The boy Laddy Merridew, sent to live with his grandmother, stumbles off the bus into a small Welsh mining community, where he begins an unlikely friendship with Ianto Passchendaele Jenkins, the town beggar-storyteller. Ianto is watchman over the legacy of the collapse many years ago of Kindly Light Pit, a disaster whose echoes reverberate down the generations of the town. Through Ianto's stories Laddy is drawn into both the town's history and the conundrums of the present. Why has woodwork teacher Icarus Evans striven most of his life to carve wooden feathers that will float on an updraft? Why is the undertaker Tutt Bevan trying to find a straight path through the town? Why does James Little, the old gas-meter emptier, dig his allotment by moonlight? And why does window cleaner Judah Jones take autumn leaves into a disused chapel? These and other men of the town, and the women who mothered them, married them and mourned them, are bound together by the echoes of the Kindly Light tragedy and by the mysterious figure of Ianto Jenkins, whose stories of loyalty and betrayal, loss and love, form an unforgettable, spellbinding tapestry. The Coward's Tale is a powerfully imagined, poetic and haunting novel, spiked with humour. It is a story of kinship and kindness, guilt and atonement, and the ways in which we carve the present out of an unforgiving past.

From the heathered fells and lowlands of Cumbria with their history of smouldering violence, to the speed and heat of summer London, to an eerily still lake in the Finnish wilderness, Sarah Hall evokes landscapes with extraordinary precision and grace. The characters within these territories are real-life survivors, but whether it's a frustrated housewife seeking extreme experience or a young woman contemplating the death of her lover, dark devices and desires rise to the surface. And the human body, too - flawed, visceral, and full of emotional conflict - provides a sensuous frame for each unfolding drama. The Beautiful Indifference includes ‘Butcher's Perfume', which was shortlisted for the BBC National Short Story Prize in 2010.

A glorious collection of stories from the author of Cold Comfort Farm. The title story tells of a typical Christmas at the farm before the coming of Flora Poste. It is a parody of the worst sort of family Christmas: Adam Lambsbreath dresses up as Father Christmas in two of Judith's red shawls. There are unsuitable presents, unpleasant insertions into the pudding and some good Starkadder table talk. Aunt Ada Doom orders Amos to carve the turkey, adding: 'Ay, would it were a vulture, 'twere more fitting!'

In 1985 Jeanette Winterson's first novel, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, was published. It tells the story of a young girl adopted by Pentecostal parents. The girl is supposed to grow up and be a missionary. Instead she falls in love with a woman. Disaster. Written when Jeanette was only twenty-five, her novel went on to win the Whitbread First Novel award, become an international bestseller and inspire an award-winning BBC television adaptation. "Oranges" was semi-autobiographical. Mrs Winterson, a thwarted giantess, loomed over that novel and its author's life. When Jeanette finally left her home, at sixteen, because she was in love with a woman, Mrs Winterson asked her: why be happy when you could be normal? This book is the story of a life's work to find happiness. It is a book full of stories: about a girl locked out of her home, sitting on the doorstep all night; about a tyrant in place of a mother, who has two sets of false teeth and a revolver in the duster drawer, waiting for Armageddon; about growing up in an northern industrial town now changed beyond recognition, part of a community now vanished; and, about the Universe as a Cosmic Dustbin. It is the story of how the painful past Jeanette Winterson thought she had written over and repainted returned to haunt her later life, and sent her on a journey into madness and out again, in search of her real mother. It is also a book about other people's stories, showing how fiction and poetry can form a string of guiding lights, a life-raft which supports us when we are sinking. Funny, acute, fierce and celebratory, this is a tough-minded search for belonging, for love, an identity, a home, and a mother.

The year is 1803, and Darcy and Elizabeth have been married for six years. There are now two handsome and healthy sons in the nursery, Elizabeth's beloved sister Jane and her husband Bingley live nearby and the orderly world of Pemberley seems unassailable. But all this is threatened when, on the eve of the annual autumn ball, the guests are preparing to retire for the night when a chaise appears, rocking down the path from Pemberley's wild woodland. As it pulls up, Lydia Wickham—Elizabeth's younger, unreliable sister—stumbles out screaming that her husband has been murdered. Inspired by a lifelong passion for the work of Jane Austen, P.D. James masterfully recreates the world of Pride and Prejudice, and combines it with the excitement and suspense of a brilliantly-crafted crime story. Death Comes to Pemberley is a distinguished work of fiction, from one of the best-loved, most- read writers of our time.

One September morning, elderly Ruth Wesemann wakes to the sound of a parcel being delivered to her door. Inside she finds a tattered little notebook. Opening its delicate pages she meets with a flood of memories…It's 1933 and she is back in her light-filled flat in Berlin. Hans is making caipirinhas, snow falls outside the kitchen window, and Hitler is making his first speech as Chancellor of Germany. Her life and those of her tight-knit group of friends are about to change beyond all recognition. Having dedicated themselves to resisting the Nazis rise, they have become hunted outlaws overnight. Fleeing the country, Ruth and Hans find refuge in a basement flat in Bloomsbury, but inspired by Ruth's fearless cousin Dora, they defy the conditions of their visas and risk being sent back to Germany in order to continue their dangerous resistance work. But with each breathtaking act of courage and every person that they trust, they cannot help but risk betrayal and deceit. And then, one day, they face the chilling realisation that Hitler's reach extends much further than they had thought, even to London itself. Inspiring, tragic and based on real events, All That I Am is a masterful and devastating novel of bravery and betrayal, of the risks and sacrifices that people endure to protect their beliefs and of discovering remarkable heroism hidden in the most unexpected of places.

Alice Robinson is having doubts about her job on a fashionable London art magazine. Agreeing to house sit for her parents, she moves back to the suburban streets of her childhood, a world of Girl Guides, Tudorbethan houses and blossom trees, and finds herself confronting some truths about the way she's chosen to live her life. How can we connect? And what are the maps and manuals that show us how to live today? Exploring the landscape of the South East and the nature of life on an island, this clear-eyed, mordantly witty, warm and unsparing novel culminates in one of the most surprising and destabilizing endings you'll have read in some time. Landfall marks the arrival of a new, intriguing voice and a major literary talent.