RESULTS

As he grew up, Andrew O'Hagan witnessed the decline of Britain and the rise of America, the end of British industry and the rise of Blair and the tabloids. This collection of essays tells the story of that period in our cultural and political life. Through the reported essays that first made O'Hagan's name, it's a book filled both with personal story and the power of documentary witness. Opening with a major personal piece examining the journey of Britain and America since the closing of the Thatcher years, it concludes with a piece of reportage telling the story of a British and an American soldier who died in Iraq on the same day in 2006. It is a fascinating, important and timely collection from a hugely important essayist.

The Scottish poet Robert Burns has been idolised and eulogised. He has been sainted, painted, tarted up and toasted. He is famous as the author of Auld Lang Syne, and he has long since become the patron saint of the heart-sore and the hung-over. But what about the poems? Beneath the cult of Burns' Nights and patriotic yawps, there is the work itself, among the purest and most truthful created in any age. This is a Burns collection like no other: a reader's edition, made for the pleasure of reading. Novelist and Scottish essayist Andrew O'Hagan comes into company with the poet who has mattered most to him in his writing life. He selects the poems for the reader, and converses with the work, offering fragments and distilled commentary of his own. The effect is explosive, giving us Robert Burns at his very best - a political Burns, a poet who can name hypocrisy and intolerance, and point directly to the human heart.

Inspired by the life of the Scottish-child star, Lena Zavaroni, O'Hagan's novel is an account of the rise to fame of Maria Tambini, who gets her big break on a television talent show and goes on to hob-nob with the great and the good of 1970s British television from Les Dawson and Morecombe and Wise to Liberace. Amid a study of the lives of 1960s Italian immigrants to Scotland is a sharp commentary on fame, family and self-destruction.

Showcases both new writers and selections from works in progress by well-known writers. Chosen by writers Colm Toibin and Andrew O'Hagan, this is an idiosyncratic collection of short stories, poems, essays and extracts from novels in progress.