Boy meets girl and a modern love story emerges, complete with lots of gritty humour, bad language, sexual references and oh, to be young again! The two voices work really well, and you find yourself laughing out loud one minute then screaming at the book the next and sobbing your heart out in this very easy quick read, designed as young adult fiction. 'It's Leeds, I said, not Hollywood. You're not going to find a hero working down Kwikfit.' Matt and Sophia live in the same city but they come from the opposite side of the track. By rights they should never have met. They definitely should never have fallen in love at first sight, of all cliches. But to their great surprise they do and that's the easy part. It's what to do next that they struggle with. Family, friends and circumstances are mostly against them. They betray themselves and each other. It's true what they say - everybody hurts sometimes but sometimes too, the pain is worth it. Teenage to young adult fiction. 342pp, paperback.

A rare view from inside the House of Commons and Westminster of the Machiavellian machinations for power, this is a snappy page turner by the slimmed down MP. Once allies, Labour MP Owen McKenna and Conservative Minister Philip Bickford now face each other across the House of Commons as bitter enemies. Then the reappearance of a figure from their past forces them to confront the choices that led to the tragic downfall of their former housemate, Jay. Late one night, Owen receives a visit from a lobbyist who promises to protect him from the consequences of his actions in exchange for a small favour, or to have his reputation and career utterly destroyed if he refuses. But that favour will sell out everything Owen believes in. As rivals gather and whispers of wrongdoing fill the corridors of Westminster, it's clear that someone knows the truth about Jay's Icarus-like fall from grace and now the former friends must face one terrible truth. Someone is responsible, and a reckoning is overdue. This was the landmark, headline-making debut novel from the former Deputy Leader of the Labour Party and bestselling novelist Imogen Robertson, a prescient political thriller about secrets, lies, ruthless ambition and betrayal. 373 pages in large softback with fairly large print.

Filthy and ferociously funny, according to the OED Lush has two meanings - as a noun a habitual drunkard and as an adjective 'very rich and providing great sensory pleasure'. The novel is both, full of raucous stories and eye-watering honesty. Gabby and Emma have been best friends since primary school in Wales. Emma has a stable job, a nice home and has just got engaged. Gabby has had a succession of disastrous one-night stands and awful jobs since drama school, and she has just been diagnosed with scurvy. She has one year until the wedding to pull herself together and prove to her friends and family that she can be a proper grown-up. Can she? Based on the author?s popular blog of her life as a struggling actress with a taste for gin. Very modern, be prepared for swearing and projectile vomit and cuddly toys and more. 287pp, paperback.

An award winning and moving tale of growing up in a Maoist cult, and the traumatic aftermath which explores ideas of freedom, control and identity. Nina X has never been outside. She had never met another child. Nina X has no books, no toys and no privacy. Nina X has no idea what the outside world is like. Nina X has a lot to learn. She has no mother and no father, she has Comrade Chen, and Comrades Uma, Jeni and Ruth. Her closest emotional connection is with the birds she sees when she removes the plasterboard that covers her bedroom window. Comrade Chen has named her The Project. She is being raised entirely separated from the false gods of capitalism and the cult of the self. He has her record everything in her journal to track her thoughts. To keep her ideology pure, her words are erased, over and over again. But that was before. Now Nina is in Freedom, and all the rules have changed. She has to remember that everything is opposite to what she was told, and yet Freedom seems to be a very confusing and dangerous place. A world that doesn't make sense. She is now 28 years old and on the second day of Freedom she writes: 'Today is the 30th September. A new kind of dog has been invented that doesn't make people allergic and a new kind of dinosaur has been discovered in Wales.' When Nina is treated badly by Social Services she encounters she finds herself behind new bars, sectioned. A tearful yet at times touches of humour, this novel is deeply moving. 273pp.

The heroically proportioned Fatty can normally take life as it comes. Right at home in easy-going Fayetteville, Arkansas, he is happily married to his childhood sweetheart Betty and likes nothing better than chewing the fat with his good friends Tubby O'Rourke and Porky Flanagan. But when Fatty and Betty head off to Ireland on the trip of a lifetime, they find that they have left their comfort zone far behind. Calamity and mayhem ensue as one mishap after another befalls the beleaguered couple. Can Fatty's broad shoulders take the strain, or will he suffer one indignity too many? Will he get his just deserts, or just dessert? We are delighted to see that this book is dedicated to our friend Hugh Andrew, the publisher at Birlinn Ltd. Woodcut illus., 174pp, paperback.

