TERSIAS by GP Taylor (Faber and Faber, £9.99. Out on Thursday.): FORMER North Yorkshire vicar Graham Taylor has enjoyed phenomenal success with his first two novels - Shadowmancer and Wormwood - and his latest offering, Tersias, is just as enthralling.

Taylor fans will be well acquainted with his dark, 18th century settings and Tersias opens with a familiar apocalyptic feel, following the near-miss of a London-bound comet. The novel follows the fortunes of Tersias, a young boy blinded by his mother and forced to beg on the streets. When a strange creature called the Wretchkin comes to him he is bestowed with the gift of prophecy. The story rips along at speed as various unscrupulous characters desperate for visions of the future enter into his life and try to manipulate the young oracle for their own ends. Taylor succeeds in conjuring up a dark world with plenty of supernatural goings-on to keep readers on the edge of their seats. His compulsive storytelling skills will leave both young and old alike gripped until the last page. Guaranteed to keep the kids quiet over the summer holidays.

Lindsay Jennings

ARTHUR & GEORGE by Julian Barnes (Jonathan Cape, £17.99)

GROWING up worlds apart, Arthur in genteel Edinburgh, the half-caste George in the vicarage of a small Staffordshire backwater, Arthur grows up to be one of the most famous men of his age - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle - while George Edjali becomes a solicitor in Birmingham.

There's nothing to connect the two, until fame - or rather infamy - is thrust upon George when he is convicted of a series of sadistic attacks on livestock known as the Great Wyrley Outrages, and Arthur, confident that an outrageous miscarriage of justice has taken place, decides, like his famous detective Sherlock Homes, to investigate.

Barnes brings to life this long-forgotten case and paints vivid portraits of his two very different protagonists. The tension cranks up smoothly as the hate campaign against George and his family builds and Doyle is forced to realise that the logic on which his literary creation relies has little to do with this real-life case.

THE HISTORIAN by Elizabeth Kostova (Little Brown, £14.99)

A QUEST to discover whether Vlad Drakula is dead - or undead - leads the reader from the US to Istanbul to Hungary to Bulgaria and of course, Transylvania (in modern Romania) in this original, creative and scholarly take on the mythical vampire tale.

The teenage daughter of an international diplomat, known only as Paul, discovers an ancient book and a packet of old letters in her father's library addressed to, "My dear and unfortunate successor..." and is compelled to follow a series of strange clues and encounter gruesome deaths in the search for Dracula's tomb.

Kostova brings the varied landscapes to life, and paints spooky scenarios of ruins and old monasteries and though it may flag at times under the weight of Kostova's ten years of research, this is a cracking tale with a wealth of historical detail and creepy atmosphere.

HEADS YOU WIN by Ferdinand Mount (Chatto & Windus, £16.99)

THE sixth and last in Mount's Chronicle of Modern Twilight series sees Gus Cotton and a motley crew being drawn into the dot-com business. But as we all know, the boom went bust and Gus and his gang don't fare too brilliantly either. The sort of absorbing novel that makes you miss your bus stop.

Published: 02/08/2005