Stuart: A Life Backwards This is a major new launch for the paperback edition of the most original, captivating and award-winning memoir of the year. Stuart, A Life Backwards, is the story of a remarkable friendship between a reclusive writer and illustrator and a chaotic, knife-wielding beggar whom he gets to know during a campaign to release two charity workers from prison. Interwoven into this is Stuart’s confession: the story of his life, told backwards. With humour, compassion (and exasperation) Masters slowly works back through post-office heists, prison riots and the exact day Stuart discovered violence, to unfold the reasons why he changed from a happy-go-lucky little boy into a polydrug-addicted-alcoholic Jekyll-and-Hyde personality, with a fondness for what he called ‘little strips of silver’ (knives to you and me). Funny, despairing, brilliantly written and full of surprises: this is the most original and moving biography of recent years.

Season of the Rain Birds

A sack of letters lost in a train crash 19 years previously has mysteriously reappeared, and the inhabitants of a small town in Pakistan are waiting anxiously to see what long-buried secrets will come to light. Could the letters have any bearing on Judge Anwar’s murder? In one of the most exquisite fictional debuts of recent years, Nadeem Aslam creates an exotic and timeless world, but one whose traditional rituals of everyday life are played out against an ominous backdrop of faraway civil wars, assassinations, changing regimes and religious tensions.

Things You Get For Free

A young Jesuit priest from Australia and his ‘mum’ tour Europe at the height of summer and live to tell about it in this witty, engaging travelogue and family memoir. In 1996, McGirr decided to take his mother on the honeymoon she never had — a six-week whirlwind jaunt through London, Paris, Rome, Florence and other well-travelled destinations. McGirr and Mum experience the best and worst of Europe: lunch in the peers’ dining room at the House of Lords, the paint-peeling profanity of a Glasgow tour guide and the flabbergasting sight of nuns carrying make-up compacts into the Sistine Chapel. McGirr’s is an investigation into the past of the Catholic Church, the Jesuits and the McGirr family itself, which left Europe just two generations before. Readers will come for the humour, but they’ll stay for McGirr’s haunting memories of his path into the priesthood, his mother’s sacrifices and his father’s death.

The Good Remains

Antihero CR Ash’s scrambled vision of the world might be due to bourbon; on the other hand, it might be due to Powers’ addiction to a sort of Faulknerian stream-of-consciousness style. In any case, CR, the aging neonatal specialist at the centre of Powers’ second novel is suffering from three problems: a chronic nostalgia for the world of his Confederate ancestor, Shrub Ash, who died at the battle of Balls Bluff; a chronic inability to connect to any woman who mentions the word marriage; and, most pressingly, the judgment of the Balls Bluff Babies Hospital governors, seconded by his conscience, that he is responsible for the death of Baby Hodges, aka Tuffy. Tuffy was the unexpected offspring of a teenage candy striper, Kirsten, for whom CR has the hots. The baby’s father, 16-year-old Todd Redman, learns of his fatherhood through the high school grapevine...

Longitude

Anyone alive in the 18th century would have known that ‘the longitude problem’ was the thorniest scientific dilemma of the day. Lacking the ability to measure their longitude, sailors throughout the great ages of exploration had been literally lost at sea as soon as they lost sight of land. Thousands of lives, and the increasing fortunes of nations, hung on a resolution. In 1714, Parliament upped the ante by offering a king’s ransom (£20,000) to anyone whose method or device proved successful. One man, John Harrison, dared to imagine a mechanical solution. Full of heroism and chicanery, brilliance and the absurd, Longitude is also a fascinating brief history of astronomy, navigation and clockmaking.