This is a big, powerful, compelling and illuminating novel set in West Bengal in the late 1960s from Neel Mukherjee (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neel_Mukherjee_(writer) and http://www.neelmukherjee.com/). The book explores power, oppression and rebellion both in the household of the Ghosh family and the society that surrounds it. From its unforgettable and shocking opening to its thought-provoking conclusion, it’s

Mr. Weston’s Good Wine (1927) by Theodore Francis Powys (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T.F._Powys) is a strange and delightful book. The story and the style are unfathomably simple. Accompanied by an assistant called Gabriel, a woolly-haired wine-seller drives into a small Dorset town called Folly Down. Time stops, and the sign on the battered van appears in the sky. Some

Ali Smith (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ali_Smith) was born in Inverness in 1962 and lives in Cambridge. She is the author of Like (1997), Hotel World (2001), Other Stories and Other Stories (1999), The Whole Story and Other Stories (2003), The Accidental (2005), Girl Meets Boy (2007) and The First Person and Other Stories (2008), There but for the (2011).

Jenny Offill’s (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jenny_Offill and http://jennyoffill.com/) slender and cannily paced novel, her second, assembles fragments, observations, meditations and different points of view to chart the course of a troubled marriage. Wry and devastating in equal measure, the novel is a cracked mirror that throws light in every direction — on music and literature; science and philosophy; marriage and