Christopher Koch
The Year of Living Dangerously

Jakarta 1965 The charismatic god-king Sukarno has brought Indonesia to the edge of chaos - to an abortive revolution that will leave half a million dead. Working at the eye of the storm are television correspondent Guy Hamilton and his eccentric dwarf cameraman Billy Kwan. In Kwan's secret fantasy life both Sukarno and Guy are heroes. But his heroes betray him and Billy is driven to desperate action. As Indonesia erupts, a complex personal tragedy of love, obsession and betrayal comes to its climax.

Elliot Perlman
Three Dollars

Three Dallars is a brilliantly deft portrait of a man attempting to retain his sense of humour in grim and pitiless times: times of downsizing, outsourcing and privatising. It is about the legacy of Thatcherism and its effects on people and their relationships. It is about us, now.

Hilary lives in seaside Sorrento with her father and sixteen-year-old son; Pippa is visiting from New York and Meg returns from England with her English husband. Three sisters, reunited after ten years in different worlds, again feel the constraints of family life. It is Meg's semi­autobiographical novel, recently shortlisted for the Booker prize, which overshadows their homecoming.