The Internet Revolutionary (Octavia trilogy Book 3)

Then he ran foul of a trooper who accused him of sedition and brought him to trial. Had it not been for the testimony of neighbours Blake would have been imprisoned. Neptune's Daughter When Gwen McIvor is widowed she embarks on a new life, buys a derelict windmill and gives it a makeover, takes a lover and finds a job, so she is put in a difficult position when she discovers that her daughter Eleanor is pregnant and expects her to take over care of the infant when it is born. What will she do?

This leads to quarrels and fights and culminates in his incarceration in Bedlam, where Suki finally finds him. Only Young Set in the middle of the 18th century in the world of sugar and slavery, whores, highwaymen and rich entrepreneurs, one of whom employs Suki Brown as a wet nurse but does not know that when his own baby dies Suki puts her own infant in its place. Avalanche of Daisies The love story of 19 year old Private Steve Wilkins and 17 year old Barbara Nelson who marry despite opposition, are then parted by the Normandy invasion and by the buzz bombs and rockets that are bombarding London, but never lose their spirit nor their determination that they will build a better world when the war is over.

Gemma's Journey Newly qualified actress Gemma is on her way to an audition when she is caught up in a terrible train crash. Her leg is amputated to release her from the wreckage but she is determined to live life to the full despite her injury. Laura's Way Laura Pendleton has always considered herself a quiet librarian but when her home is threatened with compulsory purchase to make way for a new bypass she leads the campaign to oppose it and in so doing discovers a new love and the solution to an old mystery. Two Silver Crosses An advertisement in The Times asked twin sisters Virginia and Emily Holborn, last seen 10 years previously at Victoria Station boarding the boat train to Boulogne to contact solicitors.

Who were they and why were they going to France? Sixpenny Stalls Third book of the trilogy. Fourpenny Flyer Second book of the trilogy. Nan Easter extends her empire, sending newspapers daily to every major city in England and while her three children grow up, fall in love and join her in the business, she too finds a lover, a dashing cavalry officer called Calverly Leigh.

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Nan Easter is a spirited maidservant who marries above her station and, when her husband dies young in Paris during the French Revolution, sells newspapers on the streets of London to earn her living and keep her three children.. Hearts and Farthings It is London in the s; amid the fog, the noise and bustle a three-masted ship arrives in the docks. At the rail is Alberto Pelucci, an immigrant from Italy, dreaming of romance and adventure. Adventure enough is the appalling room of his first night's stay, but romance blossoms when he falls for Alice, gentle and undemonstrative and the complete opposite to his noisy exuberance.

Campbell has long been one of the masters of psychological horror, proving again and again that what's in our heads is far scarier than any monster lurking in the shadows. In this novel, the domineering old spinster Queenie dies - a relief to those around her. Her niece Alison inherits the house, but soon starts to suspect that the old woman is taking over her eight-year-old daughter Rowan.

A paranoid, disturbing masterpiece. The intellectuals' favourite children's story began as an improvised tale told by an Oxford mathematics don to a colleague's daughters; later readers have found absurdism, political satire and linguistic philosophy in a work that, years on, remains fertile and fresh, crisp yet mysterious, and endlessly open to intepretation. Alice, while reading in a meadow, sees a white rabbit rush by, feverishly consulting a watch.

She follows him down a hole Freudian analysis, as elsewhere in the story, is all too easy , where she grows and shrinks in size and encounters creatures mythological, extinct and invented. Morbid jokes and gleeful subversion abound. The trippier sequel to Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and, like its predecessor, illustrated by John Tenniel. More donnish in tone, this fantasy follows Alice into a mirror world in which everything is reversed. Her journey is based on chess moves, during the course of which she meets such figures as Humpty Dumpty and the riddling twins Tweedledum and Tweedledee.

More challenging intellectually than the first instalment, it explores loneliness, language and the logic of dreams. The year is - and other times.

Brian W Aldiss: Non-Stop (1958)

Fevvers, aerialiste, circus performer and a virgin, claims she was not born, but hatched out of an egg. She has two large and wonderful wings. In fact, she is large and wonderful in every way, from her false eyelashes to her ebullient and astonishing adventures. The journalist Jack Walser comes to interview her and stays to love and wonder, as will every reader of this entirely original extravaganza, which deftly and wittily questions every assumption we make about the lives of men and women on this planet.

