'The Noise of a Fly' is the first collection from Douglas Dunn in sixteen years, and the first since he was awarded the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry in 2013. It is a book brimming with warmth, mischief and a self-deprecating humour, as well as with a charming, 'Larkinesque' crankiness: a quarrel with ageing, an impatience with youth, the grievousness of losing friends and colleagues. But for all its intimate, hearthside rumination, this is a volume of poems that looks outward in equal measure: at Scottish independence, British politics and an international refugee crisis, and reflects unflinchingly on what it is to consider oneself a contributor to society.

Two of the most acclaimed reference works in the area of acoustics in recent years have been our Encyclopedia of Acoustics, 4 Volume set and the Handbook of Acoustics spin-off. These works, edited by Malcolm Crocker, positioned Wiley as a major player in the acoustics reference market. With our recently published revision of Beranek & Ver's Noise and Vibration Control Engineering, Wiley is a highly respected name in the acoustics business. Crocker's new handbook covers an area of great importance to engineers and designers. Noise and vibration control is one largest areas of application of the acoustics topics covered in the successful encyclopedia and handbook. It is also an area that has been under-published in recent years. Crocker has positioned this reference to cover the gamut of topics while focusing more on the applications to industrial needs. In this way the book will become the best single source of need-to-know information for the professional markets.

Ever since Keith Ridgway published his landmark cult novel Hawthorn & Child, his ardent fans have yearned for more Finally, Ridgway gives us A Shock, his thrilling and unsparing, slippery and shockingly good new novel. Formed as a rondel of interlocking stories with a clutch of more or less loosely connected repeating characters, it’s at once deracinated yet potent with place, druggy yet frighteningly shot through with reality. His people appear, disappear, and reappear. They’re on the fringes of London, clinging to sanity or solvency or a story by their fingernails, consumed by emotions and anxieties in fuzzily understood situations. A deft, high-wire act, full of imprecise yet sharp dialog as well as witchy sleights of hand reminiscent of Muriel Spark, A Shock delivers a knockout punch of an ending. Perhaps Ridgway’s most breathtaking quality is his scintillating stealthiness: you can never quite put your finger on how he casts his spell—he delivers the shock of a master jewel thief (already far-off and scot-free) stealing your watch: when at some point you look down at your wrist, all you see is that in more than one way you don’t know what time it is…