“What is it to be a non-human life form on Earth right now?”

It is not a fish, not a dolphin, not a whale. It is lunar, hypersensory. It is the subject of rumour, legend and ritual. Journalist and novelist JM Ledgard goes in search of the strange and elusive Dugong, landing on jungle-green islands in propeller planes and hammering across aquamarine oceans in speedboats. He encounters those who hunt and study a creature that has been undertaking its yogic breathing for 35 million years, discovering a subtle, complex being. From this Yoda animal, a visionary Ledgard finds optimism for the future: can we mesh human, animal and artificial intelligences to co-evolve?

“’Sir, why are you afraid?’ I said. ‘This people?’ he said, shaking his head and pointing at the dust whipped up by the wheels of his car. ‘Before this dust clears, you will know.’”

A young Chigozie Obioma heads to Nigeria’s Caritas University with dreams of becoming a writer in When the Risen Dust Settles. Instead he enters an educational system run like a totalitarian regime. He finds crude facilities, armed guards, and fearsome nuns. Students are spied upon, beaten, and expelled. The repressive structure exists all too easily in a country menaced by violent gangs, where those with power rule with impunity and university degrees are the only guarantee of a good future. Against this backdrop of fear, Obioma is forced into confrontation with the establishment, but what happens when one person stands up to the system?

“I was nine years old at the time, but I can still recall the faces of the two brothers staring out at me from those posters.”

China, 1983, saw the year of the dog end and the year of the pig begin. The animal signified wealth and good fortune but, in a nation where food was as scarce as freedom, what would the new year bring? There was abundance, but not of the kind people hoped for. That year, the Chinese people would learn the expressions ‘killing spree’ and ‘serial killer’ for the first time. Author Xiaolu Guo revisits the China of her youth in Murder in the Year of the Pig to tell the story of the outlaw Wang brothers, murderers whose chaotic trail of robberies, gun battles and bodies scarred a nation.