SHORTLISTED FOR THE ORANGE PRIZE FOR FICTION 2002

A stunning debut novel about a little girl growing up in Belfast, from the author of the Man Booker Prize winning novel, Milkman.

'Marvellous: shocking, moving, evocative' Daily Mail

Every single night and every single day Amelia goes upstairs to look at her treasure: a miniature plastic sheep, a Black Queen chess piece, a penny prayer for serenity, a tube of glitter - and thirty-seven black rubber bullets she's collected ever since the British Army started firing them...

'A fine, intellectually sparkling and always engaging little book - a welcome addition to any Wagner library'
Hans Vaget, Opera Quarterly

Whilst no one would dispute Wagner's ranking among the most significant composers in the history of Western music, his works have been more fiercely attacked than those of any other composer. His supposed personal defects have provoked intense hostility which has translated into a mistrust and abhorrence of his music. Tanner's fascination for the relationship between music, text and plot generates and illuminating discussion of the operas, in which he persuades us to see many of Wagner's best-know works afresh. His passionate and unconventional analyses are accessible to all lovers of music, be they listeners or performers.

This outstanding collection of pieces, illustrated with his own superb photographs, is a unique record of Newby's travels all over the globe - and a lasting tribute to lost and fading worlds.

One of the funniest and most entertaining of all travel writers, Eric Newby has been wandering the by-ways of the world for over half a century.

Admired for his exceptional powers of observation, Newby's genius is also to capture the unexpected, the curious and the absurd on camera.

Since his very first journey in 1938, Newby's quest for the unknown and the unusual has been insatiable. Whether on a dangerous canoe trip down the Wakwayowkastic River, with the pastoral people in the mountainous north of Spain, or visiting the exotic archipelago of Fiji, nothing escapes his eye for unlikely or amusing detail.

A rare combination of travel writing and photography, What the Traveller Saw is an exhilarating record of Newby's humourous adventures over the years.

An enthralling, rollicking tour among the storytellers of the American Deep South.

The story of the South is not finished. The southeastern states of America, the old Confederacy, bristle with storytellers who refuse to be silent. Many of the tales passed down from generation to generation to be told and re-told continue to change their shape to suit their time, stretching elastically to find new ways of retailing the People's Truth. Travelling back and forth, from the Carolinas to Louisiana, from the Appalachians to Atlantic islands, from Virginian valleys to Florida swamps, and sitting before bewitching storytellers who tell her tales that hold her hard, Pamela Petro gathers up a fistful of history, and sieves out of it the shiny truths that these stories have been polishing over the years. Here is another America altogether, lingering on behind the façade of the ubiquitous strip-mall of anodyne, branded commerce and communication, moving to other rhythms, reaching back into the past to clutch at the shattering events that shaped it and haunt it still.

A cracking collection of short stories from the author of the stupendous 'Swimmer'.

In the title story of this sharp, clever collection of short stories, an odd-job man arrives home to his Bradford council block to find a message waiting for one of its inhabitants...in ten-foot-high letters. With his white van and set of ladders, he's the chief suspect. But who is the mysterious Slag that has the whole street gossiping; and who has she hurt?

In 'Wrestling Jacob', a lusty academic takes out his frustrations down on the farm every weekend, sparring with a fierce, strangely human ram. It's hard work being beaten up by a sheep, but he soon realizes that his girlfriends love to see him wrestle Jacob...

And in 'Coddock', there's a bold new chipshop owner in town. But who is he? And what do you get if you cross a cod with a haddock, anyway?

From the backstreets of Bradford to dingy moorland pubs with ten-year-old jukeboxes, Bill Broady's bright new stories give Yorkshire a lick of new paint, with all of the searingly precise prose, wit and energy of his highly acclaimed first novel, 'Swimmer'.

Steve Jones's highly acclaimed, double prize-winning, bestselling first book is now fully revised to cover all the new genetic breakthroughs from GM food to Dolly the sheep.'An essential sightseer's guide to our own genetic terrain.' Peter Tallack, Sunday Telegraph

'Superb and stimulating...an exhilarating trip around the double spiral of DNA, a rush of gravity-defying concepts and wild swerves of the scientific imagination.' J.G. Ballard, Daily Telegraph

'Not so much divination as demystification... An attempt to bring genetics and evolution more into the public domain. If, for instance, you ever wondered just what genetic engineering is about, here is as good a place as any to discover. Few have Jones's ability to communicate a difficult idea with such humour, clarity, precision and ease.' Laurence Hurst, Times Higher; 'Sensitive to the social issues raised by genetics... yet Jones's interest reaches beyond contemporary social issues to the human past, to what genetics can and cannot tell us about our evolution and patterns of social development. He interleaves a broad knowledge of biology with considerations of cultural, demographic and - as his title indicates - linguistic history. At once instructive and captivating.' Daniel J.Kevles, London Review of Books

An anthology of writings and photographs celebrating the outstanding contribution of one of the country's most distinguished and enduring travel writers, and the century's greatest living explorer.

