Author of the National Book Award-winning All the Pretty Horses, Cormac McCarthy is one of the most provocative American stylists to emerge in the last century. The striking novel Blood Meridian offers an unflinching narrative of the brutality that accompanied the push west on the 1850s Texas frontier.

For 11 years the clock has been ticking for Russell Gaines while he's sat in Parchman Penitentiary in the Mississippi Delta. His time now up, and believing his debt has been paid, he returns home only to discover that revenge lives and breathes all around.

Set in a variety of Southern landscapes, these startling stories excavate the ambiguous terrain of the human heart. Pizzolatto finds beauty in loneliness as his characters attempt to bridge the gulfs between themselves and others, past and present, and sometimes the even wider chasms that separate them from their true selves.

A loyal street lieutenant to New Orleans’ mob boss Carlos Marcello, Guidry knows too much about the crime of the century: the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Within hours of JFK’s murder, everyone with ties to Marcello is turning up dead. Suspecting he’s next, Guidry hits the road to Las Vegas. When he spots a beautiful housewife and her two young daughters stranded on the side of the road, he sees the perfect disguise to cover his tracks from the hit men on his trail. The two strangers share the open road west - and find each other on the way.

The Fighter is a brilliant novel set against the dark and desolate backdrop of the Mississippi Delta, where Jack the Jaw, a washed-up bare-knuckle fighter, battles against decades of booze and drug abuse as he returns home to try to save all he has lost. The acres of fertile soil, the 200-year-old house, all gone. And so is the woman who gave it to him, the foster mother who now rests in hospice care, her mind eroded by dementia, the family legacy she entrusted to Jack now owned by banks and strangers.

Deputy Sheriff Lou Ford is a pillar of the community in his small Texas town, patient and thoughtful. Some people think he's a little slow and boring, but that's the worst they say about him. But then nobody knows about what Lou calls his "sickness". It nearly got him put away when he was younger, but his adopted brother took the rap for that. Now the sickness that has been lying dormant for a while is about to surface again - and the consequences are brutal and devastating.

Mickey Haller is a Lincoln lawyer, a criminal defence attorney who operates out of the back of his car, a Lincoln, taking whatever cases the system throws in his path. He's been in the business a long time, and he knows just how to work it. When a Beverly Hills rich boy is arrested for brutally beating a woman, Haller has his first high-paying client in years. The evidence mounts on the defence's side, and Haller might even be in the rare position of defending a client who is actually innocent.

One Summer: America, 1927, is the new book by Britain’s favourite writer of narrative nonfiction, Bill Bryson. Narrated by the man himself, One Summer takes you to the summer when America came of age, took centre stage, and changed the world forever. In the summer of 1927, America had a booming stock market, a president who worked just four hours a day, a semi-crazed sculptor with a plan to carve four giant heads into a mountain called Rushmore, a devastating flood of the Mississippi, a sensational murder trial, and a youthful aviator named Charles Lindbergh who started the summer wholly unknown, and finished it as the most famous man on Earth.

When small-time gunrunner Eddie Coyle is convicted on a felony, he's looking at three years in the pen - that is, unless he sells out one of his big-fish clients to the DA. But which of the many hoods, gunmen and executioners he calls his friends should he send up river? Set on the mean streets of Boston and told almost entirely in crackling dialogue by a vivid cast of cops and lowlifes, The Friends of Eddie Coyle set a standard for authentically gritty crime fiction that has never been bettered.

In How the World Thinks, Julian Baggini travels the globe to provide a hugely wide-ranging map of human thought. He shows us how distinct branches of philosophy flowered simultaneously in China, India and Ancient Greece, growing from local myths and stories - and how contemporary cultural attitudes, with particular attention to the West, East Asia, the Muslim World and Africa, have developed out of the philosophical histories of their regions.