After Culloden, Iain MacGillivray was left for dead on Drumossie Moor. Wounded, his face brutally slashed, he survived only by pretending to be dead as the Redcoats patrolled the corpses of his Jacobite comrades. Six years later, with the clan chiefs routed and the Highlands subsumed into the British state, Iain lives a quiet life, working as a bookseller in Inverness. One day, after helping several of his regular customers, he notices a stranger lurking in the upper gallery of his shop, poring over his collection. But the man refuses to say what he's searching for and only leaves when Iain closes for the night. The next morning Iain opens up shop and finds the stranger dead, his throat cut, and the murder weapon laid out in front of him - a sword with a white cockade on its hilt, the emblem of the Jacobites. He soon finds himself embroiled in a web of deceit and a series of old scores to be settled in the ashes of war.

Oxford, Spring 1353. When young bookseller Nicholas Elyot discovers the body of William Farringdon floating in the River Cherwell, all the signs point to suicide. Soon, however, Nicholas discovers evidence of murder. Who could have wanted to kill this promising student? As Nicholas and his close friend Jordain try to unravel what lies behind William's death, they learn that he was innocently caught up in a criminal plot. When their investigations begin to involve town, university, and abbey, Nicholas takes a risky gamble - and puts his family in terrible danger in order to uncover the truth.

This is the curious story of our long love affair with books. Whether comfort reads or cult novels, we carry them with us, inhale the smell of their pages, scrawl in their margins, and protect them from book thieves and bathwater. Despite the many enemies of reading - from poverty to prejudice, from the Spanish Inquisition to Orwellian regimes - its power has endured across centuries. This is partly thanks to people like Martin Latham, the longest-serving Waterstones manager ('It's not a career, it's a philosophic path'). In 'The Bookseller's Tale', Martin uncovers the history of our collective book-obsession, and introduces us to the Canterbury bookshop that has been his working home for three decades, complete at various points with two rocking horses, a hammock for staff naps, and an excavated Roman bath-house floor.

In the spring of 2002, journalist Åsne Seierstad went to Afghanistan to live with a family for several months. Here she reveals her experiences, telling the story of Sultan Khan - who defied the authorities for 20 years to supply books to the people of Kabul - and his family.

Tim Waterstone is one of Britain's most successful businessmen, having built the Waterstones empire that started with one bookshop in 1982. In this charming and evocative memoir, he recalls the childhood experiences that led him to become an entrepreneur and outlines the business philosophy that allowed Waterstones to dominate the bookselling business throughout the country. Tim explores his formative years in a small town in rural England at the end of the Second World War, and the troubled relationship he had with his father. Before moving on to the epiphany he had while studying at Cambridge, which set him on the road to Waterstone's and gave birth to the creative strategy that made him a high street name.

This is an exhilarating and untold account of a Florentine bookseller working at the frontiers of human knowledge, and the epochal shift from script to print that defined the Renaissance. The Renaissance in Florence conjures images of beautiful frescoes and elegant buildings - the dazzling handiwork of the city's artists and architects. But equally important were geniuses of another kind: Florence's manuscript hunters, scribes, scholars and booksellers, who blew the dust off a thousand years of history and, through the discovery and diffusion of ancient knowledge, imagined a new and enlightened world. At the heart of this activity was a remarkable bookseller: Vespasiano da Bisticci. Besides repositories of ancient wisdom by the likes of Plato, Aristotle and Cicero, his books were works of art in their own right, copied by talented scribes and illuminated by the finest miniaturists.

This is an exhilarating and untold account of a Florentine bookseller working at the frontiers of human knowledge, and the epochal shift from script to print that defined the Renaissance. The Renaissance in Florence conjures images of beautiful frescoes and elegant buildings - the dazzling handiwork of the city's artists and architects. But equally important were geniuses of another kind: Florence's manuscript hunters, scribes, scholars and booksellers, who blew the dust off a thousand years of history and, through the discovery and diffusion of ancient knowledge, imagined a new and enlightened world. At the heart of this activity was a remarkable bookseller: Vespasiano da Bisticci. Besides repositories of ancient wisdom by the likes of Plato, Aristotle and Cicero, his books were works of art in their own right, copied by talented scribes and illuminated by the finest miniaturists.