'Gripping, belongs to the same shelf as Gorky Park.' - Newsday. Stepan Povin, the KGB's Chief of Foreign Intelligence, is the West's most prized intelligence agent. For years he has been passing secrets from the heart of the KGB, but his position in the Lubyanka has come under threat from within. He wants out, and is seeking asylum in the West. In exchange he has a stunning piece of information to offer - the Soviets are about to capture a sophisticated American spy plane that is so crucial to America's defence she will risk nuclear war to keep its secrets safe. This disclosure is a warning of the insane bid by Kremlin hawks to hijack the American AWACS, triggering a US first strike and plunging the globe into nuclear chaos. Combining breathless high adventure and stunning insight into the Intelligence world, this can be read alone and is volume two of the trilogy and we have the companion title Nocturne for the General code 91813. 391pp, paperback reprint of the 1983 original.

In 1933 Bella Stuart leaves her quiet London life to move to Italy to tutor the child of a beautiful Jewish heiress and an elderly Italian aristocrat. Living at the family's summer home, Bella's reserve softens as she comes to love her young charge, and find friendship with Maestro Edward, his enigmatic music teacher. But as the decade draws to an end and Fascism tightens its grip on Europe, the fact that Alec is Jewish places his life in grave danger. Bella and Edward take the boy on a terrifying train journey out of Italy, one they have no reason to believe that any of them will survive. You can feel the light and heat of Italy as you read this complex tale of courage and resilience. 392pp in paperback.

In 2007 Steven Hall published The Raw Shark Texts, a book universally praised and credited with being the start of a new literary genre, "slipstream". Quite why it took the Granta Best Young British Novelist 14 years to make his triumphant return is known only to him, but Maxwell's Demon, a powerful and unusual text that "reads like a deluge" has been well worth the wait. It centres around the plight of Thomas Quinn from Hull, a failed novelist who is eking out a living writing short stories and audio scripts for others, while his wife is working on a remote island on the other side of the world. Both bills and washing up are piling up and the world seems to be rushing headlong into imminent collapse, then he receives a voicemail from his father Stanley, a man who has been dead for seven years. Thomas's relationship with his father, a world-famous writer, had always been troubled, not least because Stanley favoured his assistant/acolyte Andrew Black over his own son. Black went on to write a million-seller book but then completely disappeared and, as strange things begin to happen in his life, Thomas cannot help but wonder whether it is Black who is manipulating his world from behind the scenes, especially when a manuscript of Maxwell's Demon, apparently Black's second book, lands in his lap... Truly brilliant, this wildly entertaining and brain-teasing mystery looks behind the mask of order we place on our world when things loom chaotic and out of our control - a literary masterpiece and a joy to read. 339pp.

Wilmet Forsyth is well dressed, well looked after, suitably husbanded, good looking and fairly young - but very bored. Her sober husband Rodney who works at the Ministry is slightly balder and fatter than he once was. Wilmet would like to think she has changed rather less. Her interest wanders to the nearby church where she can neglect her comfortable household in the more serious-minded company of three unmarried priests and of course Piers Longridge, a man of an unfathomably different character altogether. With an introduction by John Bayley who says 'The setting and the characters are perfectly aligned with each other. Mr Bason, for example, is an excellent cook and a bit of a kleptomaniac.' 277pp, paperback.

If Jane Cleveland and Prudence Bates seem an unlikely pair to be walking together at an Oxford reunion, neither of them is aware of it. They couldn't be more different - Jane is a rather incompetent vicar's wife who always looks as if she is about to feed the chickens, while Prudence, a pristine hothouse flower, has the most unsuitable affairs. With the move to a rural parish, Jane is determined to find her friend the perfect man. She learns though that matchmaking has as many pitfalls as housewifery. Set in the early 1950s with all the rationing and privation that entailed, the ghastly Fabian Driver is apparently another skewering of one of Barbara Pym's ex-lovers. 240pp in facsimile reprinted paperback.

