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The supposed collapse of Roman civilization is still lamented more than 1,500 years later - and intertwined with this idea is the notion that a fledgling religion, Christianity, went from a persecuted fringe movement to an irresistible force that toppled the empire. The intolerant zeal of Christians, wrote Edward Gibbon, swept Rome's old gods away, and with them the structures that sustained Roman society. Not so, argues Douglas Boin.

Unlike the rest of her family, Pearl Wolfbane is neat and tidy and is delighted to note that everyone else in Primrose Drive - the street into which her unconventional family has just moved - is normal, too. She does her best to keep her room neat and tidy amid the chaos the others are wreaking. When the Wolbanes' neighbours, the Rigid-Smythes, return home to No. 33 a few days later, Dudley Rigid-Smythe is horrified.

The language of genes has become common parlance. We know they make your eyes blue, your hair curly or your nose straight. The media tells us that our genes control the risk of cancer, heart disease, alcoholism or Alzheimer's. The cost of DNA sequencing has plummeted from billions of pounds to a few hundred, and gene-based advances in medicine hold huge promise. So we've all heard of genes, but how do they actually work?

A philosophical musing on sports and play, this wholly inspiring and utterly charming reissue of Bart Giamatti's long-out-of-print final book, Take Time for Paradise, puts baseball in the context of American life and leisure. Giamatti begins with the conviction that our use of free time tells us something about who we are. He explores the concepts of leisure, American-style. And in baseball, the quintessential American game, he finds its ultimate expression.

Bandy Dorner, home from Vietnam, awakes with his car mired in a canal, his cabin reduced to ashes, and his pregnant wife preparing to leave town with her lover. Within moments, a cop lies bleeding in the road. Eighteen years later, Bandy's son - a stranger bearing his name - returns to the town, where the memory of his father's crime still hangs thick. When an accident brings the family - paroled father, widowed mother, injured son - back together, the three must confront their past, and struggle against their fate.

There are so many ways to find out. From a cell phone. From a bank statement. From some weird supermarket encounter. One morning in early January 2005, Wendy Plump's friend came to tell her that her husband was having an affair. It was not a shock. Actually, it explained a lot. But what Wendy was not prepared for was the revelation that her husband also had another child, living within a mile of their family home. Monogamy is one of the most important of the many vows we make in our marriages.

Barely out of film school, Rob Long struck the jackpot and landed a job on the phenomenally successful TV sitcom Cheers. However, with the demise of the show, Long was faced with the question, "Is there life after Cheers?" Mercilessly witty about the daunting process of setting up a new series and getting it on air, these two audiobooks tell the absurd tale of what came next.

For film aficionados, Walter Murch is legendary - a three-time Academy Award winner, arguably the most admired sound and film editor in the world for his work on Apocalypse Now, The Godfather trilogy, The English Patient, and many others. Outside of the studio, his mind is wide-ranging; his passion, pursued for several decades, has been astrophysics, in particular the rehabilitation of Titius-Bode, a long-discredited 18th century theory regarding the patterns by which planets and moons array themselves in gravitational systems across the universe.

Breaking Mad is a therapist in your pocket - no mumbo jumbo or expensive one-on-one sessions here. Instead this is a friendly guide to help you through the worst times, written by someone who has been there and got the T-shirt and now works as a therapist herself. Find helpful advice every step of the way, from recognising and dealing with the first warning signs of anxiety to coping with a panic attack. Simple, straightforward guidance, whenever and wherever you might need it .

On a searing summer Friday, Eddie Chapman has been stuck for hours in a traffic jam. There are accidents along the highway, but ambulances and police are conspicuously absent. When he decides to abandon his car and run home, he sees that the trees along the edge of a stream have been burnt, and the water in the streambed is gone. Something is very wrong. When he arrives home, the power is out, and there is no running water. The pipes everywhere, it seems, have gone dry.

