To celebrate the release of Douglas Coupland and Graham Roumieu's fantastically twisted Highly Inappropriate Tales for Young People, Windmill Books, in association with Waterstone's, are giving you the chance to win an exclusive sampler of the first two chapters! All you have to do is answer the following question:

What is the name of the undead substitute teacher in Highly Inappropriate Tales for Young People?

Click here for a clue, and to see some of the wicked and malicious characters from the book. Send your answer to windmill@randomhouse.co.uk with your name and address, and you will be entered for the draw. Winners announced 1st November at 5pm. Good luck!

‘The Prix Goncourt committee took a record hour and a half to elect The Map and the Territory the winner of France’s highest literary honour … Readers … are unlikely to quibble with the decision.  Houellebecq’s fifth book is not only his best for years but very likely his best ever, a serious novel about ageing and death which employs its author’s trademark wit towards some delicious exercises in satire and self parody… a challenging, mature and highly intelligent book’ Daily Telegraph

”[Houellebecq] has shown that the novel can still shock and disturb, still be the subject of passionate debate. We’re not talking about a reality television show or a film or a video game or a rap artist - these are cleverly constructed literary novels. All novelists everywhere have benefited from his audacity‘ William Boyd, Sunday Times

‘If the French had a prize for literary provocation, Michel Houellebecq would win in a walk…The Map and the Territory is a delight to read … vigorously, enjoyably un-French … [it] skewers the art world’s pretentious jargon and galloping mercantilism … The late novelist John Updike once summed up the conventional view of Houellebecq by deploring the French writer’s “thoroughgoing contempt for, and strident impatience with, humanity”. The Map and the Territory may force a revision of that judgment.’ Financial Times

‘A great read … Houellebecq, as both his writing and his infrequent forays into public life suggest, doesn’t seem like someone who takes much notice of what people tell him to do. Thank goodness’ Guardian

‘A dark master of invention…From the very first paragraph of this brilliant, often preposterous, Prix Goncourt winning novel, the reader can be in no doubt that they’re in the blistering bleak, darkly inventive grand massif that is Houellebecq land’ Evening Standard

‘The outlaw of French letters returns with an acerbic riff on art and celebrity … A very interesting writer - witty, wildly erudite, with a scattergun approach to the inanities that he sees all around him’ Douglas Kennedy, The Times

‘Houellebecq is an astonishing writer … The Map And The Territory is funny, shocking, brutal and unbearably poignant. It is, in the sense that the 18^th century philosopher Edmund Burke meant it, sublime’ Scotland on Sunday

‘What on Earth is a French existentialist and winner of France’s top literary award, the Prix Goncourt, doing being reviewed here? He’s not commercial, doesn’t pander to any market, his prose is not always accessible, and certainly doesn’t always zip along. Turned off already? Well don’t be. If ever there was a novelist for our globally dysfunctional times it’s Michel Houellebecq …‘ Henry Sutton, The Mirror (4-star Book of the Week)

We’re delighted that The Submission by Amy Waldman has been longlisted for the Guardian First Book Award 2011.

Lisa Allardice, editor of Guardian Review is joined on the judging panel by the authors David Nicholls and Antonia Fraser, the critic Sarah Churchwell, Waterstone’s Stuart Broom and Guardian deputy editor Katharine Viner.

Supported by Waterstone’s, the award is open to all first-time authors writing in or translated into English, across all genres. A series of regional reading groups, run in partnership with Waterstone’s bookshops, will now assist the judging panel with choosing a shortlist. The shortlist will be announced in early November.

See the full longlist here

‘The grief surrounding 9/11 is central to this exceptional debut about a changing America … The novel centres on Khan and the three family members. Through their stories and interactions Waldman builds a tale of complexity and tension…Waldman’s prose is almost always pitch-perfect, whether describing a Bangladeshi woman’s relationship with her landlady or the political manoeuvring within a jury. The characters are wholly realised and believable as individuals, but they also stand in for stories and conflicts that go beyond their own lives.’

Guardian Review

‘A decade after 9/11, Amy Waldman’s nervy and absorbing new novel, “The Submission,” tackles the aftermath of such a terrorist attack head-on. The result reads as if the author had embraced Tom Wolfe’s famous call for a new social realism … and in doing so, has come up with a story that has more verisimilitude, more political resonance and way more heart than Mr. Wolfe’s own 1987 best seller, The Bonfire of the Vanities’

Michiko Kakutani, New York Times

‘The Submission is a searching, cerebral novel with the pitch and pace of a thriller’

Daily Mail

‘Sweeping novels of this sort tend to risk clumsiness by pushing their characters around in service of a message but The Submission tells a clever story very well’
4 stars Metro

‘A wonderful novel which challenges your beliefs’

The Sun

‘Waldman’s narrative is confident and her writing has a clever freshness … sensitively exploring complex issues. Waldman’s is a fine achievement’

Jewish Chronicle

‘Waldman, a former New York Times reporter, excels at involving the reader in vibrant dialogues in which the level of the debate is high and the consequences significant’

Washington Post

‘Amy Waldman’s emotionally and politically rich novel … raises wrenching post-9/11 questions about what it means to be an American’

USA Today

‘A wrenching panoramic novel about the politics of grief in the wake of 9/11

Richard Price

‘With a keen and expert eye of an excellent journalist, Waldman provides telling portraits of all the drama’s major players, deftly exposing their foibles and mutual; manipulations.’

Claire Messud, New York Times Book Review

‘Amy Waldman writes like a possessed angel’

Lorraine Adams

‘The Bonfire of the Vanities for our time’

Booklist, starred review

‘Waldman addresses with a refreshing frankness thorny moral questions and ethical ironies without resorting to breathless hyperbole’

Publisher’s Weekly, starred review

‘This is a remarkably assured portrait of how a populace grows maddened and confused when ideology trumps empathy. A stellar debut’ 

Kirkus Review, starred review

Will the internet enslave you or set you free?

