High up in the Conrad Flats that loom bleakly over Acton, two future stars of the literary scene - or so they assume - are hard at work, tapping out words of wit and brilliance between ill-paid jobs writing captions for the Cat Calendar 1985 and blurbs for trashy novels with titles like Brothel of the Vampire. Just twenty-one but already well entrenched in a life eked out on dole payments, pints and dollops of porridge and pasta, Llewellyn and Cunningham don't have it too bad: a pub on the corner, a misdirected parental allowance, and the delightful company of Aoife, Llewellyn's model fiancée, mother of his young baby - and the woman of Cunningham's increasingly vivid dreams. Alan Warner's superb new novel sees the author of Morvern Callar at the top of his game.

A battle lost. A daring escape. A long walk into obscurity. The ultimate failure…In the aftermath of the disastrous Battle of Culloden, a lonely figure takes flight with a small band of companions through the islands and mountains of the Hebrides. His name is Charles Edward Stuart: better known today as Bonnie Prince Charlie. He had come to the country to take the throne. Now he is leaving in exile and abject defeat.In prose that is by turns poetic, comic, macabre, haunting and humane, multi- award-winning author Alan Warner traces the frantic last journey through Scotland of a man who history will come to define for his failure.'Written in carefully crafted prose shot through with cleverly-deployed alliteration and assonance, this reimagining of Charles Edward Stuart’s escape from Culloden is a triumph' – Stuart Kelly, The Scotsman

NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTUREThe choir from Our Lady of Perpetual Succour School for Girls is being bussed to the national finals in the big, big city. It's an important day for The Sopranos, with pub-crawling, shoplifting and body-piercing being the top priorities. And with a newly anchored nuclear sub in the bay, the Man Trap disco will be full of submariners on shore-leave tonight. There is no time for delays – or even for winning...But after the fifth bottle of alco-pop on the bus it's clear that all is not going to plan, for anyone. The Sopranos are never going to be the same.

'A sequel to his acclaimed début Morvern Callar, These Demented Lands, confirms that Alan Warner boasts an extravagant talent... This novel is set on a Scottish island that contains a variety of weird landmarks and an hallucinogenic cast of characters - including a DJ who wants to set up the rave to end all raves, a visitor whose job is to assess candidates for sainthood and the wonderfully unfazed heroine, Morvern Callar' - Harry Ritchie, Mail on Sunday A powerful, hilarious and original novel about the intersection of lives in the rough and ready communities and wild landscapes of the Scottish Highlands.