‘Spending an evening with Campion is one of life’s pure pleasures’ Saturday Review

First, there is a skeleton in a dinner jacket, then a corpse in a golden aeroplane. After another body, Albert Campion nearly makes a fourth...Both the skeleton and the corpse have died with suspicious convenience for Georgia Wells, a monstrous but charming actress with a raffish entourage. Georgia's best friend just happens to be Valentine, a top couturiere and Campion's sister. In order to protect Valentine, Campion must unravel a story of blackmail and ruthless murder.

George Bird (Translator)

Marital troubles? Sick of life? Suicide the answer? Why not get yourself a contract killer? Nothing easier, provided you communicate only by phone and box number. You give him your photograph, specify when and in which cafe to find you, then sit back and prepare to die. Murdered, you will be of greater interest than ever you were in life. More to him than met the eye will be the judgment. Our perpetually glum hero meticulously plans his own demise, expect for one detail: if he suddenly decides he wants to live, what then? This darkly funny tale is Kurkov on top form.

Saturday is a novel set within a single day in February 2003. Henry Perowne is a contented man - a successful neurosurgeon, happily married to a newspaper lawyer, and enjoying good relations with his children, who are young adults. What troubles him is the state of the world - the impending war against Iraq, and a general darkening and gathering pessimism since the New York and Washington attacks two years before. On this particular Saturday morning, Perowne makes his way to his usual squash game with his anaesthetist, trying to avoid the hundreds of thousand of marchers filling the streets of London, protesting against the war. A minor accident in his car brings him into a confrontation with a small-time thug called Miller. To Perowne's professional eye, something appears to be profoundly wrong with this young man. Miller, in his turn, believes the surgeon has humiliated him, and visits the opulent Perowne home that evening, during a family reunion - with savage consequences that will lead Henry Perowne to deploy all his skills to keep this doomed figure alive.

"Byzantium Endures", one of the first of the "Pyat" series of novels, introduces one of Michael Moorcock's most magnificent creations - Maxim Arturovitch Pyatnitski. Born in Kiev on the cusp of the twentieth century, he discovers the pleasures of sex and cocaine and glimpses a sophisticated world beyond his horizons before the storm of the October Revolution breaks. Still a student at St Petersburg, he is deflected into more immediate concerns, caught up in the rip-tide of history.

Long, wonderfully detailed, lovingly reconstructed picture of a particular society and an individual sensibility- puts Michael Moorcock straight into the front rank of contemporary English novelists' Robert Nye, Guardian

Having escaped the horrors of the Russian civil war, Maxim Arturovitch Pyat discovers that the hazards of Europe are as nothing to the perils that await him in America. He is almost immediately involved in further scandals, touring the country as a speaker for the Ku Klux Klan. In this second of Michael Moorcock's acclaimed "Pyat" series of novels, only the reappearance of Pyat's enduring love, his femme fatale, Mrs Corenelius, offers him a chance of escape.

'This is a rich, ambitious and erudite book...If one purpose of fiction is to lead us into different worlds, and, as Virginia Woolf says, to make of them "some kind of whole", then Michael Moorcock...succeeds brilliantly'

There have been few novelists who have risen above the orthodox categories of fiction-to produce something as expansive and elaborate as this' Peter Ackroyd, Sunday Times

David Bellos (Translator)

Each day, inhabitants of a small community in the French Alps find another of their ewes with its throat cut. When one of the villagers too is killed people begin to wonder: could it be the work of a werewolf? Soon suspicion falls on Massart, one of the villagers, because of his beardlessness (according to popular legend, werewolves have no hair on their bodies because they are inside the body). Soliman, the victim's adopted son; Le Veilleur, a lonely sheperd and Camille, a lovely girl from the city, decide to pursue Massart and their hunt leads them into the Alps, but their incompetence is undisguisable and they decide to summon Commissaire Adamsberg - well known for his peculiar investigation methods - to help. Thanks to his extraordinary intuition, Adamsberg unearths an astonishing truth, one that the villagers are going to find hard to believe.

France's queen of crime writing pits the eccentric genius of Commissaire Adamsberg against a deep village history and very present wolves. Vargas needs no comparisons, but her mysteries are compelling reminders of the best of P. D. James.

Fred Vargas was born in Paris in 1957. As well as being a best-selling author in France, she is by training an historian and archaeologist.