Dean Williamson

Guy Martin can't sit still. He has to keep pushing - both himself and whatever machine he is piloting - to the extreme. He's a doer, not a talker. That applies whether Guy's competing in a self-supported 750-mile mountain bike race across Arizona, or trying to reach 300mph in a standing mile on the 800-horsepower motorbike he built in his shed. And during his TV adventures, travelling through Japan, winning records for the world's fastest tractor, re-creating the famous Steve McQueen Great Escape jump, discovering the toil and sacrifice of the D-Day landings and trying to cut the mustard as a Battle of Britain pilot.Guy's become a dad now and he's hoping that one day his daughter will grow up to be a better welder than he is. Oh, and he's still getting up at 5am to work on trucks in for service or to be out on his tractor, working the Lincolnshire land he's always called home.We're here for a good time, not a long time. To Guy, if it's worth doing, it's worth dying for.

On a still and frozen day between Christmas and New Year, a man's body is found lying in his ruined flat. As the state begins its detailed, dispassionate inquest, the man embarks on his last journey through a world he has not ventured into, alive, for years. In his wake, a series of fractured narratives emerge as his friends who look on from the shadows, keep vigil as the hours pass.

It's the early 1980s and rookie fireman Malcolm Castle is set to take on the biggest challenge of his life. After three years bouncing around Shropshire in the back of the country fire-engine, he's about to start driving it! So whether it is cats up trees or trees on cars, we follow Malcolm as he takes to the wheel in the country fire brigade.

Bob Paisley was the quiet man in the flat cap who swept all domestic and European opposition aside and produced arguably the greatest club team that Britain has ever known. The man whose Liverpool team won trophies at a rate-per-season that dwarfs Sir Alex Ferguson's achievements at Manchester United and who remains the only Briton to lead a team to three European Cups.

Yet, thirty years since Paisley died, the life and times of this shrewd, intelligent, visionary, modest football man have still never been fully explored and explained. Based on in-depth interviews with Paisley's family and many of the players whom he led to an extraordinary haul of honours between 1974 and 1983, Quiet Genius is the first biography to examine in depth the secrets of Paisley's success.

As war-reporter Martin Crowther arrives in Umbria, still raw from a recent assignment in Africa, and from a failing love affair back home, he is on a mission to track down two friends from a lifetime ago. But there are good reasons for their self-imposed exile, and not all of them are understood, and not all are in the past.