Granta: 152 books

Throughout the 19th and 20th centuries s�ances and spiritualist meetings grew in popularity. One 'ghost' appeared more than any other: the Katie King spirit. A Ghost's Story presents the mysterious spirit writings and biographical outpourings of Katie King, this famous and enigmatic spirit...

Roman Halter is an optimistic and boisterous schoolboy in 1939 when he and his family gather behind net curtains to watch the Volksdeutsch neighbours of their small town in western Poland greeting the arrival of Hitler's armies with kisses and swastika flags. Within days, the family home has been...

Billy Palmer grew up in a sleepy rural village, but his dreams were always for something else, something beyond the world he knew. As a child, this desire for the unexplored got him into trouble, as a teenager it drove him to adventure, and as an adult it propels him across the Atlantic to the dazzling...

Siblings Ismael, Rosie and Cristina are deaf, and so are many in their Maya village. The deaf and hearing alike communicate in sign language, forming a tightly-knit community with an unsophisticated, simple lifestyle. But when Ismael gets into a fight at the local fiesta and flees the village, leaving...

Slavery in Britain did not end with William Wilberforce at the beginning of the nineteenth century. They may be largely invisible to us, but living in our midst are thousands of slaves. Rahila Gupta seeks out five escapees and persuades them to tell us their stories in this compelling book. We meet...

Every few months there’s a shocking news story about the sustained, and often fatal, abuse of a disabled person. It’s easy to write off such cases as bullying that got out of hand, terrible criminal anomalies or regrettable failures of the care system, but in fact they point to a more uncomfortable...

Somewhere in the jungles of Uganda, there hides a fugitive rebel leader: he is said to take his orders directly from the spirit world and, together with his ragged army of brutalized child soldiers, he has left a bloody trail of devastation across his country. Joseph Kony is now an internationally...

Years ago, Madame Verona and her husband built a home for themselves on a hill in a forest above a small village. There they lived in isolation, practising their music, and chopping wood to see them through the cold winters. When Mr Verona died, the locals might have expected that the legendary beauty...

JO BAKER was born and grew up in Lancaster, educated at Oxford and Belfast, and now teaches creative writing at Lancaster University. She is the author of two previous novels, both published by Heinemann. She is also a script writer, whose adaptation of Charlotte Bront?'s Shirley, has just won funding from the Irish Film Board.

David Bainbridge is a vet with a particular interest in evolutionary zoology - and he has just turned forty. As well as the usual concerns about greying hair, failing eyesight and goldfish levels of forgetfulness, he finds himself pondering some bigger questions: have I come to the end of my productive...

When the Sex Pistols swore live on tea-time telly in 1976, there was outrage across Britain. Headlines screamed. Christians marched. TVs were kicked in. Thirty years on, all those words are media-mainstream - bandied about with impunity on TV and in the papers. This is the story of our bad language...

It is 1953, and the last great transcontinental air race from London to Christchurch is about to begin, but even before the KLM plane has left the runway, it has already become famous as the 'bride flight'. Of its sixty emigrating passengers, many are brides-to-be flying out to join their fiancés...