Bookfinder

Greece in the age of Heroes. Patroclus, an awkward young prince, has been exiled to the kingdom of Phthia.

City of Bohane is the powerful debut novel from acclaimed short story writer, Kevin Barry, and features a visceral gang war between the Harnett Fancy gang and their leader’s nemesis, new in town. Brutal, compelling and completely powerful stuff from a master of the written word.

Wernham's vision of the future - a seemingly free and content society controlled by a faceless government project known as the Project ('It's all about policy and implementation.

Prisoner of war, optometrist, time-traveller - these are the life roles of Billy Pilgrim, hero of this miraculously moving, bitter and funny story of innocence faced with apocalypse.

World War Terminus had left the Earth devastated. Through its ruins, bounty hunter Rick Deckard stalked, in search of the renegade replicants who were his prey.

An icy satire on what constitutes a useful human life, The Unit is an unflinching yet curiously affecting read.

These apocalyptic stories make an oddly reassuring read. In the face of fire, flood, draught and plague, people remain basically the same they tell us. We are violent, tribal, insecure - yes - but creative, loving and cooperative too.

The skewed world of George Saunders is a strangely wonderful place, an alternative but frighteningly feasible universe in which advertising and wonky syntax have smothered the life out of normal discourse and free will.

In the early hours of a summer morning, a young woman encounters a mysterious mobile library while walking down an empty suburban street.

Suburban witches, defiant old ladies, ageing monsters, suicidal Lottery winners, wolf men, dolphin women and manufacturers of erotic leatherwear come to life.

After years of selfimposed exile from a civilization rife with degradation and indecency, cynical journalist Spider Jerusalem is forced to return to a job he hates and a city he loathes.

A science-fiction mystery, a dark and funny post-modern romp serving further evidence that Lethem is the distinctive voice of a new generation.

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

In one of the most acclaimed and strange novels of recent years, Kazuo Ishiguro imagines the lives of a group of students growing up in a darkly skewered version of contemporary England.

The fictional city of Santa Teresa on the Mexico-US border draws in lost souls: convicts and academics, an American sportswriter, a teenage student with her widowed father, and a reclusive, 'missing' writer. But there is a darker side still.

The Explorer, James Smythe's second novel in as many months, in a taut exercise in claustrophobia. Its tightly-wound plot and suffocating landscape brim with intensity and strangeness.

First published in the early 1930s, these stories reveal an author whose interests lay far beyond the Scottish and rural.

The story of a mute, reluctant super hero from another planet, and the earthly teenager with whom he shares a strange destiny.

Charlie Gordon, IQ 68, is a floor sweeper, and the gentle butt of everyone's jokes, until an experiment in the enhancement of human intelligence turns him into a genius.

Sam Leith’s debut novel is an entertaining romp through a paranoid America, a paranoid tech-savvy packet of ideas, much like if Douglas Adams wrote The X Files.

A new short story collection from Karen Russell is a joy. Her fascination with injecting fantasy and metaphysical characters into mundane situations and high drama family structures is a joy. There is something of the daydreaming child, thinking up the stories that lift her out of her surroundings about Karen Russell. With elements of dystopia, oodles of humour and a lightness of touch, these short stories make a phenomenal collection.

For those who believe that the current global financial meltdown is in fact the latest harbinger of end times, rather than just a periodic downturn in economic fortunes, DBC Pierre's latest novel Lights Out in Wonderland offers some useful evidence.

For anyone not acquainted with the weird and and crazily wonderful world of Dave Eggers’ McSweeney’s publications, issue 30 might be a good (ie not too zany) place to start.

Flamboyant, theatrical, exuding ambiguous sexuality, Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, was one of the seventeeth century's most striking figures.

The Republic of Gilead offers Offred only one function: to breed.

Amsterdam writes with a tenderness and ease of touch. His writing is funny and sweet and sad all at once and What the Family Needed is an endearing tale of a family learning to come together.

This is the superlative post-modern superhero tale involving pulp noir, science, hubris, the Cold War, love, lust, craziness and pirates.

The deceptive simplicity of these often funny and oddly moving short – in some cases very short – stories reveals Keret to be a lively wit and an exuberant satirist.

The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen is comics scriptwriting supremo Alan Moore's incredible, reinvention of classic heroes and villains.

Robotic insects, in-growing cutlery, flesh-serving waiters in a zombie cafe... Welcome to the surreal, misshapen universe of Adam Marek's first collection.

Gerard Woodward’s memorable first collection of stories gives us his own peculiar fictional world, in which the surreal makes its incursions into everyday lives. Their comedy is generally of the painful kind, and the macabre is always threatening to overwhelm disaffected characters, often trapped in mundane marriages or occupations.

Dave Lizewski is just an ordinary American teenager. He has a MySpace page, he loves comic books, and he is unable to find a girlfriend. Then an idea hits him: why not become a real life super hero?

Light Boxes is a strange and moving tale about a never-ending February, where snow falls relentlessly, new crops cannot grow and all modes of flight are banned, making balloonist Thaddeus' life difficult.

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.

A collection of short stories: an elderly widow finds the Holy Grail beneath an old fur coat; a stray cat fights and refights a terrible nightly battle to protect his adoptive family from evil...

These translations bring together the small proportion of Kafka's works that he thought worthy of publication, including his most famous story Metamorphosis.

The whole of human civilisation is under threat, as powerful Martians build gigantic killing machines, destroy all in their path.

Among the curious and disturbing subjects Self's debut deals with are the Ur-Bororo, a superhumanly dull tribe of Amazonian bores; the terrible, seductive secret of Ward 9; and the revolutionary possibilities of waiting.

A middle-aged goldsmith returns to his native Spain in the hope of finding his long lost love Celia. However, he quickly realises that there is something different about the town where he grew up.

Useful Idiots is set in the 23^rd Century. Climate change has affected the British Isles, where vast areas of land lie under water.

Grandville is an anthropomorphised detective tale set in an alternative reality where not only are animals the master race and humans the 'dough face underclass' but France won the Napoleonic wars and Paris is the capital of the world.

Pigs might not fly but they are strangely altered. So, for that matter, are wolves and racoons.

Although possibly the most mind-bending novel I have picked up in a long while, this is also one of the most readable and thought provoking.

This is a book of beauty and measured mortality. The book collects the pain, grief and fears of death from a series of people who are suffering, their thoughts, hopes, dreams, self-delusions all contained in its simple mourning yearning pages.

The hauntingly prophetic classic novel set in a not-too-distant future where books are burned by a special task force of firemen.

Jonathan Barrow was not famous. But in his brother, Andrew’s, eyes, he was on a path to greatness before his life was cut short by a car accident when he was just 22. Nearly 40 years later Andrew Barrow has written this homage to his younger brother, which entwines his memories of their life together around the text of an unpublished nove.

This was the last of Borges' major collections to be published and includes stories written right at the end of his life. The stories have fantastical plots but are written very plainly.

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is officially one of the funniest books ever written.

If William Burroughs wrote a graphic novel, it might look something like this. 

Matt Haig's new novel The Humans is a wonderfully warm and uncynical assertion of humanity.