Blackout

Author: Gianluca Morozzi

Bologna on the 15th August. Unbearable heat, an empty city. Claudia is a young student in a hurry to return to the hospital bedside of her dying grandmother. Tomas, a young punk, on his way to elope with his girlfriend Francesca and rescue her from her abusive father. Aldo is a husband with guilty secrets that must be erased from his apartment before his wife returns. All three have an urgent need to be somewhere else. But then they're trapped in a lift and the jeopardy escalates in this dark, twisting and taught psychological: one of them is a serial killer...

Nikolai Dante: Sword of the Tsar

Author: Simon Fraser & John Burns & Robbie Morrison

Nikolai Dante has bonded with a cyborganic Weapons Crest, an alien combat computer, which allows him to extrude lethal bio-blades. Following the civil war, Dante is the most wanted man in the Empire. Now, he's battling for his life in Akita Sagawa's Pacifica stronghold against the lethal Dragon clones. The seventh book in this expansive, epic saga from the pages of 2000 AD: an exciting mix of swashbuckling, political intrigue and science-fiction.

Strange & Stranger

Author: Blake Bell

Steve Ditko is known among the cartooning cognoscenti as one of the supreme visual stylists in the history of comics, as well as the most fiercely independent cartoonist of his generation. His unique style and innovative spatial designs moved from the imaginatively hallucinatory landscapes of Dr Strange to the almost plebeian earthiness of The Amazing Spider-Man. Strange & Stranger is a coffee-table book tracing Ditko's life and career and his unparalleled stylistic innovations with lush displays of obscure and popular art from Ditko's thousands of comics.

Jambula Tree

Author: Monica Arac de Nyeko & Uwem Akpan & E.C. Osondu & Henrietta Rose-Innes & Ada Udechukwu

The Caine Prize for African Writing, Africa's leading literary prize, is for a short story published in English by a writer of African origin. Each year, the winning story and shortlisted entries are collected and published in one volume. The eighth winner is Monica Arac de Nyeko from Uganda for Jambula Tree. Chair of Judges Jamal Mahjoub from Sudan describes her story as a witty and touching portrait of a community which is affected forever by a love which blossoms between two adolescents.