Stretching from Babylon to Google Earth, this truly original work of global history will - literally - alter your world-view. Pace EC Bentley, chaps make maps.

The Week in Books

Stalled by downturns, delays and even the threat of a boycott by artists over the conditions of the building workers, Abu Dhabi’s masterplan to convert a vast sandy swathe of Saadiyat Island into a world-beating “cultural quarter” has sometimes looked like a desert mirage.

A closely-researched documentary novel; a bereft mother's quest for her long-lost child; a keen investigation into the disputed borders between history and fiction: Trieste, on the shortlist for this year's Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, moves and stirs on several fronts.

If you have little love for recent poetry, wake up and smell James Fenton's Yellow Tulips.

For his third autobiography, O'Grady revisits the Eighties, and the ascent of his alter ego Lily Savage – the brassy, backchatting "Blonde Bombsite" from Liverpool – from sawdust to stardust.

The Week in Books

Visionary photographer-traveller Sebastião Salgado's Genesis delivers an outsize achievement wrapped in a thumping paradox.

Something seems to have gone awry with the selectors' compass from time to time

From the First World War to the 1970s and beyond, Self's rich Modernist triptych carries his prowess in fiction to a new level.