Carmen Callil Buy this book at the Guardian bookshop. The golden age of the American comic book coincided with the outbreak of the second world war and was spearheaded by first- and second-generation Jewish immigrants who installed square-jawed supermen as bulwarks against the forces of evil. Chabon's Pulitzer prize-winning picaresque charts the rise of two young cartoonists, Klayman and Kavalier. It celebrates the transformative power of pop culture, and reveals the harsh truths behind the hyperreal fantasies. XB Buy this book at the Guardian bookshop.

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Clarke's third novel fuses science and mysticism in an optimistic treatise describing the transcendence of humankind from petty, warring beings to the guardians of utopia, and beyond. One of the first major works to present alien arrival as beneficent, it describes the slow process of social transformation when the Overlords come to Earth and guide us to the light. Humanity ultimately transcends the physical and joins a cosmic overmind, so ushering in the childhood's end of the title EB Buy this book at the Guardian bookshop. Chesterton's "nightmare", as he subtitled it, combines Edwardian delicacy with wonderfully melodramatic tub-thumping - beautiful sunsets and Armageddon - to create an Earth as strange as any far-distant planet.

Secret policemen infiltrate an anarchist cabal bent on destruction, whose members are known only by the days of the week; but behind each one's disguise, they discover only another policeman.

At the centre of all is the terrifying Sunday, a superhuman force of mischief and pandemonium. Chesterton's distorting mirror combines spinetingling terror with round farce to give a fascinating perspective on Edwardian fears of and flirtations with anarchism, nihilism and a world without god. Clarke's first novel is a vast, hugely satisfying alternative history, a decade in the writing, about the revival of magic - which had fallen into dusty, theoretical scholarship - in the early 19th century.

Two rival magicians flex their new powers, pursuing military glory and power at court, striking a dangerous alliance with the Faerie King, and falling into passionate enmity over the use and meaning of the supernatural. The book is studded with footnotes both scholarly and comical, layered with literary pastiche, and invents a whole new strain of folklore: This classic by an unjustly neglected writer tells the story of Drove and Pallahaxi-Browneyes on a far-flung alien world which undergoes long periods of summer and gruelling winters lasting some 40 years.

It's both a love story and a war story, and a deeply felt essay, ahead of its time, about how all living things are mutually dependant. This is just the kind of jargon-free, humane, character-driven novel to convert sceptical readers to science fiction. Coupland began Girlfriend in a Coma in "probably the darkest period of my life", and it shows. Listening to the Smiths - whose single gave the book its title - can't have helped.

This is a story about the end of the world, and the general falling-off that precedes it, as year-old Karen loses first her virginity, then consciousness. When she reawakens more than a decade later, the young people she knew and loved have died, become junkies or or simply lost that new-teenager smell. Wondering what the future holds?

It's wrinkles, disillusionment and the big sleep. It's not often you get to read a book vertically as well as horizontally, but there is much that is uncommon about House of Leaves. It's ostensibly a horror story, but the multiple narrations and typographical tricks - including one chapter that cuts down through the middle of the book - make it as much a comment on metatextuality as a novel. That said, the creepiness stays with you, especially the house that keeps stealthily remodelling itself: Carrie O'Grady Buy this book at the Guardian bookshop.

It wasn't a problem at first: But the changes don't stop there: A curly tail, trotters and a snout are not far off. Darrieussecq's modern philosophical tale is witty, telling and hearteningly feminist.

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Joanna Biggs Buy this book at the Guardian bookshop. The setting is a post-apocalyptic future, long past the age of humans. Aliens have taken on the forms of human archetypes, in an attempt to come to some understanding of human civilisation and play out the myths of the planet's far past. The novel follows Lobey, who as Orpheus embarks on a quest to bring his lover back from the dead. With lush, poetic imagery and the innovative use of mythic archetypes, Delaney brilliantly delineates the human condition.