The surprising truth about how the things our ears hear affect what's between them. Every day, we are surrounded by millions of sounds - ambient ones like the rumble of the train and the hum of air conditioner, as well as more attention-grabbing sounds, such as human speech, music, and sirens. But how do we process what we hear every day? And how does it affect our brains and our minds?

As Mexico has descended into a feudal narco-state - one where cartels, death squads, the army, and local police all fight over billions of dollars in profits from drug and human trafficking - the border city of Jurez has been hit hardest of all. And yet, more than a million people still live there. They even love their impoverished city, proudly repeating its mantra: "Amor por Jurez." Nothing exemplifies the spirit and hope of Juarenses more than the Indios, the city's beloved but hard-luck soccer team.

In its long history, the English language has had many lawmakers - those who have tried to regulate or otherwise organize the way we speak. The Lexicographer's Dilemma poses a pair of questions: What does proper English mean? And who gets to say what's right? Our ideas of correct or proper English have a history, and today's debates over the state of the language - whether about Ebonics in schools, the unique use of language in a South Park episode, or split infinitives in the Times - make sense only in historical context.

In October of 1910, only four years before the outbreak of World War I, nobody knew whether planes, dirigibles, or balloons would prevail. Within a period of 17 days, this question was on prime display, as the dirigible America tried to cross the Atlantic; huge crowds gathered at horse-racing tracks to watch airplanes race around overhead; and ballooning teams from around the world took off from St. Louis in pursuit of the Bennett International Balloon Cup, given to the balloon that traveled the farthest.

Meet Charlie. People think he's crazy. But he's not. People think he's stupid. But he's not. People think he's innocent...He's the Gamal. Charlie has a story to tell, about his best friends Sinead and James and the bad things that happened. But he can't tell it yet, at least not 'til he's worked out where the beginning is. Is the beginning long ago when Sinead first spoke up for him after Charlie got in trouble at school for the millionth time? Or was it later, when Sinead and James followed the music and found each other?

This charming account of the voyage of two men in a small boat half way round the world from Plymouth to New Zealand in 1953 is a rare insight into a time, not long ago, when sailors had no GPS, electronics, radio or any of the mod cons that we take for granted today. Without lifejacket or a life raft, they 'just took what came along', hand steering all the way, navigating by sextant, hand-cranking their engine and using oil lamps for light at night and for navigation. Sailors will be staggered how primitive conditions were only a few decades ago, even though it was the norm at the time.

In May 2003, President George W. Bush declared victory in Iraq. But while we won the war, we catastrophically lost the peace. Our failure prompted a fundamental change in our foreign policy. Confronted with theshortcomings of "shock and awe", the U.S. military shifted its focus to"stability operations": counterinsurgency and the rebuilding of failed states. In less than a decade, foreign assistance has become militarized; humanitarianism has been armed.

The United States intelligence establishment is a colossus. With stations in 170 countries, armed with cutting-edge surveillance gear, high-tech weapons, and fleets of armed and unarmed drone aircraft, it commands the most extensive and advanced intel force in history. But America's spy establishment still struggles to keep pace with a host of determined enemies around the world. In Intel Wars, leading espionage historian Matthew M. Aid delivers the inside stories of our decade-long struggle against terrorism.

In six weeks during April and May 1915, as World War I escalated, Germany forever altered the way war would be fought. On April 22, at Ypres, German canisters spewed poison gas at French and Canadian soldiers in their trenches; on May 7, the German submarine U-20, without warning, torpedoed the passenger liner Lusitania, killing 1,198 civilians; and on May 31, a German Zeppelin began the first aerial bombardment of London and its inhabitants.

Before Twilight and True Blood, even before Buffy and Anne Rice and Bela Lugosi, vampires haunted the 19th century, when brilliant writers everywhere indulged their bloodthirsty imaginations, culminating in Bram Stoker's legendary 1897 novel, Dracula. Michael Sims brings together the very best vampire stories of the Victorian era - from England, America, France, Germany, Transylvania, and even Japan - into a unique collection that highlights their cultural variety.