Liu Cixin is a renowned Chinese science fiction writer. He has won the Galaxy award nine times, and is the first ever Asian writer to win the Hugo award for Best Novel.

The Three Body Problem, translated by Ken Liu, is the first of the Three Body trilogy, formally known as the Remembrance of Earth's Past trilogy. During China’s Cultural Revolution, a secret project tries to establish contact with aliens. An alien civilisation that’s about to be destroyed receives signals sent by this project, and decides to invade earth. Human civilisation becomes divided over how to respond to this alien contact.

Richard Price, a screenwriter on the celebrated TV series The Wire, has received high praise for The Whites, his ninth novel. The Washington Post has called the work "a masterpiece", and The Sydney Morning Herald has said it is "the best American crime novel of the year."

The Whites is the story of Billy Graves, who was part of the notorious anti-crime unit, Wild Geese, in the mid-1990s. It all went wrong when he accidentally shot a ten-year-old boy and was shunted from one dead-end job to another.

Now in his early forties, Graves is a sergeant with the Manhattan Night Watch, a small band of detectives charged with responding to post-midnight felonies. It's far from a high profile job, but it all changes when the Watch is called to investigate a murder whose victim may have ties to the Wild Geese.

The story of the Wright brothers is written by the two-time Pulitzer winner David Mccullough, who is perhaps America’s leading historian, with biographies of Harry Truman and John Adams, as well as books about the Brooklyn Bridge and the Johnstown flood.

The Wright Brothers: The Dramatic Story-Behind-The-Story tells the “profoundly American story” of Wilbur and Orville Wright, two brothers who did not have money, contacts or a high quality education, but did have prodigious talent and a great dream. The book mines private correspondence, notebooks and diaries, and reveals information about the little-known contribution of the Wright sister, Katharine, “without whom things might well have gone differently” for the brothers.

Acclaimed novelist and essayist Jonathan Franzen – also infamous for his sexist statements and for saying absolutely cringeworthy things in interviews – is a writer people who like to keep on top of cultural trends are uneasy not to have read.

His latest novel, Purity, follows the life of a young woman named Pip Tyler, who is saddled with college debt and is squatting with a group of anarchists in Oakland, California. She has a troubled relationship with her mother, and doesn’t know who her father is.

Then Pip meets two German men, one of them the charismatic Andreas Wolf, and starts an internship with a Wikileaks-like project, through which she hopes to uncover the identity of her father.