In The Revolution Will be Digitised, award-winning investigative journalist and freedom of information campaigner Heather Brooke shows us where the battle lines are being drawn in the global information war. She interviews the hackers, corporate players, and government ministers at the centre of the digital revolution, and finds out what the internet knows about you…

Scan the QR-code on the cover to be taken to The Revolution Will be Digitised minisite for more on the book, including the book trailer and exclusive interviews.

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Jonathan Lee, author of our Book Club title Who is Mr Satoshi? took over the Windmill Twitter account last week to answer your questions.

Featured on the BBC’s Culture Show as one of the best new British novelists, his acclaimed debut is out now in paperback. Send your questions on Twitter with the hashtag #satoshi, and we’ll give away three Windmill Books of their choice to the best questioner.

To get you started, take a look at the fabulous video, which doesn’t quite tell you who Mr Satoshi is, and the reading group guide.

On Thursday 30th June from 4-5pm, Haley Tanner will be taking over the Windmill Twitter and answering your questions about her book Vaclav and Lena.

To ask her a question, send it to @WindmillBooks with the hastag #vaclav, with the five best questions winning three Windmill Books of your choice. For inspiration, head over to the Windmill Book Club, where we have Haley Tanner on what inspired her to write Vaclav and Lena.

El Sicario - Room 164, the documentary about a drug cartel hitman in Juárez, Mexico, has won the Grand Jury Award at the London Documentary Festival. William Heinemann will publish the book in paperback in July. From the judges:

The sicario is highly intelligent, very articulate and all too believable … as remarkable for its inventiveness as for its shocking content.

Watch the book’s trailer below.

Pre-order the book today at Amazon, Waterstone’s, rBooks, or at your local bookshop.

Dads - if yours is anything like mine, they’re pretty much impossible to buy presents for. Well fear not! For today, Windmill and Waterstone’s together bring you the ten, never-fail, tried and tested, absolute best books for dads anywhere. Starting with…

The thriller addict

We debated which of Robert Harris’s books to plump for here - the historical epic of Pompeii, or the modern political conspiracy of The Ghost - but in the end went back to his first: a bonafide, cast-iron classic of the genre.  The shoutline says it all: ‘What if Hitler had won?’, but what follows is a plot that twists and turns in ways you will never expect.

‘The highest form of thriller … non-stop excitement’ The Times

Buy it now

The historian

Matthew Parker’s history of the British Empire’s exploits in the West Indies is a riveting tale of corruption, power, and family. One of the darkest episodes in British history, the effects of which are still being felt today.

‘A fascinating subject, and a book worthy of it…there isn’t a dull page’ Daily Telegraph

Buy it now

The adventurer

Nick Harkaway’s debut exploded onto the scene with its swashbuckling, karate kicking adventure into the chaotic Gone-Away World, but the action never takes the place of the strength of the characters, in particular the friendship between the central duo.

‘Its scope and ambition are extraordinary, its execution is often breathtaking, and its style is by turns hilarious, outrageous, devastating, hip and profound … Hugely entertaining’ Independent on Sunday

Buy it now

The scientist

Christopher Potter takes us on a journey to discover our place in the universe, from planets and galaxies, to molecules, atoms, and the strange quantum world of the ultra-small, along the way giving us a history and philosophy of science. Incredible, mind expanding stuff.

‘One of the best popular science books I have ever read’ Guardian

Buy it now

The satirist

You know how some dads like to keep hold of the remote control, no matter what? Turns out God is no different! Having left his son Jesus in charge for a few hundred years, God returns to find Earth in a very unholy mess. He decides there is only one thing for it: He’s sending the kid back, to teach the one true commandment - ‘Be Nice’ - through the medium of American Pop Star. Featuring the return of the devilish Stephen Stelfox, this is a hilarious and merciless satire on religion from the author of Kill Your Friends.

‘Deeply, intelligently satirical. In lesser hands it could easily have become a crass rant. Yet Niven provides hilarious, perceptive entertainment’ Mirror

Buy it now

The politician

Whatever your political persuasion, Tony Blair’s autobiography has proved to be necessary reading for anyone wanting to see how the decisions at the very top are made. An extraordinarily candid book from one of the most charismatic leaders in recent memory.

Buy it now

The literary bookworm

A poetic and moving meditation on fatherhood, Tinkers was the first debut to win the Pulitzer Prize in ten years. An old man lies dying in his bed, and a world of memories collapses around him.

‘Wonderful, lyrical … Triumphant … A beautiful, moving and elegiac lament on the human condition’ The Times

Buy it now

The psychologist

What if you were told that a psychopathic arsonist might also be the person most likely to save you from a burning building? This book is about a special kind of persuasion: ‘flipnosis’. It has an incubation period of just seconds, and can instantly disarm even the most discerning mind. Flipnosis is black-belt mind control.

‘A wide-ranging and entertaining tour of the science of persuasion and influence … exposing, along with many other wonders, just how many scientists are currently at work in the shadowy territories of human personality, psychological improvement and, essentially, mind control’ Sunday Times

Buy it now

The hard-boiled detective

The first book of the acclaimed, genre busting LA Quartet, The Black Dahlia is a masterclass of pared-down crime noir.

‘A mesmerising study of the psycho-sexual obsession…extraordinarily well written’ The Times

Buy it now

The businessman

Samuel Johnson shortlisted and winner of the FT/Goldman Sachs award, this is a vivid, dramatic account of the four men whose personal and professional actions led to the world economic collapse of the late 1920s.

‘Brilliant… a colourful monetary and financial history…Lords of Finance will help to educate as it entertains’ TLS

Buy it now