Women are dying in their millions. Some blame scientists, some see the hand of God, some see human arrogance reaping the punishment it deserves. Jessie Lamb is an ordinary girl living in extraordinary times: as her world collapses, her idealism and courage drive her towards the ultimate act of heroism. If the human race is to survive, it's up to her. But is Jessie heroic? Or is she, as her father fears, impressionable, innocent, incapable of understanding where her actions will lead?

Set just a month or two in the future, in a world irreparably altered by an act of biological terrorism, The Testament of Jessie Lamb explores a young woman's determination to make her life count for something, as the certainties of her childhood are ripped apart.

Swimming for his life towards traffickers on the Italian shore, Selim enters a world where Kurdish refugees disguise themselves as tomatoes, dates of birth are a matter of opinion, and a residency permit is a ticket to paradise. When he ends up in a small town in Germany, Selim believes he is finally safe, until the law catches up with him and the clock starts ticking. Selim realises there is only one way to avoid deportation, if he dare try… Fifteen years later, in a town hall in Paris, a Registrar receives an unsettling book in the post. The Registrar's Manual for Detecting Forced Marriages only fuels her suspicions surrounding an impending Kurdish wedding. Unsure how to intervene, she embarks on an investigation that brings her uncomfortably close to an old acquaintance: Selim. Written with real imaginative flair, heart and humour, The Registrar's Manual for Detecting Forced Marriages introduces an unlikely hero who'll prove impossible to forget, and a prodigious new talent in Sophie Hardach.

It is their first day at Drama Arts, and the circle of huddled, nervous students are told in no uncertain terms that here, unlike at any other drama school, they will be taught to Act. To Be. To exist in their own world on the stage. But outside is the real world—a pitiless, alluring place in which each of them in their most fervent dreams, hopes to flourish and excel.

Nell, insecure and dumpy, wonders if she will ever be cast as anything other than the maid. She'll never compete, she knows this, with the multitude of confident, long-legged beauties thronging the profession—most notably Charlie, whose effortless ascendance is nothing less than she expects. While Dan, ambitious and serious, has his sights fixed on Hamlet, as well as on fiery, rebellious Jemma.

Over the following decade these young actors will grapple with haphazard tours, illogical auditions, unobtainable agents, deluxe caravans, rocky relationships and red-carpet premieres. This dazzling new novel from Esther Freud uncovers a world of ruthless ambition, uncertain alliances and the many-sided holy grail of Success.

A woman walks the streets of Manhattan and contemplates with exquisite longing the precarious affair she has embarked on, amidst the grandeur and cacophony of the cityscape; a young Irish girl and her mother are thrilled to be invited to visit the glamorous Coughlan's but find—for all the promise of their green gorgette, silver shoes and fancy dinner parties—they leave disappointed; an Irishman in north London retraces his life as a young lad with his mates digging the streets and dreaming of the apocryphal gold, an outsider both in Ireland and England, yet he carries the lodestar of his native land.

A collection characterised by all of Edna O'Brien's trademark lyricism, powerful evocations of place and a glorious and an often heart-breaking grasp of people and their desires and contradictions.

Maria Jameson, happy in her life as a professor, wife, and mother, finds her life upended when she begins an affair with a man she meets in a shabby Edinburgh, Scotland, bookshop. To help her make sense of her situation, Maria also embarks on a project researching the life and art of French novelist George Sand, who made a name for herself by walking around in trousers and taking beaucoup lovers. As the dry narrative advances, Brackenbury cuts back and forth between Maria's story and Sand's fateful trip to Majorca with Chopin, allowing Maria to discover deep kinship with the writer, based on the conflicting desires of the female heart. Indeed, Maria's affair makes her life complete; she is happy with her lover and with her family, but the arrangement can't possibly last.

Our unnamed narrator is the mother of countless children, also nameless, from several marriages, and the wife of the successful screenwriter Jake Armitage. The Armitages are building a glass tower in the countryside where they first met, where their large family may or may not be able to live happily ever after. The Pumpkin Eater begins in a psychiatrist's office, and from that moment, the narrator seems to dare us to diagnose her, and perhaps society as well, raising questions about men and women, sex and reproduction, but refusing to answer them. She testifies to a life full not only of children—though the children are only occasionally seen or heard, their presence, intruding on a grim adult world of movie stars and doctors, adultery and depression, is palpable—but also of bodies, grocery lists, nursery rhymes, messes, aging parents, memories, dreams, and breakdowns. Yet her voice is smart, raw, wry, and deeply sympathetic, and the prose is surprisingly spare and elegant in this exquisitely surreal black comedy.