Guy Gavriel Kay's fantasy career began with "The Fionavar Tapestry", a popular trilogy mixing Arthurian and Tolkienian themes. He's since developed an original vein of alternative-historical fiction: richly suspenseful stories whose period settings have different country names and added magic. The Lions of Al-Rassan reinvented medieval Spain;Sailing to Sarantium lovingly reflects the intrigue and splendour of the Byzantine Empire and echoes W.B. Yeats's famous Byzantium poems. Magic exists: at least one old god is horribly real, and those artificial singing birds celebrated by Yeats take their life from an unexpected creepy source. Sarantium City is intensely imagined, with dynastic upheavals, riot and rebellion, a smashing chariot race, and knives glinting in every alley. There's sharp intelligence here, too. The hero, an outlander mosaic expert summoned to decorate Sarantium's newest and greatest dome, faces his worst test at the Emperor's court—where mechanical trickery lurks, conversation is double-edged and exile awaits the loser in a debate on mosaic techniques. There's also a Sherlockian challenge to deduce how the top charioteer pulled off a magical- seeming coup. Kay has laid fine groundwork for this new series "The Sarantine Mosaic", with more to follow. —David Langford

On the face of it, Rebecca Bloomwood has it all. Confident, single and happily living in des-res Fulham with her best friend Suze, she's a financial journalist who spends her days writing articles advising other people on the importance of budgeting and prudent investing. Her private life is a different story though; Rebecca manages her own finances in a way that would make most of her readers' hair curl—for Rebecca is a woman on a mission—she just can't stop spending.

I look up and I'm in front of Octagon. My favourite shop in the whole world. Three floors of clothes, accessories, furnishing, gifts, coffee shops, juice bars and a florist which makes you want to fill your entire home with flowers. I've got my purse with me. Just something small, to cheer me up. A T-shirt or something. Or even some bubble bath. I won't spend much. I'll just go in and... I'm already pushing my way through the doors. Oh God, the relief. The warmth, the light. This is where I belong. This is my natural habitat.

As the plot unfolds, Rebecca finds increasingly bizarre and often highly comical ways to ignore her ever-growing debts and mounting pile of unpaid Visa bills and red bank statements. Got a bill you can't pay? No problem. Just take it out for a walk and deposit it in the nearest skip whilst no-one is looking. Need to justify that £120 velvet scarf? Don't worry! It was a snip at half price in the sale, so what initially looks like a splurge is actually an example of canny discount shopping. Rebecca's disastrous love life mirrors her finances. And her career seems to be taking a turn for the worse, too. That is, until she finds a financial story that really sparks her journalistic interest, and begins to spar with handsome and successful financial PR millionaire Luke Brandon. Witty, light-hearted and often hilarious, The Secret Dreamworld of a Shopaholic is the ideal read for anyone who has ever found themselves mentally justifying rash purchases in their heads, or buying just one more pair of black trousers because they are so different from the other eight pairs in their wardrobe. —Emily Lowson

Publisher: Looney Labs Designer: Andrew Looney, John Cooper, Kory Heath, Jacob Davenport, Kristin Looney Number of Players: 1 - 6 Playing Time: 5 to 30 minutes Ages: 8 & up Overview: Contained herein are the rules to a dozes of the best games you can play with a set of Icehouse pieces. - IceTowers (turnless, stacking style game for 3-5 players where each player needs one stash of Icehouse pieces); - Thin Ice (building, party game for 2+ players where each player needs one stash); - Zendo (inductive, puzzle game for 3-5 players requiring 60 stones and 3 stashes); - Martian Backgammon (luck-based, race game for 2 players requiring dice, 3 stones and 2 stashes); - Volcano (puzzle, positional game for 1-4 players requiring 6 stashes); - Martian Chess (colorblind chess game for 2 or 4 players requiring a chessboard and 3 stashes); - RAMbots (program, predicting style game for 2-4 players requiring a chessboard and 4 stashes); - Pikemen (pointing chess style game for 2-4 players requiring a chessboard and one stash per player); - Zagami (consume and exploitation style game for 4 players requiring a chessboard and 4 stashes); - Icehouse (turnless, strategy game for 3-5 players where each player needs one stash); - Homeworlds (space opera style game for 2-6 players requiring cards and 4 stashes); and - Gnostica (territorial war game for 2-5 players requiring a tarot deck and one stash per player).