Mohammed Moulessehoul, a veteran Algerian army officer living in France, has already received plaudits for novels written under his nom de plume of Yasmina Khadra. He is sure to receive more for this intoxicating, utterly thrilling work.

The Sirens of Baghdad follows the journey of a young Bedouin from a forgotten desert village in Iraq who is provoked into terrorism by circumstances that corrupt his peace-loving nature. A turning point [...]

Rosie Boycott has been many things in her life: mother, feminist, hippy, divorcee and drunk. She was co-founder of the 1970s feminist magazine Spare Rib, the first woman editor of two national broadsheets, as well as editor of the Daily Express. She is now a pig breeder and agricultural enthusiast.

Her fractured, but at times fascinating, account of becoming a farmer begins slowly and impersonally, before picking up speed. Echoes [...]

Layla Baalbaki, notorious in the Arab world during the 1960s, was persecuted by the Lebanese government for her "corrupting", sexually explicit writing. But it is now, of course, mainstream. Her story "A Spaceship of Tenderness to the Moon" opens this collection, and reads not unlike Jilly Cooper - "I love his naked body," thinks her heroine in the opening scene. In the Middle East as well as the west, times [...]

"All proofs or disproofs that we tender/Of His existence are returned/Unopened to the sender." So runs the W H Auden epigraph to this priest-turned-professor's book - an apt choice for the agnostic philosophising of excommunicated Anthony Kenny.

This is no prodigal's murmur of recantation. "I am a mortal, rational animal," says Kenny, whose own spiritual story is presented in small, themed chapters that prove complete and satisfying. It is an [...]