Galaxy ® British Book Awards

Khaled Hosseini was born in Kabul, but moved to Paris when he was still a child. The family's return in 1980 was prevented as Afghanistan had already witnessed a bloody communist coup and the invasion of the Soviet army. The Hosseinis were granted political asylum in the US, where Khaled graduated in medicine. It was while in medical practice that he began writing The Kite Runner, now a bestseller in 38 countries and recently released as a major film. His second novel, A Thousand Splendid Suns, was published in 2007 and, as the first Richard & Judy Book Club title this year, has spent several weeks at the top of the fiction chart. Propelled by the same storytelling instinct that made The Kite Runner so well loved, A Thousand Splendid Suns is both a chronicle of three decades of Afghan history and a deeply moving account of family and friendship.

At the age of 88, Doris Lessing was awarded the 2007 Nobel Prize for Literature, an honour felt by many to be long overdue. She is one of the most distinguished writers of the second half of the twentieth century, winning a host of international awards for her fiction and non-fiction. Her first novel was The Grass is Singing, published in 1949 and inspired by Lessing's early life in South Africa. Her subsequent work is wide-ranging in themes, from the political to science fiction, while her seminal text, A Golden Notebook, about a struggling writer, was published in 1962. Lessing's most recently published book, The Cleft, confronts the differences between the two genders and how they affect every aspect of our existence. Albert and Emily, a fictionalisation of her parents' lives, will be published by Fourth Estate in May.

McEwan's last book, On Chesil Beach, stretched the criteria of the 2007 Man Booker Prize to its limits when it reached the shortlist, and was a favourite to win, but missed out to Anne Enright's The Gathering. The Oscar-nominated film adaptation of Atonement (2002) ensured that this book enjoyed a renaissance in 2008, with the tie-in edition spending several weeks at the top of the paperback fiction chart. McEwan turns 60 this year, and can look back on a glittering thirty-year literary legacy, starting with his critically acclaimed short story collection, First Love, Last Rites, in 1975. His award-winning novels include Amsterdam, which won the Man Booker in 1998, and Saturday, published in 2005 and widely heralded as “one of the most serious contributions to the post-9/11, post-Iraq war literature".

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie first came to prominence when she won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Purple Hibiscus (2003), but her next novel, Half of a Yellow Sun, catapulted her into the limelight when it was selected for last year's Richard & Judy Book Club - Judy called it “the best book I've ever read". The novel recreates a seminal moment in modern African history: Biafra's impassioned struggle to establish an independent republic in Nigeria, the author's home, and the chilling violence that followed. Adichie weaves together the lives of three characters swept up in the turbulence of the decade, in a novel about moral responsibility, ethnic allegiances, class and race - and how love can complicate them all.

The Damned Utd, published in 2006, is an extraordinary novel that recreates Brian Clough's controversial time as manager of Leeds United Football Club during the 1970s. It's by no means the only one of Peace's novels to draw on real life: the gruesome activities of the so-called Yorkshire Ripper overshadowed his early writing career, giving rise to his Red Riding quartet. Further afield, Tokyo Year Zero, published in 2007, is the first of a trilogy set in the Japanese city in the aftermath of World War II, and based on true events. The chaos and uncertainty of post-war Tokyo comes alive, a bombed-flat city where no one is quite who they say they are, providing fertile ground for a serial killer. In 2003, Peace was named by Granta magazine as one of its twenty Best of Young British Novelists.