MARCEL THEROUX

Nicholas Slopen has been dead for months. So when a man claiming to be Nicholas turns up to visit an old girlfriend, deception seems the only possible motive. Yet nothing can make him change his story. From the secure unit of a notorious psychiatric hospital, he begins to tell his tale: an account of attempted forgery that draws the reader towards an extraordinary truth - a metaphysical conspiracy that lies on the other side of madness and death. Strange Bodies takes the reader on a dizzying speculative journey that poses questions about identity, authenticity, and what it means to be truly human.

The violent death of Daisy's husband leaves her a widow at 32, obliterating everything she has lived for. As she struggles to build a new life, a chance encounter with her husband's killer becomes the starting point of a journey into obsessive hatred. Daisy stalks the man, a small-time criminal and boxer called Joel Heath, and pursues him in secret into the twilight world of professional boxing. She befriends Tate, a boxing has-been, and his deaf protege Isaac, in order to strike back at Heath. But Isaac's disability and his once-in-a-lifetime talent present Daisy with harder choices and more dangerous opponents than she could have imagined.

Every day I buckle on my guns and go out to patrol this dingy city. Out on the far northern border of a failed state, Makepeace patrols the ruins of a dying city and tries to keep its unruly inhabitants in check. Into this cold, isolated world comes evidence that life is flourishing elsewhere - a refugee from the vast emptiness of forest, whose existence inspires Makepeace to take to the road to reconnect with human society. What Makepeace finds is a world unravelling, stockaded villages enforcing a rough and uncertain justice, mysterious slave camps labouring to harness the little understood technologies of a vanished civilization. But Makepeace's journey also leads to unexpected human contact, tenderness, and the dark secrets behind this frozen world. Far North leads the reader on a quest through an unforgettable arctic landscape, from humanity's origins to its likely end. Bleak, haunting, spare - and yet ultimately hopeful, the novel is suffused with an ecstatic awareness of the world's fragility and beauty, and its unexpected ability to recover from our worst trespasses