The Chivalry of Crime is the story of one of America's most compelling figures, the outlaw gunslinger Jesse James. Bringing real and invented characters together in a dramatic and moving story, Desmond Barry's novel mingles the life of an imaginary boy with a factually faithful account of the lives of Jesse James and Robert Ford, the man who killed James, in the days when shootists were legends. Joshua, a young, idealistic friend of Ford's, is determined to get a gun of his own - a desire that puts his own life in jeopardy and reveals the painful realities masked by America's most cherished myths.
The title is a quote from a Kansas City Times editorial that condemned Jesse James for robbing a bank but celebrated his style for showing that after the Civil War there were still unbowed men of blood in the South. Violent lyrically written and heart-rending, The Chivalry of Crime is a brilliant debut

Already celebrated as a prodigiously gifted novelist and poet, John Burnside now extends his range to the shorter form, in a collection of stories written with the same beautiful control, the same power to ravish and disturb.

In 1912, in Storyville, the notorious red-light district of New Orleans, a photographer named E J Bellocq took a series of photographs of the women who worked in the brothels. Rediscovered in the 1950s, Bellocq's photographs have become famous, but the man himself remains a mystery.

'A masterly storyteller... An enormously popular writer who was also one of the most significant novelists of his time.' Newsweek

Graham Greene's first novel, written when he was twenty-one and published in 1929, tells the story of Andrews, a young man running and hiding from the fellow-criminals he has betrayed, and Elizabeth, the young woman whose house he takes refuge in and who persuades him to give evidence against them in court. But that is only the beginning of the trouble for them both...

`Graham Greene had wit and grace and character and story and a transcendent universal compassion that places him for all time in the ranks of world literature: John Le Carre

Raven is an assassin, a hired killer, and his brutal murder of the Minister raises the spectre of war across Europe. As the nation prepares for war, Raven goes on the run, hunted by the police and hunting the man who had paid him in stolen banknotes, eventually unearthing the terrible truth behind the killing.

'Would you believe me if I told you that I was only nine years of age when I killed him?'

In his paint-splattered room, a young and successful Irish painter confronts his own murderous past: the memory that has haunted him, for over twenty years, of that day on the beach at Bundoran, Co. Donagal, when he killed a palaeontologist with his own geological hammer.
His life is further disrupted by the beautiful Dilly Maguire, an Ingrid Bargman lookalika who leads him all the way to Prague and involves him - and his beloved and devoutly paranoid grandmother - in yet another grievous crime. As ha struggles to keep reality and unreality apart he wishes only to be taken seriously - as sinner and lover, artist and murderer.
Featuring camaos from Elvis Presley, Shirley Temple and the Pope, and some of the funniest writing this side of Flenn O'Brien, The Little Hammer is a triumph of linguistic brio, dark imagination and wild Northern wit from one of Ireland's most interesting new talents.

Alexander MacDonald tells the story of his family from the vantage point of the 1980s. In 1779, driven from his home, Calum MacDonald sets sail from the Scottish Highlands for Canada. Reaching "the land of trees", he settles his extensive family until they become a separate Nova Scotian clan.

"Witty, worldly, learned, and richly redolent of the obscurer byways of the old City, London Bridges is an intellectual feast" Literary Review

Jane Stevenson's collection of four novellas, Several Deceptions, was one of the critical successes of 1999 - 'refreshingly, unapologedcally erudite, said The Observer; the Times Literary Supplement,, declared it "An enjoyable display of deadly wit given with a relaxed literary confidence . . . here is a gossipy, smart, critical, intellectual, high spirited and literate voice'.

In London Bridges, her first novel, Stevenson puts these same qualities -erudition, wit, charm and magnetic storytelling - to work to evoke the mood and sheer enjoyability of classic English detective fiction.

The setting is contemporary London, the cast of characters huge, the plot extremely involved. A young lawyer comes across a treasure lost in the Blitz, and is tempted into a series of crimes which end eventually in murder. Meanwhile, a very contemporary cast of characters assembles to confound him. The denouement of the plot occurs in the Cotswolds, and involves Greek monks, New Age bikers and the source of the Thames, but before we get there, there is humour, satire, social observation, and occasional moments of pathos.

"A compelling eccentric, erudite tale of contemporary and historical detection...a genuine and original talent" The Times