Elena Fairchild is a teacher at one of the state’s new elite schools. Her daughters are exactly like her: beautiful, ambitious and perfect. A good thing, since the recent mandate that’s swept the country is all about perfection. Now everyone must undergo routine tests for their quotient, Q, and any children who don’t measure up are placed into new government schools. Instead, teachers can focus on the gifted.

2059. The world has stopped turning. One half suffers an endless frozen night; the other, nothing but burning sun.Only in a slim twilit region can life survive. In an isolationist Britain, Ellen Hopper receives a letter from a dying man. It contains a powerful and dangerous secret. One that those in power will kill to conceal.

QualityPartner identifies your ideal mate, earworm personal assistants get you where you need to go and android drones know you need a six pack of beer at the end of a long day even before you crave one. Humans, robots and algorithms coexist; everything is seamlessly corporatised, stratified and monetised. Your very name reveals much of what we need to know about you, and your profile discloses the rest.  

Obsessed with his ex-girlfriend, Alistair Haston heads off to Greece, where she is on holiday. Then he is robbed of everything. So when Ricky, a charming Aussie, shows up and offers Alistair a job recruiting tourists to pose for his wealthy boss, Heinrich, a charismatic German artist, Alistair accepts. He soon realises that it is more than just painting that Heinrich has in mind. Swept away on a tide of wild parties, wild sex, fine food and drugs, Haston sheds his reserve and throws himself headlong into the pursuit of pleasure. Until the body of a missing tourist is found....

1961. Hidden deep within the forests of central Soviet Russia is a place that doesn’t appear on any map: a city called Arzamas-16. Here a community of dedicated scientists, technicians and engineers are building the most powerful nuclear device the world will ever see - 3,000 times more powerful than Hiroshima. But 10 days before the bomb is to be tested, a young physicist is found dead. His body contains enough radioactive poison to kill thousands. The Arzamas authorities believe it is suicide - they want the corpse disposed of and the incident forgotten.

Patricia Campbell's life has never felt smaller. Her ambitious husband is too busy to give her a goodbye kiss in the morning, her kids have their own lives, her senile mother-in-law needs constant care, and she's always a step behind on thank-you notes and her endless list of chores. The one thing she has to look forward to is her book club, a close-knit group of Charleston women united by their love of true crime and paperback fiction. At these meetings they're as likely to talk about the Manson family as they are marriage, motherhood, and neighborhood gossip.

Working at the local processing plant, Marcos is in the business of slaughtering humans - though no one calls them that anymore. His wife has left him, his father is sinking into dementia, and Marcos tries not to think too hard about how he makes a living. After all, it happened so quickly. First, it was reported that an infectious virus has made all animal meat poisonous to humans. Then governments initiated the "Transition". Now, eating human meat - "special meat" - is legal. Marcos tries to stick to numbers, consignments, processing.

Three journeys. One road. England, 1348. A gentlewoman flees an odious arranged marriage, a Scots proctor sets out for Avignon and a young ploughman in search of freedom is on his way to volunteer with a company of archers. All come together on the road to Calais. Coming in their direction from across the Channel is the Black Death, the plague that will wipe out half of the population of Northern Europe.

On the longest day of the summer, 12 people sit cooped up with their families in a faded Scottish cabin park. The endless rain leaves them with little to do but watch the other residents. A woman goes running up the Ben as if fleeing; a retired couple reminisces about neighbours long since moved on; a teenage boy braves the dark waters of the loch in his red kayak. Each person is wrapped in their own cares but increasingly alert to the makeshift community around them. 

Lee thought she’d lost Mal, but now she’s miraculously returned. But what happened that day on the moors? And where has she been all this time? Mal’s reappearance hasn’t gone unnoticed by MI5 officers either, and Lee isn’t the only one with questions. Julian Sabreur is investigating an attack on top physicist Kay Amal Khan. This leads Julian to clash with agents of an unknown power - and they may or may not be human. His only clue is grainy footage showing a woman who supposedly died on Bodmin Moor.

Oligarchy is Scarlett Thomas' fierce and brilliant new novel about power, privilege and peer pressure. When Natasha, daughter of a Russian oligarch, arrives for her first day at an all-girl boarding school, she finds herself thrown into a world of fierce pecking orders, eating disorders and Instagram angst. Then her friend Bianca mysteriously vanishes, and the world of the school gets ever darker and even weirder. Scarlett Thomas' first adult fiction since 2015 is a major return.

1930. A chilling encounter on London's Necropolis Railway leads to murder. At the Old Bailey, a man accused of a 'blazing car' killing escapes the gallows after a surprise witness gives sensational evidence. And journalist Jacob Flint finds himself framed for murder. To save himself, Jacob needs to discover what links these strange events to a remote estate on a northern coast, Mortmain Hall. At Mortmain Hall, an eccentric female criminologist hosts a gathering of people who have narrowly escaped the consequences of miscarriages of justice. 

What would you do if you woke up 30 years older than you were yesterday? Brooklyn, 1982. Oona Lockhart and her boyfriend are about to ring in the New Year and Oona's 19th birthday. But seconds after the New Year begins, Oona is torn from her life and everyone she loves, finding herself in her 51-year-old body 33 years into the future. The life she had is gone, and all she is a letter from herself from the previous year to guide her. Each year on the stroke of midnight she finds herself resurfacing in a different year of her own adulthood.

The town of Red Bluff, Mississippi, has seen better days, though those who've held on have little memory of when that was. Myer, the county's aged, sardonic lawman, still thinks it can prove itself - when confronted by a strange family of drifters, the sheriff believes that the people of Red Bluff can be accepting, rational, even good. The opposite is true: This is a landscape of fear and ghosts - of regret and violence - transformed by the kudzu vines that have enveloped the hills around it, swallowing homes, cars, rivers, and hiding a terrible secret deeper still.

Robin Voigt is dead. If her sister Leslie had arrived at her cramped Las Vegas apartment just hours earlier, this would have been their first reunion in a decade. In the years since Robin ran away from home as a teenager, Leslie has stayed in New Mexico, taking care of their dying father, even as she began building a family of her own. But when their father passed away, Leslie received a rude awakening: She and Robin would receive the inheritance he left them together - or not at all. Now her half of the money may be beyond her grasp.