What sort of a man is Gordon Brown? What kind of Prime Minister will he make? Can he stem the growing unpopularity of the Labour Party and win it a fourth term in office? This book, written in the first three months of the year in which Brown becomes Prime Minister, is both a biography and an assessment. Francis Beckett interviewed several of Brown's closest political collaborators, and had a background briefing from Brown himself. He says the popular image of Brown is entirely wrong: he found an amusing, erudite and charming man who will bring his own style to 10 Downing Street - not Tony Blair's style, but at least as stylish. He believes that a Brown premiership will mark a fundamental break with the Blair years: a new and different relationship with the USA, a broader foreign policy which is able to look beyond the Middle East, a new and more transparent way of reaching decisions. In a groundbreaking final chapter, he draws on the best evidence available to predict what Gordon Brown will do with his new job.

Francis Fukuyama used to regard himself as a 'neocon'. But, attacking the right-wing policymakers he had previously worked with, he argues here that the Bush administration, in the war in Iraq, has wrongly applied the principles of neoconservatism - a philosophy that is vital to the arguments about Iraq, but rarely explored, and whose history he carefully untangles. He explains why the US did not realize how much foreign hostility there would be towards the war, or how difficult reconstruction would be. Showing that there is no established tradition in international relations theory that can help guide American foreign policy today, he then outlines a new approach, in his usual clear and penetrating style.

Few future contenders for the American presidency are more enigmatic than US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. She is both regularly voted one of the most influential women in the world, and, in a poll taken well into her new post, the preferred dinner guest for men - ahead of a celebrity field including Angelina Jolie and Oprah Winfrey. Yet for a senior politician with such wide appeal, very little is known about her private life. Condoleezza Rice, who has remained unmarried, gave interviews for this first personal biography. She also consented to unqualified access to her close-knit family and friends.

In this memoir written at the age of 33, Barack Obama, son of a black African father and a white American mother, describes the search for meaning in his life as a black American. He begins in New York where he learns that his father, more a myth than a man to him, has been killed in a car accident. This sudden death inspires an emotional odyssey that sees Obama travel to Kansas, Hawaii and Kenya in search of his family's roots. A memoir that rightfully belongs on the shelves alongside the autobiography of "Malcolm X", "Dreams from My Father" is an unforgettable read.