'Combining the sensibilities of a Joseph Conrad or a Cormac McCarthy with the poetic intensity of an Emily Dickinson, this rich, raw, and powerful seascape by Paul Lynch throws the sea's storms and the sea's light into the darkest corners of human consciousness. An astonishing achievement.' - Jane Urquhart. With its echoes of Greek mythology, the pages sing in this powerful new novel from the author of Grace. When fishermen Bolivar and Hector set sail from their South American village, they soon find themselves cast adrift in the Pacific Ocean by a sudden storm. As the days pass and no rescue materialises, the two men must come to terms with their environment and with each other if they are to survive. Part survival story, part fearless existential parable, the novel is a meditation on what it means to be a man, a friend, a father and a sinner in our fallen world, from a master of lyrical prose. 181pp, paperback, apologies for sticker.

Sparce, lyrical, more writing from David Park, one of the quiet men of Irish writing with one of the truest voices. Three women, each destined to play the role of a poet's wife - Catherine Blake, the wife of William Blake, a poet, painter and engraver who struggles for recognition in a society that dismisses him as a madman. Nadezhda Mandelstam, wife of the Russian poet Osip Mandelstam, whose poetry costs him his life under Stalin's terror. And the wife of a fictional contemporary Irish poet, who looks back on her marriage during the days after her husband's death as she seeks to fulfil his final wish. Set across continents and centuries, and in very different circumstances, these three women confront the contradictions between art and life, contemplate their emotional and physical sacrifices for another's creativity, and struggle with infidelities that involve not only the flesh, but ultimately poetry itself. They find themselves custodians of their husbands' work, work that has been woven with love's intimacies and which has shaped their own lives in the most unexpected ways. Deeply insightful and moving with lush and starling imagery. 296pp, paperback.

A brave and ambitious novel set in Ireland and Africa, and a definitive comment on the Ulster struggles written by David Park, born in Belfast in 1953. The explorations of the protagonist's childhood in Donegal are moving. Haunted by the Troubles in Northern Ireland, and trapped in a land between the mountains and the sea, Naomi dreams of another life far away from the rainy sands of Donegal. When she moves to work in a refugee camp in the burning heat of Africa, she exchanges the city streets of Belfast for the arid desert. But before she leaves behind the land where she was born, escaping her past is not so easy. A powerful novel about guilt and absolution. 278pp, paperback.

With deft charm, affection and wit, these now familiar characters from the 44 Scotland Street series come alive on each page. At the bottom of a sharply descending street, in the topographical sense, in Edinburgh's Georgian New Town, new residents have moved in joining the already well-known and much-loved denizens of that remarkable building, 44 Scotland Street. What exactly did Sister Maria-Fiore, the aphorism-coining socialite nun, find on the No. 23 bus? Could it be the remains of a hitherto unknown Neanderthal, homo Watsoniensis? On the romantic front, long-suffering Stuart's hopes of kindling a new relationship are dashed thanks to chino-wearing narcissist Bruce, effortlessly exercising his powers of charm. The Promised Land beckons for Bertie who is off to Glasgow for a school exchange that takes him doon the watter. Back in Edinburgh, the Duke of Johannesburg's desire to learn a new language involving his Gaelic-speaking driver Pádruig has gone horribly wrong - to be immersed in a language it seems can be a captivating linguistic mistake. And the patrons of Big Lou's café are in for a gastronomic treat. In other words, everything in Edinburgh is absolutely normal. Glamorous hardback, 297pp.

A bright Coney Island Jew tries to rise in the gin-soaked world of WASP publishing, where his job is to mash the tragedy of the Rosenberg executions into pulp. This cunning and engrossing book is set in 1953. Simon Putnam is a recent Harvard graduate, newly hired by a distinguished New York publishing firm. He has entered a glittering milieu of three-martini lunches, exclusive literary parties, and old-money aristocrats in exquisitely tailored suits, a far cry from his loving, middle-class Jewish family on Coney Island. But his first assignment, editing "The Vixen, the Patriotic and the Frantic", a steamy bodice-ripper improbably based on a recent trial of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, makes him question the cost of admission into this exciting new profession, because Simon has a secret - his beloved mother was a childhood friend of Ethel's. His dilemma grows thornier when he meets the author, the startlingly beautiful, reckless, seductive Anya Partridge, ensconced in her opium-scented boudoir in a luxury Hudson River mental asylum. As mysteries deepen, as the confluence of sex, money, politics and power spirals out of Simon's control, he must face what he's lost by exchanging the loving safety of his home for the witty, whiskey-soaked orbit of his charismatic boss, the legendary Warren Landry. But everyone is keeping secrets and ordinary events may conceal a diabolical plot. Includes passages from Anya's hilariously bad novel and illuminates a period of history with striking similarities to the current moment, plus timeless questions like how do we balance ambition and conscience, social mobility and cultural assimilation? Desirable roughcut edges to the 318pp in this US first edition.