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Born in 1955 to a poor family in Devon Thomas refused to conform. His fierce independence, recklessness and contrariness led not only to scrapes and self-inflicted dangers but to a life enriched by the love of women. Catrina Davies came to know him in his last years and has given his life and times in his own words, creating a rich, pungent language in a knowing, poetic and poignant voice. We learn of his accumulation of engines, tools and guns, the complexity of his connection to nature, the animals he loved and his desire to hunt them.

A four-year-old girl goes missing in plain sight outside her nursery in Oxford, a middle-class, affluent area, her mother only a stones-throw away. Ryan Wilkins, one of the youngest ever detective inspectors in the Thames Valley force, dishonourably discharged three months ago, watches his former partner DI Ray Wilkins deliver a press conference, confirming a lead. Ray begins to delve deeper, unearthing an underground network of dark forces in the local area. But will he be able to get closer to the truth of the disappearance? And will Ryan be able to stay away?

Ryan Wilkins grew up on a trailer park, a member of what many people would call the criminal classes. As a young Detective Inspector, he's lost none of his disgust with privileged elites - or his objectionable manners. But he notices things; they stick to his eyes. His professional partner, DI Ray Wilkins, of affluent Nigerian London heritage, is an impeccably groomed, smooth-talking graduate of Balliol College, Oxford. You wouldn't think they would get on. They don't. But when a young woman is found strangled at Barnabas Hall, they're forced to.

Soaked in mist and old magic, Storyland tells a history of Britain and the politics of its people through medieval eyes. Grounded in research, related as fiction, it begins before the Great Flood, with a troop of African giants quarrying stones. Later, the first migrants enter the Atlantic, calling themselves the Scoti and Britons, followed by the English and the Normans, crossing the North Sea.

On the day of Henry and Keelin Kinsella's wild party at their big house, a violent storm engulfed the island of Inisrun, cutting it off from the mainland. When morning broke, Nessa Crowley's lifeless body lay in the garden, her last breath silenced by the music and the thunder. The killer couldn't have escaped Inisrun, but no-one was charged with the murder. The mystery that surrounded the death of Nessa remained hidden. But the islanders knew who to blame for the crime that changed them forever. 

Friday Black tackles urgent instances of racism and cultural unrest and explores the many ways we fight for humanity in an unforgiving world. In the first unforgettable story of this collection, 'The Finkelstein Five', Adjei-Brenyah gives us an unstinting reckoning of the brutal prejudice of the US justice system. In 'Zimmer Land' we see a far-too-easy-to-believe imagining of racism as sport. And 'Friday Black' and 'How to Sell a Jacket as Told by Ice King' show the horrors of consumerism and the toll it takes on us all.

London is in lockdown under martial law. A hospital is being urgently built by the river Thames to contain the thousands of victims of a flu-like epidemic. Construction is brought to a sudden halt when a leather holdall containing the bones of a child is unearthed from the rubble. A psychopath has been unleashed on the city; his mission is to take all measures necessary to prevent the bones from being identified. But why are he and his handlers determined to go to such murderous lengths to hide the origins of the body?

A woman walks into a tattoo parlour. But this is no ordinary woman, and this is Hackney in 2233. Jones' body is covered in tattoos but she wants to add one final inking to her gallery - a thin line of ink mixed with blood that connects her body art together, creating a unique map. As the two artists set to work, Jones tells them the story behind each tattoo. As Jones is no ordinary woman, these are no ordinary stories: each one represents a doorway to a life Jones fell into, a 'remembering'.

Every Living Thing centres on the rivalry pledged between two scientists, Linnaeus and Buffon, who, from 1743 to 1778 raced each other to complete an inventory of all life on Earth. Their focus was on scientific immortality and the core conception of our relationship to the natural world. Their catalogues were starkly different and showed a divergence of opinion on the creation of nature and humanity. Buffon advocating for a natural system of classification, while Linnaeus was dedicated to naming and classifying objects of nature.

In Wild, Amy Jeffs journeys—on foot and through medieval texts—from landscapes of desolation to hope, offering the listener an insight into a world at once distant and profoundly close to home. The seven chapters, entitled Earth, Ocean, Forest, Beast, Fen, Catastrophe, Paradise, open with fiction and close with reflection. They blend reflections of travels through fen, forest and cave, with retelling of medieval texts that offer rich depictions of the natural world.

