American Gods is Neil Gaiman's best and most ambitious novel yet, a scary, strange, and hallucinogenic road-trip story wrapped around a deep examination of the American spirit. Gaiman tackles everything from the onslaught of the information age to the meaning of death, but he doesn't sacrifice the razor-sharp plotting and narrative style he's been delivering since his Sandman days.

 Shadow gets out of prison early when his wife is killed in a car crash. At a loss, he takes up with a mysterious character called Wednesday, who is much more than he appears. In fact, Wednesday is an old god, once known as Odin the All-father, who is roaming America rounding up his forgotten fellows in preparation for an epic battle against the upstart deities of the Internet, credit cards, television, and all that is wired. Shadow agrees to help Wednesday, and they whirl through a psycho-spiritual storm that becomes all too real in its manifestations. For instance, Shadow's dead wife Laura keeps showing up, and not just as a ghost—the difficulty of their continuing relationship is by turns grim and darkly funny, just like the rest of the book.

 Armed only with some coin tricks and a sense of purpose, Shadow travels through, around, and underneath the visible surface of things, digging up all the powerful myths Americans brought with them in their journeys to this land as well as the ones that were already here. Shadow's road story is the heart of the novel, and it's here that Gaiman offers up the details that make this such a cinematic book—the distinctly American foods and diversions, the bizarre roadside attractions, the decrepit gods reduced to shell games and prostitution. "This is a bad land for Gods," says Shadow.

 More than a tourist in America, but not a native, Neil Gaiman offers an outside-in and inside-out perspective on the soul and spirituality of the country—our obsessions with money and power, our jumbled religious heritage and its societal outcomes, and the millennial decisions we face about what's real and what's not. —Therese Littleton

The blowgun is a mysterious tool of silent death. Michael Janich reveals the many secrets of its capabilities and uses: how to buy or make your own blowgun and darts (including "special" projectiles), shoot the weapon, devise custom targets and customize, maintain and store your gun. This is the best book on this fascinating and deadly device.

Culture-curious readers and life-long fans of comics are invited to read along as two of the medium's greatest contributors - legendary innovator and godfather of sequential art Will Eisner, and the modern master of cinematic comics storytelling, Frank Miller, discuss the ins-and-outs of this compelling and often controversial art form. Eisner/Miller is widely illustrated and features rare, behind-the-scenes photos of Eisner, Miller, and other notable creators.

Don't leave earth without this story of the end of the world and the happy-go-lucky days that follow. The writing of New York Times Best-selling author, Douglas Adams, has been brilliantly successful on both sides of the Atlantic in radio, television, theatre and spoken word audio.

The Faeryland Companionis a quite delightful art gallery of the faery world. Most art books on faeries are portfolios of the imagination and skill of a single artist; this, in contrast, draws on the work of dozens of different artists. Many are from the 19th and early 20th centuries; Arthur Rackham, as one might expect, features strongly, with some 15 paintings; other well-known artists, many of them Pre-Raphaelites, including Edward Robert Hughes, Sir Joseph Noel Patton, Richard Dadd, George Cruickshank, John Anster Fitzgerald, Arthur Hughes and Sir John Everett Millais. It is a shame that (presumably for copyright reasons) there are no illustrations by JRR Tolkien; but two of the famous Cottingley Fairy photographs are included.

Beatrice Phillpott's text, as well as being highly entertaining, is both informed and informative, drawing on mythology, folklore, literature, ballads and poetry, as well as referring to a vast array of art. She describes how the idea of faery has developed over the centuries, pointing out, for instance, that the idea of faeries being tiny and flowery rests almost entirely on Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, then taken up by the Jacobean poets. Our present-day image of the faery world owes much to Victorian Romanticism; the prudery of the day was circumvented by portraying nude faeries in classical style.

A good art book is not just compiled or edited; it is designed, and credit must go to this book's designer, Bernard Higton, for creating a clear, clean and beautiful book, entirely in sympathy with its subject matter. My only criticisms are of the lack of an index to the text, and the decision not to identify titles and artists alongside the paintings, necessitating a trawl through the Acknowledgements page. But these are minor niggles in such as splendid book. —David V Barrett