LATEST TITLES.

WASHINGTON BLACK by Esi Edugyan, Profile Books, PS14.99 (ebook PS6.99) HHHH H CANADIAN author Esi Edugyan is back on the Man Booker Prize longlist again with a vast, brutal, intricate and searching novel that sees its eponymous hero, Washington Black, escape slavery via a 'cloud cutter' airplane, the work of a bumbling Englishman.

It plucks Washington from the trauma and violence of the Barbados plantation he grew up on, and nudges him into a world of international travel and exploration.

It is an epic adventure, pinned to a scaffold of jeopardy. Edugyan's descriptions of slavery - and the pained love between Washington and Big Kit, who tries to take care of him - are ferocious and terrifying, yet elegantly wrought.

This is a bold, determined and often fascinating saga that will sit with you for days.

NOW WE SHALL BE ENTIRELY FREE by Andrew Miller, Sceptre, PS18.99 (ebook PS12.99) HHHH H COSTA Award-winning novelist Andrew Miller's latest offering is set in 1809, in the aftermath of the British Army's chaotic and brutal retreat to Corunna at the start of the Peninsular War.

Wellington wants a scapegoat to present to the much-wronged Spanish, and he finds one in hapless junior cavalry officer John Lacroix. Lacroix, whose real talents are musical, takes off for the Hebrides with an assassin in pursuit. A Spanish officer tags along to make sure justice is done. Miller has a slight issue with narrative drive in the mid-part of the novel, though the subplot involving the assassin, a murderous corporal called Calley, and his evolving relationship with reluctant sidekick Medina, is more vital. But Miller redeems himself in the denouement, with a gripping procession of thrills and spills.