Dick's novel became the basis for the film Blade Runner, which prompted a resurgence of interest in the man and his works, but similarities film and novel are slight. Here California is under-populated and most animals are extinct; citizens keep electric pets instead. In order to afford a real sheep and so affirm his empathy as a human being, Deckard hunts rogue androids, who lack empathy. As ever with Dick, pathos abounds and with it the inquiry into what is human and what is fake. Much imitated "alternative universe" novel by the wayward genius of the genre. The Axis has won the second world war.

Imperial Japan occupies the west coast of America; more tyrannically, Nazi Germany under Martin Bormann, Hitler having died of syphilis takes over the east coast. The Californian lifestyle adapts well to its oriental master. Germany, although on the brink of space travel and the possessor of vast tracts of Russia, is teetering on collapse.

The novel is multi-plotted, its random progression determined, Dick tells us, by consultation with the Chinese I Ching.

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Foucault's Pendulum followed the massive success of Eco's The Name of the Rose, and in complexity, intrigue, labyrinthine plotting and historical scope it is every bit as extravagant. Eco's tale of three Milanese publishers, who feed occult and mystic knowledge into a computer to see what invented connections are created, tapped into the worldwide love of conspiracy theories, particularly those steeped in historical confusion.

As "The Plan" takes over their lives and becomes reality, the novel turns into a brilliant historical thriller of its own that inspired a similar level of obsession among fans. Nicola Barr Buy this book at the Guardian bookshop. A woman drives around the Scottish highlands, all cleavage and lipstick, picking up well-built male hitchhikers - but there's something odd behind her thick pebble glasses Faber's first novel refreshes the elements of horror and SF in luminous, unearthly prose, building with masterly control into a page-turning existential thriller that can also be read as an allegory of animal rights.

And in the character of Isserley - her curiosity, resignation, wonderment and pain - he paints an immensely affecting portrait of how it feels to be irreparably damaged and immeasurably far from home.

• LOnly Child.
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• Leon Chameleon PI and the case of the missing canary eggs.
• La Rencontre Interdite (French Edition).
• Douglas Adams: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (1979).
• Burr, Hamilton, and Jefferson: A Study in Character.

Determined to extricate himself from an increasingly serious relationship, graduate Nicholas Urfe takes a job as an English teacher on a small Greek island. Walking alone one day, he runs into a wealthy eccentric, Maurice Conchis, who draws him into a succession of elaborate psychological games that involve two beautiful young sisters in reenactments of Greek myths and the Nazi occupation.

Appearing after The Collector, this was actually the first novel that Fowles wrote, and although it quickly became required reading for a generation, he continued to rework it for a decade after publication. David Newnham Buy this book at the Guardian bookshop. Before long, he is embroiled in a battle between ancient and modern deities: A road trip through America's sacred places is spiced up by some troublesome encounters with Shadow's unfaithful wife, Laura. She's dead, which always makes for awkward silences. The author of such outstanding mythical fantasies as Elidor and The Owl Service, Garner has been called "too good for grown-ups"; but the preoccupations of this young adult novel love and violence, madness and possession, the pain of relationships outgrown and the awkwardness of the outsider are not only adolescent.

The three narrative strands - young lovers in the s, the chaos of thebetweenalcoholics, English civil war and soldiers going native in a Vietnam-tinged Roman Britain - circle around Mow Cop in Cheshire and an ancient axehead found there. Dipping in and out of time, in blunt, raw dialogue, Garner creates a moving and singular novel. This classic of cyberpunk won Nebula, Hugo and Philip K Dick awards, and popularised the term "cyberspace", which the author described as "a consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions".

A fast-paced thriller starring a washed-up hacker, a cybernetically enhanced mercenary and an almost omnipotent artificial intelligence, it inspired and informed a slew of films and novels, not least the Matrix trilogy. When three explorers learn of a country inhabited only by females, Terry, the lady's man, looks forward to Glorious Girls, Van, the scientist, expects them to be uncivilised, and Jeff, the Southern gallant, hopes for clinging vines in need of rescue.

The process by which their assumptions are overturned and their own beliefs challenged is told with humour and a light touch in Gilman's brilliantly realised vision of a female Utopia where Mother Love is raised to its highest power.

