November 9th, 1942. Amid the cloaking gloom of the Liverpool docks lay the Dunedin Star. A ship of the Blue Star Line, she was bound for the Middle East, her consignment of munitions for the 8th Army supplemented by twenty-one fare-paying civilians escaping the Blitz for the colonies, all forced to take the long haul round the Cape. As an unescorted merchantman sailing U-boat infested waters, Dunedin Star's passage was, at best, a risky undertaking. But her eventual fate was to defy all expectation. Three weeks into her voyage, her hull mysteriously holed, Dunedin Star ran aground off Namibia's infamous Skeleton Coast - five hundred miles of raging surf and burning desert, the most violent and desolate shore on earth. Sixty-three men, women and children were to defy mountainous waves and unfathomable odds to reach land ...but their struggle for survival had only just begun. From interviews with survivors, eyewitness testimony, historical resources and personal journals, Dawson skilfully reconstructs the Dunedin Star's doomed voyage, the terror of the wilderness and the painstaking rescue missions. From the grim waters of the North Atlantic to the blistering African wastes, he narrates a classic tale of pluck, set against the backdrop of World War II.

Andre Szara, survivor of the Polish pogroms and the Russian civil wars, is a journalist working for Pravda in 1937. War in Europe is already underway and Szara is co-opted to join the NKVD, the Soviet secret intelligence agency. He does his best to survive the tango of pre-war politics by calmly obeying orders and keeping his nose clean. But when he is sent to retrieve a battered briefcase the plot thickens and is drawn into even more complex intrigues. Szara becomes a full-time spymaster and as deputy director of a Paris network, he finds his own star rising when he recruits an agent in Berlin who can supply crucial information. Dark Star captures not only the intrigue and danger of clandestine life but the day-to-day reality of what Soviet operatives call special work.

The new 'Troy' from John Lawton is a gem. The backdrop is London in the late 1950s. The East End is ripe for redevelopment; the property sharks are buying up the bombsites and Victorian terraces; corruption is rife; Macmillan is PM of a shaky Tory government; Gaitskell expects to succeed as the first Labour PM for almost a decade to the delight of Troy's brothers, one an MP, the other a Fleet Street editor. Troy's last big case (told in Lawton's OLD FLAMES) had been to protect the Russian leaders, Bulganin and Khrushchev, on their first visit to Britain in 1956. Now a series of increasingly sadistic murders occurs on his old East End patch; a wartime girlfriend, who became a GI bride - since married to a Democratic Presidential candidate - reappears into his life. Nor is she the only woman to occupy his bed in the tiny house in Goodwin's Court, St Martin's Lane. When 'Ike', the retiring US President, makes a farewell visit to London, all Troy's worlds combine in a frightening cresendo of corruption and violence. The title, Blue Rondo, is taken from a Dave Brubeck record.

[The Troy novels} add up to an enjoyablly subversive portrait of mid-century Britain, its places visualised with photographic precision and events described with the authority of a historian.' Jessica Mann, The Spectator

The hero of Firecracker is a likeable, 32-year-old, slightly feckless divorced father-of-one who lives in Texas and is nicknamed 'Dead' Kennedy, for the rather good reason that he can see dead people. We're told this in a very matter of fact way - there's nothing gothic or horror-like about this novel - it's been something he's had to live with all his life and, apart from the fact that it makes driving a car impossible for him (he keeps swerving to avoid the ghosts), it hasn't really affected his life. DK is trying to put his life back on track, in part to do justice to the faith his daughter Megan - 12 years old, and very funny - continues to place in him, and in part because he's still in love with his ex-wife and he can't bear to prove her new ex-marine husband Don right. The trouble is, he keeps being distracted, first by a long-lost cousin with a weeping ghost in his garage and a terrible secret to hide, then by his all-too-alive mother who is planning a family reunion, and finally by a number of his dead relatives who all seem to want something from him. This isn't trying to be the Sixth Sense - it's far quirkier and funnier. It is a ghost story - with ghosts who are both living and dead - but it's also a love story and the story of a man who loses his way and the people who try and help him find it once again.