Recently evacuated to the British countryside and with World War Two raging around her, one young girl is struggling to make sense of her life. Then she is given a book of ancient Norse legends and her inner and outer worlds are transformed. Intensely autobiographical and linguistically stunning, this book is a landmark work of fiction from one of Britain's truly great writers. Intensely timely, it is a book about how stories can give us the courage to face our own demise. The Ragnarok myth, otherwise known as the Twilight of the Gods, plays out the endgame of Norse mythology. It is the myth in which the gods Odin, Freya and Thor die, the sun and moon are swallowed by the wolf Fenrir, the serpent Midgard eats his own tail as he crushes the world and the seas boil with poison. It is only after such monstrous death and destruction that the world can begin anew. This epic struggle provided the fitting climax to Wagner's Ring Cycle, and just as Wagner was inspired by Norse myth so Byatt has taken this remarkable finale and used it as the underpinning of this highly personal and politically charged retelling.

When a bridge collapses in the Highlands of Scotland, dozens of people vanish into the river below. A car hired by a woman tourist was filmed pulling onto the bridge moments before it fell. Now numbered among the missing, the woman seizes her chance to start her life over. But her new path takes her no farther than a wooden cabin on the riverbank, where she seeks rebirth and freedom from her old self. There she lives with Silva, an illegal immigrant whose husband and daughter have not been seen since the day of the bridge's collapse. The women are befriended by the boatman Ron, and together they create a fragile sanctuary. Lost souls all, they keep secrets from each other, yet connect in ways none of them expects, as they strive to reconcile their past histories with the present and shape for themselves an elusive, longed-for future. A haunting story of identity and reinvention, loss and reparation, Across the Bridge is a stunning new novel from award-winning author Morag Joss.

Matthew Arnold praised the Iliad for its 'nobility', as has everyone ever since—but ancient critics praised it for its enargeia, its ‘bright unbearable reality’ (the word used when gods come to earth not in disguise but as themselves). To retrieve the poem's energy, Alice Oswald has stripped away its story, and her account focuses by turns on Homer's extended similes and on the brief 'biographies' of the minor war-dead, most of whom are little more than names, but each of whom lives and dies unforgettably—and unforgotten—in the copiousness of Homer's glance. 'The Iliad is an oral poem. This translation presents it as an attempt—in the aftermath of the Trojan War—to remember people's names and lives without the use of writing. I hope it will have its own coherence as a series of memories and similes laid side by side: an antiphonal account of man in his world… compatible with the spirit of oral poetry, which was never stable but always adapting itself to a new audience, as if its language, unlike written language, was still alive and kicking.' —Alice Oswald

Alice Oswald lives in Devon and is married with three children. Dart, her second collection, won the T. S. Eliot Prize in 2002. Her most recent collection, Woods etc, was a Poetry Book Society Choice and was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection and the T. S. Eliot Prize.

Julia O'Faolain's second novel, first published in 1973 and now available in a new edition, offers a rich, vivid portrait of the political and religious turmoil of sixth-century Gaul, wherein we find Radegunda, wife of King Clotair, having been seized by him as a prize of war. Radegunda builds a convent, a refuge for the Brides of Christ, and there becomes renowned for her austerity and mysticism. Her religion, however, is fanatical, and her quest for sainthood will serve to undermine the seeming calm of the retreat she has made.

'Vibrant and strange … [a] journey into a darker, wilder moment of history.' —Sarah Dunant, Guardian

Julia O'Faolain was born in London in 1932. Educated at University College, Dublin, the University of Rome and the Sorbonne, she worked as a translator and language teacher before becoming a writer. Her works include several short story collections and six novels. She has edited (with husband Lauro Martines) Not in God's Image: Women in History from the Greeks to the Victorians.

From Comrade Shakespeare McNab who enlists the help of La Diablesse to retrieve his faltering career at a Caribbean broadcasting station, to the fourteen-year-old English girl who develops a terror of infinity; from the electrifying description of a woman attacked as she lies sleeping, to the lyrical exploration of myths of El Dorado, Pauline Melville lures the reader into intriguing different worlds. The sheer malevolence of everyday life is offset with hilarity, making these stories both unsettling and funny.

Pauline Melville is a Guyaneseborn writer and actress who lives in London. Her other works include The Ventriloquist's Tale, which won the Whitbread First Novel Award and was shortlisted for the Orange Prize, and Eating Air, published in paperback by Telegram, 2010. Shape-shifter was awarded the Guardian Fiction Prize, the Commonwealth Writer's Prize and the Pen/Macmillan Silver Pen Award.

Paula is a victim of mysterious harassment. She lives near the railway line that carries nuclear waste through the heart of London and feels curiously, constantly unwell. Grace, her eighty-five-year-old aunt, once loved by a major painter, now deplores the modern evils that rampage across the world. When she, too, is plagued by silent phone calls, she escapes to Seaborne on the South Coast, where nothing ever happens except quiet deaths and holidays. Bruno is a sexually quirky private detective who attacks daisies with scissors, germs with bleach and old ladies for fun. If he follows Grace to Seaborne, can anything save her? Inspired by the real-life murder of anti-nuclear protester Hilda Murrell, Grace is a breathtaking thriller that asks whether, in a secretive, violent Britain, courage and love still count for something.

Stories and Essays of Mina Loy is the first book-length volume of Mina Loy's narrative writings and critical work ever published. This volume brings together her short fiction, as well as hybrid works that include modernized fairy tales, a Socratic dialogue, and a ballet. Loy's narratives address issues such as abortion and poverty, and what she called "the sex war" is an abiding theme throughout. Stories and Essays of Mina Loy also contains dramatic works that parody the bravado and misogyny of Futurism and demonstrate Loy's early, effective use of absurdist technique. Essays and commentaries on aesthetics, historical events, and religion complete this beguiling collection, cementing Mina Loy's place as one of the great writers of the twentieth century.

A wife, comfortably married and with three children, is contemplating middle age along with all the constraints of motherhood. Finding herself numb and locked down in an unending cycle of school runs, laundry and meal times, she cannot at first see a way to live with honesty. Even her husband, whom she loves, has never reached the core of her. Despairing of ever finding a way through her family to her own identity, she returns to the the memory of an old love affair—the consequences of which she has never resolved. She goes back to her past and confronts it, and the result is an exhilarating examination of present-day sexuality. With My Body is exquisitely raw, emotional and bold, and deeply resonant of the classic French erotic writings of Colette, Nin and Duras—but with a modern and provocative twist.