Bookfinder

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the map of the world was littered with blanks; of the regions that had been ‘discovered’, there was still plenty to be learned.

Carol Birch's eleventh novel harnesses this same drive and commitment, producing a story of rich, vivid detail, brilliant characters and a satisfying and compelling narrative.

One of the most interesting books about books - what it means to buy them, own them, read them, collect or lose them - that's been brought out for a good long while.

This is a story told by the wife and four daughters of Nathan Price, a fierce evangelical Baptist who takes his family and mission to the Belgian Congo in 1959.

Crossley-Holland's trilogy continues with Arthur leaving Caldicot and his childhood behind and taking up a position as squire to Lord Stephen.

On one level Q is a straightforward historical thriller set against the violent and confusing backdrop of the northern Reformation. On that level alone it can stand as one of the best stories of recent time.

Peter Hobbs' debut novel is a sustained and beautiful piece of writing about one man's crisis of faith in extremis; it is almost unremittingly bleak but all the more powerful for so being.

England in the 1540s is a heartbeat from disaster. If the king dies without a male heir, the country could be destroyed by civil war. Henry VIII wants to annul his marriage of twenty years, and marry Anne Boleyn. The pope and most of Europe oppose him. The quest for the petulant king's freedom destroys his advisor, the brilliant Cardinal Wolsey, and leaves a power vacuum and a deadlock.

More than two decades since Rose Tremain found success with Restoration, she resurrects her 17th century physician and courtier, Sir Robert Merivel, for another chapter in his colourful life.

Set during the Turkish invasion of Cyprus in 1974, A Watermelon, A Fish and A Bible is not just an efficient tearjerker (although it is that, too), but a vivid recollection of a lost way of life and the tragedies of war, separation, love and exile.

The acronym GULAG means, prosaically, Main Camp Administration, but of course it has come to symbolise in its entirety the system of prisons and industrial camps that were scattered across the most inhospitable regions of the Soviet Union. The Nazi concentration camps may have exhibited a greater fascination upon the imagination, but the horrors of the German lagers took place over a much shorter period of time. In stark contrast, as this book amply and painstakingly explains, the Soviet system initially came into being in the 1920s, but it wasn't until February 1992 that the last camps were finally closed for good.

This is the complete story of Vladek Spiegelman and his wife, living and surviving in Hitler's Europe.

What if, behind all of these conspiracies both real and imagined, lay just one man? What if that evil genius created the most infamous document of all?

The author of the prizewinning Deafening returns with a poignant and compelling novel in ten stories.

Visitation takes place in a chillingly spooky house. The stories that surround the house and Visitation build a history of horror, taking in the German population during the Jahrhundertwende, the turn-of-the-century shift, and over the following decades of war, National Socialism and Soviet occupation.

It's hard to think of a better way to celebrate the publisher's 70^th birthday than with this superb and copiously illustrated history of iconic Penguin cover design.

Snow is a profoundly modern and universal novel, interested less in the real-life historical drama that forms the backdrop than in the emotional and moral dilemma of Jakob Torn

Jamila Hashmi, Mumtaz Shirin, Fahmida Riaz and others use intricate narrative patterns, polemicism and lyricism in their stories about Pakistan's convoluted history.

Cortazar's stories are like small time pieces, where each polished part moves relentlessly on its own particular path, exercising a crucial and perpetual influence on the mechanism as a whole.

Torn from her mother, eight-year-old Anna Sands is relocated with other children to a large Yorkshire estate that has been opened up to evacuees by Thomas and Elizabeth Ashton, an enigmatic childless couple.

What Daniel Swift does with this slim but fascinating debut book is to fuse a history of one part of the Second World War with a reclamation and a reevaluation of the the poetry it created.

In luminous, lyrical prose, Fletcher vividly evokes the haunting, wild landscape of the Scottish Highlands in this story ultimately concerned with the transformative power of nature, and the importance of kindness and hope.