Dulcie Mainwaring is always helping others, but never looks out for herself, especially in the realm of love. Her friend Viola is besotted by the alluring Dr Aylwin Forbes, so surely it isn't prying if Dulcie helps things along? Aylwin however is smitten by Dulcie's pretty young niece. And perhaps Dulcie herself however ridiculous it might be is falling, just a little, for Aylwin. Once life's little humiliations are played out, maybe love will be returned and fondly after all. Comic, brave, heartrending, this Virago Modern Classic edition has an introduction by Paul Binding. 288pp, paperback.

It's in the nature of myth to be infinitely adaptable. These witty fables, elegantly written by the historian and full of sharp-eyed observation of modern life, are also visionary explorations of potent mysteries and strange passions, charged with the hallucinatory beauty and horror of their originals. An elderly counter-tenor tries to sing his wife back to life in the modern underworld of a hospital ward, and is doubly befuddled by dementia and the death of his wife. Acton, a cocksure estate agent, trespasses on his boss, a powerful woman's privacy, and is hunted down for it by his own pack. Minos, people-trafficker and drug-lord, rules a seedy south-east town from his labyrinthine underground hideaway. There we get to understand the gang-master and a prostitute. We meet a pest-controller suspected of paedophilia and a librarian so well-behaved that her parents wonder anxiously whether she'll ever find love. We are pulled into the pitfalls of the dating age in the #metoo era and all of these stories are inspired by ones drawn from Greco-Roman myth, from the Bible or from folklore. 'A wonderful book. It moved me to tears.' - John Burnside. With useful explanations of the fables at the end. 205pp, paperback.

London 1967. Nik Christou has been a rent boy since he was 15. He knows the ins and outs of Piccadilly Circus, how to spot a pretty policeman and interpret a fleeting glance. One summer night his life is turned upside down, first by violence and then by an accusation of murder. Anna Treadway, fleeing the ghosts of her past, works as a dresser in Soho's Galaxy theatre. Experience has taught her never to put too much faith in the law, so, convinced Nik is innocent, she determines to find him an alibi. Merrian Wallis, devoted wife to an MP whose career has already been tarnished by sandal, just wants proof that her husband couldn't have been involved. As Anna searches for clues amongst a cast of MPs, actors, members of gentlemen's clubs and a hundred different nightly clients, will anyone be willing to come forward and save Nik from his fate? Emmerson portrays summer nights in the city with all their 'distemper and discretions' and a cruel, surprisingly small world in which privilege and prejudice quash any compassion, a world where actors need 'lead stomachs, steel minds and loose knickers.' A pitch-perfect evocation of 60s London, well-plotted, engrossing and moving particularly in that the novel gives voice to the marginalised and disdained. Written by a well-regarded dramatist. 280pp, paperback.

A companion to 91955 Little London Scandal, we taken back a couple of years to Soho in 1965. How do you find a missing actress in a city where everyone's playing a role? In a tiny two-bed flat above a Turkish café on Neal Street lives Anna Treadway, a young dresser at the Galaxy Theatre. When the American actress Iolanthe Green disappears after an evening's performance at the Galaxy, the newspapers are wild with speculation about her fate. But as the news grows old and the case grows colder, it seems Anna is the only person left determined to find out the truth. Her search will take her into an England she did not know existed, of jazz clubs and prison cells, backstreet doctors and seaside ghost towns, where her carefully calibrated existence will be upended by violence but also perhaps by love. A fabulous depiction of a London where the Swinging Sixties hides a darker and more complicated story of prejudice and struggle, expertly evoked by the acclaimed playwright. 290pp, paperback.

Jack Morgan is having a bad week. His twin brother is up on a murder charge and determined to frame him for the crime, and one of Jack's clients has just called to report the burnt bodies of four surfers on his beach. But what seems like a random mugging gone wrong soon reveals something far worse - a killer calling themselves No Prisoners is holding the city to ransom. And there's more bad news - Hollywood's golden couple Thom and Jennifer Harlow have been kidnapped, along with their adopted children. It looks like the whole world is about to discover whether Private are really as good as they say they are. 501pp, paperback.