The Rapture by Liz Jensen (Bloomsbury)

In a merciless summer of biblical heat and destructive winds, Gabrielle Fox’s main concern is a personal one: to rebuild her career as a psychologist after a shattering car accident. But when she is assigned Bethany Krall, one of the most dangerous teenagers in the country, she begins to fear she has made a terrible mistake.

Raised on a diet of evangelistic hellfire, Bethany is violent, delusional, cruelly intuitive and insistent that she can foresee natural disasters – a claim which Gabrielle interprets as a symptom of doomsday delusion. But when catastrophes begin to occur on the very dates Bethany has predicted, and a brilliant, gentle physicist enters the equation, the apocalyptic puzzle intensifies and the stakes multiply. Is the self-proclaimed Nostradamus of the psych ward the ultimate manipulator, or could she be the harbinger of imminent global cataclysm on a scale never seen before? And what can love mean in ‘interesting times’?

Liz Jensen is the author of Egg Dancing (longlisted for the Orange Prize), Ark Baby (shortlisted for the Guardian Fiction Prize and longlisted for the Orange Prize), The Paper Eater, War Crimes for the Home (longlisted for the Orange Prize), The Ninth Life of Louis Drax and My Dirty Little Book of Stolen Time. Liz divides her time between Copenhagen and London.

Netherland by Joseph O'Neil (HarperCollins)

In early 2006, Chuck Ramkissoon is found dead at the bottom of a New York canal.

In London, a Dutch banker named Hans van den Broek hears the news, and remembers his unlikely friendship with Chuck and the off-kilter New York in which it flourished: the New York of 9/11, the powercut and the Iraq war. Those years were difficult for Hans - his English wife Rachel left with their son after the attack, as if that event revealed the cracks and silences in their marriage, and he spent two strange years in the Chelsea Hotel, passing stranger evenings with the eccentric residents.

Lost in a country he'd regarded as his new home, Hans sought comfort in a most alien place - the thriving but almost invisible world of New York cricket, in which immigrants from Asia and the West Indies play a beautiful, mystifying game on the city's most marginal parks. It was during these games that Hans befriended Chuck Ramkissoon, who dreamed of establishing the city's first proper cricket field. Over the course of a summer, Hans grew to share Chuck's dream and Chuck's sense of American possibility - until he began to glimpse the darker meaning of his new friend's activities and ambitions...

Joseph O’Neill is an Irish barrister living in New York. He is the author of two previous novels, This Is The Life and The Breezes, and a memoir, Blood Dark Track.

The Swimmer by Roma Tearne (HarperPress)

Forty-three-year-old Ria is used to being alone. As a child, her life changed forever with the death of her beloved father and, since then, she has struggled to find love. That is, until she discovers the swimmer.

Ben is a young illegal immigrant from Sri Lanka who has arrived in Norfolk via Moscow. Awaiting a decision from the Home Office on his asylum application, he is discovered by Ria as he takes a daily swim in the river close to her house. He is 20 years her junior and theirs is an unconventional but deeply moving romance, defying both boundaries and cultures - and the xenophobic residents of Orford.

That is, until tragedy occurs.

Roma Tearne fled Sri Lanka at the age of ten, travelling to Britain where she has spent most of her life. She gained her Masters degree at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art, Oxford, and was Leverhulme Artist in Residence at the Ashmolean Museum. Roma was recently awarded a fellowship in the visual arts by the Arts and Humanities Research Council of Great Britain. She lives and works in Oxford.

Missing You by Louise Douglas (Macmillan)

Fen works in a bookshop and is devoted to her young son, Connor, but she keeps herself to herself. Haunted by guilt and a terrible secret, Fen lives a compromised life, isolated from her family, far from home and too afraid of the past to risk becoming close to anyone. She is constantly looking over her shoulder, knowing that one day the truth will catch up with her.

Sean, on the other hand, is enjoying a seemingly perfect life. He has a successful career, lives in his dream home and adores his beautiful wife, Belle, and their six-year-old daughter, Amy. That is until the day Belle announces she has found someone else and wants Sean to move out.

Circumstance throws Fen and Sean together. Slowly their quiet friendship turns into something much deeper and the joy they find in each other eventually gives them the confidence to trust and love again. But will the past tear them apart just as they find happiness?

Louise Douglas is a journalist and lives near Bristol with her three children. Her first novel was called The Love of My Life.

Death, War, Famine and Pestilence, known to the sentient races of the Multiverse as the Absolutes, face their greatest threat since the first race made its mark on the cosmos. The Adversary, Lucifer’s right hand and enforcer, has decided the time has come for him to take charge instead of orders. Freeing Fenris the Dread Wolf to aid him and systematically wiping out the Earth’s guardians – those individuals whose destiny it was to protect the world from extinction and slavery – he gathers his forces, poised to strike and annihilate humanity.

The world as mortal kind knows it stands to fall and the age of humans is about to end. Extinction is only moments away.

Two heroes rise to challenge the Adversary, drawn into the conflict by an Arch-Angel, two ancient Dragons and the four Horsemen of the Apocalypse themselves. Tomas – a former government operative – winds up trapped in Hell and becomes allied with a group of exiled Valkyrie; while Gwen is forced from her home in Santa Fe and is sent on a quest for the First Tree, the tree that seeded all others including the legendary tree of knowledge, and whose whereabouts has been forever lost in the mists of time and memory.

Success depends on their survival and their survival is threatened on an almost perpetual basis by the demonic minions of the Adversary, werewolf-like Hounds of Fenris and swarms of possessed, to name but a few. For the sake of the Multiverse, humanity, every other living creature and for the pure life essence of the Earth herself, let battle be joined.

