Lloyd from Leith has a transfiguring passion for the unhappily married Heather. Together they explore the true nature of house music and chemical romance. Will their ardour fizzle and die or will it ignite and blaze like a thousand suns? Ecstasy follows them and others through the backstreets of Edinburgh, stifling suburban sitting rooms and the bright lights of London.

Exhilarating and dazzling, this is Welsh at his very best.

In his magnificent new work of fiction, acclaimed author William T. Vollmann turns his acute intelligence to the warring authoritarian cultures of Germany and the USSR in the twentieth century.

"Five Spice Street" is a novel about a street in an unnamed city whose inhabitants speculate on the life of a mysterious Madam X. The novel interweaves their endless suppositions into a work that is at once political parable and surreal fantasia. Some think X is 50 years old; others that she is 22.

Some believe she has occult powers and has thereby enslaved the young men of the street; others think she is a common trickster playing mind games with the common people. Who is Madam X? How has she brought the good people of Five Spice Street to their knees either in worship or in exasperation? The unknown narrator takes no sides in the endless dialectic of visions, arguments, and opinions. The investigation rages, the street becomes a Walpurgisnacht of speculations, fantasies, and prejudices.

***Stocked 29 June 2012***

A long-married couple are spending an unaccustomed week apart. The wife has flown to East Africa to grieve the death of her sister with her brother-in-law, who had suffered worse heartbreak years earlier.