She always went too far. DS Alexandra Cupidi has done it again. She should have learnt to keep her big mouth shut after the scandal that sent her packing - resentful teenager in tow - from the London Met to the lonely Kent coastline. Murder is different here, among the fens and stark beaches. She was the one who found the killers. The man drowned in the slurry pit had been herded there like an animal. He was North African, like many of the fruit pickers that work the fields. The more Cupidi discovers, the more she wants to ask - but these people are suspicious of questions. 

Rachel's boyfriend Frank is different from other people. His strangeness is part of what she loves about him: his innocence, his intelligence, his passionate immersion in the music of JS Bach. As a coder, Frank sees patterns in everything, but as his theories slide further towards the irrational, Rachel becomes increasingly concerned for his wellbeing. There are people Frank knows online, people who share his view of the world and who insist he has a unique role to play. In spite of Rachel's fears for his safety, Frank is determined to meet them face to face.

It has been a whirlwind few years for Li Yan and Margaret Campbell. Nowadays, both are busy juggling their huge professional workloads - Li as the newly promoted chief of Beijing's serious crime squad and Campbell as lecturer at the University of Public Security - with the day-to-day raising of their young son, Li Jon. When a desperate mother appeals to Campbell's own maternal instincts, Li agrees to look into the disappearance of a 17-year-old Beijing girl, Jiang Meilin.

In a small town where everyone knows everyone, Emma O'Donovan is different. She is the special one - beautiful, popular, powerful. And she works hard to keep it that way. Until that night.... Now she's an embarrassment. Now she's just a slut. Now she is nothing. And those pictures - those pictures that everyone has seen - mean she can never forget. For fans of Caitlin Moran, Marian Keyes and Jodi Picoult. The award-winning, best-selling novel about the life-shattering impact of sexual assault, rape and how victims are treated.

A memoir of hope, faith and love, Samra Habib's story starts with growing up as part of a threatened minority sect in Pakistan and follows her arrival in Canada as a refugee, before escaping an arranged marriage at 16. When she realised she was queer, it was yet another way she felt like an outsider. So begins a journey that takes her to the far reaches of the globe to uncover a truth that was within her all along. It shows how Muslims can embrace queer sexuality and families can embrace change.

When Dave Cullen went to Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in the wake of the shootings, he saw something radically different from what he had witnessed anywhere else in his 20 years covering the mass shootings epidemic. A handful of remarkable survivors seized control of their story, galvanised a nation and built a movement to capture its energy at lightning speed. Parkland is Cullen's intimate account of the birth of a movement and its stunning metamorphosis in the wake of the tragedy that ignited a revolution.

In a village like every other village in Germany, a scrawny boy balances on a rope between two trees. He's practising. He practises by the mill, by the blacksmiths; he practises in the forest at night, where the Cold Woman whispers and goblins roam. When he comes out, he will never be the same. Tyll will escape the ordinary villages. In the mines he will defy death. On the battlefield he will run faster than cannonballs. In the courts he will trick the heads of state.

At three o'clock in the morning, Emergency receives a call. 'This is Zara Fanshawe. Always lost and never found.' An hour later, the wayward celebrity's Rolls Royce Phantom is found abandoned in dingy Becket Street. The paparazzi go wild. For some reason, news of Zara's disappearance prompts homeless woman Lena Wójcik to search the camps, nervously, for the bad-tempered vagrant known as 'Waitrose', a familiar sight in Oxford pushing his trolley of possessions. But he's nowhere to be found either.

Clement Attlee was the Labour prime minister who presided over Britain's radical postwar government, delivering the end of the empire in India, the foundation of the NHS and Britain's place in NATO. Called 'a sheep in sheep's clothing', his reputation has long been that of an unassuming character in the shadow of Churchill. But as John Bew's revelatory biography shows, Attlee was not only a hero of his age but an emblem of it, and his life tells the story of how Britain changed over the 20th century.

The breathtaking new novel from the prize-winning author of Larchfield. Set across two continents, Tiger is a sweeping story of survival and redeeming love that plunges the listener into one of the world's last wildernesses with blistering authenticity. Frieda is a primatologist, sensitive and solitary, until a violent attack shatters her ordered world. In her new role as a zookeeper, she confronts a very different ward: an injured wild tiger. Deep in the Siberian taiga, Tomas, a Russian conservationist, fears that the natural order has toppled.