Granta

Even if we don't believe that Jesus was the son of God, we tend to think he was a great moral teacher. But was he? And how closely do idealised values such as our love of the family, helping the needy, and the importance of kindness, match Jesus's original tenets?Julian Baggini challenges our assumptions about Christian values - and about Jesus - by focusing on Jesus's teachings in the Gospels, stripping away the religious elements such as the accounts of miracles or the resurrection of Christ.

On the morning of Saturday 22nd April 1978, members of an Active Service Unit of the IRA hijacked a car and crossed the countryside to the town of Lisburn. Within an hour, they had killed an off-duty policeman in front of his young son. In Anatomy of a Killing, award-winning journalist Ian Cobain documents the hours leading up to the killing, and the months and years of violence, attrition and rebellion surrounding it.

The Big Guy loves his family, money and democracy. Undone by the results of the 2008 Presidential election, he taps a group of like-minded men to reclaim their version of America. As they build a scheme to disturb and disrupt, the Big Guy also faces turbulence within his family and must take responsibility for his past actions.

Taking in the jazz and blues icons whom Jefferson idolised as a child in the 1950s, ideas of what the female body could be - as incarnated by trailblazing Black dancers and athletes - Harriet Beecher Stowe's Topsy reimagined in the artworks of Kara Walker, white supremacy in the novels of Willa Cather, and more, this breathtakingly eloquent account is both a critique and a vindication of the constructed self.

Pulsing with suspense and intellect, Biography of X is a roaring epic that plumbs the depths of grief, art and love, and that introduces an unforgettable character who shows us the fallibility of the stories we craft for ourselves.

One day in August, Jane wakes to find her husband and five-year-old son have vanished without a trace. In a single moment, all men - everywhere - have mysteriously disappeared. In the wake of this terrible loss, theories abound.

From an award-winning author comes a tale of a notorious double-murder, for readers of Truman Capote's In Cold Blood, or Emmanuel Carrere's The Adversary.

Beautifully written and unfolding against an epic American landscape, August is a compelling, authentic and poignant story of the joys and traumas that irrevocably shape us all.