A practical guide to viewing the universe.

The phenomenal Russian bestseller. A vampire novel set in a richly realized post-Soviet Moscow, The Night Watch has sold across Europe and to 20th Century Fox for huge advances. In The Night Watch, the first of a trilogy, and reminiscent of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials in its ambitions and achievement, the setting is contemporary Moscow. A small number of Muscovites with supernatural powers — those who are Other, owing allegiance either to the Dark or the Light — co-exist in an uneasy truce, each side keeping a close eye on the other’s activities around the city. Anton, an Other on the side of the Light, is a night-watchman, patrolling the streets and Metro of the city as he protects ordinary people from the vampires of the Dark. On his rounds, Anton comes across a young woman, Svetlana, whom he realizes is under a curse that threatens the entire city, and a boy, Igor, a young Other, as yet unaware of his own enormous power. Partnered by Olga, an Other who is in the form of an owl, he struggles to remove the curse and thereby save the city, while at the same time prevent Igor from falling into the clutches of the Dark. The Night Watch explores the nature of good and evil and the tensions between the individual and the collective in a gripping narrative that owes as much to The Master and Margarita as it is does to the richly realized worlds of Philip Pullman and Tolkien.

Noel Kerns is a Texas-based photographer who specializes in capturing ghost towns, decommissioned military bases, and industrial abandonments by night. His images incorporate two distinct photographic techniques: time-exposure by the natural light of a full moon, and the artful application of artificial light, vividly painted into the scene while the cameras shutter is open. Light-painting is all about vision, says Kerns. Or more accurately, pre-vision. Its the ability to imagine the scene you want to emerge from the darkness, and then to execute it in such a way as to match or surpass what you imagined. Nightwatch: Painting with Light is the first book from Kerns, one of the worlds foremost practitioners of the art of light-painting. Join him as he ventures into the darkness of the American Southwest, exploring remote desert ghost towns under a full moon, or prowling the abandoned, seemingly post-apocalyptic structures of Americas industrial wastelands. In his photographs, Kerns captures the world surreal: flowing cloud-streaks in a night sky, the laser-like light trails of cars racing by on a highway, a raging ocean shoreline rendered eerily calm through long exposure.

DIVAn innovative ethnography of peasant communities in Peru caught between the government and the Shining Path./div

I thought everything would change, after the war. And now, no one even mentions it. It is as if we all got together in private and said whatever you do don't mention that, like it never happened. It's the late 1940s. Calm has returned to London and five people are recovering from the chaos of war. In scenes set in a quiet dating agency, a bombed-out church and a prison cell, the stories of these five lives begin to intertwine and we uncover the desire and regret that has bound them together. Sarah Waters's story of illicit love and everyday heroism takes us from a dazed and shattered post-war Britain back into the heart of the Blitz, towards the secrets that are hidden there. Olivier-nominated playwright Hattie Naylor has created a thrilling and theatrically inventive adaptation of a great modern novel. The stage adaptation of The Night Watch was premiered at the Royal Exchange Theatre, Manchester, on 16 May 2016.

The Templar: Lieutenant Iari discovers a murder with an impossible suspect. The Spy: officially, Gaer is an ambassador from the vakari. Unofficially, he's also a spy. As they both search for truth, they discover that the murderous riev, one of the battle-mecha decommissioned after the end of the last conflict and repurposed for manual labor - is just a weapon in the hands of a wielder with wider ambitions than homicide, including releasing horrors not seen since the war, that make a rampaging riev seem insignificant. Author of "How Rory Thorne Destroyed the Multiverse." Print run 12,000.

Serves as a useful reference guide to stargazers around the world.