Twenty-five years ago, during the spring and summer of 1975, a rapist stalked the streets of Cambridge, attacking young, single women in their bed-sits and flats and subjecting them to horrifying and increasingly violent assaults. For several months the city endured a climate of fear and suspicion, where the old assumptions about sexual relations and civic decency fell into question, and no human male could be taken at face value.

These events form the background to The Locust Room, John Burnside's extraordinary new novel, in which a young photographer is forced by circumstances to examine his relations with women, with other men and with his family at home. Over one dramatic summer, he becomes involved in a series of sexual intrigues and acts of subtle violence, as he journeys towards tentative self-definition and what he comes to see as honorable isolation.
What emerges from this atmosphere of tension and terror is Burnside's finest novel so far: an exquisitely written, beautifully observed fiction - and a moving examination of the possibilities of male tenderness, individual autonomy and personal grace.

A firefighter in London during the Blitz is caught up in an intelligence game Set in WWII London, in the last months of 1940 when the Blitz and destruction and firebombing were at their worst and morale was at its lowest. A young man, Jack Finlay, is called back from the African front to mastermind the firefighting in a small but crucial area of the City of London, looking after 5 rather mysterious buildings in particular. In the pre-war period he was a legendary firefighter, though his past is rather murky - poor Liverpool Irish Catholic, sent to Borstal for fighting, and generally suspect because of his unnatural interest in fires, thought to be an arsonist. His father was a WWI hero - and one of the beautifully handled themes of the novel is the effect of that war on those who survived to fight another so soon after, and on their sons. Our hero finds himself a pawn in an Intelligence game, and in British Intelligence's attempts to feed false intelligence to the Germans at a crucial point in the war. He falls in love with a young woman who's the curator of one of the buildings which was built by her German (disgraced) architect father - she to is being manipulated (or is she?) and the crisis comes when she is caught in the burning building. With its brilliantly vivid evocation of London in the Blitz, an unusual love story, an emotional heart but a cynical eye, and devastatingly good descriptions of fire (how it moves and works and destroys), this unusual and assured first novel has real appeal for men and women alike.

Set in an unnamed territory that appears to be under military rule, this novel features narratives in English which resemble the kind of basic translation that might appear in an overseas "foreign office". The accounts have been passed to a senior civil servant and then a state agency.

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Natalie is a girl who should be going somewhere. Bright, beautiful and ambitious, she's stuck in a dead end job in the accounts department of Nu-Line Telecommunications. Living her life through wild weekends, yearning for something more.
When she sees a chance to change her life, she takes it. After all, it's only a minor crime. Nobody will be hurt, will they? But Colin gets hurt. He's the man who Natalie marries. And other people's lives are changed, terribly and irrevocably. Because Natalie's actions do have consequences - tragic consequences for Chloe and her parents.

Gun law is out of control in Liverpool. Organised gangs fight it out for control of clubland and with it, regulation of the lucrative supply of narcotics. Supremacy in this violent world is short?lived as younger, hungrier and more ruthless gangs move in. Against this brutal backdrop, three South End villains pursue a dying trade.
Ged, Moby and Ratter are Blaggers. Old?fashioned highwaymen with two decades of meticulously planned job behind them. With the Christmas season in full swing, Ged is planning a job that'll see the boys through until spring. A! usual, he won't give them any details until the morning of tl blag. Until then, they have to stay off the street and keep of of trouble. The problem is that Moby loves to go out. A wee before the blag, an incident in a lapdance bar nearly leads to a gang war.
Ratter, meanwhile, has long since outgrown the needless danger of the blag. He's invested his loot in the booming property sector, converting banks, churches and warehouse into apartments. He wanted to cut his links with Ged a long time ago, but has his own sinister reasons for staying on board.
As the make?or?break heist approaches, Ged needs to summon all his street nous and killer instinct just to surviv And even then he needs friends in low places to ensure tlh the stains vanish without trace.

Outlaws is Kevin Sampson's finest book to date: a taut, thrilling novel told in a vernacular that sizzles off the page

Glue is the story of four boys growing up in the Edinburgh schemes, and about the loyalties, the experiences - and the secrets - that hold them together into their thirties. Four boys becoming men: Juice Terry, the work-shy fannymerchant, with corkscrew curls and sticky fingers; Billy the boxer: driven, controlled, playing to his strengths; Carl, the Milky Bar Kid, drifting along to his own soundtrack; and the doomed Gaily - who has one less skin than everyone else and seems to find catastrophe at every corner.
As we follow their lives from the seventies into the new century - from punk to techno, from speed to Es - we can see each of them trying to struggle out from under the weight of the conditioning of class and culture, peer pressure and their parents' hopes that maybe their sons will do better than they did. What binds the four of them is the friendship formed by the scheme, their school, and their ambition to escape from both; their loyalty fused in street morality: back up your mates, don't hit women and, most importantly, never grass - on anyone.

Despite its scale and ambition, Glue has all Irvine Welsh's usual pace and vigour, crackling dialogue, scabrous setpieces and black, black humour, but it is also a grown-up book about growing up - about the way we live our lives, and what happens to us when things become unstuck.