A boy awakens in the Afterlife, with a pocketful of vague memories, a key, a raven, and a mysterious atlas to guide him as he sets out to piece together what happened, and try to find his way home ... Twig is alone as a newly-made street kid after his dad goes missing. But when he meets Flea, a cheerful pickpocket, the pair become fast friends. Together, Twig and Flea raise themselves on the crime-ridden streets, taking what they need and giving the rest to the even-poorer. Life is good, as long as they have each other. But then Twig wakes up in the Afterlife with just a handful of memories from Earth and one big question ... how did he get there? Loyalty will be tested, and a cruel twist of fate will lead to an act of ultimate betrayal in this epic story that spans a city, a decade, and the divide of life and death itself. From the award-winning author of The Bone Sparrow.

#1 INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER • A timeless, structure-bending classic that explores how actions of individual lives impact the past, present and future—from a postmodern visionary and one of the leading voices in fiction Featuring a new afterword by David Mitchell and a new introduction by Gabrielle Zevin, author of Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow One of the New York Times’s 100 Best Books of the 21st Century • Shortlisted for the International Booker Prize Cloud Atlas begins in 1850 with Adam Ewing, an American notary voyaging from the Chatham Isles to his home in California. Ewing is befriended by a physician, Dr. Goose, who begins to treat him for a rare species of brain parasite. The novel careens, with dazzling virtuosity, to Belgium in 1931, to the West Coast in the 1970s, to an inglorious present-day England, to a Korean superstate of the near future where neocapitalism has run amok, and, finally, to a postapocalyptic Iron Age Hawaii in the last days of history. But the story doesn’t end even there. The novel boomerangs back through centuries and space, returning by the same route, in reverse, to its starting point. Along the way, David Mitchell reveals how his disparate characters connect, how their fates intertwine, and how their souls drift across time like clouds across the sky. As wild as a video game, as mysterious as a Zen koan, Cloud Atlas is an unforgettable tour de force that, like its incomparable author, has transcended its cult classic status to become a worldwide phenomenon.

Pickard County, Nebraska, July 1979. Sheriff's deputy Harley Jensen is restless, looking for something to take his mind off the past. Pam bristles against her role as wife and mother; her husband, Rick, struggles with the wreckage of his youth. Paul Reddick, town miscreant, is flint to Harley's steel. It's just a matter of time before their conflict burns Pickard County to the ground. -- adapted from jacket

The story of Atlas and Heracles Atlas knows how it feels to carry the weight of the world; but why, he asks himself, does it have to be carried at all? In Weight — visionary and inventive, yet completely believable and relevant to the questions we ask ourselves every day — Winterson’s skill in turning the familiar on its head to show us a different truth is put to stunning effect. When I was asked to choose a myth to write about, I realized I had chosen already. The story of Atlas holding up the world was in my mind before the telephone call had ended. If the call had not come, perhaps I would never have written the story, but when the call did come, that story was waiting to be written. Rewritten. The recurring language motif of Weight is “I want to tell the story again.” My work is full of Cover Versions. I like to take stories we think we know and record them differently. In the retelling comes a new emphasis or bias, and the new arrangement of the key elements demands that fresh material be injected into the existing text. Weight moves far away from the simple story of Atlas’s punishment and his temporary relief when Hercules takes the world off his shoulders. I wanted to explore loneliness, isolation, responsibility, burden, and freedom too, because my version has a very particular end not found elsewhere. —from Jeanette Winterson’s Foreword to Weight

From the author of Apocalyptic Planet comes a vivid travelogue through prehistory, that traces the arrival of the first people in North America at least twenty thousand years ago and the artifacts that tell of their lives and fates. In Atlas of a Lost World, Craig Childs upends our notions of where these people came from and who they were. How they got here, persevered, and ultimately thrived is a story that resonates from the Pleistocene to our modern era. The lower sea levels of the Ice Age exposed a vast land bridge between Asia and North America, but the land bridge was not the only way across. Different people arrived from different directions, and not all at the same time. The first explorers of the New World were few, their encampments fleeting. The continent they reached had no people but was inhabited by megafauna—mastodons, giant bears, mammoths, saber-toothed cats, five-hundred-pound panthers, enormous bison, and sloths that stood one story tall. The first people were hunters—Paleolithic spear points are still encrusted with the proteins of their prey—but they were wildly outnumbered and many would themselves have been prey to the much larger animals. Atlas of a Lost World chronicles the last millennia of the Ice Age, the violent oscillations and retreat of glaciers, the clues and traces that document the first encounters of early humans, and the animals whose presence governed the humans’ chances for survival. A blend of science and personal narrative reveals how much has changed since the time of mammoth hunters, and how little. Across unexplored landscapes yet to be peopled, readers will see the Ice Age, and their own age, in a whole new light.

When seventeen-year-old Anju wins an all-expenses-paid scholarship to study in New York for a year, she jumps at the chance to leave her home town in Kerala and embrace all that America has to offer. But there are bittersweet consequences ahead, not only for Anju, but also for the father and older sister she has left behind. For when the lie behnd Anju's scholarship is suddenly revealed she is left without a visa and, too proud to confess to her family, goes into hiding. She accepts a job in a suburban beauty salon and the offer of a roof over her head from the kindly Bird, who strangely seems to know more about Anju's past than Anju herself has told her. Meanwhile, Anju's family are on a mission to find her, trying not to contemplate the possibility that they might never see her again… Atlas of Unknownsis vibrant, moving and breathtakingly told -- the debut of an irresistible and utterly original new voice in fiction.

Beautiful, magical and moving, this is a SKELLIG for a new generation, from the author of THE BONE SPARROW, shortlisted for the Carnegie Medal 2017 and the Guardian Children's Fiction Prize 2016. Some stories need to be told... A moving, beautifully-written and poignant novel about child trafficking and the search for freedom. Kept by a ruthless gang, three children manage to escape from slavery. But freedom isn't just waiting on the outside. Separated, scared and looking after a small child, Esra will do whatever she can to reunite with her friend Miran, who was captured by the police - the police who she mustn't trust. Hiding in the shadows of the forest, Esra is found by a local boy, a boy with his own story. Together they will create a man out of mud. A man who will come to life and lead them through a dark labyrinth of tunnels until they finally have the courage the step above ground. Until they finally have the courage to speak their story. Until they finally have the courage to be free.