Out of the World

The Sellout had been widely turned down by UK publishers – until Oneworld Publishing's Juliet Mabey was alerted to it. Today, the satirical novel is the 2016 Man Booker Prize for Fiction.

The Sellout tackles the difficult topics of race, history and politics. And through a young, black watermelon grower, we see the changing racial landscape of a fictional American town. And Paul Beatty's witty, satire lends the entire situation an air of hilarity without making light of these serious topics.

The story is told through ghosts, witnesses, federal agents, beauty queens, even Keith Richard’s drug dealers. The 2015 Man Booker Prize for Fiction is an unconventional crime story, about Bob Marley’s assassination attempt by seven mysterious killers.

When it's not attached to your head, your very own hair takes on a disconcerting quality. Suddenly, it is strange. But whether treated as waste or as gift, relic, sacred offering or commodity in a billion-dollar industry for wigs and hair extensions, hair has many stories to tell.

Emma Tarlo explores just how much our locks and curls tell us about who we are. Full of surprising revelations and penetrating insights, Entanglement will change the way you see hair for ever.

In this unique history, Jenni Murray tells the stories of twenty-one women who refused to succumb to the established laws of society, whose lives embodied hope and change. Famous queens, forgotten visionaries, great artists and trailblazing politicians – all pushed back boundaries and revolutionised our world. In Murray’s hands their stories are enthralling and beguiling; they have the power to inspire us once again.

Christopher Davidson exposes the dark side of Western foreign policy – dragging many disturbing facts out into the light for the first time. Most shocking for us today is his assertion that US intelligence agencies continue to regard the Islamic State, like al-Qaeda before it, as a strategic but volatile asset to be wielded against their enemies. Provocative, alarming and unrelenting, Shadow Wars demands to be read – now.

A car is found on a deserted beach on the Spanish island of Fuerteventura. On the back seat lies a cardboard box containing the body of a small boy buried in newspaper cuttings. No one knows his name, and there is no trace of a driver. The last thing an ailing tourist resort needs is a murder, and the police are desperate to close the case.

Thomas Rydahl presents to us a gripping thriller fraught with lies and plenty of tension and dilemma. Can an old man cut off from the modern world solve this crime and restore order within this community?

Where else are you going to get some of the best thinkers in one place? Alain de Botton, Malcom Gladwell, Matt Ridley and Steven Pinker band together to question: is humanity approaching a Golden Age, or is the notion of progress an illusion born in the West?

This may be no Man Booker, but it has hit lists from Buzzfeed, Amazon and Flavourwire.

Call Private Citizens a gleefully rude comedy of manners, a Middlemarch for Millennials, as it embraces the contradictions of our new century. The novel's four whip-smart narrators are torn between fixing the world and cannibalizing it. In boisterous prose that ricochets between humour and pain, the four estranged friends stagger through the Bay Area's maze of tech start-ups, protestors, gentrifiers, karaoke bars, house parties and cultish self-help seminars, washing up in each other's lives once again.

A wise and searching depiction of a generation grappling with privilege and finding grace in failure, Private Citizens is as expansively intelligent as it is full of heart.

(TW: Self-harm) At seventeen, Charlie Davis has already lost more than most people lose in a lifetime. But she's learned how to forget it through cutting and self-harm. But when her insurance runs out and she's kicked out of a special treatment center, Charlie finds herself in the bright and wild landscape of Tucson, Arizona, where she begins the unthinkable: the long journey of putting herself back together.

This beautiful yet painful coming-of-age tale is fraught with more than just pains of teenagedom. It's one girl's battle with self-harm and trauma. And while heartbreaking, this triumphant tale will definitely give many hope.

Steve Burrows has pursued his birdwatching hobby across five continents, and is formerly an editor of the Hong Kong Bird Watching Society Magazine. So maybe it's no surprise that his novel A Cast of Falcons, would center around birds as well.

More than just a story about the death of a bird poacher, a cast of falcons is about the delicate balance between power and society, animal and man. So when police inspector Domenic Jejeune is faced with this murder case, he must step carefully, because one wrong move will topple everything.

A woman’s body is discovered on Edgware Road; ten miles away, her head is dredged from the dark, muddy waters of the Thames. Famed detective William Pinkerton had one lead to the notorious thief Edward Shade, and now that lead is dead.

By Gaslight is set in Steven Price's rich Victorian world of London, with its gas-lit streets, opium dens, sewers and séance halls, filled with an underworld of spies, blackmailers, cultists, petty thieves and pitiless murderers.