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Enjoy more sugar... Take a saunter down Silver Street once more for an early Christmas encounter with the determined heroine of The Crimson Petal and the White, and find out more of what became of her. In this collection, Michel Faber revisits the world of his bestselling novel, briefly opening doors onto the lives of its characters to give us tantalising glimpses of where they sprang from and what happened to them.

An intoxicating tome, Michel Faber's second novel takes us on a dazzling journey through the streets of Victorian London as seen through the eyes of a charismatic and well-read prostitute, Sugar. With touches of George Eliot, Charlotte Bront? and Charles Dickens, The Crimson Petal and the White is a compulsive read. 'The real joy of the book is in its acutely drawn intimacies of the late 19th-century metropolis, of the huge gap between rich and poor, between upstairs and downstairs.' The Guardian

Theo Griepenkerl is a modest academic with an Olympian ego. When he visits a looted museum in Iraq, looking for treasures he can ship back to Canada, he finds nine papyrus scrolls that have lain hidden for 2,000 years. Once translated from Aramaic, these prove to be a fifth Gospel, written by an eye-witness of Jesus Christ's last days. But when Theo decides to share this sensational discovery with the world, he fails to imagine the impact the new Gospel will have on Christians, Arabs, homicidal maniacs and Amazon customers. Like Prometheus's gift of fire, it has incendiary consequences.

In the author's first collection of short stories, the lead title is a tale of traumatised children and the internal world of the psychologist enlisted to help them. 'Fish' reads almost like science fiction, in its story of a mother protecting her child from a school of terrifying fish.