It's 1899. London. A young girl is abandoned by her feckless family and finds lodging and work assisting a doctor. But Jane Stretch is no ordinary girl, and Mr Swift is no ordinary doctor. Jane does her best to keep up with the doctor, her twisted bones throbbing, as they hurry past the markets, stage doors and side shows to appointments in certain boarding houses across town. The young actresses who live there have problems, and Mr Swift does what is required, calmly and discreetly. Grateful to her benefactor and his wife, Jane assists him and asks no questions—the desperate young women not minding that it is a cripple girl who wipes their brows. When this unlikely pair become involved with a rakish music hall star, Johnny Treble, who calls on Swift's help for his rich mistress's predicament, it seems that Jane's spell of good fortune is not going to last. The police come knocking—how will the doctor explain the absence of his medical certificates? How will they explain their connection to Johnny Treble's sudden death? And how will Jane argue her innocence? It seems that no amount of wand waving will make their problems disappear.

Little Bones conjures a tawdry, tantalising, troubling world of unclear morality and conflicting sympathies—richly evocative and full of curiosities. Two people act against their consciences simply to get by, and the choices we make are called into question. Is it possible to commit abhorrent acts without being corrupted by them?

You're having some kind of crisis. It's called being fifty. You must be having it too. Hilary once protested at Greenham. Now her protests tend to focus on persuading her teenage daughter to go out fully clothed. A frank and funny family drama questioning parental anxieties and life after fifty, Jumpy premiered at the Royal Court Theatre, London, in October 2011.

April De Angelis's plays include Jumpy, Wild East, A Laughing Matter, The Warwickshire Testimony, The Positive Hour and many others. She has also done work for BBC Radio and opera.

A woman in her thirties is released from prison with a new name and not much else. She begins to make a fresh start, but the present is soon invaded by fragments from her past. Unsettling, hallucinatory and without precedent, this is the tragic account of a broken life; but, against all expectation, it amounts to something utterly beautiful. Mountains of the Moon is a shocking, vivid and boldly imagined debut novel.

A young orphan poses nervously for a Renaissance maestro in medieval Siena. An artist's servant girl in seventeenth-century Amsterdam snatches a moment away from her work to lose herself in tales of knights and battles. An eighteenth century female painter completes a portrait of a deceased poetess for her lover. A Victorian medium poses with a book in one of the first photographic studios. A girl suffering her first heartbreak witnesses intellectual and sexual awakening during the Great War. A young woman reading in a bar catches the eye of a young man who takes her picture. And in the not-so-distant future a woman navigates the rapidly developing cyber-reality that has radically altered the way people experience art and the way they live.

Each chapter of Katie Ward's kaleidoscopic novel takes us into a perfectly imagined tale of how each portrait came to be, and as the connections accumulate, the narrative leads us into the present and beyond. In gorgeous prose Ward explores our points of connection, our relationship to art, the history of women, and the importance of reading. This dazzlingly inventive novel that surprises and satisfies announces the career of a brilliant new writer.

From one of Britain's most important writers, An Honourable Man is set in the tumultuous world of late Victorian England. Beginning in the Sudan and London of 1884, this extraordinary new novel is played out against the shambolic end of the Empire. Slovo draws on the lives of two real men: Charles Gordon, an heroic, hubristic, career army man whose refusal to obey orders helped bring down the Gladstone government, and W. T. Stead, editor of the Pall Mall Gazette, the father of tabloid journalism. Their story is intercuts with the tale of a poor, working woman in London. This is a book about destiny and about how wrong men can be; about foreign adventure and heroism doomed to failure; about women struggling to carve a place for themselves in the world; about political compromise and military mayhem.

Zahara is struggling with the legacy of her dual nationality. Half-Sudanese and half-Welsh, she's torn between loyalty to her father and her African heritage and to her mother back in the UK, who still insists on calling her Sandra. Bee is bringing up her family of four across two continents—splitting her life between rural Suffolk and drought stricken Africa. Both Zahara and Bee struggle to survive in a world that isn't always easy to understand. As the country descends into a civil war, what will become of them?

Lottie announces at the breakfast table that she is getting married. The youngest daughter of a large and close-knit family, Lottie is nineteen but looks five years younger. Her fiancé is Edgar Lennox, a composer of religious music and lecturer at Lottie's university, forty-five years her senior. We follow as Lottie's life unfolds; her marriage to Edgar, the tiny flat they share, the children that follow. It is a story of romantic dreams and daily reality, family loyalties tested but holding, and the comedy and solace to be found in small moments. Evoking a world that expands beyond the pages, it marks the beginning of what is an astonishing new collection.

On full display in these stories are the qualities Tessa Hadley has been praised for often before: her unflinching examination of family relationships; her humour, warmth and psychological acuity; her powerful and precise prose. In this collection there are domestic dramas, generational sagas, wrenching love affairs and epiphanies—captured and distilled to remarkable effect.

Angela Carter was one of the most vivid voices of the twentieth century: much studied, copied and adored. When she died at the age of fifty-one, she had published fifteen books of fiction and essays; outrage at her omission from the shortlists of any Booker Prize led to the foundation of the Orange Prize. February 2012 will be the twentieth anniversary of her death but no biographical work has yet appeared. Susannah Clapp and Angela Carter were friends for many years. The postcards that Carter sent to her form a paper trail through her life. The pictures she sent were sometimes domestic, sometimes flights of fantasy and surrealism. The messages were always pungent. From Stratford, Ontario, she explained that Canada was 'like Scandinavia, with liquor'. From the States, where she was smarting from a critical onslaught in the London Review of Books, where Susannah then worked, she sent a terrifying picture of Texan chili, with the message: 'Carter's reply to the critics …goes through you like a dose of salts …I'd liked to feed it to that drivelling wimp…' Through the medium of her postcards—small documents that are the emails of the twentieth century—Susannah Clapp evokes Angela Carter's anarchic intelligence, her fierce politics, the richness of her language, her ribaldry, the great swoops of her imagination; she also says something about her life. Intimate, funny, unexpected, it catches this unique artist on the wing.