At the age of twenty-three, three years after attending the coronation of Haile Selassie, Thesiger made his first expedition into the country of the murderous Danakil tribe. Since then he has traversed the Empty Quarter twice, spending five years among the Bedu, followed by several years living as no Westerner had in the strange world of the Marshmen of Iraq.

Later he made many mountain journeys in the awesome ranges of the Karakorams, the Hindu Kush, Ladakh and Chitral. After these varied and often dangerous adventures among fast-disappearing cultures, Thesiger settled down to spend over twenty years living mostly among the pastoral Samburu in Northern Kenya, until 1994 when he finally returned to England permanently.

These experiences have, over the years, provided rich material for writings which express a romantic but austere vision, and for exquisite photographs which capture the spirit of a bygone era. This book contains extracts from the eight books Thesiger published to great acclaim between 1959 and 1998, most notably 'Arabian Sands', 'Marsh Arabs' and 'The Life of My Choice'.

The extraordinary and unconventional life of a modern teenage bohemian.

'I am Cat Balou, I am Jeanne Moreau, I am Modigliani's lover, but not the one who threw herself out of the window...'

Una is a sixteen year old sexual fantasist. In 1989 she is a kept woman in Paris, whose romantic ideas about the lifestyle of a mistress to an aging record producer don't quite live up to the reality. She searches for an affair that corresponds to her dreams, but finds herself flitting from one romantic infatuation to another, obsessed by the idea of sex but careful of her virginity.
From her borrowed studio in Pigalle she explores a bohemian Paris full of unpredictable characters: her Caribbean neighbour Henri, who creeps in naked to use her shower when she's out; her friends Ines the stripper and Marcus, who help her scrape an existence of Burger Kings and Gauloises. La Dolce Vita is hot on her heels, from the pretentious prince who woos her to the transvestite prostitute who chases her.
As Una drifts through a year in her life, she is carried from Paris to a wintry Prague on the verge of revolution, to her rambling family home in rural Italy and to a shocking pre-honeymoon in Brazil. Una's voyage is a rite of passage from girlhood to womanhood. Like most journeys, it involves danger and discovery.
Dolce Vita, with its cocktail of fantasy, innocence and worldliness, introduces a strong and unusual new voice in British fiction.

The English debut of a bestselling novelist, kin to Penelope Fitzgerald and Louis Begley in style and subtlety.

At eighty, Max Opass is still reeling from the death of his wife a year earlier. His two grown-up children live abroad with their own families, his son in Bolivia, his daughter in Japan: he writes awkwardly to his daughter with the news of his humdrum activities and tells her that he's decided to have his wife's portrait committed to paper or canvas, permanently and posthumously. So, he looks up 'Artists' in the Yellow Pages, picks a few for arbitrary reasons, and calls them up. He asks each if they will paint a portrait of his wife, using his five favourite photographs of her for their sole visual reference. One artist - successful and modish - intimidates him; another - an amateur raising kids by herself - prompts him to pity; a pair of art students baffle him; and a bridge-playing acquaintance turns out to have elderly hots for him. Each encounter, each portrait, is both comic and moving, like Max. As these accumulate, the reader comes to realise that Max's grasp on who his wife really was is not so sure after all. The book oscillates calmly between being amusing and being reflective, and delivers a powerful slow punch at its close.

Agnès Desarthe began her writing life as a children's writer, and it shows here: as in Gretta Mulrooney's 'Araby', not a word is wasted and the pace is even and sure. In its sympathetic but unsentimental portrayal of a deluded old man, the book is reminiscent of Louis Begley's work. And in her dry wit, exquisite ear for conversation and reverberating sense of more being meant than at first seems apparent, there are echoes of Penelope Fitzgerald or Hilary Mantel.

She swims into the medals and then into oblivion - a sensuous, searing, compact debut from an outstanding new British writer.

This is a striking, supple and direct debut from a new English writer that both promises an exceptionally exciting future and provides an unusual, accomplished and saleable debut. It's a character piece, charting the life of a girl who becomes besotted with butterflies and swimming on the same holiday when an infant, then grows up to become a world-class swimmer before, at 19, obsolescence overtakes her with disorienting haste... If taken on its own terms - as an intense and focused portrait - it is simply staggering; a miniature, but a perfect one. It is stuffed with gorgeously apt and fresh imagery and has tremendous verve about it. It reads, in fact, like a race, as it should.

