John Murray Big Girl, Small Town Gallen Michelle

John Julius Norwich's last book is the book he always wanted to write: the extremely colourful story of the country he loves best • From frowning Roman generals and belligerent Gallic chieftains, to Charlemagne (hated by generations of French children taught that he invented schools) through Marie Antoinette and the storming of the Bastille to Vichy, the Resistance and beyond, FRANCE is packed with heroes and villains, adventures and battles, romance and revolution. Full of memorable stories and racy anecdotes, this is the perfect introduction to the country that has inspired the rest of the world to live, dress, eat -- and love better

It's the summer of 1994, and all Maeve Murray wants is some money and good exam results so she can escape her shitty wee town in Northern Ireland • Over the holidays, Maeve bags herself a job at the local shirt factory with her best friends Caroline and Aoife. It's set to be the summer of their lives, but first she's got to survive a tit-for-tat paramilitary campaign as brutal as her relationship with her mam, iron 800 shirts a day to keep her job and dodge the attentions of Handy Andy Strawbridge, her slimy English boss. And when she starts to notice things aren't adding up at the factory, it seems like revealing the truth may just be her one-way ticket out of town

Smart-mouthed and filthy-minded, Maeve Murray has always felt like an outsider in the shitty wee town in Northern Ireland that she calls home. She hopes her exam results will be her ticket to a new life in London; a life where no one knows her business, or cares about her dead sister. But first she's got to survive a tit-for-tat paramilitary campaign as brutal as her relationship with her mam, iron 800 shirts a day to keep her summer job in the local factory, and dodge the attentions of Handy Andy Strawbridge, her dubious English boss • Maeve and her two best friends try to squeeze as much fun as possible into their last summer at home. But as marching season raises tensions among the Catholic and Protestant workforce, Maeve realises something is going on behind the scenes at the factory, forcing her to make a choice that will impact her life - and the lives of others - for ever

In the 1790s an extraordinary group of friends changed the world. Disappointed by the French Revolution's rapid collapse into tyranny, what they wanted was nothing less than a revolution of the mind. The rulers of Europe had ordered their peoples how to think and act for too long. Based in the small German town of Jena, through poetry, drama, philosophy and science, they transformed the way we think about ourselves and the world around us. They were the first Romantics • Their way of understanding the world still frames our lives and being.We're still empowered by their daring leap into the self. We still think with their minds, see with their imagination and feel with their emotions. We also still walk the same tightrope between meaningful self-fulfilment and destructive narcissism, between the rights of the individual and our role as a member of our community and our responsibilities towards future generations who will inhabit this planet

An ambitious noble and his three serving men travel through the Irish countryside in the stifling summer of 1348, using the advantage of the plague which has collapsed society to buy up large swathes of property and land. They come upon Nobber, a tiny town, whose only living habitants seem to be an egotistical bureaucrat, his volatile wife, a naked blacksmith, and a beautiful Gaelic hostage. Meanwhile, a band of marauding Gaels are roaming around, using the confusion of the sickness to pillage and reclaim lands that once belonged to them • As these groups converge upon the town, the habitants, who up until this point have been under strict curfew, begin to stir from their dwellings, demanding answers from the intruders. A deadly stand-off emerges from which no one will escape unscathed

Can a prison free those who enter? • Nisida, moored like a boat in the Mediterranean, is a small island nestled between Capri and Bagnoli, off the coast of Naples. Each day, through the early morning light, Elisabetta Maiorano travels across the city, passes by the guards on the way into the detention centre, hands over her bag and arrives at her classroom. All thoughts are suspended once inside. Usually Elisabetta hasn't spoken to anyone since the day before; her only reason for living to teach mathematics to the group of young inmates who arrive not long after she does. But one day, Almarina shows up and everything changes. She is Romanian and bears the signs of her personal history on her body. Together, closed up in a small classroom, a true island within an island, Elisabetta and Almarina discover a possible pathway to freedom