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Many of Herland's insights are as relevant today as when it was first published a hundred years ago. Joanna Hines Buy this book at the Guardian bookshop. The shadow of the second world war looms over Golding's debut, the classic tale of a group of English schoolboys struggling to recreate their society after surviving a plane crash and descending to murderous savagery.

Fat, bespectacled Piggy is sacrificed; handsome, morally upstanding Ralph is victimised; and dangerous, bloodthirsty Jack is lionised, as the boys become "the Beast" they fear. When the adults finally arrive, childish tears on the beach hint less at relief than fear for the future. NB Buy this book at the Guardian bookshop. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Originating as a BBC radio series in , Douglas Adams's inspired melding of hippy-trail guidebook and sci-fi comedy turned its novelisations into a publishing phenomenon.

Non-Stop Aldiss's first novel is a tour-de-force of adventure, wonder and conceptual breakthrough. Foundation One of the first attempts to write a comprehensive "future history", the trilogy - which also includes Foundation and Empire and Second Foundation - is Asimov's version of Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, set on a galactic scale.

The Blind Assassin On planet Zycron, tyrannical Snilfards subjugate poor Ygnirods, providing intercoital entertainment for a radical socialist and his lover. The Wasp Factory A modern-gothic tale of mutilation, murder and medical experimentation, Banks's first novel - described by the Irish Times as "a work of unparalleled depravity"- is set on a Scottish island inhabited by the ultimate dysfunctional family: Frank's victims are mostly animals - but he has found time to kill a few children … Phil Daoust Buy this book at the Guardian bookshop Iain M Banks: Consider Phlebas Space opera is unfashionable, but Banks couldn't care less.

Weaveworld Life's rich tapestry is just that in Clive Barker's fantasy. Darkmans Nicola Barker has been accused of obscurity, but this Booker-shortlisted comic epic has a new lightness of touch and an almost soapy compulsiveness. Darwin's Radio Bear combines intelligence, humour and the wonder of scientific discovery in a techno-thriller about a threat to the future of humanity. Lost Souls Brite's first novel, a lush, decadent and refreshingly provocative take on vampirism told in rich, stylish prose, put her at the forefront of the s horror scene.

Rogue Moon Al Barker is a thrillseeking adventurer recruited to investigate an alien labyrinth on the moon. The Master and Margarita When the Devil comes to s Moscow, his victims are pillars of the Soviet establishment: The Coming Race In this pioneering work of British science fiction, the hero is a bumptious American mining engineer who stumbles on a subterranean civilisation.

A Clockwork Orange One of a flurry of novels written by Burgess when he was under the mistaken belief that he had only a short time to live. The End of the World News In one of the first split-screen narratives, Burgess juxtaposes three key 20th-century themes: A Princess of Mars John Carter, a Confederate veteran turned gold prospector, is hiding from Indians in an Arizona cave when he is mysteriously transported to Mars, known to the locals as Barsoom.

Naked Lunch Disjointed, hallucinatory cut-ups form a collage of, as Burroughs explained of the title, "a frozen moment when everyone sees what is on the end of every fork". Kindred Butler's fourth novel throws African American Dana Franklin back in time to the early s, where she is pitched into the reality of slavery and the individual struggle to survive its horrors.

Erewhon The wittiest of Victorian dystopias by the period's arch anti-Victorian.

The Baron in the Trees It is The Influence Campbell has long been one of the masters of psychological horror, proving again and again that what's in our heads is far scarier than any monster lurking in the shadows. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland The intellectuals' favourite children's story began as an improvised tale told by an Oxford mathematics don to a colleague's daughters; later readers have found absurdism, political satire and linguistic philosophy in a work that, years on, remains fertile and fresh, crisp yet mysterious, and endlessly open to intepretation.

Nights at the Circus The year is - and other times. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay The golden age of the American comic book coincided with the outbreak of the second world war and was spearheaded by first- and second-generation Jewish immigrants who installed square-jawed supermen as bulwarks against the forces of evil. Childhood's End Clarke's third novel fuses science and mysticism in an optimistic treatise describing the transcendence of humankind from petty, warring beings to the guardians of utopia, and beyond.

Humanity ultimately transcends the physical and joins a cosmic overmind, so ushering in the childhood's end of the title EB Buy this book at the Guardian bookshop GK Chesterton: