'When I was 12 years old God spoke to my father for the first time. God didn't say much. He told my father to be a painter and left it at that.... ' So begins Niall Williams' magical tale about love and destiny. Nicholas Coughlan and Isabel Gore were made for each other - but fate doesn't always take the easiest or the most obvious route to true love. For a start, Nicholas and Isabel have never met and nor are they likely to, without some kind of divine intervention. But as God, ghosts, a series of coincidences and seemingly chance events and encounters conspire to bring the couple together.

Jim Foley loves his parents, his brother, his sister, Dickens and God, although not necessarily in that order. Later, he loves Kate, enough to make her his wife; later still, he loves his children, Jack and Hannah. This is Jim's story, from early days spent in County Clare to early adulthood in America, and back to Clare again.

It is August 1616. The whaling ship Heartsease has ventured high into the Arctic, and the crew must return home before the ice closes in. All, that is, save Thomas Cave. He makes a wager that he will remain there alone until next season, though no man has yet been known to have survived a winter this far north. So he is left with provisions, shelter, and a journal - should he not live to tell the tale.

Seventeen-year-old Noel Crowe is idling in the unexpected sunshine when Christy makes his first entrance into Faha, bringing secrets he needs to atone for. Though he can't explain it, Noel knows right then: something has changed. As the people of Faha anticipate the endlessly procrastinated advent of the electricity, and Noel navigates his own coming-of-age and his fallings in and out of love, Christy's past gradually comes to light, casting a new glow on a small world.

On a moonlit night in 1903, a mysterious young woman flees alone across the Canadian wilderness. Mary Bouton is 19 years old, half mad and widowed - by her own hand. Tearing through the forest, she is desperate, her nerves burning, and she is certain of only one thing - that two red-headed brothers, rifles across their backs, lurch close behind her. She has murdered their brother and their cold lust for vengeance is unswerving.

Thirty-four years ago, when they were in their 20s, Niall Williams and Christine Breen made the impulsive decision to leave their lives in New York City and move to Christine’s ancestral home in the town of Kiltumper in rural Ireland. In the decades that followed, the pair dedicated themselves to writing, gardening and living a life that followed the rhythms of the Earth.  

We are our stories. We tell them to stay alive or keep alive those who only live now in the telling. In Faha, County Clare, everyone is a long story...Bedbound in her attic room beneath the falling rain, Plain Ruth Swain is in search of her father. To find him Ruthie must first trace the jutting jaw lines, narrow faces, and gleamy skin of the Swains from the restless Reverend Swain, her great-grandfather, to her father.

When reading and writing are the most important things in the world. Jevick, the pepper merchant's son, has been raised on stories of Olondria, a distant land where books are as common as they are rare in his home - but which his mother calls the Ghost Country. When his father dies and Jevick takes his place on the yearly selling trip to Olondria, Jevick's life is as close to perfect as he can imagine. Just as he revels in Olondria's Rabelaisian Feast of Birds, he is pulled drastically off course and becomes haunted by the ghost of an illiterate young girl.

From the night she is rescued as a baby out of the flames of a sinking ship, to the day she joins a pair of daredevil pilots looping and diving over the rugged forests of her childhood, to the thrill of flying Spitfires during the war, the life of Marian Graves has always been marked by a lust for freedom and danger. In 1950, she embarks on her life's dream - to fly a Great Circle around the globe, pole to pole. But after a crash landing, she finds herself stranded on the Antarctic ice without enough fuel. 

It is 1950. In a devastating moment of clarity, Margery Benson abandons her dead-end job and advertises for an assistant to accompany her on an expedition. She is going to travel to the other side of the world to search for a beetle that may or may not exist. Enid Pretty, in her unlikely pink travel suit, is not the companion Margery had in mind. And yet together they will be drawn into an adventure that will exceed every expectation. They will risk everything, break all the rules and, at the top of a red mountain, discover their best selves.

In A River Runs Through It, Norman Maclean claims that “in my family, there is no clear line between religion and fly-fishing.” Nor is there a clear line between family and fly-fishing. It is the one activity where brother can connect with brother and father with son, bridging troubled relationships at the junction of great trout rivers in western Montana. In Maclean’s autobiographical novella, it is the river that makes them realize that life continues and all things are related.

Emmett returns home to pick up his little brother Billy, tie up his late father's estate and get out of town for good. Since leaving the Kansas youth facility where he served time, Emmett has wanted one thing: to give them both a fresh start - and that means heading out to the sparkling west. Young, precocious Billy has plans of his own - to get to San Francisco, where he believes their long-estranged mother is waiting for them.

The many voices of The Promise tell a story in four snapshots, each one centered on a family funeral, each one happening in a different decade. In the background, a different president is in power, and a different spirit hangs over the country, while in the foreground the family fights over what they call their farm, on a worthless piece of land outside Pretoria. Over large jumps in time, people get older, faces and laws and lives all change, while a brother and sister circle around a promise made long ago and never kept.... 

On a summer's day in 1596, a young girl in Stratford-upon-Avon takes to her bed with a fever. Her twin brother, Hamnet, searches everywhere for help. Why is nobody at home? Their mother, Agnes, is over a mile away, in the garden where she grows medicinal herbs. Their father is working in London. Neither parent knows that one of the children will not survive the week.

The international best seller and recommended by medics, patients and the NHS, this is a brain scientist's personal experience of a stroke. It tells of her journey and gives rare insight into human consciousness and its possibilities for all of us. On the morning of the 10th December 1996, Jill Bolte Taylor, a 37-year-old Harvard-trained brain scientist, experienced a massive stroke when a blood vessel exploded in the left side of her brain. A neuroanatomist by profession, she observed her own mind completely deteriorate.