But Beautiful 

Geoff Dyer

PB £8.99

Through the Children's Gate 

Adam Gopnik

PB £8.99

On every page of this delicious book you will meet characters and situations that tell you this could only be New York. The parents who are determined to get their children literally to fly at the school production of Peter Pan - the Cambodian cashier at the local deli who is more Jewish than Gopnik's grandfather - his gloriously peculiar analyst who argues that a name can be damaging to the human psyche, saying Adam's name is very ugly - the birder who takes Adam to see the huge flock of feral parrots that have taken over Flatbush. No one knows how they got there or how they survive the brutal winters, but they do. And flourish on it. 'These birds are so bold. They are real New Yorkers. They have so much attitude'. "Through the Children's Gate" is written with Gopnik's signature mix of mind and heart, elegantly and exultantly alert to the minute miracles that bring a place to life. 

Ministry of Special Cases  

Nathan Englander

PB £7.99

Kaddish Poznan chips the names off gravestones for a living, removing traces of disreputable ancestors for their more respectable kin. His wife Lillian works in insurance, earning money when people live longer than they fear. As Argentina's Dirty War unfolds around them, their sometimes hilarious misadventures are soon replaced by something much darker. A visit to the dreaded Ministry of Special Cases is only the start of Englander's stunning vision of a nation in the hold of corruption and torture, a place where absurdity, despair and hope are the end products of a bureaucracy run out of control.

From Beirut to Jerusalem

Thomas Friedman

PB £9.99

In this memorable book, Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Thomas Friedman reaches deep into the traumatic and complex recent history of the conflicts in the Middle East. A shrewd and surprisingly funny, indispensible to anyone seeking a fuller understanding of the political causes and psychological effects of the seemingly endless litany of strife which besets this embattled region. For this edition, Friedman has added a further two chapters that bring the book up to 1995 and the unfolding and stalling of the Middle Eastern peace process.

Intimacy

Hanif Kureishi

PB £6.99

A novel by the author of "The Buddha of Suburbia" and "My Beautiful Laundrette" which analyzes the agonies and joys of being connected to another person. The book follows the train of thought of Jay, a husband and father, the night before he is about to walk out on his wife Susan and their two sons. Short, poignant, insightful and touching.

Terror and Liberalism

Paul Berman

PB £9.99

This is the first book to address the political-philosophical dimensions of Islamic fundamentalist terrorism and offer conclusions about how the West should respond. Author biog: Paul Berman is a political and cultural critic. His writings appear in The New Republic, The New York Times and Slate, among other publications.

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay

Michael Chabon

PB £8.99

Like the comic books that animate and inspire it, "The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay" is both larger than life and of it too. Complete with golems and magic and miraculous escapes and evil nemeses, even hand-to-hand Antarctic battle, it pursues the most important questions of love and war, dreams and art, across pages lurid with longing and hope. Samuel Klayman--self-described little man, city boy and Jew--first meets Josef Kavalier when his mother shoves him aside in his own bed, telling him to make room for their cousin, a refugee from Nazi-occupied Prague. It's the beginning, however unlikely, of a beautiful friendship, of which is born the Escapist, a super-hero who "roams the globe, performing amazing feats and coming to the aid of those who languish in tyranny's chains".

The Family Mashber

Der Nister

PB £12.99

A protean work: a tale of a divided family and divided souls, a panoramic picture of an Eastern European town, a social satire, a kabbalistic allegory, an innovative fusion of modernist art and traditional storytelling, a tale of weird humour and mounting tragic power, embellished with a host of uncanny and fantastical figures drawn from daily life and the depths of the unconscious. Above all, the book is an account of a world in crisis, torn between the competing claims of family, community, business, politis, the individual conscience, and an elusive God.

History: A Novel

Elsa Morante

PB £12.99

"History" was written nearly 3 decades after Morante spent a year hiding from the Germans in remote farming villages in the mountains south of Rome. There she witnessed the full impact of the war and first formed the ambition to write an account of what history does when it reaches the realm of ordinary people struggling for life and bread. The central character in this powerful and unforgiving novel is Ida Mancuso, a schoolteacher whose husband has died and whose feckless teenage son treats the war as his playground. A German soldier on his way to North Africa rapes her and leaves her pregnant with a boy whose survival becomes Ida's passion, and her source of joy and meaning amid universal catastrophe.