Awaiting her husband's arrival on holiday in France, Sheila Redden,quiet, middle-aged doctor's wife, suddenly finds herself caught up in a passionate affair with a young American, ten years her junior, this extraordinary powerful portrayal of a woman transformed by love was shortlisted for the Booker Prize.

    His world was a nightmare of internal furies and haunting poetic vision. Harvey Lawson watched and protected him until his final suicide. From his solitary old age Harvey writes this brief account of their twenty years together and then burns all the papers to shut out an inquisitive world.The tautness and control that characterize Susan Hill’s work are abundantly evident in The Bird of Night as she magnificently handles the heights and depths, the splendours and miseries of madness and friendship.

    But times have changed. Now, as he lies dying in one of his own failed buildings, his grandson Jamie comes home to watch over him. The old man’s final months bring Jamie to see what is best and worst in the past that haunts them all, and he sees the fears of his own life unravel in the land that bred him.It is Jamie who tells the story of his family, of three generations of pride and delusion, of nationality and strong drink, of Catholic faith and the end of political idealism. It is a tale of dark hearts and modern houses, of three men in search of Utopia. A poignant and powerful reclamation of the past, Our Fathers is a deeply felt, beautifully crafted, utterly unforgettable novel.

    Central to the story is the friendship that tentatively grows up between Joe and Kathleen, a young school-teacher who brings a fresh perspective to his familiar world.

    He yearns to write long philosophical pieces about the American dream gone sour, not the flaccid write-ups of bake-off contests demanded by the "Truth." Then, old man Lawton goes missing, and suspicion fixes on his son, Ronny. Paradoxically, the specter of violent death breathes new life into the town. For Bill, a deeper and more disturbing involvement with the Lawtons ensues. The Lawton murder and the obsessions it awakes in the town come to symbolize the mood of a nation on the edge. Compulsively readable, "The Keepers of Truth" startles both with its insights and with Collins's powerful, incisive writing.

    Maginn returns to Kerry and uncovers an astonishing tale: both the account of the destruction of a place and a way of life which once preserved Ireland's ancient traditions, and the tragedy of an increasingly isolated village where the women mysteriously die-leaving the priest, Father McGreevy, to cope with insoluble problems. Looking back in time, the book traces how, as World War II rages through Europe, McGreevy struggles to preserve what remains of his parish, and struggles against the rough mountain elements, the grief and superstitions of his people, and the growing distrust in the town below. The Deposition of Father McGreevy is a remarkable story, and a gripping exploration of both the locus of misfortune and the nature of evil. Rich in the details of Irish lore and life, its narrative evokes both a time and a place with the accuracy of a keen, unsentimental eye, and renders its characters with heartfelt depth.

    It was two-thirty. If everything went according to schedule, she could safely reckon to be dead by six o'clock.'But by the day's end, events have taken a dramatic turn and Miss Hawkins is sentenced to live. Forcibly retired, she is presented by her colleagues with a five-year diary.Programmed since childhood to total obedience, Miss Hawkins slavishly follows her diary's commands until the impossible happens – she meets a man. As a last reprieve from the horrors of loneliness she embarks on a determined full-scale mission to taste life's secret pleasures – and pains– until the cup runs dry…

    Nothing can prepare him for the ensuing circumstances in this witty novel of memory and expectations.

    Threatened by famine and anarchy at home, the Germans struggle to mitigate the punishing terms offered by the Allies. But both sides are torn by battle exhaustion and a confusion that far exceed their national differences. In this riveting combination of history, speculation and rumour, Thomas Keneally recreates the personalities, ideals, prejudices, arguments and desperate measures that resulted in the armistice which would shape the future of Europe.

    She is befriended by the wonderfully dangerous Ruby, whose red hair and brutal home life emphasise her love of fire, and by the immaculately dressed Mr Greenridge who likes to follow her around the village. Mingling the innocent with the sinister and laced with the tragic and the bizarre, this is a rare evocation of a 1950s childhood.

    A mirror is held to the back of the head and one's hand has to move the opposite way from what was intended."In these closing lines from Impossible Object, one has embodied both Nicholas Mosley's subject of love and imagination, as well as his unmatched lyric style. In eight carefully connected stories that are joined by introspective interludes on related subjects, the author pursues the notion, through the lives of a couple seen by different narrators, that "those who like unhappy ends can have them, and those who don't will have to look for them."The impossible object of the title, "the triangle that can exist in two dimensions but not in three," is a controlling symbol for the impossibility of realizing the good life unless one recognizes the impossibility of attaining it: only then can it be possible to realize it, through a kind of renunciation, especially in "a sophisticated, corrupt, chaotic world." Such a provocative theme, comic or tragic by turns, was met by critics in 1968 as brilliant, insightful, intense, and moving, but especially original.

    But for Stanley Woolley, commanding officer of Goshawk Squadron, the romance of chivalry in the clouds is just a myth. There are two types of men up there: victims and murderers, and the code he drums into his men bans any notion of sport or fair play. This produces better killers but, even so, Wolley believes the whole squadron will be dead within three months. Derek Robinson quietly builds the day-to-day details of these mens lives and deaths into a powerful indictment of war. But this classic of war literature is also very funny, often painfully so; Shortlisted for the Booker Prize, this is Derek Robinson's masterly novel of the war in the air over the Western Front in 1918.

    Time passes and opinions change. “Why should we go on supporting a book which we detest?” Rose Curtland asks. “The brotherhood of Western intellectuals versus the book of history,” Jenkin Riderhood suggests. The theft of a wife further embroils the situation. Moral indignation must be separated from political disagreement. Tamar Hernshaw has a different trouble and a terrible secret. Can one die of shame? In another quarter a suicide pact seems the solution. Duncan Cambus thinks that since it is a tragedy, someone must die. Someone dies. Rose, who has gone on loving without hope, at least deserves a reward.

    Eventually freed from the gulag in the 1970's, he finds he has no reason to return to the West-he has become Russian in everything but birth. Now, on the day of his 80th birthday, Russia has changed. Communism has evaporated. In the aftermath, information has come to light that Alex is still alive. This moving story weaves together the events of Alex's life, exploring this momentous day, his harrowing past in the camp and his life in the village. And it ends with his having to make a personal choice, perhaps for the first time in his life, and the climax is shattering.

    And so it has come to his Baas's final command to his Hottentot slave Adam, to flog his mother, because she refuses to prune the master's vineyard in order to attend her own beloved mother's funeral. And when he refuses to do so, and his Baas smashes his face with a piece of wood, Adam turns on him, and beats him almost to death. Then he flees to South Africa's veld. There he comes to the rescue of Elizabeth, a white woman, and the only person to survive her husband's expedition in the vast South African interior. Alone and terrified, she pleads with the runaway slave to bring her back to the Cape and her home. Adam agrees because he believes by rescuing Elizabeth, he will be awarded his own freedom. This, then is the stunning story of their trek together, how they find in each other their mutual need and humanity, and finally how their days together turn into an unforgettable, tender love story. Shortlisted for the 1976 Booker Prize