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!

£2.99 • Paperback • Buy Now

Ararat is a breathtaking journey along the fault-line between religion and science, a pilgrimage by a non-believer that takes Frank Westerman to Mount Ararat where, as biblical tradition has it, Noah’s Ark ran aground and God made his covenant with mankind.

Mount Ararat in Armenia is now a geographical, political and cultural crossroads, bound up with the centuries-old history of warfare between different cultures in this region. As Westerman stands at its foot it poses both a physical and a religious challenge: where is the God from my children’s bible? Who or what has taken his place? Can one free oneself of a religious upbringing?

He meets geologists, priests, and, on the mountain’s high slopes, an expedition in search of the Ark’s remains. And also a Russian astronaut who observes that ‘there is something between heaven and earth about which we humans know nothing’.

Ararat is a dazzling, highly personal book about science, religion and all that lies between, by one of Europe’s most celebrated young writers.

£16.99 • Hardback • Buy Now

Following on from the assured day-to-day poems of her first collection, Leontia Flynn’s second, Drives, is a book of restless journeys – real and imaginary – interspersed with a series of sonnets on writers. Beginning in Belfast, where she lives, she visits a disjointed number of cities in Europe and the States – each one the occasion for an elliptical postcard home to herself.

Alongside these reports from abroad, portraits of dead writers flicker through the pages of this book – Baudelaire, Proust and Beckett; Bishop, Plath and Virginia Woolf – all revealing aspects of themselves, their frailties and their sicknesses, but also, we suspect, aspects of their ventriloquising author.

What these poems share is a furious refusal of received opinion, of a language recycled and redundant; they are raw exposed and angrily aware of distance – the distance between what one needs and what one receives, between love and what is lost. In particular, the lives here are haunted by the lost idyll of childhood, while poems about the poet’s own mother and ageing father bring the collection to a close. With an alert ear for fracture and disarray and a tender eye for damage, Drives is a passionate enquiry into what shapes us as individuals.

£9.00 • Trade Paperback • Buy Now

It’s the dawn of the nineties in suburban Quirely. Chris and Neil go way back, but now, as they enter their teenage years, Chris is no longer sure he wants Neil as his friend. Neil is embarrassing. Neil is odd. Neil talks about strange things that nobody else knows about, or wants to. And Chris just wants to be popular now that it’s time to be seen hanging around outside the gates of the local girls’ school.

Still, Chris has other interests. He’s fallen in love with the instrumental rock stylings of Joe Satriani, and is learning guitar at school in order to emulate his hero, if only he can get the hang of Streets of London first. But there’s another boy in his guitar class who’s miles ahead of everybody. He’s a natural at it, if a bit lazy when it comes to anything else. His name is Ben.

It’s only a matter of time before Chris and Ben find themselves in a band, Animal Magnets. On drums is Jase, sure of himself and easy-going.The bass player is Thomas Depper, ginger and spectacled, bad-tempered and violent. But who can they get to be their frontman? Although they hate to admit it, there’s really only one boy for the job…

Flying Saucer Rock ‘n’ Roll follows Chris and Neil, Ben, Thomas and Jase through the years, into their teenage golden age and out the other side, where between them they face disillusionment and determination, the nine-to-five grind and art college, Britpop and Brighton. It is a tale of those who are alienated and those who belong, their childhoods lost and adulthoods found, and the fine line they walk between belief and madness. Most of all, it defines a generation, its music and mindset, a reminder of a time just gone, a world lost for ever.

£12.99 • Trade Paperback • Buy Now

If you love ponies like Katie does, then these books are perfect for you!

“Ponies don’t just disappear. Carol must be somewhere and we’re going to help find her!”

It’s the school holidays and Sam and her friends are enjoying an Easter egg competition at the stables. But with all the excitement, nobody notices that one of the ponies is missing - until it’s too late!

The police don’t have any clues and Vicki’s worried sick about her pony, so the girls are determined to find the friendly little Shetland.
Do they have the detective skills needed to help solve the mystery and bring Carol home?

£3.99 • Paperback • Buy Now

All Dr John Goode asks is for a little house in north London where people read The Paper and speaking decent English doesn't get his kids kicked. Though spending 1984-89 studying East Germany was possibly a mistake, surely fifteen years of solid lecturing has earned John Goode (PhD) the right to such a modestly normal life?

