Divisadero

It is the 1970s in Northern California. A farmer and his teenage daughters, Anna and Claire, work the land with the help of Coop, the enigmatic young man who lives with them. Theirs is a makeshift family, until they are riven by an incident of violence — of both hand and heart — that ‘sets fire to the rest of their lives’. Anna will come to rest in the calming landscape of south-central France. There, she delves into the story of a writer who, decades earlier, lived in the isolated house she now occupies — a story that circles around the ‘raw truth’ of her own life, the one she’s left behind but can never truly leave. And while Anna’s story lies at the heart of the novel, the narrative sweeps across the terrain of the lives of Coop and Claire as well, each of them managing to find some foothold in a present rough-hewn from the past.

In Spite of the Gods ...

India is poised to become one of the world’s three largest economies in the next generation and to overtake China as the world’s most populous country by 2032. Well before then India’s incipient nuclear deterrent will have acquired intercontinental range and air, sea and land capabilities. India’s volatile relationship with its nuclear-armed neighbour, Pakistan, may prove to be the source of the world’s next major conflict. And if you call anyone — from your bank to rail enquiries — your query may well be dealt with by a graduate

in Gujarat. Any way one looks at it, India’s fate matters. In In Spite Of The Gods, Edward Luce, one of the most incisive and talented journalists of his generation, will assess the forces that are forging the new nation. Cutting through the miasma that still clouds thinking about India, this extraordinarily accomplished book takes the measure of a society that is struggling to come to grips with modernity.

The Indian Clerk

On a January morning in 1913, G H Hardy — eccentric, charismatic and, at thirty-seven, already considered the greatest British mathematician of his age — receives a mysterious envelope covered with Indian stamps. Inside he finds a rambling letter from a self professed mathematical genius who claims to be on the brink of solving the most important unsolved mathematical problem of his time. Some of his Cambridge colleagues dismiss the letter as a hoax, but Hardy becomes convinced that The Indian Clerk who has written it

— Srinivasa Ramanujan — deserves to be taken seriously. Aided by his collaborator, Littlewood, and a young don named Neville who is about to depart for Madras with his wife, Alice, he determines to learn more about the mysterious Ramanujan

and, if possible, persuade him to come to Cambridge. It is a decision that will profoundly affect not only his own life, and that of his friends, but the entire history of mathematics.

On the Road to Kandahar ...

In the summer of 1991 Jason Burke set off to join Kurdish guerrillas fighting in Iraq. It was the start of a remarkable journey that would take him from the sands of the Sahara to the highest peaks of the Himalayas, revealing the true complexity and variety of the ‘Islamic world’. Describing encounters with hundreds of people ranging from destitute refugees to senior government ministers, from American snipers to hardened mujahideen, this extraordinary work of reportage is a vivid account of life and death, war and peace, bigotry and ignorance, hate and tolerance.

Sex.Com

What’s in a name? For the owner of sex.com, a cool $100 million a year. With five million page views every day, sex.com was the most valuable piece of virtual real estate on the planet and the dubious jewel in the crown of the newborn Internet. But the fact that it didn’t physically exist didn’t mean that it couldn’t be stolen. With an ingenious scam — the full details of which have never been revealed until now — lifelong con man Stephen Cohen was able to snatch sex.com and walk into a life of untold wealth and luxury. But Cohen had underestimated the determination of Gary Kremen, the man he had stolen it from, to get his property back. It would take ten years and millions of dollars, but Kremen would see Cohen finally pay for his crimes. Sex.com details the extraordinary battle between two extraordinary men: a Stanford scholar with uncanny foresight; and an uneducated con man with a genius IQ and an unnatural gift for persuasion. The fight pushed each man to the edge, rewrote the law, and shaped the history and development of the Internet, as we know it.