How does the world see you? Nine characters illuminate an unknowable woman. From the school art teacher who sees a spark of talent in her, to the man whose fleeting passion with her could change his life, to the female student whose friendship turns into love. Deeply affecting and luminous, this kaleidoscopic novella explores the nature of intimacy and how each connection you make forms who you are. 

1944, in the ruined wine cellar of a Tuscan villa, as bombs fall around them, two strangers meet and share an extraordinary evening. Ulysses Temper is a young British soldier; Evelyn Skinner is a sexagenarian art historian and possible spy. She has come to Italy to salvage paintings from the wreckage and relive memories of the time she encountered EM Forster and had her heart stolen by an Italian maid in a particular Florentine room with a view.

Tom Connolly's dazzling second novel is a funny, turbulent and heartfelt study of male relationships and a glorious love letter to the city of New York. It is April in Manhattan, and the destinies of four very different men are about to collide. Nineteen-year-old Finn has just arrived in the city with his irrepressible and volatile girlfriend, Dilly, determined to even the score with his older brother, Jack, for abandoning him in the UK in the aftermath of their parents' deaths.

Everyone tells Martha Friel she is clever and beautiful, a brilliant writer who has been loved every day of her adult life by one man, her husband Patrick. So why is everything broken? Why is Martha - on the edge of 40 - friendless, practically jobless and so often sad? And why did Patrick decide to leave? Maybe she is just too sensitive, someone who finds it harder to be alive than most people. Or maybe - as she has long believed - there is something wrong with her. 

Piranesi lives in the House. Perhaps he always has. In his notebooks, day after day, he makes a clear and careful record of its wonders: the labyrinth of halls, the thousands upon thousands of statues, the tides that thunder up staircases, the clouds that move in slow procession through the upper halls. On Tuesdays and Fridays Piranesi sees his friend, the Other. At other times he brings tributes of food to the Dead. But mostly, he is alone.

Following the international critical acclaim of The Cost of Living, this final volume of Deborah Levy's Living Autobiography is an exhilarating, thought-provoking and boldly intimate meditation on home and the spectres that haunt it. 

Penguin presents the unabridged downloadable audiobook edition of Walk Through Walls, written and read by Marina Abramovic. This memoir spans Marina Abramovic's five-decade career and tells a life story that is almost as exhilarating and extraordinary as her groundbreaking performance art.

Early this morning, several hours before my arrest, I was woken by an earth tremor. I mention the incident not to suggest that there was a connection - that somehow the fault lines in my life came crashing together in a form of a couple of policemen - for in Tokyo we have a quake like this every month. I am simply relating the sequence of events as it happened. It has been an unusual day, and I would hate to forget anything....

While the celebrated opera singer Terri Ivory is in hospital, facing what could be the end of her career, her daughter Julie stumbles upon a long-buried secret that forces her to question her past and her place in her mother’s affection. In their empty house that no longer seems like a home, mother and daughter try to keep their closeness to each other and to the men they love.

Bea's five-year-old daughter, Agnes, is slowly wasting away. The smog and pollution of the overdeveloped, overpopulated metropolis they call home is ravaging her lungs. Bea knows she cannot stay in the City, but there is only one alternative: the Wilderness State. Mankind has never been allowed to venture into this vast expanse of untamed land. Until now. Bea and Agnes join 18 other volunteers who agree to take part in a radical experiment. 

Brisbane, 1983: A lost father, a mute brother, a mum in jail, a heroin dealer for a stepfather and a notorious criminal for a babysitter. It's not as if Eli's life isn't complicated enough already. He's just trying to follow his heart, learning what it takes to be a good man, but life just keeps throwing obstacles in the way – not least of which is Tytus Broz, legendary drug dealer. But Eli's life is about to get a whole lot more serious. He's about to fall in love. And he has to break into prison on Christmas Day, to save his mum.

The downloadable, digital audiobook edition of Colm Tóibín's new novel, read by Fiona Shaw. It is the 1960s and Nora Webster is living with her two young sons in a small town on the east coast of Ireland. The love of her life, Maurice, has just died.Nora must learn how to forge a new life for herself, how to give her sons a future as she tries to hold onto the past.

Aged 13, Joan Ashby drew up a list of How to Become a Successful Writer: 1. Do not waste time. 2. Ignore Eleanor Ashby* when she tells me I need friends [*J. A.'s mother]. 3. Read great literature every day. 4. Write every day. 5. Rewrite every day. 6. Avoid crushes and love. 7. Do not entertain any offer of marriage. 8. Never ever have children. 9. Never allow anyone to get in my way.

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.

In 1986, 26-year-old Ruth Coker Burks visits a friend in hospital when she notices that the door to one of the patient's rooms is painted red. The nurses are reluctant to enter, drawing straws to decide who will tend to the sick person inside. Out of impulse, Ruth herself enters the quarantined space and begins to care for the young man who cries for his mother in the last moments of his life.