John Murray Death is a Welcome Guest Welsh Louise

Growing up, it was always the three of them: Miller and Olly and Ash. They stuck together, like they were keeping a secret. They needed each other. As teenagers, they drove to LA, lived in a ramshackle place on the beach in Malibu, set up a record label. They were successful, best friends and Olly and Miller fell in love. Before it fell apart, it was beautiful • Then Olly stopped looking at Miller the way he used to. Miller spent a night with Ash, which turned into a marriage. And Miller and Ash came back to Wonderland, the tidal island of sugary painted houses they'd run away from. Now Miller's forty and she feels like she's disappearing. She wears her tinted sunglasses so often sometimes she forgets the world isn't green. Ash is having an affair with a helmet-haired tv presenter and Olly's career is over

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

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 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

'It was a strange time. He felt like he was happy • It was strange because it wasn't so long ago that he was convinced the only way out of the depression that had crippled him since he was a child, was death.' • But now, he is on a high-speed train travelling from Rome to Modena, a failed novelist on the tail of a famous physicist whose memoir he is ghostwriting. The more of another man's life he writes, the more his debt to his publisher is paid off. But nothing would be possible, not the journey, not the writing, not his beautiful wife who is waiting for him at the hotel, had he not experienced the life-altering, life-saving treatment for the darkness which had been hovering since the chemical spill in West Virginia

When a young British man asks his German grandfather what it was like to fight on the wrong side of the war, the question is initially met with irritation and silence. But after the old man's death, a long letter to his grandson is found among his things • That letter is this book. In it, he relates the experiences of an unlikely few days on the Eastern Front - at a moment when he knows not only that Germany is going to lose the war, but that it deserves to. He writes about his everyday experience amid horror, confusion and great bravery, and he asks himself what responsibility he bears for the circumstances he found himself in. As he tries to find an answer he can live with, we hear from his grandson what kind of man he became in the seventy years after the war

In Jessie Greengrass' superb debut novel, our unnamed narrator recounts her progress to motherhood, while remembering the death of her own mother ten years before, and the childhood summers she spent with her psychoanalyst grandmother • Woven among these personal recollections are significant events in medical history: Wilhelm Rontgen's discovery of the X-ray; Sigmund Freud's development of psychoanalysis and the work that he did with his daughter, Anna; and the origins of modern surgery and the anatomy of pregnant bodies • Sight is a novel about being a parent and a child: what it is like to bring a person in to the world, and what it is to let one go. Exquisitely written and fiercely intelligent, it is an incisive exploration of how we see others, and how we might know ourselves

London, 1931. Nick Bassington-Hope, veteran of the Great War and controversial artist, is suddenly found dead. His death from a fall, the night before a much-anticipated exhibition of his work, is recorded as 'accidental'. But his sister is not convinced • Despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, Georgina Bassington-Hope believes her brother was murdered, and she turns to Maisie Dobbs for help. Maisie's investigation takes her from the desolate beaches of Kent to the dark underbelly of London's art world. Still fragile after her war-related breakdown, Maisie's immersion in her work could lead her to lose more than she bargained for, while a desperate family with strong ties to her heart urgently needs her help

In crisp, unembellished prose, Choi Eunyoung paints intimate portraits of the lives of young women in South Korea, balancing the personal with the political. In the title story, a fraught friendship between an exchange student and her host sister follows them from adolescence to adulthood. In 'A Song from Afar', a young woman grapples with the death of her lover, travelling to Russia to search for information about the deceased. In 'Secret', the parents of a teacher killed in the Sewol ferry sinking hide the news of her death from her grandmother • In the tradition of Sally Rooney, Banana Yoshimoto, and Marilynne Robinson - writers from different cultures who all take an unvarnished look at human relationships and the female experience - Choi Eunyoung is a writer to watch

Brighton, 1950s. When Daisy got married, she knew nothing of a police wife's struggles - the way secrecy and suspicion seep into the home. But over the years she finds ways to resist. She builds a fierce bond with her children, Linda and Michael, and escapes to the twilit world of the cinema • By 1998 Linda and Michael are still struggling to cope after their mother's death, a decade before. Mike finds solace in suburban violence, while Linda invests her hopes in Lucas, her deaf teenage son. But the appearance of a man from Daisy's past threatens to upend their uneasy peace • Meanwhile, Lucas is obsessed with his support worker, and relearning the sign language he shared with his grandmother. As the language comes back, so do memories of his early childhood

What do the $350 million Ford Motor Company disaster known as the Edsel, the fast and incredible rise of Xerox, and the unbelievable scandals at General Electric and Texas Gulf Sulphur have in common? Each is an example of how an iconic company was defined by a particular moment of fame or notoriety • These notable and fascinating accounts are as relevant today to understanding the intricacies of corporate life as they were when the events happened • Stories about Wall Street are infused with drama and adventure and reveal the machinations and volatile nature of the world of finance. John Brooks's insightful reportage is so full of personality and critical detail that whether he is looking at the astounding market crash of 1962, the collapse of a well-known brokerage firm, or the bold attempt by American bankers to save the British pound, one gets the sense that history really does repeat itself

Jon Swift is in trouble • His journalism career is in freefall • He's too old to be part of the new world order and he's never learned to suck up to those in charge. But experience has taught him to trust his instincts • When, for the first time in years, Jon runs into Lin Lifeng in a cafe in Oxford he wonders if the meeting is a coincidence. When Lin asks him to pass on a coded message, he knows it's not • Travelling to Beijing, Jon starts to follow a tangled web in which it is hard to know who he can trust. Under the watchful eyes of an international network of spies, double-agents and politicians, all with a ruthless desire for power, Jon is in a high-stakes race to expose the truth, before it's too late