It is a constant lament that league cricket has taken a lot of the fun out of the amateur game, but this sparkling history of wandering sides, stuffed with good anecdotes, indicates that there are still many who enjoy playing friendly matches in the right spirit and with a smile on their faces. No fewer than 114 clubs are featured, many still going strong, some less so, starting with the most historic of all, I Zingari (The Gypsies), founded in 1845.

Murder, mystery and Marcos all feature as Michael Arditti's gumshoe confronts dilemmas of faith, corruption, oh, and Imelda's footwear

Adrift bearing memories of a faraway war

Scenes from the brink of catastrophe

Think of this as a tour of the world's most influential galleries: if it's hot in the art world today, it's in this book.

An insightful outsider's view of English public school? Well, almost

Beauty lies buried under brutal history

Boudoirs, bodices and battlefields

Digging over our blooming past

This superb novella, a finalist for the 2011 Pulitzer Prize, feels like a doorstopper, so huge is it in its concerns.

Amit Chaudhuri's lament for the city of his birth is also an emotional and intellectual response to modernity, the notion of progress that for him is "something that was never new".

Rachel Heath begins in similar territory to Maggie O'Farrell's Instructions for a Heatwave, with an elderly parent who goes missing one day for no apparent reason, but she lacks O'Farrell's edge and psychological complexity.

Life-affirming properties amid the building sites

This book is about being messed up, and "then being messed up even more by numbing doses of pharmaceuticals", Deborah Levy tells us in her introduction to this short, stunning read.

The rupee rules at the wicket today. But can the old game survive in a new economic era?