Riddley Walker is a novel.

Captain Najork has never quite got over the time that Tom beat him and his Hired Sportsmen at womble, muck and sneedball, so when he sees Tom hurtle past his window in a two-seater jam powered frog, he sets off in hot pursuit.

Tom is so good at fooling around that he does little else. His Aunt Fidget Wonkham-Strong, who thinks this is too much like having fun, calls upon the fearsome Captain Najork and his hired sportsmen to teach him a lesson. So the Captain challenges Tom to three rounds of womble, muck, and sneedball, certain that he will win.

Recently separated, Phil Ockerman falls hard for Bertha Strunk at a tango lesson in Clerkenwell. Bertha also bears a strong resemblance to the seventeenth-century Venetian singer and composer Barbara Strozzi (with whom Phil happens to be obsessed), to the point where Phil is no longer sure which is which.

One stormy night the sea-thing child, a draggled heap of scales and feathers, is flung up on the beach. Afraid of the wild waves and the storm skies, he meets a fiddler crab with no bow and together they avoid facing their fears. Finally, though, he finds his star, his courage and his ocean self.

With London in the grip of a heat-wave, a man takes refuge from the scorching sun in a nearby tea-shop, only to share his table with a stranger who seems determined to make conversation. Too polite to ignore him, he becomes his reluctant confidant as harmless small talk gives way to dark memories.

Phil Ockerman falls hard for Bertha Strunk at a tango lesson in a church crypt in Clerkenwell. Bertha bears a strong resemblance to the 17th century Venetian singer and composer Barbara Strozzi (with whom Phil happens to be obsessed), to the point where Phil is no longer sure which is which.

He climbs a ladder to reach another man's wife and gives himself up to her beauty, but then Pilgermann descends into a mob of peasants inspired by the Pope to shed the blood of Jews. Alone on the cobblestones, he cries out to Israel, to the Lord his God, to Abraham and Isaac and Jacob. He is answered instead by Jesus Christ.

On a day like any other, Kleinzeit gets fired. Hours later, he finds himself in hospital with a pair of adventurous pyjamas and a recurring geometrical pain. Here, he falls instantly in love with a beautiful night nurse called Sister. And together they are pitched headlong into a wild and flickering world of mystery Kleinzeit.

Angelica's Grotto is a pornographic website into which seventy-two-year-old art historian Harold Klein wanders one evening. Klein, a walking catalogue of infirmities, known to medical consultants as 'he who declines to hop the twig', may not be up to much physically but there's a lot of sex going on in his head.

A novel about bloodthirsty 1950s movie cowgirls with hallucinogenic toadsucking properties: this is seductive, fine fiction at the cutting edge of mayhem

The mouse and his child are discarded into the rubbish after Christmas. Forced to join the ruthless Manny the rat, they remain indomitable - with the help of their guardian angel, a self-absorbed frog trapped in an old glove.

New novel by prolific British novelist Russell Hoban

On 4 November 2052 Fremder Gorm is found drifting in space a few megaklicks off Badu, a planet in the Fourth Galaxy. He is the only survivor from Clever Daughter , a battered old tanker. Why did Fremder survive?

In a not-so-distant future when lions are extinct Jachin-Boaz, a middle-aged mapmaker, leaves home with the wonderful map that was to tell his son where to find everything. In the ruins of a palace at Nineveh, his son Boaz-Jachin finds the wall-carving of a great lion dying on the spear of an ancient king.

So begins the story of a tin father and son who dance under a Christmas tree until they break the ancient clockwork rules and are themselves broken. Thrown away, then rescued from a dustbin and repaired by a tramp, they set out on a dangerous quest for a family and a place of their own.

A tale of how love of Alberta reforms the uncouth Arthur who has no manners, but decides to learn them when Alberta invites him to her house for dinner.

Recently widowed and increasingly lonely, Roswell's life had arrived at the point when he felt he needed a tattoo. His ideal image was that of a bat featured on an 18th-century bowl in the Victoria and Albert Museum, but strangely, on a visit to the museum, he encountered a woman called Sarah, who was compelled by the same bat. What did it mean?

Jonathan Fitch is distraught when his girfriend, Serafina, leaves him. He is so desperate that when the peculiar Mr Rinyo-Clacton offers him one million pounds but only one year to live, he agrees to the proposal. But what happened next was even more shocking.

Angelica's Grotto is a pornographic website into which 72-year-old art historian Harold Klein wanders one evening. He first visits the Grotto after losing his inner voice , that censoring mechanism that keeps us from blurting our the first thing that pops into our heads.