Winner of the Man Booker Prize for Fiction 2011Beginning with an unlikely stowaway's account of life on board Noah's Ark, A History of the World in 10½ Chapters presents a surprising and subversive fictional-history of earth told from several kaleidoscopic perspectives.

Winner of the Man Booker Prize for Fiction 2011Graham Hendrick, an historian, has left his wife Barbara for the vivacious Ann, and is more than pleased with his new life. Soon Graham is pouncing on old clues, examining her books for inscriptions from past lovers, frequenting cinemas and poring over the bad movies she appeared in.

Arthur and George grow up worlds apart in late nineteenth-century Britain: Arthur in shabby-genteel Edinburgh, George in the vicarage of Staffordshire village. Arthur is to become one of the most famous men of his age, while George remains in hard-working obscurity. But as the new century begins, they are brought together by a sequence of events.

Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize for Fiction As every schoolboy knows, you can fit the whole of England on the Isle of Wight.