Where's your next disease coming from? From anywhere in the world—from overflowing sewage in Cairo, from a war zone in Rwanda, from an energy-efficient office building in California, from a pig farm in China or North Carolina. "Preparedness demands understanding" writes Pulitzer-winning journalist Laurie Garrett, and in this precursor to Betrayal of Trust: The Collapse of Global Public Health she shows true understanding of the patterns lying beneath the new diseases in the headlines (AIDS, Lyme) and the old ones resurgent (tuberculosis, cholera). As the human population explodes, ecologies collapse and simplify, and disease organisms move into the gaps. As globalisation continues, diseases can move from one country to another as fast as an aeroplane can fly.While the human race battles itself... the advantage moves to the microbes' court. They are our predators and they will be victorious if we, Homo sapiens, do not learn how to live in a rational global village that affords the microbes few opportunities. Her picture is not entirely bleak: epidemics grow when a disease outbreak is amplified—by contaminated water supplies, by shared needles, by recirculated air, by prostitution—and controlling disease amplifiers is within our power, a matter of money, people and will. —Mary Ellen Curtin

Ever been dumped? No? You're lying. Mike Gayle, previously a contributor to FHM and Just Seventeen magazines has dipped his pen in the inkpot of universal experience and written a comic novel underpinned by rejection and the ripples (or tidal waves) it continues to produce for years afterwards. For exactly three years afterwards in the case of Will Kelly, assigned to the "history" drawer on his 23rd birthday by Aggi, (she of the titular moniker) and who is now undergoing his 26th "celebration" alone in his bedsit in Archway, North London.

English teacher, serial smoker and serious list-maker—Will is a Numnul, to quote Gayle; a "New Nineties New Man New Lad", living an existence that screams "Single!". Can you fall in love over the telephone with someone you've never met? Should your best friend sleep with your girlfriend? And just how many presents should a platonic friend send you on your birthday? In real time the novel takes place over a weekend, but in effect it traces a journey that has led to this tumultuous birthday, when Will considers marriage, death, fatherhood and Pot Noodles (but not in that order).

Helen Fielding and Nick Hornby are two names that will understandably haunt Mike Gayle, whose prescriptive hero has been dubbed the "male Bridget Jones", but Gayle's book probably owes more to early Martin Amis, soaked as it is in a fever of male self-pity redolent of The Rachel Papers or Success, though without the literary flourishes or darkness. Ultimately My Legendary Girlfriend is pulp fiction for the Pulp generation, an old-fashioned morality tale dressed up as an enjoyable romp that should appeal to lovers of Men Behaving Badly and anyone who has suffered the ignominy of having a Sting song quoted at them to justify a break-up.—David Vincent

Mary Gentle's Ash kills her first man when she is eight, and at 20 is an experienced captain of mercenaries in the small wars of the late Middle Ages—but not quite the Middle Ages we know from history. The more scholar Piers Ratcliffe works on the evidence, the more knowledge and recorded history and the rules of evidence crumble under him—this world of Visigoths with ceramic robots and of the religion of the Green Christ is nothing he knows of. Ash hears voices, but not like those of Joan of Arc—voices that give her very specific advice about the winning of battles. Married against her will to a man who despises her, but whom she lusts after; finding that the Visigoth general is her twin; coping with the day-to-day problems of battle and siege and mayhem, Mary Gentle's Ash is a magnificent creation. This long, passionate novel, blending historical fantasy with thoughtful speculative fiction, is as smart about the minutiae of medieval war-making and manners as it is about the wilder reaches of contemporary cosmology. —Roz Kaveney

Case was the best interface cowboy who ever ran in Earth's computer matrix. Then he double- crossed the wrong people.… Winner of the Hugo, Nebula and Philip K. Dick Awards.

In Pattern Recognition, William Gibson changes focus from the not-too-distant future of his slick, influential SF novels to a netwise vision of strangeness just hours or minutes from the present.

Talented, vulnerable heroine Cayce Pollard is an adept "coolhunter" with an intuitive gift for telling whether any image or logo will be a commercial flop. The downside is her tortured sensitivity—like an allergic reaction—to logo overexposure. She can just about bear to fly BA, but not cross-promoted Virgin...

When she's consulted by top ad agency Blue Ant and gives the thumbs-down to their designer's latest concept, the edgy urban paranoia begins. A porn-site URL that she never accessed appears in her browser history, and the phone's redial button goes somewhere it shouldn't. The same faces appear around her as she flits between continents. Small world. Worryingly small.