But while planting a plum tree in his little south-London garden, Goode finds a long-buried assault rifle. Before he has time to think, he is sent staggering from the Red Lion in Peckham to Prague to Dresden. He finds that Europe, liberalism and the ice caps are all melting down faster than his inhibitions: normal is gone with the wind and cultivating one's own garden these days needs more than just a spade.

And if the world won't keep to the bargain he made in 1984, maybe John Goode, Doctor of Philosophy, has just found a tool to renegotiate the deal...

Set in the world that he has made his own - that of middle-class Englishmen struggling with the mortgage, low self-esteem and dreams of sash windows - this is Hawes at his sharpest and funniest.

£12.99 • Hardback • Buy Now

Selena Harper always thought she had the perfect job: working on a luxury cruiseship, she’s whisked around the world from Alaska to Zanzibar with excitement and adventure awaiting her in every port. But as she prepares for her latest shore-leave – and finds herself unexpectedly deserted by her newly-engaged best friend – she begins to wonder if life on the ocean wave really is her dream come true. Why is she the only one who isn’t settling down? And how can she be feeling homesick when she has no home?

On a whim, she agrees to spend a week on the idyllic island of Crete, in the company of Alekos, a man she’s convinced is an incorrigible womaniser. Steeped in mythology, the island soon starts to work its magic on Selena – and, more worryingly, so does Alekos. Is he really the cad she’s always thought him to be? Or could it turn out that his home is where her heart is?

Praise for Belinda Jones

'Deliciously entertaining' heat

'A wise and witty read about the secret desires within us' Marie Claire

'As essential as your SPF 15' New Woman

£6.99 • Paperback • Buy Now

In each soul, a secret …

Philadelphia homicide detectives Kevin Byrne and Jessica Balzano’s first assignment from the Cold Case files is the brutal murder of a young runaway. The lifeless body of Caitlin O’Riordan was found carefully posed in a glass display case in the desolate Philadelphia Badlands but, as Byrne and Balzano rapidly discover, she was just the first pawn in the killer’s twisted game…

A mysterious phone call leads them on a scavenger hunt for a second victim. This time a young girl has been dismembered, her body parts left in three boxes in the basement of a deserted house. More clues lead to other victims and, as the body count rises, it becomes clear that there is a serial killer on the loose, hell-bent on completing the ‘performance’ of a lifetime.

As more runaways vanish, Byrne and Balzano come to realize that the homicidal mastermind plans to complete seven depraved tricks in his dark and dangerous magic act. With Balzano increasingly obsessed by a case that haunts her, and Byrne struggling with a loss of his own, the stakes are mounting. But this is one game they can’t afford to lose…

£12.99 • Hardback • Buy Now

'When The Kop is roaring it really is like having a twelfth man out there on the pitch. They're the best fans in the country - by miles.' Jamie Carragher

The Spion Kop is one of the most famous, emotive and atmospheric vantage points in all of sport. The one-time terracing that could 'suck the ball into the net' - in Bill Shankly's immortal phrase - still inspires and intimidates today. Once the home of more than 25,000 swaying, singing, standing Kopites, it's now seated and can hold merely half that number, but its magic still remains.

In this fully revised and updated edition, Stephen F Kelly uses eyewitness testimonies from Kopites, policemen, cleaners and referees as well as newspaper reports and the recollections of players and managers to trace the history of this amazing and fascinating stand - each anecdote wonderfully evoking the spirit of the changing times the Kop has experienced.

Stirring, emotional and marvellously readable, The Kop is a must for any Liverpool fan and anyone interested in what it means to be a supporter of any football club.

£7.99 • Paperback • Buy Now

What are The Pages?
On a family sheep station in the interior of Australia, a brother and sister work the property while their reclusive brother, Wesley Antill, spends years toiling away in one of the sheds, writing a philosophy. Now he has died. Erica, a philosopher, is sent from Sydney to appraise his work. Accompanying her is Sophie, who needs a distraction from a string of failed relationships. Her field is psychoanalysis. These two women, each with different views of the world, face a situation they have not experienced before, with surprising results.
Murray Bail’s first novel since Eucalyptus is a beguiling meditation on friendship and love, on men and women, on landscape and the difficulties of thought itself.

£14.99 • Hardback • Buy Now