This book will change the way you think about football as played in the English Premier League. We all suspected that most footballers were a bit dodgy, obsessed with money and fame, women, gambling and booze, but hoped that things may have got better as standards rose, and greater fitness was ever more crucial etc etc. But no, this book, written by an anonymous player at the highest level in English football, confirms all of our worst fears. They're all horrible! The book started as a blog on the Guardian website, and has now been expanded into a book.

Travel writing has always been one of Granta's great strengths, and this latest issue does not disappoint. There's some brilliant writing here, and as always, it's not just the big names here who impress. We have Dave Eggers, Haruki Murakami, Robert Macfarlane and Teju Cole, all on top form, but the pieces by Miroslav Penkov and Hector Abad and some of the other, lesser known writers are just as outstanding. This is not comfortable armchair travel, these stories and essays are confronting and discomforting.

What an extraordinary, and strange, little memoir this is! In 1981, 'She', an intelligent, educated woman, actively involved in the feminist movement of the time, asked her wealthy lover, 'He', to sign a contract with her, by which he would provide her with a home and income, and she would provide sexual acts as requested, with no emotional issues. 30 years later, the contract is still in place.

It's very difficult to say anything about this brilliantly exciting novel without giving away some of its many twists and revelations. In the opening chapter, Seth drowns .Then he wakes up, naked, thirsty and hungry. And alone, in the suburban English town where he grew up. The town is clearly abandoned. How did this happen? Seth needs to find out, all the while tortured by excruciating memories and strange, inexplicable events. To say more would be to give away much of the pleasure of reading this book. Suffice to say, it is incredibly exciting, thought-provoking, surprising and epic.

Back in the 1990s, there was a flurry of books written by people who had been taken hostage in Lebanon. Some Other Rainbow, by John McCarthy and Jill Morrell, An Evil Cradling, by Brian Keenan, and Taken On Trust, by Terry Waite. I think there were one or two more, but those were the ones I read, and loved. I hadn't thought about those books for a while, until Judith Tebbutt's similar book came up.

J. Robert Lennon was seen as a rising star of American writing in the late 1990s with his debut novel The Light of Falling Stars in 1997, and On The Night Plain in 2001, but he seemed to disappear after that, at least from my view, and this new novel looked really intriguing. It's a strange, almost science fiction scenario - a woman is driving home from visiting her deceased son's grave when something changes, and she finds herself the same person but different.