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It is the aftermath of the Second World War and the country is in the grips of post-war austerity. Tommy and Duds Lethbridge have inherited a manor house in Buckinghamshire and plan on a weekend-long celebration to keep their minds off the drabness of the times. After a disastrous evening, in the early hours of New Year''s Day, one of the guests is found dead, an apparent suicide. Duds realises that as well as the police, it might be a good idea to call in the services of her good friend Lady Lupin. The Coroner seems convinced that it is indeed suicide. But Lupin is not so sure...

The scene is The Blue Boar in the High Street, Lulverton. The occasion: the stag party planned to celebrate Sergeant Bert Martin''s retirement after thirty years'' service. But Bert had still until midnight before Bradfield was due to step into his shoes. At nine twenty-five Jimmy Hooker was still very much alive, if a little the worse for wear, when he barged in on the party in the upstairs room. At closing time he was dead in the saloon. ''And I don''t think,'' said ''Pop'' Collins, licensee of the Blue Boar, ''that it was in the way of nature.''

The novel is in two sections. In the first, the narrator, Vaughn Tudor, describes the formation of the small amateur theatre group, in a sleepy village on the South Coast in the period leading up to the Second World War. But then in the second half, after the revelation of the identity of the victim and the calling in of Witting''s series detective Inspector Charlton to investigate, the reader finds out that there were rather a lot of people who had cause to visit that little theatre on the night of the murder...

John Rutherford, bookseller and fiction writer, discovers the bludgeoned corpse of a policeman. He takes the policeman''s overturned bike to rural Paulsfield police station, two miles away, to report the crime. There he finds Sgt. Martin who initiates calls to a doctor, a photographer and Inspector Charlton. But it is not these two lead detectives who are the most interesting characters of the book. That honour goes to 19-year-old bookshop assistant George; a detective story addict and keen on solving the various mysteries surrounding Johnson''s violent death.

Jonathan Smith, author of many successful novels, but also a playwright and educationalist, wrote two radio plays dramatising Betjeman''s life which were first broadcast on the BBC in 2017 and which have now been combined into a single narrative, part biography, part fiction but providing an extraordinary - and above all, highly entertaining - journey into the mind and the life of John Betjeman.

This remarkable book - an exciting and intriguing story, a blend of Hindu mythology and existentialism and told with great verve in a vigorous, direct language of many moods and voices - is one of the major fictions Alfred Doblin produced over the forty tumultuous years pre-World War 1 to post-World War 2. Doblin himself is one of the least known of the twentieth century''s great German writers, though his reputation has grown in Germany since his death in 1957: smart new editions appear every decade or so, and streams of books, journal articles and scholarly colloquia examine aspects of his art and his thinking.

Sadao Hibi''s superbly composed photographs show Japan''s best known gardens in a variety of styles, from austere compositions in stone and gravel to richly planted landscapes. The photographs, here shown for the first time outside Japan, express the extraordinary beauty and diversity of one of the world''s most ancient and revered styles of gardening. Alongside the photographs are extracts from the Sakuteiki, ''Notes on Garden Design'' written in the 11th century by the courtier and poet Tachibana no Toshitsuna.

In the 1930s, the writer and poet, Nan Shepherd was one of North-East Scotland''s best known literati, and a highly respected member of the Scottish modernist movement. Her image now graces the new Scottish [5 note; her book The Living Mountain has become a classic and sells in its thousands. Wild Geese is a fantastic new collection of her work, never-before-published, including essays, poems and short stories.

John Muir: A Miscellany is a gathering together of a rich and hugely entertaining collection of Muir''s writings. Although he is famed in the USA for both his writing and his accomplishments in helping establish the US National Parks system, he is still relatively unknown this side of the Atlantic. This book may well change this.

Latest in the much-praised "100 Best Books" series (which has previously counted down fiction, non-fiction and translations). Begins with "Pilgrim's Progress" and ends with Potter.

The legendary poet of the Orkneys - who later became one of Scotland''s most loved C20th poets - George Mackay Brown: this is his first published book of poems, here reissued with a new introduction by Kathleen Jamie and illustrations by Julia Sorrell. George Mackay Brown was born in Stromness, Orkney, on 17 October 1921. He died there in 1996. His many awards include a Society of Authors Travel Award, 1968; SAC Literature Prize, 1969; Katherine Mansfield Menton Short Story Prize, 1971; Hon. LLD from Dundee University, 1977; OBE, 1974; James Tait Black Memorial Prize 1987 (for The Golden Bird). He was nominated for the Booker Prize in 1994 for his novel Beside the Ocean of Time. He left behind him an extraordinary body of work: novels, short stories, poetry, journalism and even two operatic collaborations with Peter Maxwell Davis.

Everybody loves a list but this is a list of major ambition: namely, to select the best 100 novels in the English language, published from the late 17th century to the present day. This list has been built up week by week in The Observer since September 2013, and selected by writer and Observer editor Robert McCrum. With a short critique on each book, this is a real delight for literary lovers.