Karin Alvtegen
Shadow

As darkness falls on 10 May 1975, a little boy waits alone on the steps of an amusement park. The park is about to close and everyone is leaving, except the child. He continues to wait there, not daring to move. He has been told to stay right where he is. Only no one is coming back for him. Why has he been abandoned, with only the briefest of notes to whoever finds him? And what connection do the events of this day have to the death of Gerda Persson 30 years later – a woman who leaves few clues to her life, apart from a freezer full of books?

'Shadow won't make you feel good about humankind, but it will keep you reading under the duvet during the small hours' – Daily Mail

Karen Armstrong
The Case for God

For the first time in history, a significantly large number of people want nothing to do with God. What has happened? Tracing the history of faith from the Palaeolithic Age to the present, Karen Armstrong shows that the meanings of words such as ‘belief’, ‘faith’, and ‘mystery’ have been entirely altered, so that atheists and theists alike now think and speak about God – and, indeed reason itself – in a way that our ancestors would have found astonishing. Does God have a future? Karen Armstrong examines how we can build a faith that speaks to the needs of our troubled and dangerously polarized world.

Graham Greene
The Confidential Agent

In a small continental country, civil war is raging. Once a lecturer in medieval French, now a confidential agent, D is a scarred stranger in a seemingly casual England, sent on a mission to buy coal at any price. Initially, this seems to be a matter of straightforward negotiation, but soon, implicated in murder, accused of possessing false documents and theft, held responsible for the death of a young woman, D becomes a hunted man, tormented by allegiances, doubts and the love of others.

'The most ingenious, inventive and exciting of our novelists' - V. S. Pritchett, The Times