It is seven years since the Sweats wiped out most of the world's population. But for those who survived the outbreak, life has gone on. Stevie Flint and Magnus McFall are now part of a small community on the Orkney Islands, without mobile phones or TV, without antibiotics or fuel, who are trying to rebuild the rudiments of democratic civilisation • When three strangers arrive on the islands, however, they upset the fragile community, bringing long-buried tensions to the surface. Realising that a number of the islands' young are missing, Stevie and Magnus set off on a journey to the mainland to get them back - a mainland swarming with outlaw gangs, and where self-appointed autocrats and religious fanatics hold sway • Thrilling and breathless, No Dominion asks what happens when the scaffolding of civilisation collapses, and how far we'd go to preserve our humanity

‘You cannot pretend to read a book. Your eyes will give you away. So will your breathing. A person entranced by a book simply forgets to breathe. The house can catch alight and a reader deep in a book will not look up until the wallpaper is in flames.’ • Bougainville, 1991. A small village on a lush tropical island in the South Pacific. Eighty-six days have passed since Matilda’s last day of school as, quietly, war is encroaching from the other end of the island • When the villagers’ safe, predictable lives come to a halt, Bougainville’s children are surprised to find the island’s only white man, a recluse, re-opening the school. Pop Eye, aka Mr Watts, explains he will introduce the children to Mr Dickens. Matilda and the others think a foreigner is coming to the island and prepare a list of much needed items

'The feeling of being lost in time and geography with months and years hazily sparkling ahead is a prospect of inconjecturable magic.' • In 1933, aged eighteen, Patrick Leigh Fermor set out on his 'great trudge', a year-long journey by foot from the Hook of Holland to Istanbul. Three decades later he wrote A Time of Gifts, the sparklingly original account of the first part of this youthful adventure, which took him through the Low Countries, up the Rhine, through Germany, down the Danube, through Austria and Czechoslovakia, and as far as Hungary • Alone, carrying only a rucksack and with a small allowance of only a pound a week, Fermor had planned to sleep rough - to live 'like a tramp, a pilgrim, or a wandering scholar' - but a chance introduction in Bavaria led to comfortable stays in castles, and provided a glimpse of the old Europe of princes and peasants

This extraordinary novel is seen through the eyes of Johannes, an avid member of the Hitler Youth in the 1940s. After he is severely injured in a raid, he discovers his parents are hiding a Jewish girl called Elsa behind a false wall in their large house in Vienna • His initial horror turns to interest, then love and obsession. After the disappearance of his parents, Johannes finds he is the only one aware of Elsa's existence in the house, the only one responsible for her survival. Both manipulating and manipulated, Johannes dreads the end of the war: with it will come the prospect of losing Elsa and their relationship, which ranges through passion and obsession, dependence and indifference, love and hate • This gripping, masterful work examines truth and lies at both political and personal levels, laying bare the darkest corners of the human soul

When a house explodes in a quiet Oxford suburb and a young girl disappears in the aftermath, Sarah Tucker - a young married woman, bored and unhappy with domestic life - becomes obsessed with finding her. Accustomed to dull chores in a childless household and hosting her husband's wearisome business clients for dinner, Sarah suddenly finds herself questioning everything she thought she knew, as her investigation reveals that people long believed dead are still among the living, while the living are fast joining the dead • What begins in a peaceful neighbourhood reaches its climax on a remote, unwelcoming Scottish island as the search puts Sarah in league with a man who finds himself being hunted down by murderous official forces

'I'll come back for you later. I promise.' • Paris, July 1942: Sarah, a ten year-old Jewish girl, is arrested by the French police in the middle of the night, along with her mother and father. Desperate to protect her younger brother, she locks him in a cupboard and promises to come back for him as soon as she can • Paris, May 2002: Julia Jarmond, an American journalist, is asked to write about the 60th anniversary of the Vel' d'Hiv' - the infamous day in 1942 when French police rounded up thousands of Jewish men, women and children, in order to send them to concentration camps. Sarah's Key is the poignant story of two families, forever linked and haunted by one of the darkest days in France's past. In this emotionally intense, page-turning novel, Tatiana de Rosnay reveals the guilt brought on by long-buried secrets and the damage that the truth can inflict when they finally come unravelled