Peter Ackroyd
Poe: A Life Cut Short

Peter Ackroyd's biography of Poe opens with his end, his final days - no-one knows what happened between the time when friends saw him off on the steam-boat to Baltimore and his discovery six days later dying in a tavern. This mystery sets the scene for a short life packed with drama and tragedy combined with extraordinary brilliance. Poe has been claimed as the forerunner of modern fantasy and credited with the invention of psychological dramas (long before Freud), science fiction (before H.G. Wells and Jules Verne) and the detective story (before Arthur Conan Doyle). Tennyson described him as 'the most original genius that America has produced'.

Linwood Barclay
No Time For Goodbye

Suburban teenager Cynthia Archer awakes with a nasty hangover and a feeling she is going to have a confrontation with her parents. But the house is empty, with no sign of her parents or younger brother. Her family has disappeared. Twenty-five years later Cynthia is still haunted by unanswered questions. Were her family murdered? If so, why was she spared? And if they're alive, why did they abandon her in such a cruel way? Now married with a daughter, Cynthia fears that her new family will be taken from her just as her first one was. So she agrees to take part in a TV documentary revisiting the case, in the hope that somebody will remember something. Soon she begins to realise that stirring up the past could be the worst mistake she has ever made.

Who better to go looking for enlightenment than Tim Cahill, who faces down the extremities of the challenge with his characteristic humour and insane bravery. With trademark wit and insight, Cahill searches for the elusive enlightenment. Whether stalking the legendary Caspian tiger in the mountains bordering Iraq, slogging through a pitch-black Australian Eucalyptus forest to find the nocturnal platypus, diving with great white sharks in South Africa, or staving off bliss at a yoga retreat in Jamaica, vivid and masterly storytelling combine with outrageously sly humour and jolts of real emotion to show the master of extreme travel at the peak of his game.