This is an extraordinarily moving novel about coming to terms with loss. The monster showed up just after midnight. As they do.

But it isn’t the monster Conor’s been expecting. He’s been expecting the one from his nightmare, the one he’s had nearly every night since his mother started her treatments, the one with the darkness and the wind and the screaming…The monster in his back garden, though, this monster is something different. Something ancient, something wild.

And it wants the most dangerous thing of all from Conor. It wants the truth. Costa Award winner Patrick Ness spins a tale from the final idea of much-loved Carnegie Medal winner Siobhan Dowd, whose premature death from cancer prevented her from writing it herself.

Darkly mischievous and painfully funny, “A Monster Calls” is an extraordinarily moving novel of coming to terms with loss from two of our finest writers for young adults. This book is jacketed.

Alan Sugar was born in 1947 and brought up on a council estate in Clapton, in Hackney. As a kid he watched his dad struggle to support the family, never knowning from one week to the next if he’d have a job. It had a huge impact on him, fuelling a drive to succeed that was to earn him a sizeable personal fortune.

Now he describes his amazing journey, from schoolboy enterprises like making and selling his own ginger beer to setting up his own company at nineteen; from Amstrad’s groundbreaking ventures in hi-fi and computers, which made him the darling of the stock exchange, to the dark days when he nearly lost it all; from his pioneering deal with Rupert Murdoch to his boardroom battles at Tottenham Hotspur FC. He takes us into the world of The Apprentice, and describes his appointment as advisor to the government and elevation to the peerage. Like the man himself, this autobiography is forthright, funny and sometimes controversial.

‘A Private Empire’ is a finely grained account of one family’s experience of empire, extending over five continents and 250 years. The narrative is centred on the Scottish Macpherson family. Between the 1740s and the 1990s, six generations of the family contributed to the British empire and its legacies, recording their activities in an extraordinary archive of letters, papers and diaries, to which the author has unlimited access.

This is a cross-cultural, imperial history title which aims to appeal to readers with an interest in history who like a good story. It builds on two themes that fascinate contemporary audiences: life stories and empire. Key points: a fascinating cross-cultural, imperial history title; meticulously researched; beautifully presented

It is 1946: the war is over and three young women face a new kind of life. But peacetime brings its own pressures …Katie O’Neill’s childhood has been dominated by her temperamental mother and by frightening secrets that she barely understands. Innocent, yet hungry for love, she is easily taken in by male charm and is left outcast and alone with her young son.

Emma Brown has spent the war at home in Birmingham, longing for her husband Norm to return and meet the son he has never seen. But she soon finds that the joy of homecoming only brings a whole new set of problems. And Molly Fox, after a sad and brutal childhood, found a place to belong during the war, in the women’s army, the ATS.

Now, the women are no longer wanted and Molly finds peacetime a bleak, difficult challenge. Finding work in guesthouses and holiday camps, she keeps running from herself, in search of a place she can call home. “All the Days of Our Lives” is the story of three girls who first met in a Birmingham classroom in the 1930s, each facing life with all its joys, sorrows and surprises.