret • A darkly humorous tale of sibling rivalry and creative one-upmanship, The Bind shows once again that William Goldsmith is an incomparable storyteller and a marvellously inventive artist

The highly anticipated follow-up to Alexander MacLeod's critically acclaimed debut, Animal Person is a wry and perfectly-observed collection of short stories about intimacy, family and the struggle to connect • Animal Person is a collection of startling juxtapositions. Criminals and bystanders, siblings and strangers, infants, adolescents, young parents, and the elderly, mammals, reptiles and fish: unexpected encounters occur and every meeting is an opportunity for recognition or rejection • An empty-nest couple, separated after years of coexisting, find themselves pulled into the dreams of their silent, gazing rabbit; a mysterious passenger in search of his missing suitcase roams through the caverns of a 1970s LA airport; a piano recital goes wildly astray; and a great-aunt refuses to apologise as she struggles to find a place for everything in the tight space of her senior's apartment

The year is 1964 • Bailey doesn't realize he is about to fulfil his tragic destiny when he walks into a US Army recruitment office. Secretive, damaged, innocent, trying to forget a past and looking for a future, Bobby is the perfect candidate for a secret US government experiment, an unholy continuation of a genetics program that was discovered in Nazi Germany nearly 20 years earlier in the waning days of World War II. Bailey's only ally and protector, Sergeant McFarland, intervenes, which sets off a chain of cascading events that spin out of everyone's control. As the monsters of the title multiply, becoming real and metaphorical, the story reaches a crescendo of moral reckoning • A 360-page tour de force of visual storytelling, Monsters' narrative canvas is copious: part familial drama, part thriller, part metaphysical journey, it is an intimate portrait of individuals struggling to reclaim their lives and an epic political odyssey that plays across two generations of American history

The most acclaimed European graphic novel of the last ten years, Epileptic is David B.'s story of his brother's battle with epilepsy - but it turns into a penetrating and sometimes lacerating self-examination on the author's part, as he delves into his own complex emotions and his family's troubled history, as well as his own youthful fantasy life. Particularly pointed is his description of the family journey from one attempted cure to another, including acupuncture, spiritualism and macrobiotics • David B.'s drawing is utterly extraordinary, balancing literal representation and expressionist psychological distortion