It's Jake's birthday. He is sitting in a small plane, being flown over the landscape that has been the backdrop to his life. Now he is in his early 60s, and he isn't quite the man he used to be. He has lost his wife, his son is in prison, and he is about to lose his past. Jake has Alzheimer's.

Set against the backdrop of tabloid frenzies and an escalating national crisis, 'All is Song' is a novel about filial and moral duty, and about the choice of questioning above conforming. It is a work of remarkable perception, intensity and resonance from one of Britain's most promising young writers.

In the middle of a winter's night, a woman wraps herself in a blanket, picks up a pen and starts writing to an estranged friend. In answer to a question you asked a long time ago, she writes, and so begins a letter that calls up a shared past both women have preferred to forget.

And what will happen if he can't?Moving back in time towards the moment of Thomas Newman's death, the story is related by Reve - an extraordinary creation, a patient shepherd to his wayward flock, and a man with secrets of his own to keep.

'Easily one of the truest and best books I've read about what it's like to be alive now, in this country' Max PorterSleep. Then you think about it all the time, and the less you have the more you think about it. For Samantha Harvey, extreme sleep deprivation resulted in a raw clarity about life itself.