Wolves of the north

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Jen Williams

There are some tall stories about the caverns beneath the Citadel - about magic and mages and monsters and gods. Wydrin of Crosshaven has heard them all, but she's spent long enough trawling caverns and taverns with her companion Sir Sebastian to learn that there's no money to be made in chasing rumours. But then a crippled nobleman with a dead man's name offers them a job: exploring the Citadel's darkest depths. It sounds like just another quest with gold and adventure ... if they're lucky, they might even have a tale of their own to tell once it's over. These reckless adventurers will soon learn that sometimes there is truth in rumour. Sometimes a story can save your life.

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Naomi Mitchison

Set over two thousand years ago on the clam and fertile shores of the Black Sea, The Corn King and the Spring Queen tells of ancient civilisations where tenderness, beauty and love vie with brutality and dark magic.

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Brian Schofield

Part historical narrative, part travelogue through the wilds of the West and part environmental polemic, 'Selling Your Father's Bones' is a thrilling journey through the history and wilderness of the stunning area of landscape that is Continental USA.In the summer of 1877, around seven hundred members of the Nez Perce Native American tribe set out on one of the most remarkable journeys in the history of the American West, a 1,700-mile exodus through the mountains, forests, badlands and prairies of modern-day Oregon, Idaho, Wyoming and Montana. They had been forced from their homes by the great wave of settlement that crashed over the West as the American nation was born. Led by their charismatic chiefs, the Nez Perce used their unerring knowledge of the landscapes they passed through to survive six battles and many more skirmishes with the pursuing United States Army, as they raced, with women, children and village elders in their care, towards the safety of the Canadian border. But all Chief Joseph, the young pastoral leader of the exodus, wanted was to return home - to his beloved Wallowa valley, which his dying father had ordered him never to abandon: 'Never sell the bones of your father and your mother. 'Now, Brian Schofield retraces the steps of that epic exodus, to tell the full dramatic story of the Nez Perce's fight for survival - and to examine the forces that drove them to take flight. The white settlement of the West had been largely motivated by patriotic fervour and religious zeal, a faith that the American continent had been laid out by God to fuel the creation of a mighty empire. But as he travels through the lands that the Nez Perce knew so well, Schofield reveals that the great project of the Western Empire has gone badly awry, as the mythology of the settlers opened the door to ecological vandalism, unthinking corporations and negligent leadership, which have lest scarred landscapes, battered communities and toxic environments.

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Tom Reiss

An extraordinary and hugely topical story of a Jewish man's passion for the Arab world.On the border between West and East, a Jewish man with a passion for the Arab world.Tom Reiss first came across Nussimbaum when he went to the ex-USSR to research Russia's oil reserves, and discovered a novel instead. Written on the eve of the Second World War, Ali and Nino is a captivating love story set in the glamorous city of Baku, Azerbaijan's capital. The novel's depiction of a lost cosmopolitan society is enthralling, but equally intriguing is the identity of the man who wrote it. Who was Kurban Said, its supposed author? And why did he and his book fade into obscurity?For five years, Reiss tracked Said's protean identity from a wealthy Jewish childhood in Baku, to a romantic adolescence in Persia on the run from the Bolsheviks, and an exile in Berlin as bestselling author and self-proclaimed Muslim prince. The result is a thoroughly unexpected picture of the twentieth-century – of the origins of our ideas about race and religious self-definition, and of the roots of modern fanaticism.