A run-down provincial town at the end of the world. Just before Christmas Eve, sixteen-year-old Delia claims to have seen an alien, but no one believes her. This changes when a dead cow is discovered in a corn circle and when the lovely girl learns she is pregnant although she has not even kissed any of the boys in the town. When the same thing befalls Delia's best friends, Lucinda and Yvonne, not even the priest can explain this miracle. Fascinated by the outrageous happenings, and even more by the three strong-willed girls, three men attempt to unravel the mystery, each in his own way: the priest, Vic the tabloid reporter from Wellington, who needs a scoop to save his career, and the handsome new librarian, Phillip, a quiet, but fiercely intellectual man. A story with a tragic core, told like a whodunnit, whose headstrong heroes – thanks to their courageous and original initiative – overcome their limitations.

He who wants to win must be able to let go: The great new novel by Anthony McCarten. Welcome to the hardest contest of all time : five days and five nights without sleep, and all for a car. Fifty desperate people from all over London make their way to a run-down car dealership. For most of them it is their last chance in a life that so far has not treated them kindly. The rules of the game: The person who keeps their hand on the body of a Land Rover the longest will drive away as owner of the car. Who will be the last one standing? The longer the days and nights drag on the more the contestants reveal who they really are . . .

For a year, Jeff Delpe, 18, has tried to help his parents after the death of his younger brother, Donald. Now he is fed up: His father sees moving to the countryside as the only solution to the family tragedy, and his mother spends her days chatting with an unknown man named God. So Jeff decides to disappear. His new address is www.lifeoflore.com, where he is the big star of an online game and earns a lot of money. In order not to lose another son, his distraught father ends up looking for him in the place that is more foreign to him than any other. Reluctantly he sneaks into Jeff's online world... creating havoc, most of all for himself. While he fights his way up, level after level, to his son's sphere, offline he falls into an abyss and risks losing his job and his wife. Is that the end of the Delpe family? Far from it.

The new novel by Anthony McCarten, the master storyteller of fascinating changes of identity, is a tale of false and real heroes and about the challenge of tolerating doubts in oneself.

He is a shadow of his former self, drinking himself to death in Florida: Jack Kerouac, the beatnik idol who once cannibalized his friend Neal Cassady’s life to make the cult novel On the Road. One day a student of literature knocks on his door out of the blue. Her dream is to write down his life story, to be his first biographer. Jack refuses and yet he lets Jan’s admiration seduce him into looking back. A trip from which no one comes back unharmed. How much of our life is really our own and how much is only borrowed, emulated?

»Reading Kerouac taught me how to write. I knew his angels and demons. He is the hero of American Letters: a story that seeks to ask ›Who am I?‹, or perhaps even ›Who is anyone?‹.«
Anthony McCarten

Welcome to the world of Donald Delpe. He is fourteen. A skinny teenager with shoulders as scrawny as a coat-hanger. An oddball. No eyebrows, no hair, and a face like a boiled potato. He trudges through the streets of North London in his size 12 shoes. Woolen cap pulled down to his eyes, headphones on, his iPod at full volume. No chance with the girls. And to top it all off, irritating parents and a pesky older brother. But worst of all: he has cancer, and things are not looking good. The world would be a bloody awful place, but for… MIRACLEMAN, the indomitable, invincible superhero invented by Donald, whose adventures he draws all over his pad – adventures involving the superhero's never-ending battle against his archfiend GLOVE, an insane doctor. Time is running out… Donald doesn't know how much longer he has to live, but he knows that he doesn't want to die a virgin. That is his dream. MIRACLEMAN has RACHEL, even GLOVE has a super-sexy nurse. And what about Donald? A time for superheroes… Superheroes have a habit of showing up when we least expect them. But unlike comic-book superheroes with their funny costumes covered in strange symbols, real-life heroes appear totally normal. It is Donald's good fortune to be helped by a number of human superheroes in a way he would never have thought possible. But will that be enough to save Donald? Donald Delpe is 14, fatally ill, full of unfulfilled desire and a comic-book artist. The only thing he wants to know is: »What is love all about?«