THE GATHERING is a family epic, condensed and clarified through the remarkable lens of Anne Enright's unblinking eye. It is also a sexual history: tracing the line of hurt and redemption through three generations - starting with the grandmother, Ada Merriman - showing how memories warp and family secrets fester. This is a novel about love and disappointment, about thwarted lust and limitless desire, and how our fate is written in the body, not in the stars. THE GATHERING sends fresh blood through the Irish literary tradition, combining the lyricism of the old with the shock of the new. As in all Anne Enright's work, fiction and non-fiction, this is a book of daring, wit and insight: her distinctive intelligence twisting the world a fraction, and giving it back to us in a new and unforgettable light.

At the foot of Mount Kanchenjunga in the Himalayas, lives an embittered old judge who wants nothing more than to retire in peace. But with the arrival of his orphaned granddaughter, Sai, and his cook's son trying to stay a step ahead of US immigration services, this is far from easy. When a Nepalese insurgency threatens Sai's blossoming romance with her handsome tutor they are forced to consider their colliding interests. The judge must revisit his past, his own journey and his role in this grasping world of conflicting desires - every moment holding out the possibility for hope or betrayal.

When Max Morden returns to the coastal town where he spent a holiday in his youth, he is both escaping from a recent loss and confronting a distant trauma. The grace family appeared that long-ago summer as if from another world. Drawn to the grace twins, chloe and myles, max soon finds himself entangled in their lives.

It is the summer of 1983, and young Nick Guest has moved into an attic room in the Notting Hill home of the Feddens: Gerald, an ambitious new Tory MP, his wealthy wife Rachel, and their children Toby and Catherine. As the boom-years of the mid-80s unfold, Nick, an innocent in matters of politics and money, becomes caught up in the Feddens' world, with its grand parties, its holidays in the Dordogne, its parade of monsters both comic and threatening. In an era of endless possibility, Nick finds himself able to pursue his own private obsession, with beauty - a prize as compelling to him as power and riches are to his friends. An affair with a young black clerk gives him his first experience of romance; but it is a later affair, with a beautiful millionaire, that will change his life more drastically and bring into question the larger fantasies of a ruthless decade.

Fifteen-year-old Vernon Gregory Little is in trouble. And it has something to do with the recent massacre of 16 students at his high school. News of the tragedy serves as open invitation to the media and soon the quirky backwater of Martirio is flooded with wannabe CNN hacks all too keen to lay the blame for the killings at Vernon's feet. Eulalio Ledesma, in particular, sniffs out his opportunity to make good at Vernon's expense and soon Vernon finds himself drawn into a series of increasingly bizarre (to say nothing of life-threatening) circumstances.

A tale of disaster at sea. The only survivor from the wreck of a cargo ship on the Pacific, 16-year-old Pi spends 221 days on a lifeboat with a hyena, a zebra, a female orang-utan and a 450-pound Royal Bengal Tiger called Richard Parker.

With Ned Kelly as narrator, this is the heart-rending story of a young boy growing up in the grinding poverty of colonial Victoria and of a young man defiantly resisting the wealth and power of those who wish to destroy him.

Even now, at the age of 82, Iris lives in the shadow cast by her younger sister Laura. Now poor and trying to cope with a failing body, Iris reflects on her far from exemplary life, in particular the events surrounding her sister's tragic death and the novel which earned her such notoriety.

A divorced, middle-aged English professor finds himself increasingly unable to resist affairs with his female students. When discovered by the college authorities he is expected to apologize to save his job, but instead he refuses and resigns.