Daphne Kouma

In the grip of existential malaise, 25-year-old Daphne moves to Berlin for a fresh start. Far from resolving her quarter-life crisis, things take a turn for the worse.

Because Daphne doesn't just have to navigate all the archetypal experiences of an outsider in the big city - acquiring friends and lovers, grappling with the language and a whole new way of life.

A series of mysterious and troubling events are in motion - starting with a brick hurled through her bedroom window in the dead of night - and a further unravelling ensues. What is at the heart of these strange events and our troubled heroine? Who is Daphne, really, and what is she running from?

A very entertaining audiobook about life at stage school in the 1950s by the author of Ballet Shoes

Rachel and Hilary are sent to live with their ambitious aunt who runs a stage school, training a troupe of dancing girls. It's heaven for Hilary who loves to perform, but quite the opposite for quiet Rachel. The last thing Rachel wants is to become one of her aunt's Little Wonders - particularly if it means behaving like their irritating show-off of a cousin . . .

A mischievous, fun and moving story about young performers, from the acclaimed author of the classic Ballet Shoes.

Renowned gamester and the first to admit that he is entirely void of a romantic disposition, Max Ravenscar regards all eligible females with indifference and unconcern. But when he meets the woman his young cousin Adrian is bent on marrying - the beautiful Deborah Grantham, mistress of her aunt's gaming house - he finds that none of his experience in risk and gambling has prepared him for such a worthy opponent.

Here are myths of the creation, of Heracles and Theseus and Perseus, the Trojan war and its origins and aftermaths, tales of Thebes and Argos and Athens.

There are stories of love and desire, adventure and magic, destructive gods, helpless humans, fantastical creatures, resourceful witches and the origins of birds and animals.This is a world of extremes, and one that resonates deeply with our own: mysterious diseases devastate cities; environmental disasters tear lives apart; women habitually suffer violence at the hands of men.

Unlike in many previous collected myths, female characters take centre stage - Athena, Helen, Circe, Penelope and others weave these stories into elaborate imagined tapestries. 

In Charlotte Higgins's thrilling new interpretation, their tales combine to form a dazzling, sweeping epic of storytelling, and a magnificent work of scholarship and imagination.

A myth-busting biography of Henrietta Maria, wife of Charles I, which retells the dramatic story of the civil war from her perspective

Henrietta Maria is the most reviled consort to have worn the crown of Britain's Three Kingdoms. Condemned as that 'Popish brat of France', a 'notorious whore' and traitor, she remains in popular memory the wife who wore the breeches and turned her husband Catholic ? so causing a civil war ? and a cruel and bigoted mother.

Leanda de Lisle's White King was hailed as 'the definitive modern biography about Charles I' (Observer). Here she considers Henrietta Maria's point of view, unpicking the myths to reveal a very different queen. We meet a new bride who enjoyed annoying her uptight husband, a leader of fashion in clothes and cultural matters, an innovative builder and gardener and an advocate of the female voice in public affairs. No bigot, her closest friends included 'Puritans' as well as Catholics, and she led the anti-Spanish faction at court linked to the Protestant cause in the Thirty Years War. When civil war came, the strategic planning and fundraising of his 'She Generalissimo' proved crucial to Charles's campaign.

The story takes us to courts across Europe, and looks at the fate of Henrietta Maria's mother and her sisters, who also faced civil wars. Her estrangement from her son Henry is explained, and the image of the Restoration queen as an irrelevant crone is replaced with Henrietta Maria as an influential 'phoenix queen', presiding over a court with 'more mirth' even than that of the Merry Monarch, Charles II.

It is time to look again at this despised queen and judge if she is not in fact one of our most remarkable.

Privilege is set in the 18th century France of an Enlightenment at odds with the absolute power of the King determined to suppress opposition on pain of death.

Delphine Vimond flees to Paris after being cast out from her home in Rouen when her father is disgraced. Into her life tumbles Chancery Smith, apprentice printer from London, sent to discover the mysterious author of potentially seditious papers marked only D.

In a battle of wits with the French censor, Henri Gilbert, Delphine and Chancery set off in a frantic search for D's author. But who is he - and does he even exist?

Mathematics shapes almost everything we do. But despite its reputation as the study of fundamental truths, the stories we have been told about it are wrong. In The Secret Lives of Numbers, historian Kate Kitagawa and journalist Timothy Revell introduce readers to the mathematical boundary-smashers who have been erased by history because of their race, gender or nationality.

From the brilliant Arabic scholars of the ninth-century House of Wisdom, and the pioneering African American mathematicians of the twentieth century, to the 'lady computers' around the world who revolutionised our knowledge of the night sky, we meet these fascinating trailblazers and see how they contributed to our global knowledge today. Along the way, the mathematics itself is explained extremely clearly, for example, calculus is described using the authors' home baking, as they pose the question: how much cake is in our cake? This revisionist, completely accessible and radically inclusive history of mathematics is as entertaining as it is important.

Nico Cloud desperately wants to be an explorer, but her parents think adventures aren't for girls. Fate intervenes when Nico chases a kitten on board a ship... and then the ship sails out to sea!

NICO IS AN ACCIDENTAL STOWAWAY.

Lucky for her, the ship belongs to a famous scientist who is on a quest for new discoveries. But clouds are brewing overhead and cunning pirates are determined to wreck the crew's mission. Can Nico steer the ship to victory and prove her parents wrong?

Freya Scott is getting married. Her wedding to Matthew, her long-term boyfriend, is the first of eight in her calendar this year, and as someone who prides herself on being meticulously organised, Freya is intent on making it the perfect day to remember.

But when Matthew calls things off hours before they walk down the aisle, Freya's entire life plan goes up in smoke. Humiliated and heartbroken, the last thing she wants is to attend a summer of other peoples' nuptials on her own.

Fortunately, her friends have an idea: together they devise a series of outrageous challenges for Freya to complete at each event, designed to distract her from Matthew and what might have been.

By the time the final wedding arrives, she's not the same woman she was at the start of the season. And maybe her own love story isn't over just yet...