In this new coming-of-age novel, Pulitzer winner Andrew Sean Greer brings his readers deep into the Tuscan hills. Broke and directionless, a young man takes a job as the all-purpose assistant to Lisabetta, who’s known to her friends as Coco – a strong-willed, wealthy widow of great local renown. Trained as an archivist, he thinks he's been hired to catalogue the contents of her beautiful, crumbling mansion. Instead, his days are spent ridding the house of a marten, locating the antediluvian septic system, entertaining an endless carousel of guests, and attending a funeral in order to make off with the urn. As summer turns into autumn and the Italian countryside begins to work its magic on the protagonist, the secrets of Villa Coco and its inhabitants are slowly brought to light – and with them, a story of the enduring power of friendship.

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You know Batman, but how much do you know Frank Miller? In Push the Wall, the comic book master chronicles the creation of works such as Sin City, 300, Ronin, Daredevil, Wolverine and, of course, Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, which has served alongside Batman: Year One as the foundation for all Batman film and animated adaptations of the past 40 years. Miller reveals how he got his first breaks, how he poured his own life into his darkly realistic characters, how he fought against comic-book censorship of the early 1980s, and how he introduced manga-style storytelling to US readers decades before anime and manga began tiptoeing into pop culture. Push The Wall is a masterclass in the art of storytelling, and an intimate look inside the mind and life of a creative genius. With over a dozen illustrations, chosen from seminal moments from Miller's art, and organised by the 16 lessons that mean most to Miller, this book reveals the man behind some of the most exciting stories of our age.

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Douglas Stuart – Booker-winning author of Shuggie Bain and Young Mungo – is set to release his third novel this summer. Set on the Isle of Harris, John of John is a tender and devastating story of love and religion, of a father and son, art and landscape, and the corrosive effects of living a secret life. Out of money and with little to show for his art-school education, John-Calum Macleod takes the ferry home to the island of Harris to find that not much has changed except for him. In the windswept croft where he grew up, Cal resumes his old life, caught between the two poles of his childhood: his father John – sheep farmer, weaver and pillar of the local Presbyterian church – and his Glaswegian grandmother Ella, who has kept a faltering peace with her son-in-law for decades. While Cal wonders if any lonely men might be found on the barren hillsides of home, John is dismayed by his son’s long hair and how he seems unwilling to be saved. As the seasons pass, everything is poised to change as the threads holding together the fragile community become increasingly entangled.

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Woody Brown’s vibrant and profoundly moving debut novel takes readers to sun-bleached California, to a daycare centre for Los Angeles’s disabled community. Among the clients and staff are Carlos, a charismatic aide who lost his mother as a boy, and Jorge, who is gentle, nonspeaking and prone to escape despite Carlos’s best efforts. Tom, a beautiful young man with cerebral palsy, pines for Ann, the lifeguard for the summer who feels out of her depth. Then there’s Dave, the centre’s director. He wanted to be an actor, but finds himself on a very different path. At the heart of Upward Bound is Walter, a recent college student returning to the company of his peers after a family tragedy. Around him, a story unfolds of friendships forged, connections missed and the dreams – some new, others almost forgotten – that shape us.

Available at Amazon.co.uk