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Tamarisk Row is the story of a young boy growing up in Australia. He is a solitary-type and prefers to immerse himself in an imaginary world rather than mingle with kids his own age. His father is a compulsive gambler and because of this the world of horse racing becomes central to the boy's fantasies which feature a complex web of images involving calendars, colours, grasslands, creeks and rivers, Catholic rituals, priests' houses, horse races and racking skills, marbles, stones, freckles, books and libraries, and tunnels and secret places, that have all been used repeatedly and with remarkable consistency by Murnane in his subsequent fiction. It has been called "one of the very best books about childhood and the world as the child finds it."

So the Wind Won't Blow it All Away is hugely underrated in the Brautigan canon. The narrative is laced with a sense of sadness for a lost way of life, the loss of childhood and the death of the American gothic, something Brautigan blames on television for the way it "crippled the imagination of America and turned people indoors and away from living out their fantasies with dignity". Whereas in earlier works, Brautigan's characters viewed the world with child-like fascination, in this last book he reverses the process by examining a child's world through an adult's sad and diminishing gaze. It's a summation of all that Brautigan had previously achieved but in the harsher, colder climate of the late 20th century.

Drove House has always loomed large over village life. Boarded-up for years, it is reputed to be brimming with ghosts, and is shunned by the locals - all except Billy, for whom it has been the site of childhood dens and secret adolescent adventures. When the captivating Muriel moves in with her bohemian mother, they sweep out the ghosts and breathe new life into both the house and Billy's quiet rural existence. After an idyllic summer, though, Muriel returns to her life in London, and the newly empty Drove House becomes the backdrop for Billy's struggle to reconcile the vanishing agricultural lifestyle he has inherited with the glimpses of a baffling new way of life Muriel seemed to offer. Charting the conflict between these two competing worlds, Peter Benson's award-winning first novel is at once a lyrical portrait of the landscape of the Somerset Levels and a touching evocation of first love.

Women are dying in their millions. Some blame scientists, some see the hand of God, some see human arrogance reaping the punishment it deserves. Jessie Lamb is an ordinary girl living in extraordinary times: as her world collapses, her idealism and courage drive her towards the ultimate act of heroism. If the human race is to survive, it s up to her. But is Jessie heroic? Or is she, as her father fears, impressionable, innocent, incapable of understanding where her actions will lead? Set just a month or two in the future, in a world irreparably altered by an act of biological terrorism, The Testament of Jessie Lamb explores a young woman s determination to make her life count for something, as the certainties of her childhood are ripped apart.

Time isn't what it used to be  TIME is not what it used to be. Once a flowing river whose current we passively monitored, time is now more properly understood as something constructed by the brain and personalised by culture. We have relationships with time; we fight it and manipulate it. Into this arena steps Eva Hoffman with her poetically scientific and austerely titled Time. Hoffman is on an exploration to become intimate with time, motivated by her sense that our interaction with time has changed. Our societies have become obsessed with time and timekeeping, both in the workplace and at home. Jet travel manipulates our experience of day-night cycles and seasons, while biomedical science races to increase our lifespan yet further. At the other end of the spectrum, new technologies adapt our minds to the ever-briefer scales of micro and nano. Hoffman covers a lot of ground, from physics (why time flows in only one direction) to biology (the circadian rhythm and sleep) to neuroscience (how temporality is constructed by the brain). She addresses questions of time and consciousness, including the uniquely human ability to envision large vistas of past or future. Perceived time is illuminated by disease states such as Alzheimer's disease or Korsakoff's syndrome, in which one's time narrative becomes disorganised, and by fantasies and dreams, in which the unconscious brain does not necessarily commit to a temporal narrative at all. Hoffman also investigates individual differences in how people treat time (those who leave parties early versus those who have to be shooed out at the end) as well as cultural differences (communities in which haste amounts to a breach of ethics, for instance). A recurring theme is that the human capacity to manipulate our environment ushers in new complexities to the basic biology of time. For example, while other animals age and die on a strict schedule, humans do everything in their power to control that timing. And the book is full of

Twisted Velvet Chains is a collection of poems which follows the experiences of one woman growing up with a bipolar, drug addicted, gothic musician mother. Each poem represents specific moments of their life that embrace vivid rich imagery, and illustrate the turmoil of emotions both experience while together. The collection is divided into four parts that flow one into the other from childhood, adolescence, adulthood, and post-death.

The Harry Potter franchise has its last hurrah on Friday, and fans like me are facing a forcible graduation from the protection of a fictional universe we've always known. I was 7 when Harry began, but I'm 21 now, and it's time to broaden my horizons beyond Hogwarts. But what to pick up first? To me, the perfect post-Potter book isn't an imitator, but rather something entirely different (darker, perhaps, or less padded with childhood optimism) that's laced with threads of familiar territory. Through striking and unexpected lenses, these three books give new life to my favorite foundations of Harry's literary magic.