Michael Beard is a Nobel prize-winning physicist whose best work is behind him. Trading on his reputation, he speaks for enormous fees, lends his name to the letterheads of renowned scientific institutions and half-heartedly heads a government-backed initiative tackling global warming. A compulsive womaniser, Beard finds his fifth marriage floundering. But this time it is different: she is having the affair, and he is still in love with her. When Beards professional and personal worlds collide in a freak accident, an opportunity presents itself for Beard to extricate himself from his marital mess, reinvigorate his career and save the world from environmental disaster. Ranging from the Arctic Circle to the deserts of New Mexico, SOLAR is a serious and darkly satirical novel, showing human frailty struggling with the most pressing and complex problem of our time. A story of one mans greed and self-deception, it is a profound and stylish new work from one of the worlds great writers.

While speaking at a memorial event for her father, Siri Hustvedt suffered a violent seizure from the neck down. She managed to finish her talk and the paroxysms stopped, but not for good. Again and again she found herself a victim of the shudders. What had happened?
Chronicling her search for the shaking woman, Hustvedt takes the reader on a journey into contemporary psychiatry, neurology and psychoanalysis. She unearths stories and theories from the annals of medical history, literature and philosophy, and delves into her own past. In the process, she raises fundamental questions: what is the relationship between mind and body? How do we remember? What is the self?
In a seamless synthesis of personal experience and extensive research, Hustvedt conveys the often frightening mysteries of illness and the complexities of diagnosis. As engaging as it is thought-provoking, The Shaking Woman brilliantly illuminates the age-old dilemma of the mental and the physical, and what it means to be human.

All his life Shep Knacker has dreamed of leaving New York and living in simplicity in the Third World. Yet he comes to realise that his wife, Glynis, has never been serious about making the change. On the very day that he announces he is leaving for the island of Pemba with or without her, she informs him that she is gravely ill.So he can′t leave. If nothing else, Glynis needs his health insurance. But despite their having insurance coverage, the co-payments required for her astronomically expensive treatments systematically deplete Shep′s nest egg, and this once well-off small businessman hurtles toward bankruptcy.Lionel Shriver′s brilliant and affecting new novel takes a hard look at America′s health-care system and asks the uncomfortable question: how much money is one human life worth?

 The energetic and passionate Luciana Sampogna, of the popular cooking school Cucina Italiana, shares the rites of passage of the Italian woman from childhood to motherhood, mapped by Italian tradition, superstition and celebration through food. Learn why flour is god and be swept away by the romance of eating pizza on the back of a Vespa with your bello. This is Italian cooking from the heart.

It was the last-chance moment of the war. In January 2007, President George W. Bush announced a new strategy for Iraq. He called it the surge. 'Many listening tonight will ask why this effort will succeed when previous operations to secure Baghdad did not. Well, here are the differences,' he told a skeptical nation. Among those listening were the young, optimistic army infantry soldiers of the 2-16, the battalion nicknamed the Rangers. About to head to a vicious area of Baghdad, they decided the difference would be them.

Fifteen months later, the soldiers returned home - forever changed.

What isthe true story of the surge? And was it really a success? Those are the questionsthat the Pulitzer Prize-winning Washing Post reporter David Finkle grapples with in his remarkable report from the front lines. Combining the action of Mark Bowden's Black Hawk Down with the literary brio of Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried, The Good Soldiers is an unforgettable work of reportage. And in telling the story of these good soldiers, the heroes and the ruined, David Finkel has also produced an eternal tale-not just of the Iraq War, but of all wars, for all time.

Berlin, 1940. The city is paralysed by fear.
But one man refuses to be scared.

Otto, an ordinary German living in a shabby apartment block, tries to stay out of trouble under Nazi rule. But when he discovers his only son has been killed fighting at the front he's shocked into an extraordinary act of resistance, and starts to drop anonymous postcards attacking Hitler across the city. If caught, he will be executed.

Soon this silent campaign comes to the attention of ambitious Gestapo inspector Escherich, and a murderous game of cat-and-mouse begins. Whoever loses, pays with their life.