A full-blooded, pacy biography of one of the most charismatic writers of the century, whose life and work were to inspire Hemingway, Steinbeck, Kerouac and Mailer. 'We cannot help but read on' TLS. 'The energy, dynamism and sheer bursting life-force of Jack London bowls you over' Scotsman.

• Jack London's life story (1876-1916) is as dramatic as any of the fiction he wrote. Born illegitimate in San Francisco, he was (in his teens) an oyster pirate, seal-hunter, hobo, Klondike goldminer - and spectacular drinker.
• On publication of The Call of the Wild in 1903, he became the most highly publicised writer in the world. Subsequent books, including Martin Eden, White Fang, The Iron Heel, The People of the Abyss, John Barleycorn, The Sea Wolf, continue in print as world classics in many languages.
• Apart from writing 50 books, he lectured for the Socialist Party in America; was a war correspondent in Korea and Mexico; introduced surfing to the West Coast; sailed the seven seas in his yacht, the Snark...

A funny and intensely moving portrait of childhood, death and a man's relationship with his larger-than-life mother.

This poignant, witty, warm-hearted yet unsentimental novel charts the turbulent relationship of a mother and son.

As a young boy, Rory Keenan finds his mother bewilderingly and embarrassingly eccentric as his childhood is punctuated by hilarious, cringe-making episodes caused entirely by her unpredictable behaviour and bizarre habits and exploits. Kitty has a huge appetite - for food, for mysterious imaginary illnesses and for strange hobbies. Her irrepressible, opinionated nature ensures that she (and against his will, Rory too) is the centre of any attention to be had.

At the end of Kitty's life, Rory, now a grown man, begins to come to terms with his confused feelings for Kitty - he loves her devotedly, but nevertheless her cussedness still infuriates him. As memories and secrets from his family's stormy past in Ireland and London echo through the tragedy of her final, very real illness we are given an outstandingly vivid and compassionate vision of life, love and death.

How should a young woman live now?

Lily is waiting, as ever, for the weekend, waiting to get out of the city, waiting for that ever-elusive, life-defining, climactic episode, the one that will 'explain to me everything that's gone before, and everything that's to come'.

She's been friends with the decisive Edward and the freewheeling Josh for years, and makes what progress she does by clinging on to them. She seeks a narrative for her life, a story to dress in, and embarks on a daring, blind romance that begins on a train with the mysterious Colin, but just as swiftly talks herself out of it, out of commitment. Meanwhile, next door, Shirley, a plainer, simpler woman, just gets on with things, caring for home, husband and baby, making strides, repeating cycles.

Will Lily reach her epiphany? Will she recognize it when it arrives? Will it really change her life? Does she even need one?

The bestselling voice of Europe's fastest-growing, fastest-living city: the new Berlin.

'The little jewellery box also held the red coral bracelet from Nikolai Sergeyevich. Its six hundred and seventy-five little coral beads were strung onto a silken thread, and they glowed as red as rage. My great-grandmother put the hairbrush down in her lap. She closed her eyes for a long time. Then she opened her eyes again, took the red coral bracelet from the little box and fastened it around her left wrist. Her skin was very white. That evening, for the first time in three years, she shared a meal with my great-grandfather.'

Coral bracelets 'as red as rage' from Russian lovers; a sad old woman who nonetheless 'sometimes sang and winked with her left eye and laughed till the tears came'; country houses 'away from Berlin, linden trees out front, chestnuts in the back, sky above' 'The Summer House, Later' is an elegant, measured, reflective collection of stories which captures beautifully the promise of bright colours lying just out of reach of our grey daily routines.

Set in and around Europe's fastest-growing, fastest-living city, these stories take as their starting point the monotony of modern urban life - the endless antennas and chimneys, the pigeons in the gutters - and looks beyond them to 'the narrow strip of sky over the rooftops'. The literary sensation of the year in her native Germany, Judith Hermann is a wonderfully talented young writer whose ability to find drama and beauty in the smallest, most trivial moments makes 'The Summer House, Later' a very special debut indeed.

A rich and dramatic story of a poor young Indian boy who fights like a tiger to achieve fame and fortune.

In a village just outside present-day Calcutta, Koonty, a young girl, is squatting in pain beside the river, convinced that her agony is the result of a fish allergy. It's not - she's giving birth and as the realisation dawns on her, she makes the connection with the encounter she had all those months ago with the swimming stranger with the golden bathing shorts...Horrified, she places the baby onto a piece of floating debris, fixes her own necklace around his neck and pushes him downriver. Several miles downstream in Calcutta, the baby is discovered by Dolly, a young married woman desperate for a child. She takes him home and brings him up as her own son, calling him Karna.

And so begins a chain of events which sees Karna's initial good fortune turn to tragedy so that, years later, he's forced to seek out Koonty, now married and with a son of her own...