Sort of Books – serie

The scientific exploration of the ocean is an extraordinary story. Hundreds have climbed Everest yet only two people have descended, in a homespun 'bathyscaphe', to the very depths of the deepest sea chasm. Amazing oases teeming with life have been found in deep sea volcanic vents but we have hardly begun to identify their resident species. We know that sea currents control our climate but we don't know how. Ocean scientists are pretty sure that we could reverse the greenhouse effect by manipulating plankton blooms with doses of iron ... but fear we might trigger an ice age in the act.Mapping the Deep is a state-of-the-ocean report on the sea and its science. After amazing you at how little you know of the ocean, Kunzig swiftly draws you into a compelling narrative of oceanographers past and present - scientists, pioneers, maverick thinkers, deep water divers and submersible pilots. Like all the best science books, this is a hugely informative page-turner that confirms Robert Kunzig's position in the top rank of popular science writers.

When ten Pakistani men walk into Kathleen Jamie's small Scottish town on a peace march, in November 2001, she is thrown back to her own travels in Northern Pakistan and a book she wrote a decade earlier.Among Muslims is the account of Jamie's time travelling alone and living among the Shia and Ismaili Muslims in the Northern Areas - the mountainous regions wedged between Afghanistan, India and China and one of the most volatile borderlands in the world.A bold, sympathetic and superbly written book, Among Muslims delves into Jamie's own Scottish upbringing to find links with the purdah-observing lifestyle of her Shia Muslim hosts. It is a privileged account from an acclaimed poet, who during her travels was often literally the only woman on the bus.Among Muslims was originally published as The Golden Peak. For this edition, Kathleen Jamie returned to Pakistan to write an Afterword and Preface.

Join Christopher Nye on his hilarious journey to become the self-styled Rocco Forte of the Road to Eastbourne...This is a book about a dream. The dream of running a restaurant. In Uckfield, East Sussex.Well, okay, Uckfield didn't actually appear in the dream. But for Christopher Nye it was the perfect choice: a small town, but not too small; a town crying out for an American-style diner; a town without a McDonald's.So here's the story of how to make it big in small-town Britain. How to find the right premises (if not quite the right location); how to motivate teenage staff while giving work experience to a haute cuisine chef; how to stay out of casualty when things get a bit 'Goodfellas' on a Friday night; how to keep your puppy hidden from the Environmental Health Inspector; and why you should never, ever, hire an Elvis impersonator on the cheap. Oh - and how to deal with McDonald's, when they realise they need an outlet in Uckfield after all.Maximum Diner is a tale of all this, served up with the crispiest fries and the strangest milkshakes on the south coast. Read it and laugh aloud. But keep that dream alive. For this might all happen to you.

MEN & DOGS and WOMEN & DOGS are a stunning pair of books. Each contains 80 images of people and their dogs, from Maria Callas to Robbie Williams, Churchill to Jilly Cooper. They are an amazing collection of photos, covering a century of dogs and their owners. But they are far more than picture books, with fascinating text, full of compelling anecdotes, and dog lore, which show people in a fascinating new light -through the story of their relationships with their pets.

Set in the Welsh Borders in 1980, "The Claude Glass" charts an unlikely friendship between two neighbours: Robin, the seven year old son of English hippie sheep farmers, and Andrew, a child so neglected by his impoverished parents that he is left almost mute, seeking solace among the farm dogs. Exploring his parents' semi-derelict farmhouse, Andrew finds an antique convex mirror - a Claude Glass - and, gazing into it, the two boys see their wild, rural landscape strangely ordered. But this comforting vision proves fragile as tensions and sexual jealousy rock the adult world around them. Written with a lyricism and freshness that echoes the work of Bruce Chatwin and Esther Freud, "The Claude Glass" draws you into the lives of its startling characters and their tarnished romance with nature.

Everybody has their secrets, and in Sophie Hannah's fantastic stories the curtains positively twitch with them. Who, for instance, is the hooded figure hiding in the bushes outside a young man's house? Why does the same stranger keep appearing in the background of a family's holiday photographs? What makes a woman stand mesmerised by two children in a school playground, children she's never met but whose names she knows well? And which secret results in a former literary festival director sorting soiled laundry in a shabby hotel? All will be revealed...but at a cost. As Sophie Hannah uncovers the dark obsessions and strange longings behind the most ordinary relationships, life will never seem quite the same again.

Dominic Pattison's life is one of level contentment: his marriage has proved happy and durable; his business, too, is successful.And then Sam Williams, a builder and ex-squaddie, enters his life. Sam claims to be his son.Yet is Sam who he says he is? After almost thirty years, Dominic can remember little of the affair with Sam's mother. His instinct is to recoil from this aggressive and volatile stranger, who could, with just a few words, take his life apart. But Sam refuses to be dismissed.With its deft switches of sympathy between menaced 'father' and rebuffed 'son' and its exploration of the intricacies of memory, Contact will resonate long with its readers.

Daniel Brennan, approaching the premature end of his life, retreats to a room in his brother's suburban house. To divert himself and to entertain Ellen, his carer, he writes the journal that is Telescope, blurring truth, gossip and fiction in vignettes of his own life and the lives of those close to him. Above all he focuses on his siblings: mercurial Celia, whose life as a teacher in Italy seems to have run aground, and kindly Charlie, the entrepreneur of the family. Enriched with remarkable anecdotes and observations on topics ranging from tattoos and Tokyo street fashion to early French photography, Telescope is a startlingly original and moving book, a glimpse of the world through the eyes of a connoisseur of vicarious experience.

Bored of the 'mango smoothie' trail and keen to spice up their Facebook albums, and perhaps also their sex lives, Jake and Will take a tour into China's jungle borderland with Burma. Their guide, however, has his own agenda and gradually the two gap-year students slip into a nightmarish spiral of murder and moral decay; their chance of survival determined by a game of hide and seek played out with deadly crossbows.A fast paced, adrenaline ride of a novel: Deliverance meets Lord of the Flies.

The small Tuscan town of Castelluccio is preparing for its annual festival, a spectacular pageant in which a leading role will be taken by the self-exiled English painter Gideon Westfall. A man proudly out of step with modernity, Westfall is regarded by some as a maestro, but in Castelluccio - as in the wider art world - he has his enemies, and his niece - just arrived from England - is no great admirer either. At the same time a local girl is missing, a disappearance that seems to implicate the artist.But the life and art of Gideon Westfall form just one strand of Nostalgia, a novel that teems with incidents and characters, from religious visionaries to folk heroes. Constantly shifting between the panoramic and the intimate, between the past and the present, Nostalgia is as intricately structured as a symphony, interweaving the narratives of history, legend, architecture - and much more - in a kaleidoscope of facts and invention.