Under the Skin

Michel Faber

Canongate, 2000

Paperback. 296pp.

£6.99

The book introduces to us a female character, Isserley, obsessed with picking up male hitch-hikers - just so long as they are well-muscled and alone. As the novel unfolds, the reader is drawn inexorably into a completely unexpected and increasingly terrifying world.

Beautifully written, funny, macabre, and deeply affecting, Michel Faber's debut novel is an outstanding piece of fiction that will stay with you long after you have turned the final page.

Other books by Michel Faber include The Courage Consort.

Martha Peake

Patrick McGrath

Penguin, 2001

Paperback. 340pp.

£7.99

In vast, ancient Droga Hall, young Ambrose tree is told a tale by his dying uncle. By the light of a crackling fire he hears of flame-haired Martha Peake and her grotesquely misshapen father Harry, of the tragedy which took them from the ragged coast of Cornwall to hellish Cripplegate in London, and of the strange and terrible events which tore them apart, forcing Martha to flee to the New World - a turbulent place in the throes of revolutionary ferment where her nam would become the stuff of legend.

Other books by Patrick McGrath include Asylum.

Number9Dream

David Mitchell

Hodder & Stoughton, 2001

Paperback. 419pp.

£6.99

Shortlisted for the Booker Prize.

Eiji Miyake arrives in a sprawling Japanese metropolis to track down the father he has never met, but the city is a mapless place if you are 18, broke, and the only person you can trust is John Lennon.

Other books by David Mitchell include Ghostwritten.

Vertigo

W.G. Sebald

Harvill Panther, 2000

Paperback. 263pp.

£6.99

Part fiction, part travelogue, the narrator of this compelling masterpiece pursues his solitary, eccentric course from England to Italy and beyond, succumbing to the vertiginous unreliability of memory itself. What could possibly connect Stendhal's unrequited love, the artistry of Pisanello, a series of murders by a clandestine organisation, a missing passport, Casanova, the suicide of a dinner companion, stale apple cake, the Great Fire of London, a story by Kafka about a doomed huntsmen and a closed-down pizzeria in Verona?

Other books by W.G. Sebald include The Rings of Saturn and The Emigrants.

The Fencing Master

Arturo Perez-Reverte

Harvill, 1999

Paperback. 212pp.

£6.99

On the eve of the Revolution of 1868, old-fashioned gentleman and master of fencing, Jaime Astarloa, is above the rumours of political exploit and the Queen's love life. But even he is distracted when mysterious, beautiful young Adela arrives at his door and asks him to take her on as a pupil.

Other books by Arturo Perez-Reverte include The Flanders Panel, The Dums Club and The Seville Communion.

The Blackwater Lightship

Colm Toibin

Picador, 2000

Paperback. 273pp.

£5.99

It is Ireland in the early 1990s. Three women - Dora Devereux, her daughter Lily and her granddaughter Helen - have arrived, after years of strife, at an uneasy peace. For Helen's adored brother Declan is dying, and the three of them join him in the grandmother's crumbling old house by the sea with two of his friends. These six, from different generations and with different beliefs, are forced to listen to each other and come to terms with each other.

Other books by David Mitchell include The South.