As new vistas open in viral marketing and stealth publicity, the big admen are all too interested in Cayce's private hobby: mystery fragments of haunting movie footage, released anonymously on the Web. This unknown "garage Kubrick" auteur has spawned a fascinated, obsessive online cult. Is this a brilliant marketing operation for a still-unknown product, or something with different, dark and painful roots?

Cayce's personal quest, or flight, converges on the source of the Footage, helped and threatened by memorably offbeat characters. In Britain, these include a pettily sadistic woman who seems to know Cayce's most carefully concealed phobias, and an embittered collector of obsolete mechanical calculators made in Liechtenstein. Tokyo: a lovesick Japanese geek whose "otaku" friends find a hidden digital signature in the Footage. Moscow: a strange girl whose uncle is a fabulously wealthy—and dangerously protected—Russian mafioso...

Here's Cayce in a Japanese hotel, showing that wittily lyrical Gibson view of the world and his deft use of brand names:

She uses the remote as demonstrated, drapes drawing quietly aside to reveal a remarkably virtual-looking skyline, a floating jumble of electric Lego, studded with odd shapes you wouldn't see elsewhere, as if you'd need special Tokyo add-ons to build this at home.

This world of glittering surfaces and pulsating data connections is mined with surprises, betrayals, flurries of violence and unexpected allies. This is a very 21st century novel: compulsive reading, and vintage Gibson. —David Langford

According to Arthur Golden's absorbing first novel, the word "geisha" does not mean "prostitute," as Westerners ignorantly assume—it means "artisan" or "artist." To capture the geisha experience in the art of fiction, Golden trained as long and hard as any geisha who must master the arts of music, dance, clever conversation, crafty battle with rival beauties and cunning seduction of wealthy patrons. After earning degrees in Japanese art and history from Harvard and Columbia—and an M.A. in English—he met a man in Tokyo who was the illegitimate offspring of a renowned businessman and a geisha. This meeting inspired Golden to spend 10 years researching every detail of geisha culture, chiefly relying on the geisha Mineko Iwasaki, who spent years charming the very rich and famous.

The result is a novel with the broad social canvas (and love of coincidence) of Charles Dickens and Jane Austen's intense attention to the nuances of erotic maneuvering. Readers experience the entire life of a geisha, from her origins as an orphaned fishing-village girl in 1929 to her triumphant auction of her mizuage (virginity) for a record price as a teenager to her reminiscent old age as the distinguished mistress of the powerful patron of her dreams. We discover that a geisha is more analogous to a Western "trophy wife" than to a prostitute—and, as in Austen, flat-out prostitution and early death is a woman's alternative to the repressive, arcane system of courtship. In simple, elegant prose, Golden puts us right in the tearoom with the geisha; we are there as she gracefully fights for her life in a social situation where careers are made or destroyed by a witticism, a too-revealing (or not revealing enough) glimpse of flesh under the kimono, or a vicious rumour spread by a rival "as cruel as a spider."

Golden's web is finely woven, but his book has a serious flaw: the geisha's true romance rings hollow—the love of her life is a symbol, not a character. Her villainous geisha nemesis is sharply drawn, but she would be more so if we got a deeper peek into the cause of her motiveless malignity—the plight all geisha share. Still, Golden has won the triple crown of fiction: he has created a plausible female protagonist in a vivid, now-vanished world and he gloriously captures Japanese culture by expressing his thoughts in authentic Eastern metaphors.

First published well, in 1973 actually, this book spawned the Rob Reiner-directed cult film of the same name. It's a tongue-in-cheek fairytale of love, life, action, death and life again. Featuring the obligatory handsome Prince and supremely beautiful princess, it also boasts a Spanish sword wizard, the Zoo of Death, a chocolate-coated resurrection pill and lots of villains, who span the spectrum from evil, through even more evil to (gasp) most evil. And then there's Fezzik, the gentle giant addicted to rhyming.

William Goldman—who—who's won two Oscars for his screenwriting (Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and All the President's Men), and has endeared himself to dentists and their patients planetwide through his novel Marathon Man—has always claimed he merely abridged this text, extracting the "good parts" from an inventive yet wordy classic by Florinese literary superstar, S Morgenstern.

It has, however, been whispered in certain circles that Morgenstern himself is a figment of Goldman's ultra-fertile imagination. Read Goldman's original and special Anniversary introductions and make up your own mind. Oh—and don't forget his explanation as to why he's only "abridged" the first chapter of the sequel Buttercup's Baby—which appears here for the first time—and why it took him so long to get round to it.

