Jean-Paul Sartre said, “Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does.” Four amazing novels confront chance and choice, the intangible links between cause and effect and how we shape and are shaped by the people in our lives.

By turns blackly comic, thought-provoking and harrowing, Harmless, the debut novel by James Grainger, winner of the ReLit Award for Short Fiction, is set over the course of a single day and night. At a remote farm, a group of old friends gather to catch up, but things take a terrifying turn when the adults discover their two teenage daughters are missing.

The inaugural winner of the HarperCollins/UBC Prize for Best New Fiction, Karim Alrawi’s Book of Sands is set amid the upheaval of the Arab Spring and the brutal repression of a totalitarian regime. It is an atmospheric, multi-layered story of intimate lives, informed by recent events and heightened by touches of magic realism, set against the wider canvas of historic events.

I Saw A Man is the second novel by Welsh author and playwright Owen Sheers, winner of the Somerset Maugham Award and the Amnesty International Freedom of Expression Award. After the sudden loss of his wife, Michael Turner moves to London and quickly develops a close friendship with the family next door. Then a catastrophic event changes everything. Moving from London and New York to the deserts of Nevada, it explores violence, guilt and redemption.

He says he wants it to stop, his mother wants it to stop, we all want it to stop. But who will stop Martin John? Will you stop him? Should she stop him? From Anakana Schofield , author of the bestselling Malarky, comes Martin John, a darkly comic novel circuiting through the mind, motivations and preoccupations of a character many women have experienced but few have understood quite so well.