Nevis Gow is fifteen. For eleven years he has lived in a van with his father Marshall, travelling the country. They don't need people or school or jobs. All they need is each other. But Nevis doesn't just love his father, he's in love with him too.

Until one day Marshall crashes the van and everything changes. Stranded on a remote Highland farm amid a family overshadowed by grief, Marshall tries to steer them back to normality while Nevis fights to keep things the way they were. Soon, though, he comes to realise that nothing about his lost life in the van was quite as it seemed.

In Nevis's meticulously detailed record of events, lines blur between love and obsession, reality and wish-fulfilment, dreams and memory. Shocking, funny and poignant, this is the first novel by a young writer of remarkable talent.

Why did a gifted writer like Sylvia Plath stumble into a marriage that drove her to suicide? Why did Hilda Doolittle want to marry Ezra Pound when she was attracted to women? Why did Simone De Beauvoir pimp for Jean-Paul Sartre? The list of the damages done in each of these sexual relationships between female writers and their male literary partners is long, but each relationship provokes the same question: would these women have become the writers they were without these literary relationships?

Focusing on the diaries, letters, and journals of each woman, Between the Sheets explores nine famous literary liaisons of the twentieth century. Lesley McDowell examines the extent to which each woman was prepared to put artistic ambition before personal happiness, and how dependent on their male writing partners these women felt themselves to be. She probes the consequences of the women's codependence and reveals how in many instances, their partnerships liberated unspoken desires, encouraged artistic innovations, and even shored up literary reputations.

Reading other people's letters always provides a guilty pleasure. There's no such joy for two west Yorkshire policemen. They contemplate twenty-seven letters with the task of solving a crime: the shocking attack, just before Christmas, on a post box in the village of Burley Cross.

Nicola Barker's epistolary novel is one of immense comic range, her characteristic ambition, her shrewd humanity but, above all, about how we laugh at ourselves and fail to see the funny side. It is unlike anything else Britain's most consistently surprising writer has written: desperately readable, leaving the reader (if not the policemen) shuddering with mirth - Burley Cross Post Box Theft is a Cranford for today, albeit with a decent dose of Tamiflu, some dodgy sex therapy and a whiff of cheap-smelling vodka.

Leningrad in 1952: a city recovering from war, where Andrei, a young hospital doctor, and Anna, a nursery school teacher, are forging a life together. Summers at the dacha, preparations for the hospital ball, work and the care of sixteen year old Kolya fill their minds. They try hard to avoid coming to the attention of the authorities, but even so their private happiness is precarious. Stalin is still in power, and the Ministry for State Security has new targets in its sights. When Andrei has to treat the seriously ill child of a senior secret police officer, Volkov, he finds himself and his family caught in an impossible game of life and death - for in a land ruled by whispers and watchfulness, betrayal can come from those closest to you. A gripping and deeply moving portrait of life in post-war Soviet Russia, The Betrayal brilliantly shows the epic struggle of ordinary people to survive in a time of violence and terror.

The Swimmer is a gripping, captivating novel about love, loss and what home really means. Forty-three year old Ria is used to being alone. As a child, her life changed forever with the death of her beloved father and since then, she has struggled to find love.That is, until she discovers the swimmer. Ben is a young illegal immigrant from Sri Lanka who has arrived in Norfolk via Moscow. Awaiting a decision from the Home Office on his asylum application, he is discovered by Ria as he takes a daily swim in the river close to her house. He is twenty years her junior and theirs is an unconventional but deeply moving romance, defying both boundaries and cultures -- and the xenophobic residents of Orford. That is, until tragedy occurs.

When Leila Bell agrees to spend the summer in rural Spain with her husband Charlie, they both know this is the last chance to save their marriage. But behind the idyllic setting, old secrets and desires are set to unravel. Alone and lost, Leila turns to her long-estranged sister Kate back in London. Kate, who works in a struggling drop-in centre for troubled teenagers, inhabits a world of harsh realities and genuine threat. For Leila—eyes newly opened to the artifice and casual cruelty of her old, monied life—there is a tantalising glimpse of a better, more rewarding life. But revelations are rarely as simple as they first appear and Leila's reappearance in Kate's life after six years will have dark and unsettling repercussions for both of them.

With luminous clarity and compassion, Talitha Stevenson explores the relationships that truly matter, and evokes a world where hope can still flourish, even for those who long only to disappear.