Dunn's latest novel centres on the fourth wife of Henry VIII and the events which would lead to her ultimate execution by order of her husband, but Dunn's unique approach to this piece of history is to create a contemporary coming-of-age tale dressed in the trappings of the Tudor court.

Worthless Men reads as convincing social history and its portrayal of historical attitudes to the poor raises questions for today.

The title refers to an underground movement of artists and poets who resisted the censure of artistic freedom imposed by communism in Vietnam.

Following the intricately woven lives of three families, A Different Sky plunges us into the turmoil of pre-independence Singapore.

Doctor Zhivago is the epic novel of Russia in the throes of revolution and one of the greatest love stories ever told.

Based on a real-life divorce case from the 1860s, The Sealed Letter is the story of Vice-Admiral Henry Codrington, his unfaithful wife Helen, and their erstwhile friend Emily 'Fido' Faithfull, independent businesswoman and pillar of the women's movement.

It's 1964 and vulnerable young widow Esther is nervously waiting for her new lodger, Mr Chartwell to arrive. But when he does appear at her door, she receives an unexpected shock, for Mr Chartwell is no ordinary lodger - in fact, he is a monstrous black dog.

100 short stories and extracts from novels by women - one for each century - form this anthology

Part classic country house novel, part surreal fantasy, The Uninvited Guests marks a very different approach for Sadie Jones

Early in 1890, three young gentlemen left England for the backwoods of Canada, each hoping to make a fortune. Within days of their arrival, one was dead and the other two had been arrested for murder.

Tipping the Velvet, all 472 pages of it, is as saucy, as tantalising, and as touching as the narrator's first encounter with the seductive but shame-ridden Miss Kitty Butler.

Written with fantastic, gruesome detail of maritime life in the 1700s this book is full of love, longing and secrets.

Bored and beautiful, Emma Bovary is frustrated by the banality of provincial life in 19th Century France. Her marriage to a mediocre doctor cannot match the glittering, passion-filled romances of the sentimental novels she devours.

A stunning historical novel, The Book of Fires is the unforgettable story of Agnes Trussel; and love, fireworks and redemption.

Martin's tale of slavery on a nineteenth century plantation in the American South won the 2003 Orange Prize for Fiction against strong competition from Carol Shields, Donna Tartt, Zadie Smith, Anne Donovan and Shena Mackay.

In this frank, tender and beautifully written true story, Austrian author Johanna Adorján explores the lives and deaths of her eccentric Jewish-Hungarian grandparents.

Babi Yar is the name of a ravine on the outskirts of Kiev, where between 1941 and 1943 the Nazis murdered untold numbers of Jews, Roma, the disabled, Ukrainian resisters and hostages.

It's a cracking story that asks important questions without offering answers, and does so by letting you pleasurably inhabit other peoples' worlds for the space of an afternoon.

At less than 300 pages, this comparatively brief life of George Washington is a fine and necessary addition to the voluminous body of literature about the revolutionary General who became the first President of the United States.

This is Patrick Leigh Fermor's spellbinding part-travelogue, part inspired evocation of a part of Greece's past.

Rosemund lies dying in her remote Shropshire home. But before she does so, she has one last task.

Elizabeth Bowen combines social comedy and reportage, perception and vision in this 79-strong collection.

Using stories from the Bible as her starting point, Lamming breathes life into its female characters who have been condemned to live in the shadows of their male counterparts until now.

Jonathan Coe's warm and heartening look back at the 1970s and its fashions and tastes is a zesty comedy full of acute observations about growing up and being an awkward teenager at school.

Black Mamba Boy is a sumptuous and bittersweet journey book that starts in Aden in 1935 in war-torn Eritrea and Sudan, to Egypt, Palestine and to Britain.

How straight-laced and, let's face it, clean, twenty-first century London seems in comparison to its bawdy and filthy eighteenth-century cousin. The gap between the rich and poor was as great then as it is now, and the public's obsession with gossip about royalty and the aristocracy was as intense, but the well-to-do were not averse to visiting low-life taverns and brothels in search of adventure.