Marie Powell is sixteen when her father marries her to the poet John Milton in payment of a debt. They move to a pretty garden-house in London, but she struggles to adjust to her new life. Her husband is high-minded and unyielding, and only makes Marie long for the man she really loves. As Civil War sweeps across England and the King is killed, a battle starts to rage between husband and wife – one that only the powerful can win.

Told through the fictional journals of Milton’s wife, Robert Graves’s sympathetic and sensitive reconstruction of her tragic life is also a convincing, linguistically rich portrait of seventeenth-century England as it is ravaged by war.

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‘The best book I’ve read this year … darkly comedic and full of tension and surprise’ Marina Abramovic

‘Life for sale. Use me as you wish. I am a twenty-seven-year-old male. Discretion guaranteed. Will cause no bother at all.’

When Hanio Yamada realises the future holds little of worth to him, he puts his life for sale in a Tokyo newspaper, thus unleashing a series of unimaginable exploits. A world of murderous mobsters, hidden cameras, a vampire woman, poisoned carrots, code-breaking, a hopeless junkie heiress and makeshift explosives reveals itself to the unwitting hero. Is there nothing he can do to stop it? Resolving to follow the orders of his would-be purchasers, he comes to understand what life is worth, and whether we can indeed name our price.

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It is fifty years in the future and the individual nations of Europe no longer exist. New Democracy rules. Elections are considered divisive and a thing of the past, power has been fully centralised, and cheerful Controllers make the decisions for the good of the masses. Conformity means freedom. Big smiles, easy debt and lots of nice words mask a corporate-driven, closet dictatorship. When special police unit Cool come to take you away they arrive with fresh coffee and blueberry muffins. But resistance groups are fighting back.

In London, ambitious young bureaucrat Rupert Ronsberger uses Suspicion software to identify threats to the system, stumbling across a shocking murder just as Controller Horace is about to arrive in the city. At the same time Kenny Jackson – a member of the outlawed GB45 – leaves a free town in the West Country and heads towards the capital. Despite the best efforts of Cool, the three men are set on a collision course.

The Liberal Politics Of Adolf Hitler predicts a time when the internet is embedded in the human body, having morphed into propaganda/surveillance tool InterZone; correct thinking and a denied censorship crushes individual expression; physical books, audio and film are illegal; the people’s culture is cancelled or sold back to them in distorted forms; and enforced digitisation has seen history edited, deleted and rewritten, so that even the most wicked of individuals can be reinvented.

John King’s dystopian novel imagines a future firmly rooted in the present day, and is a dark satire that merges absurdity and humour with the terrors of a new brand of totalitarianism made possible by Big Tech – a nightmare society that we should see coming.

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A novel of the friendships and woes of two couples, which tells the story of their lives in lyrical, evocative prose by one of the finest American writers of the late 20th century.

When two young couples meet for the first time during the Great Depression, they quickly find they have much in common: Charity Lang and Sally Morgan are both pregnant, while their husbands Sid and Larry both have jobs in the English department at the University of Wisconsin. Immediately a lifelong friendship is born, which becomes increasingly complex as they share decades of love, loyalty, vulnerability and conflict. Written from the perspective of the aging Larry Morgan,Crossing to Safety is a beautiful and deeply moving exploration of the struggle of four people to come to terms with the trials and tragedies of everyday life.

With an introduction by Jane Smiley.

Wallace Stegner (1909-1993) was the author of, among other novels, Remembering Laughter, 1937; A Shooting Star, 1961; Angle of Repose (Pulitzer Prize), 1971; The Spectator Bird (National Book award), 1977; Recapitulation, 1979. Three of his short stories have won O.Henry prizes, and in 1980 he received the Robert Kirsch award from the Los Angeles Times for his lifetime literary achievements. His collected stories were published in 1990.

Jane Smiley is the author of many novels and works of non-fiction, including, most recently, “Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel”, about the history and anatomy of the novel. Her most recent novel is “Good Faith”. She won the Pulitzer Prize in 1992 for “A Thousand Acres”, and was shortlisted for The Orange Prize in 2001 for Horse Heaven.

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