Shaw had a breakdown, but he's getting himself back together. He has a single room, a job on a decaying London barge and an on-off affair with a doctor's daughter called Victoria, who claims to have seen her first corpse at age 13. It's not ideal, but it's a life. Or it would be if Shaw hadn't got himself involved in a conspiracy theory that, on dark nights by the river, seems less and less theoretical....

In M. John Harrison’s dangerously illuminating new novel, three quantum outlaws face a universe of their own creation, a universe where you make up the rules as you go along and break them just as fast, where there’s only one thing more mysterious than darkness.

When the English journalist named Cave visits the island of Autotelia, he finds the dockyards of the old harbor gentrified and the island’s famous ruins a tourist attraction. When he gets to know the alluring Julia Vicente, a former film actress, he discovers that her life has been marked by the childhood disappearance of her brother. Was she guilty of his death, or was it an accident after all? As Cave’s life grows entwined with hers, he tries to answer these questions, while his new lover seems determined to perpetuate the mystery.

Arkady and Boris Strugatsky are widely considered the greatest of Russian science fiction masters, yet the novel they worked hardest on, the one that was their own favorite and that listeners worldwide have acclaimed their magnum opus, has never before been published in English. The Doomed City was so politically risky that the Strugatskys kept its existence a secret even from their closest friends for 16 years. It was only published in Russia during perestroika in the late 1980s, the last of their works to see publication.

With great originality and wit, Orwell unfolds his views on subjects ranging from a revaluation of Charles Dickens to the nature of Socialism, from a comic yet profound discussion of naughty seaside postcards to a spirited defense of English cooking. Displaying an almost unrivalled mastery of English plain prose, Orwell’s essays created a unique literary manner from the process of thinking aloud and continue to challenge, move, and entertain.