THE CAPTAIN PUGWASH JOKE BOOK Ahoy there, shipmates! Raise the anchor, batten down the hatches, hoist the sails and giggle along with Captain Horatio Pugwash and his crew for hilarity on the high seas with this top-hole collection of pirate puns, treasure-hunting teasers and general buccaneering buffoonery! Tottering turtles!

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In the tradition of Nancy Mitford’s The Pursuit of Love and Gerald Durrell’s My Family and Other Animals, comes a story of a young narrator in the midst of her eccentric family. But rather than landed gentry or bohemian travellers, it’s a mad extended Iran clan who flee Tehran to 1980s Britain after the fall the Shah.

Five year old Shappi and her beloved brother Peyvand arrive with their parents in London - all cold weather and strange food - without a word of English. If adapting to a new culture isn’t troubling enough, it soon becomes clear that the Ayatollah’s henchmen are in pursuit. With the help of MI5, Shappi’s family go into hiding. So apart from checking under the family car for bombs every morning, Shappi’s childhood is like any other kids – swings in the park, school plays, kiss-chase and terrorists.

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Peter was a confirmed loner and cat hater, until he was given a small, grey (and impeccably handsome) kitten with folded ears by his then girlfriend. The girlfriend went but Norton stayed – in fact, he and Peter became inseparable.

Trotting along beside him down the street, having his own chair in restaurants or sitting on Peter’s lap on plane journeys, Norton made his presence felt and Peter was a loner no more. But, after learning how to love his cat, would Peter now learn how to love another human too?

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Jenneen, Kate, Ellamarie and Ashley are enviable women. They are desirable and powerful, with glamorous jobs in the media and the theatre and, most importantly, the closest of friendships.

But each of the friends has a dark secret, and none of them can ever be entirely safe from the passion, deceit and danger which threatens to seduce and then destroy them.

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Set in 1857 between England and India, A Proper Education for Girls is a rollicking novel about feisty women, the devotion of sisters and the Victorian obsession with empire, experiments and photography.

The peachgrowers of the title are 27 year-old twin sisters with a passion for botany. Lilian, in mysterious disgrace, has been married off to a dreary missionary. Alice is left at home, curator to her father's monstrous collection of artefacts under the watchful eye of the malevolent Dr Cattermole.

A Proper Education for Girls is a dazzling debut. Tongue-in-cheek and inventive, comic and horrifying, it illuminates the dark heart of Victorian hypocrisy and selfishness, yet at the same time is engaging and highly enjoyable. Readers will become completely involved with Alice and Lilian - and their hair-raising escapades.

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Steering clear of adventure travel clichés, Time Out has cherry-picked 40 diverse and exciting experiences from all corners of the world, from wilderness wanderings, volcano climbs and canoe expeditions to snow safaris, road trips and epic rail journeys.

An inspirational, visually enticing book with lavish full-colour photography throughout, and stimulating, in-depth travel writing from an impressive stable of writers.

Libby Purves crews on a Tall Ships Race; ski expert Minty Clinch investigates Kashmir’s pristine powder; and Time Out magazine’s travel editor Chris Moss takes the Trans-Manchurian Express to the shores of Lake Baikal.

This is a book for all fitness levels, from those hardy enough to scale the world’s highest peaks to those who prefer adventures at the wheel.

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The Omagh bomb was the worst massacre in Northern Ireland’s modern history – yet from it came a most extraordinary tale of human resilience, as families of murdered people channelled their grief into action. As the bombers congratulated themselves on escaping justice, the families determined on a civil case against them and their organisation. No one had ever done this before.

It was a very domestic atrocity. In Omagh, on Saturday, 15 August 1998, a massive bomb placed by the so-called Real IRA murdered unborn twins, six men, twelve women and eleven children, of whom two were Spanish and one English: the dead included Protestants, Catholics and a Mormon.

Although the police believed they knew the identities of the killers, there was insufficient evidence to bring charges. Taking as their motto ‘For evil to triumph, all that is necessary is for good men to do nothing’, families of ten of the dead decided to pursue these men through the civil courts, where the burden of proof is lower. This is the remarkable account of how these families – who had no knowledge of the law and no money, and included a cleaner, a mechanic and a bookie – became internationally recognised, formidable campaigners and surmounted countless daunting obstacles to win a famous victory.

How these mothers and fathers and sisters and brothers turned themselves into the scourge of the Real IRA is not just an astonishing story in itself. It is also a universal story of David challenging Goliath, as well as an inspiration to ordinary people anywhere devastated by terrorism.

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Birthday parties always make people happy and Alfie’s neighbour, Mr MacNally, really does need cheering up because their beloved cat, Smoky, has died. Alfie thinks a party might just help, and there’s an extra special surprise in store for Bob MacNally…

Join Alfie as he tries to keep a secret in this celebration of pets old and new.

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All At Sea is a celebration of the epic absurd, an attempt to explain just how out of hand things can become from a very simple starting point. The book follows the author’s death-defying 200-mile journey in his antique Thomas Crapper bath – not just across the Channel, but around Kent – right up to the tremendous reception and huge media attention which awaited him under Tower Bridge. Tim met the Queen, and his bath now resides in the National Maritime Museum of Great Britain.

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In haunting ways this wonderful, compelling novel prefigures Suite Française and some of the themes of Némirovsky’s great unfinished sequence of novels. All Our Worldly Goods, though, is complete, and exquisitely so – a perfect novel in its own right. First published in France in 1947, after the author’s death, it is a gripping story of family life and starcrossed lovers, of money and greed, set against the backdrop of France from 1911 to 1940 between two terrible wars.

Pierre and Agnès marry for love against the wishes of his parents and the family patriarch, the tyrannical industrialist Julien Hardelot, provoking a family feud which cascades down the generations. This is Balzac or The Forsyte Saga on a smaller, more intimate scale, the bourgeoisie observed close-up with Némirovsky’s characteristically sly humour and clear-eyed compassion. Full of drama and heartbreak, telling observation of the devastating effects of two wars on a small town and an industrial family, this is Némirovsky at the height of her powers. The exodus and flow of refugee humanity through the town in both wars foreshadows Suite Française, but differently, because this is Northern France, near the Somme, and the town itself is twice razed. Taut, evocative and beautifully paced, the novel points up with heartbreaking detail and clarity how close were those two wars, how history repeated itself, tragically, shockingly... It opens in the Edwardian era, on a fashionable Normandy beach, and ends with a changed world, under Nazi occupation.

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