James R. Bowman was born and raised in Ipswich, Suffolk. An only child with a vivid imagination and a penchant for asking too many awkward questions, he's still searching for answers to the mysteries that have haunted him all his life.  Visiting New Mexico and Arizona helped, as dealing with Native Americans had a profound effect on his thinking: 'it's not always the destination that defines us, but the willingness to actually embark upon the journey itself'.

James still lives in Ipswich with his wife, Sue, their crow, Magic, their chameleon, Gremlin, and whichever visiting animal chooses to call their house home.  He is working on the second book of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse Saga, The Emergence.

On the banks of a sprawling Brazilian river lies São Tiago. A place poised between the old ways and the new, fought over by gangsters and big business. It's a town for people with nowhere else to run; a place where Sam, a former priest, has ended up. He left England to help people, but what he's seen has scarred him, and now he cares about nothing except drinking and fishing on the great river.

But one night changes all that. When a man lies bleeding on a dirt floor, what starts as a fight to save a life becomes a battle with São Tiago's dark heart. Caught between friends and enemies, and entangled in the affections of an ex-prostitute and a predatory landowner's wife, Sam realises that in a place where life is cheap, love can be deadly. As the long dry season stretches out ahead, Sam must face his past if he is to forge the chance of a future and survive in a town without a soul.

Dan Smith's first 18 years were spent following his parents across the world to Africa, Indonesia and Brazil. He has been been writing short stories for as long as he can remember. Dan has been published in the anthology 'Matter 4' and shortlisted for the Royal Literary Fund mentor scheme and the Northern Writer's Awards. Dry Season is inspired by the four years he spent living in the interior of Brazil.

Dan lives in Newcastle with his wife and two young children.

Jake Harker is an outsider, a loser whose nose is always in a horror comic. That is until horror stops being fiction and the Pale Man and his demon Mr Pinch stop Jake on a dark, deserted road. That night, under a tree called the demon’s dance, Jake will learn the true meaning of terror.

William Hussey has a Masters Degree in Writing from Sheffield Hallam University. His novels are inspired by long walks in the lonely fenlands of Lincolnshire and by a lifetime devoted to horror stories, folklore and legends. William lives in Skegness and writes stories about things that go bump in the night...

Mr Toppit by Charles Elton (Penguin)

When the author of The Hayseed Chronicles, Arthur Hayman, is mown down by a concrete truck in Soho, his legacy passes to his widow, Martha, and her children - the fragile Rachel, and Luke, reluctantly immortalised as Luke Hayseed, the central character of his father's books. But others want their share, particularly Laurie, who has a mysterious agenda of her own that changes all their lives. For buried deep in the books lie secrets which threaten to be revealed as the family begins to crumble under the heavy burden of their inheritance. 
 
Charles Elton worked as a designer and editor in publishing before becoming a director of the literary agency, Curtis Brown. Since 1991 he has worked in television and has been Executive Producer in drama at ITV since 2000. Among his productions are the Oscar-nominated short Syrup, The Railway Children, Andrew Davies' adaptation of Northanger Abbey and the recent series Time Of Your Life.

Washed up on the shores of a remote island, two children from cultures half a world apart who have been separated from friends, family and the lives they once knew, must learn how to communicate and to overcome the guilt they both feel at surviving a terrible tsunami.

Mau has spent his whole life on a tiny island set in the southern hemisphere. He’s just spent a week on the Boys’ Island, and is about to return to his home as a man. Then the wave comes, and everything he knows and loves is washed away. Mau is the last surviving member of his nation, and alone until he finds the pale ghost girl. Daphne, sole survivor of the wreck of Sweet Judy, now jammed uselessly between the trunks of two fig trees, is certain her father, a distant cousin of the Royal Family, will come and rescue her, but for now all she has for company is the boy.

Other survivors start to arrive to take refuge on the island they all call the Nation and then raiders accompanied by mutineers from the Sweet Judy. Together, Mau and Daphne discover some remarkable things - including how to milk a pig and why spitting in beer is a good thing - and start to forge a new Nation.

Terry Pratchett is a superb satirist who has been compared to Jonathan Swift and described as the Dickens of the twentieth century. He has an enviable knack for setting his books in an alternate world that is nevertheless stuffed with cultural references - and explores beneath the humour, every aspect of human existence. He is one of today’s most popular and successful authors. Creator of the phenomenally successful Discworld® series which celebrates its 25th anniversary this year and has enjoyed global sales of over 55 million copies, he was appointed OBE in 1998. His first junior Discworld novel, The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents, was awarded the Carnegie Medal. Several of his works have been adapted for television, including The Colour of Magic and Hogfather. Terry lives in Wiltshire.

London, 1924. As Britain comes to terms with the aftermath of war, Evelyn Gifford is still haunted by the death of her younger brother James in the trenches. So when the doorbell rings late one night and a woman appears, claiming to have been James’s lover, her world is overturned – especially when the woman, Meredith, produces a child who is allegedly James’s son.

Against a chorus of disapproval from her family, Evelyn has trained as one of the country’s first female solicitors but her home life is stifling and she longs to escape. Meredith, on the other hand, is a free spirit. As Meredith manipulates her way into the family’s affections, Evelyn finds herself opening up in ways she could barely imagine. Especially when a dashing and charismatic barrister, Nicholas Thorne, offers his help with two new cases – one involving a woman accused of stealing her own baby, and the second in defence of a man who has been charged with shooting his new wife through the heart.

Suddenly vulnerable to love and change, Evelyn embarks on a journey that will challenge her own desires, her faith in justice, and the truth about her brother’s final days.

Katharine McMahon is the author of six other novels, including the bestseller The Rose of Sebastopol. She has taught in secondary schools, performed in local theatre and worked as a Royal Literary Fund fellow teaching writing skills at the Universities of Hertfordshire and Warwick. Katharine lives in Hertfordshire.