Daniel Cole

Eighteen months have passed, but the scars the Ragdoll murders left behind are reopened on a daily basis, the legacy of the infamous investigation infecting all aspects of daily life. Despite the media's best efforts, copycat murders all over the planet have proven to be nothing more than violent mutilations by the unimaginative and deranged - until a Wall Street banker is strung up impossibly across the Brooklyn Bridge, the word BAIT carved deep into his chest.

Translated into over 30 languages, Ragdoll is a rocket-paced serial killer thriller with twists and turns you won't see coming. You will not be able to stop talking about this book.

Drawing on a lifetime of writing about theatre and film, Callow takes us behind the curtain and behind the camera to introduce us to the performers and performances that have shaped him as an actor and as a public persona. They include giants like Orson Welles, Charles Dickens, Tommy Cooper, Charles Laughton and Laurence Olivier.

Hardly anyone ever leaves Des Moines, Iowa. But Bill Bryson did, and after 10 years in England he decided to go home, to a foreign country. In an ageing Chevrolet Chevette, he drove nearly 14,000 miles through 38 states to compile this hilarious and perceptive state-of-the-nation report on small-town America.

Bryan Cranston landed his first role at seven, when his father, a struggling actor and director, cast him in a commercial. Soon Bryan was haunting the local movie theater, reenacting scenes with his older brother. Acting was clearly his destiny - until one day his father disappeared. As a young man on a classic cross-country motorcycle trip, he found himself stranded at a rest area in the Blue Ridge Mountains. To pass the time, he read a tattered copy of Hedda Gabler, and in a flash he found himself face-to-face with his original calling.