Completely delightful, suitable for cynics and romantics alike. Suspension of disbelief optional. — Lisa Gee

First published well, in 1973 actually, this book spawned the Rob Reiner-directed cult film of the same name. It's a tongue-in-cheek fairytale of love, life, action, death and life again. Featuring the obligatory handsome Prince and supremely beautiful princess, it also boasts a Spanish sword wizard, the Zoo of Death, a chocolate-coated resurrection pill and lots of villains, who span the spectrum from evil, through even more evil to (gasp) most evil. And then there's Fezzik, the gentle giant addicted to rhyming.

William Goldman—who—who's won two Oscars for his screenwriting (Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and All the President's Men), and has endeared himself to dentists and their patients planetwide through his novel Marathon Man—has always claimed he merely abridged this text, extracting the "good parts" from an inventive yet wordy classic by Florinese literary superstar, S Morgenstern.

It has, however, been whispered in certain circles that Morgenstern himself is a figment of Goldman's ultra-fertile imagination. Read Goldman's original and special Anniversary introductions and make up your own mind. Oh—and don't forget his explanation as to why he's only "abridged" the first chapter of the sequel Buttercup's Baby—which appears here for the first time—and why it took him so long to get round to it.

Completely delightful, suitable for cynics and romantics alike. Suspension of disbelief optional. — Lisa Gee

Kathleen Ann Goonan's first novel is an impressive sci-fi debut, combining the themes of post-holocaust America and rampant nanotechnology. This imagined technology of molecule-sized machines and computers has excited many science fiction writers with its possibilities for total control of matter, atom by atom—including human flesh and DNA. In Goonan's future America, cities brought to life with nanotechnology or "nan" have mutated in strange, threatening ways. Rural areas, meanwhile, were devastated by nan-based plagues. Our heroine Verity, raised by a rustic Shaker community that rejects most technology, feels a mysterious compulsion towards learning machines and the closest transformed city. This is Cincinnati, whose skyscrapers have blossomed into exotic nan flowers between which huge artificial bees carry pollinating information. Verity's adventures there are complex, flickering between real-life action, virtual reality and chemically induced all-senses hallucinations. Eventually—the old, old sci-fi story—Verity realises that she herself was created to redeem the malfunctioning city. Its inhabitants are trapped in pleasant but futile cycles of dreams and play-acting (living the roles of Hemingway, Gertrude Stein and others): Verity must somehow free them. Well written and colourfully imagined, the story requires close attention to thread its maze of realities and unrealities. —David Langford

The award-winning Are You Dave Gorman? is the oddly touching story of how Perrier Award nominee Dave Gorman went in search of all the world's other Dave Gormans.

Fans of the TV version of this travelogue-cum-Arthurian-quest will know how it all began: one minute Dave and his flatmate Danny Wallace (himself a talented producer and writer) were kicking their heels in suburban London, the next they were on the night-train to Scotland to see assistant manager of East Fife Football Club David Gorman, so Dave Gorman could prove to Danny Wallace there were other Dave Gormans—and thereby win a drinker's bet. Such was the buzz Dave Gorman got from meeting Dave Gorman, he then went on a half year schlep around the world seeking out yet more Dave Gormans: in Ireland, Israel, Norway, America, with a sarcastically derisive Danny Wallace in constant and niggling attendance.

Things that work on TV—or start as drunken bets—don—don't always make the most successful of books and there are times when Are You Dave Gorman? seems a little contrived, not to say fatuously pointless. But such is the charm, candour, and wit of the two writers' alternating voices, any qualms come to seem churlish, if not thick-headed: it's the very frivolousness and absurdity of Are You Dave Gorman? that makes it so boyishly likeable. —Sean Thomas

Stephen Jay Gould needs no introduction as he is probably the best-known popularizer of the biological and earth sciences who is also a practising scientist. Likewise his ongoing series of "Essays in Natural History" should need little or no introduction. He writes a regular monthly essay for the popular science magazine Natural History (now totalling over 270), which is the house journal of the American Museum of Natural History. This is now the eighth volume of his selections from this magazine to be published in book format. In these essays he deals with topics ranging from the history of palaeontology, palaeolithic art and depiction of the giant deer's hump, to Martian canals and various biological "bit" players, such as carnivorous sponges.

His "nose" for the scent of a good story and his ability to tell one is well known, as is his erudition, wit and way with words. Gould is not just a brilliant reporter and storyteller but an active palaeobiologist with an enthusiasm for evolution. As Gould says in his opening piece, called "The Upwardly Mobile Fossils", Leonardo da Vinci used his "concept of the universe to pose the great questions, and to organize the subjects and phenomena"—so does Gould. You may not always agree with him and his erudition can verge on the wearisome, but anyone interested in our place and responsibility as humans in the natural world will find something worthwhile amongst this collection. —Douglas Palmer